EATS: Bolo

Friends call eating on Buford Highway "adventure dining" with the variety of unusual ethnic eateries. There's a little adventure dining in a worn shopping center on College Park's Virginia Avenue.

Bole restaurant serves Ethiopian fare at modest prices in a well kept dining room. Yellow walls brighten the eating area with tables covered in red-white checkered table clothes. Pictures depicting Ethiopian scenes hang on the walls. Here's one.



We ordered two dishes: the vegetable combination at the suggestion of the friendly host and chicken and rice.

Veggie combo ($7.99) comes with misir (lentils), gomen (collard green) and two other types of vegetarian dishes.  It came arranged on a platter lined with injera, a spongy flat bread. A side dish included more injera used to scoop up the food. Not only was it tasty, but fun to eat with your fingers.




The rice dish ($6.99) was well received. The rice had a slight curry flavor mixed with onions and garlic.

Overall, Bole it's a place you'd return to if you like adventure dining off the beaten path.

Eats: La Fiesta

I was in a TGIF mood with margarita’s on the brain last week.

With a foursome in tow, we headed to La Fiesta restaurant at 1419 Virginia Ave., College Park. It has comfort-food Mexican. It serves nothing fancy but reasonably priced and decent food.

The restaurant’s interior is filled with tables and booths. The restaurant’s patio was buzzing with diners on this warm night. There isn’t a view to recommend it, unless you like watching the traffic on nearby Virginia. Colorful walls of red and blue enliven the interior, as did the karaoke entertainment that started around 9.

Warm chips and salsa appeared on the table soon after we filled a booth. The salsa had a nice spicy zing to it, not just flavorless tomato salsa. A large order of queso, the flavored melted cheese, soon appeared.  

Soon after came the margaritas in big beer steins. No complaints. As I said, this isn’t the place that experiments with food and drink. It delivers the standard-issue tequila-based cocktail. Others had a Diet Coke and a beer.

 

 The wait staff didn’t keep us waiting to take our dinner requests. 

Entrees orders were soon made and delivered. The chicken fajitas ($10.99) made about three servings of chicken and grilled onions wrapped in soft tortillas. The side of black beans was sparse, not much to them.

Another order included a mix of classic Mexican food, and included a chile relleno - stuffed pepper – was met with approval. Others ordered the fajita quesadilla and beef enchiladas, above.

The total for the meal for the four of us, including a couple rounds of drinks, came to about $100. 

If you like your Mexican food unspoiled by originality or a creative cook, stop by here. La Fiesta's web site is here.

Eats: Thai Heaven

Thai Heaven is a new restaurant just across the city line on nearby Virginia Avenue.

Open for two months, Thai Heaven was more like Thai hell, cracked one of my friends. That kind of tells you where this review is going. 

Located above the Landmark Diner, at 1155 Virginia Ave., Atlanta, the parking lot is large and easy to find a parking spot. The restaurant had comfortable seating to watch the planes take off from Hartsfield Jackson International Airport. The large patio would be a nice place to sit during the warmer months. Large bamboo sticks held up by sand is the most obvious decorative touch. The restaurant includes a sushi bar.

 

The waitress took our drinks quickly, along with our appetizer orders. She wrote them down, but then she started to ask questions and we repeated ourselves to make sure everyone got what they wanted: curry rolls; chicken satay, on left, with peanut sauce; and a Delta sushi roll, named for the nearby airline HQ. 

And that's when the visit took a turn. We waited a long time for the drinks and the food.  That's when the crack about Thai Hell was uttered. Eventually, the Thai iced tea was refreshing, the sweet coconut milk and tea combo. Beer drinkers with us were pleased to see Blue Moon, but they had to ask for the pint glass with the slice of orange. 

The menu had a variety of Thai food. The foursome ordered yellow curry ($10.95); pad thai ($10.95)i; basil stir fry ($10.95) and the most original dish, pineapple fried rice ($13.95).

The pineapple fried rice, photo on the left, was a mixture of shrimp, cashews, chicken, rice, bits of pineapple. And it was served in a pineapple shell. It was well liked and not overly sweet.

Like the pineapple fried rice, all the other dishes were tasty, with a nice aroma. The curry started sweet with the first bite and ended with a slight spicy flavor. The basil dish was rated with three spicy peppers and it delivered. The pad thai didn't have the peanut flavor that makes Thai food special. 

Basil fried rice

The price matched the amount of food served. In fact, the pad thai and the yellow curry was enough to save half and take home for a later meal. 

Overall, the consensus was that the meal was good and priced right. The service would be the only hurdle that would deter a return trip.