Omnivore - Root City Market Faces #2: Jessamine Starr, Xanna Kidd, Laura Curtis, Paris Renata,
Up-and-coming food peeps
Last week’s Root City Market turned out 1,000 shoppers in a few hours. I went mainly for the food, but I was tempted by a table of three poets. You gave them a topic, and they wrote you a poem. There was a line - they wrote 60 poems total - so I decided to forgo the adventure. I stuck to the food.
Xanna Kidd, owner of XK Macarons, sold 700 of her addictive meringue cookies. I looked for one of her lavender-flavored regulars but couldn’t find one. So I settled on the tangy-sweet gingerbread. The macaron, of course, has recently reached if not exceeded the faddish proportions of the still-but-not-quite-so-fashionable cupcake. The macaron is to the cupcake as airiness is to density, as spirit is to soul, as insatiability is to satiety, as calories are to mega-calories. You can find Laura’s macarons at Mae’s Bakery in Buckhead.
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This is Laura Curtis and Paris Renata, who operate Mestizo Southwest Grill in Cumming. Laura recently began marketing “malvis” - homemade flavored marshmallows between two butter cookies. Not being a big fan of marshmallows, I was shocked by the great taste and smooth texture of the hibiscus-raspberry one. You can get in touch with Laura via Facebook. Rumor is that she’ll be opening her own bakery soon.
Meet Jessamine Starr, who owns Good Food Truck, which many consider the best food truck in town (including Creative Loafing in 2011). Jessamine was dispensing curries at Root City, but her truck menu is much broader. Check out Brad Kaplan’s review.
I couldn’t resist posting this detail from a huge blackboard at the market. It invited people to name the thing they want to do before they die. Apparently, considering the messiness of the spelling, this person has already begun an uninhibited life.