Khabar Magazine. May 2019. As I checked into a charming Italian villa converted into a boutique hotel, nestled on top of a hill on the Amalfi Coast, I wondered how I would spend two summer days in this romantic location by myself. I stood on the purple-bougainvillea-wrapped white balcony of my room, with a glass […]

For Cuisine Noir Magazine. October 2018. The founder of Caribbean Smooth, a new brand of tropical spiced rum liqueur, shakes an unusually shaped black-colored bottle and pours me a taste of his guava-pineapple and passion fruit blends as we chat sitting at the bar of a Mexican restaurant near his home in Atlanta. “This is […]

For Creative Loafing Atlanta. November 2018 print issue.  Before I moved to Atlanta in 1997, I had a picture-postcard image of Thanksgiving — a Caucasian family wearing plaid shirts gathered around a big table covered with a dozen delectable dishes. There was always a whole pumpkin and orange tones to signify autumn. I knew there […]

For Creative Loafing Atlanta. September 2018.  “Get yourself a Persian friend. Just show interest in their culture, and the next thing you know, they will invite you over to their house,” says Samira Shakib Bregeth, an Iranian-American English teacher at Roswell High School and advisor for news and opinion website VOX. She and others I […]

For Creative Loafing Atlanta. October 2018. Check out some of critics picks in the Oral Pleasure section of the annual Best of Atlanta competitive countdown. Full story in print.

For Creative Loafing Atlanta. April 2018. Chef Lotfi Chabaane spends each day at a retirement community called Parc at Duluth. At 60, he’s the place’s de facto spring chicken, telling stories, dancing, and cooking for the seniors who live there. What he’s cooking are Tunisian, Indian, French, Malaysian, and German dishes, but his patrons often […]

For Chowhound. February 2018.  Airport food doesn’t always have to be greasy fast food, pre-packed sandwiches, and run-of-the-mill chain restaurants. Over 100 million passengers fly through the world’s busiest Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport each year, and they have several options where they can taste local flavors. While most travelers don’t have enough time to step outside the airport […]

For Chowhound. February 2018.  You know you are in the South when you hear men and women screaming “what’ll ya have, what’ll ya have?” as they move you down quickly through the line. If you don’t respond quickly, you’ll be sent back to the line. Sounds like a high school cafeteria? This fast food restaurant […]

For Chowhound. February 2018.  An American girl travels to Italy, meets a charming Italian man, gets married, and together they live happily ever after. It sounds like a cliché love story, right? Well, it happened in January 2009 when Meredith Hall, a resident of Atlanta, met Luigi D’Arienzo (who goes by Gigi) during a milonga […]

For Chowhound. January 2018.  Khaled and Ruwaida had a deep-rooted life back in Damascus, Syria. They owned two apartments and a few electronic shops. Khaled worked, while Ruwaida took care of their two kids. But political unrest forced them to leave their home country and walk across to Jordan, where they lived as refugees for four […]

For Creative Loafing Atlanta. December 2017.  Seewai Sayavong welcomes me into a 12,000-square-foot Victorian mansion overlooking 15th street. “Tennessee Williams has lived here!” she says. Upon further research, I find that no one is quite sure whether this factoid is true or not, but the building, often referred to as “the castle,” was indeed a […]

For Creative Loafing Atlanta. October 2017. “Refugee cookies!” a 10-year old Syrian boy screamed from the front porch of an Oakhurst home. The shortbread style cookies, known in the Middle East as mamool and flavored with orange blossom, dates and pistachios, were an instant hit. In less than three hours, the entire batch sold: 45 […]

For Creative Loafing Atlanta. July 2017. Floor-to-ceiling glass windows wrap around a sleek interior of red and black. Waves of natural wood cover the entire ceiling. A lone painting of Atlanta’s skyline adorns one of the walls. Designed under the Japanese minimalist principal of Ma, the space is uncluttered, the lines clean. This is CO, […]

For Creative Loafing Atlanta. March 2017.  From the outside, Royal Myanmar Cuisine looks like nothing more than a drive-through converted into a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, standing by itself in a quiet commercial plaza with a strip club, a liquor store and a few questionable-looking eateries. The interior of the former Crazy Wings is also very plain, […]

For Creative Loafing Atlanta. March 2017.  Sadia Sosa Walker moved to Atlanta from Santiago, the second largest city in the Dominican Republic, in the year 2000. It was her first time in the United States and she felt instantly nostalgic for the aroma of slow roasting pork, the chit-chat of aunts and uncles gathered for […]

For Creative Loafing Atlanta. February 2017.  Sandwiching the northwestern corner of I-285 are the city of Smyrna and the unincorporated town of Vinings, fondly known together by some locals as Smynings. Until the 1990s, one of the only iconic structures here was the historic Vinings Jubilee, a town center with brick buildings, a clock tower, […]

For One Travel Going Places. January 2017.  Atlanta, Georgia: The de facto capital of the southeastern United States. It’s a hub for conventions, a former Olympic host city (the 1996 summer games, if you’ll recall), as well as home to CNN, Coca-Cola, AND the world’s busiest airport in the world. But it’s also a city […]

For Creative Loafing Atlanta, January 2017. One evening in the central Italian region of Tuscany, Meredith Hall, a young English teacher from Atlanta, walked into a traditional tango gathering known as a milonga. There, she met a charming local chef named Luigi D’Arienzo. Over passionate slow dances, fine wine, and Tuscan food, the two fell in […]

For Creative Loafing Atlanta, December 2016.  Amara is easy to spot, thanks to its electric blue and white sign. A Persian rug welcomes diners into the spacious, modern-industrial interior with pendant lights dangling from a high vaulted ceiling. A glass-backed bar with yellow chairs is central to the space, where one can watch people stopping […]

For Creative Loafing Atlanta. October 2016. Take a stroll through a narrow brick corridor decorated with glowing patio lights, aromatic herbs, and a mural of the Mediterranean. Listen to the cheerful clinking of glasses coming from a wrought iron Juliet balcony above the fountain as you make your way up a flight of steps. The […]

For Creative Loafing Atlanta, October 2016.  Le Gomier is not a traditional restaurant. Nestled in an unassuming strip mall in Lawrenceville, it boasts no distinct landmarks nor nearby neighbors. And although the restaurant and event hall has been open for three years, it has managed to slide quite discretely under the radar of Atlanta’s culinary scene. […]

For Atlanta Journal Constitution. October 2015. The idea of Go Eat Give came mostly from friends well versed with my love for food and travel. They asked me to share my experiences and help them plan their trips, where they could also have meaningful travel experiences like mine. I founded Go Eat Give as a […]