Atlanta restaurant reviews: Gigi's Italian at Gato

The candelabra on the bar at Gigi’s Italian Kitchen & Restaurant has accumulated so much wax that it’s beginning to look like a grotto on the isle of Capri. The drippy trio of flames is so much a part of the ambiance of the delightful Italian-American pop-up, run by Atlanta chefs Eric Brooks and Jacob Armando, that it inevitably gets posted on Instagram — an unlikely mascot of sorts.

When the lights dim, and the Negronis mist the moment, you’d swear you are in some mythical Little Italy of days gone by, when veal piccata and chicken parmigiana were the last word in American-style Italian. And, yet, there is something more profound happening at Gato’s Sundays-Tuesdays pop-up. Gigi’s is not your typical spaghetti-garlic bread-big salad theme night. It’s more than the sum of its garish red-glass votives, celebrity headshots with fake signatures and disco playlist.

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Credit: Wendell Brock

Credit: Wendell Brock

Brooks and Armando, you see, can cook.

I mean, really cook.

In their crisp white shirts and red Gigi’s caps, these young alumni of Kimball House and Bacchanalia perform an elegant pas de deux in a tight space. Their culinary choreography is focused, their food a delicate balance of the lyrical and the lusty. Never does it feel forced.

Brooks, 30, and Armando, 28, are Atlanta natives who were almost genetically pre-disposed to work in food. From his father’s small farm in Fairburn, Brooks gleaned that good soil can produce magnificent mustard greens, corn and Jimmy Nardello peppers. And, from his summers working on Block Island, Rhode Island, he learned the basics of Italian-American cuisine and pizza-making. (The name Gigi’s is a tribute to Brooks’ interlude between kitchen jobs. While hawking his dad’s vegetables to Atlanta restaurants, he became known as the “Green Guy.”)

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Credit: Wendell Brock

Armando, for his part, practically grew up at Wells Cargo, his family’s restaurant in Stone Mountain. So, early on, he discerned the pleasure of honest food, simply prepared, and absorbed a philosophy of creating meals from the ingredients at hand.

Such personal influences — as well as working for Little Bear’s Jarrett Stieber (Armando), Redbird’s Zeb Stevenson (Brooks) and Kimball House’s Bryan Wolfe and Myles Macquarrie (both) — helped mold the partners into the highly polished technicians they are today.

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Credit: Wendell Brock

For a drink, I suggest a Dirty Gigi (a remarkably nuanced gin martini with house-brined olives and lemon), although the Negroni and the Little Italy are spot on, as you might expect from Kimball veterans.

The menu changes often, but there are some constants: There’s always a leafy green salad (right now, a pristine little gem Caesar with miso dressing, crispy garlic and fricoed Parmesan); a dazzling beef carpaccio (with salsa verde, manchego, rice cracker and arugula); and a fried polenta cake (loaded with creme fraiche, jewel-like trout roe and sturgeon caviar, wisps of dill and snipped chives). The polenta is a prime example of how this collaborative duo excels at marrying the earthy and the luxurious. It’s a stunner.

Credit: Wendell Brock

On the lighter side, a plate of beets with candied pecans, Sweet Grass Dairy asher blue, torn sorrel and nasturtiums elevates a familiar flavor profile into something luminous and unforgettable.

On my first visit, my guests so loved their pasta primavera (a vehicle for house-made cavatelli and seasonal vegetables) and chicken Francese that I never snagged a bite of either, so I drowned my sorrow in a heady carbonara with duck confit — poor me.

Credit: Wendell Brock

And I kept going back — for the fish Milanese, a perfect fried hunk of mahi-mahi with aioli, capers and lemon; for the scampi in a garlic-butter sauce with cubes of focaccia (I wanted to turn the dish up and drink the remaining liquid at the end); and for the chicken Marsala, which, rather than gravy-soaked escalopes of breast, featured a nicely grilled leg quarter in a puddle of rich wine sauce, with oyster mushrooms and spring onion. Granny might not recognize her continental go-to, but she’d no doubt sop it up.

Gigi’s, it seems, is not interested in blowing your mind with flashy shenanigans. There’s plenty of that around, in rooms far spiffier than shop-worn Gato. Maybe that’s why the experience feels so fresh. We step back in time to marvel at something we thought we had lost.