24 Hours on
Buford Highway
73 knock-out dishes, 33 essential grocery buys, 17 kaleidoscopic snacks, and 6 inspiring families who keep the highway buzzing at every hour
If there is one question most frequently asked by and of food-obsessed Atlantans, it is this: “What should I eat on Buford Highway?” Below, we offer a meager 123 answers. We break them down by time of day (because on a highway that’s home to this much culinary diversity, every hour elicits a new craving), by what items you should grab in the literal miles of grocery aisles (we walked them all), and, most obviously, by which single dish you should eat at a given restaurant (in case you want to strategically plot a multicultural, multicourse meal). We intended not to pick more than one offering from any menu, but in an exercise this epic, we were bound to inadvertently double-dip—and we challenge you to find which restaurant snuck in two dishes.
Compiling this issue was a marathon (one with pit stops that filled us with pupusas, biriyani, and dumplings). But despite the joyous complexities along the way, it turns out that the answer we attempted to give you could have been much more simply boiled down. What should you eat on Buford Highway? Everything.
Edited by Mara Shalhoup
Contributions by Sonam Vashi, Christiane Lauterbach, Sucheta Rawal, Juan Vidal, Jennifer Zyman, and Muriel Vega
