Spring is a small neighborhood restaurant located in Marietta, about 30 minutes from Atlanta city center.  Opening in 2016, it is named for Chef Brian So’s favorite season.  The small menu changes with the availability of ingredients.  The front door is tucked around the corner from the street and the train tracks are right next to it.  Inside it is bright with bench seating along the walls meeting up with small 2-top tables.  Brick and painted walls reach to the high ceiling with exposed ductwork.  Faint music is in the background sometimes, so maybe it just bled out of the kitchen window.  The wine list is reasonable and contained a lot of half bottle sized choices.   Service was friendly but not totally perfect.  The server did help us determine how much to order, so we split the first 2 courses and then each had our own main.

 

Shaved Foie Gras is made with brioche, cherry gelée and Sicillian pistachios.  It came with 2 pieces in the order on really crisp brioche toast.  The cherry gelee was tart and cold as was the shaved foie gras that covered it.  The dusting of pistachios was very mild.  It was a nice couple bites.

 

Bread service was 2 thick slices of warm wonderful sourdough polenta bread and leek butter.  The crust was perfectly crisp and the interior nicely chewy and moist.  The softened butter was also delicious and this would have been easy to fill up on.

 

The Persimmon Salad contains hachiya and fuyu varieties along with chicories, asher blue cheese, pecans and pickled carrot.  They nicely split this one for us in the kitchen.  It was a really good salad.  The strongly flavored blue cheese worked well with the sweet persimmon.  Some less sweet persimmon was also in the salad – a different variety.  It was lightly dressed.  I might have toasted the pecans a minute more but overall it went together well and offered up a fair amount of flavor.

 

Roasted Pekin duck breast and confit leg with sweet potato, broccolini, huckleberry and sage.  The breast was cooked medium rare and sliced.  The fat under the skin had been nicely rendered in cooking.  The sweet potato was mixed with a little maple syrup and on one part of the plate while the sweet huckleberry gastrique was on another side.  Some sweet potato fries decorated the broccolini (nicely cooked) and added a nice crunch, as did the fried sage leaves.    A good plate of food.

 

Tarte Tatin came with calvados sabayon and vanilla ice cream on the side.  A calvados infused caramel was on top of the Honeycrisp apples.  The sabayon was on top of the ice cream and made a creamy  sweet accompaniment to the tart.  The crust was nicely done for a successful sweet ending for a nice meal.

 

A parting treat was a dark chocolate ganache with a wine center in a green shell.  It was full of contrasts and fairly interesting.