Kudzu aims to plant roots along Sunbelt, beyond

Nation's Restaurant News, March 8, 1993 by Jack Hayes

Liberty House Restaurant Corp., the veteran group that gave us Atlanta Bone's, Trotters, Pearl's and OK Cafe during the near-decade span between 1979 and 1987, has cooked up a concept that is certain to outrun all of its earlier and more ambitious dining inventions.

This is not to suggest that the venerable Bone's -- backbone of the Liberty House organization and first of the city's masculine-themed, saloon-style upscale steak houses, which competes vigorously with Chops, Morton's and Ruth's Chris -- is at all worried that it suddenly will be eclipsed.

Yet one never knows in this business. In a few months, according to unconfirmed rumors, Kudzu Cafe will be a multiunit operation -- testing its roots for expansion in and perhaps even beyond this Sunbelt capital.

Launched last fall in the same space that had been home to Trotters since 1982, Liberty House's Kudzu Cafe is a highly polished Southern-themed dinner house, boasting only half the average check, $15.50, of its up-and-down white-tablecloth predecessor.

With a slender menu of standout signatures, such as crispy crayfish salad, fried green tomatoes, grilled meat loaf, house-made saltines, hot and spicey applesauce and Southern-style barbecued chicken, Kudzu Cafe is doing what a hot restaurant is supposed to do in a competitive market -- turn heads and tables.

Liberty House partners Susan DeRose and Richard Lewis have been buffeted by fickle dining critics and sometimes even more fickle circumstances -- despite their boldness in bringing new concepts to the table during the past 14 years. Among their misfortunes was Pearl's Fish Cafe, which swam in an unproven location south Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood from summer 1985 until the fall of 1987.

Bashed by some reviewers, Pearl's only real fault was a menu considered too "adventurous" for the city's landlocked seafood palette, which then was more in the color of fried shrimp and broiled swordfish.

Yet another faulty stroke for Liberty House came with the launch of its second OK Cafe "roadhouse," on the east side of Buckhead next to a flourishing Houston's dinner house, only a year after OK Cafe's highly successful debut on West Paces Ferry Road.

Foolishly tinkering with the cozy ambience of its original 98-seat model, Liberty House in effect got too ambitious with its second OK Cafe, trying to turn a diner concept into a 160-seat dinner house. The operation has since been shuttered.

Through it all, DeRose and Lewis have remained two of the most publicity-shy restaurateurs in the region.

And while they lack in ostentation -- and often in luck, DeRose, a onetime flight attendant, and Lewis, a Tulane M.B.A. whose family ran a grocery business, show the creativity and guts of operators with years more experience.

And now that a little good luck is coming their way with Kudzu Cafe, DeRose and Lewis may finally have the high-volume -- and highly clonable -- concept they were originally seeking in OK Cafe.

"If they had opened something like this instead of OK Cafe on Lenox Road, I think they'd have given Houston's a run for their money," remarked a Kudzu Cafe patron just one week ago.

Indeed, Kudzu Cafe -- like so many other re-creations of the extraordinarily successful Houston's--presents high energy and high value in an "upscale" dinner-house ambience. But the theme is tasteful Southern -- even down to the $7.95 Tomahawk Chopped Salad, named for the feverish hand gesture that is now a signature of Atlanta Braves baseball watching.

The upscale elements include a dramatic 150-seat four-section dining room plus a racetrack-shaped bar with 40 additional seats. Kudzu's interior is set apart by waist- and chest-high partitions, spaced by massive brick and painted wooden columns and trimmed lavishly with brass. The dominant color is "Kudzu" green.

Kudzu makes a serious impression on guests with its gang-style wait service and its hand-painted plates. Another appealing element is the "partial" exhibition kitchen set behind a 5- by 20-foot glass wall.

Kudzu is the common name for a wild Southern roadside vine that grows so rapidly up tree trunks and telephone poles that it can actually smother an orchard or disrupt a community's electric service. After only six months, Kudzu Cafe has the look of a concept that is eager to begin curling its tendrils into the most fertile corners of the Sunbelt.