Restaurant Review - Mighty Neighborly
Wahoo! caters to Decatur’s crowds with easygoing finesse
The city of Decatur, unlike its sprawling next-door neighbor, has no penchant for flashy, flaky restaurants. Skip the muckety-muck culinary pyrotechnics and the glitzed-out trappings. Decaturites prefer their eateries user-friendly. They want honest food in a place that provides booster seats for the kids and where they can converse without bellowing.
That’s not to imply that Decatur doesn’t possess a sense of style. These folks can certainly appreciate a snazzy industrial redo. Just make it comfortable, not convulsive.
Judging from the nightly crowds, Wahoo! has Decatur’s tastes down. It feels like hunting for a hidden find the first time you cross the tracks onto College Avenue and trek down the forlorn street, wondering just where the restaurant is. Then you see the cars. The ones that wouldn’t fit in the parking lot line the streets in a tight cluster. As you walk in, you glimpse a buttery-lit throng of humanity through the picture windows. This find has definitely been found.
But don’t take that to mean you can’t get in the door. Wahoo! seems to have just the right amount of busyness. Seats are mostly filled, and there’s a solid crowd at the handsome bar in the back. An easygoing sense of occasion pervades the place. On the nights I visited, though, there was always a table or two available. Nice to be able to join the party immediately for a change.
Wahoo! is in every way a restaurant designed to be embraced by its community. And like most neighborhood spots, it has its share of foibles and quirks - particularly when it comes to the food.
The menu has no specific ethnic or thematic predilection. It’s a wholly democratic mishmash of popular dishes that epitomizes millennial American tastes. Glance down the appetizer choices: You’ve got Mexican, fusion, Continental and nods to France and the Deep South. Unfortunately, most of these dishes need a bit of tweaking.
Coconut shrimp, for example, are golden morsels fried just long enough for the shrimp to be cooked but still buxom and the batter to become properly crispy. A bit of mango sauce is thoughtfully pooled on each shrimp. Too bad that sauce has an overly potent whiff of uncooked rum that permeates every bite.
A quesadilla has clear, familiar flavors: basil pesto, tomato and melty mozzarella. Sadly, it’s filled with cottony, pale tomatoes that mar the texture. Put this one on hold until summer. And speaking of texture, the tuna tartare is simply off-kilter. The menu advertises the tuna being served over baby greens, but mentions nothing about the monstrous, floury chips with which you are meant to scoop the stuff up. It doesn’t work. The delicate, satiny fish needs a courtlier companion.
But don’t give up on the idea of a starter here just yet. Mussels are elevated from the doldrums by the addition of sherry in their creamy sauce. Spinach salad with bacon, blue cheese and sugared pecans gets a chipper kick from a mustard vinaigrette heady with tarragon.
And the kitchen has a maternal way with soups. A special of seafood bisque in a lobster base was chunky with fish and shellfish and intensely creamy in that old-school way. Remember when creamy bisques, almost but not quite gluey, were the essence of sophistication? Even better was a bowl of potato cheddar soup, reassuring and lovely as the strands of yellow cheese melded with the pale potage. I’ll take that as succor on a rainy afternoon any day.
Entrees are heavy on seafood, with largely winning results. Ever tried the restaurant’s namesake fish? Called ono in Hawaii, they’re large, elusively solitary creatures that favor tropical waters and are big sport for game fishers. The taste is akin to swordfish or mahi-mahi. Wahoo! serves its wahoo grilled with a drizzle of mild salsa verde and a hunk of mashed potatoes. The fish was a smidgen dry, but I’d order it again.
Even better was the fresh catch of the day - grouper under a supple lemon-caper-butter sauce with wild rice. It could have come off as banquet food, but the grouper’s freshness gave the dish epicurean cred. Halibut was served with a horseradish balsamic blueberry sauce - how scary does that sound? Guess what, it ain’t bad. No one flavor dominates; it gives the fish a vinegary, slightly fruity lift. A variation of the sauce tastes even better over tender medallions of duck breast.
My one main course grouse came when I saw three meager shrimp clustered on top of a pile of tomatoey grits. My friend dug around in the grits and flagged over our server. “You only get three shrimp with this dish?” she asked. “No, no. the shrimp are mixed in, too,” he relayed before running off. We rooted around some more. We found one more shrimp. Harrumph.
Most of the desserts are shipped in from Southern Sweets, a Decatur cafe and caterer that makes fantastic wedding cakes. The coconut cake is hard to pass up, especially for children who spy it proudly displayed on the kitchen counter.
An important note: The prices at Wahoo! are astoundingly reasonable, an essential ingredient to a neighborhood restaurant. You can get a thoroughly enjoyable baked chicken breast coated in parmesan and Dijon with baby greens and a blob of mashed potatoes for 11 bucks. Sheesh. I’m coming to Decatur to eat more often. In Midtown and Buckhead, I pay $11 just for an appetizer.