A good sandwich shop with a cheeky name.

A literal hole-in-the-wall pizza outlet.

Although the name means the fisherman, it was never meant to be a seafood restaurant, and in fact seafood was never its forte. The name was merely an homage to the original owner’s childhood on the waters of his native Sicily.

Iron Cow is rather a large place that in early evening hours (it opens most days at 6 p.m.) it looks like a big empty warehouse with a bar and kitchen set up on one side. Indeed, the business’ own description calls it “a modern industrial warehouse merging food, beverage and music…” (Nothing comes after the ellipses, so I don’t know what we’re to infer from them.)

Milkhouse certainly has a splashy presence. Located, as the name clues, in the Milk District, the area of town surrounding the T.G. Lee Dairy facility at Bumby and Robinson Avenues, its name is spelled out in a blaze of marquee-like light bulbs as though announcing the production of a lactose-tolerant Broadway musical.

Primrose Lanes is the culmination of a multiyear project by Team Market Group (Mathers Social Gathering, The Wellborn) to renovate the former Colonial Lanes, a conventional mid-century bowling facility, into a hip and happening latter-day entertainment and dining facility. 

What impressed me most about the food I had here was how vibrant and colorful it looked. Even the pho, which is many restaurants can look like day old dishwater, was vivid and fresh looking. Part of the reason may be that my dining companion had chosen the vegetable and tofu pho, so the broth was a clear vegetable broth. But the carrots and greens and even the white cubes of tofu were so enticing.

New brewer in the burgeoning Milk District. The beers are the main draw, but the food is pretty good, too.

Smoke & Donuts, the barbecue and oil-boiled dough specialty that started out as a food truck, finally made the move to the brick and mortar store they had been planning for a couple of years. I don’t know what took so long – it certainly wasn’t waiting for the flooring to go in. The space, which was previously occupied by a gourmet popcorn shop, looks sort of like an excavation site.

But the focus is the food, the duality of basic barbecue and gourmet donuts.

I sort of get the impression that Stasio’s Italian Deli & Market is a work in progress and that the people doing the work aren’t exactly sure themselves what the final product will be.

But for all the tentativeness in the air, the food that I’ve sampled so far is solidly good.