European Deli, Athens GA

Marie has a friend in Athens who apparently doesn't get out much. I never quite know what to do about people like that. I figure that the whole point of having a place to be in is to get out of it as often as possible, because no matter how wonderful your "in" might be, it just can't be big enough to accommodate all of the out. On Saturday, I had found a very interesting "out" to visit, which I'll tell you about some other time, but it was a little unusual, even for us. That's not to say I don't hope to change that, and what is a little unusual today might be commonplace before long, but I did fear I was asking Marie to indulge me a little more than usual. So I suggested that she come up with someplace we could have lunch. Well, that and I knew that I had a really expensive book waiting for me at Bizarro Wuxtry, and therefore would be short on cash, and so since she'd be covering lunch, the least I could do is let her pick where we'd go.

Well, Marie's friend in Athens, when she does go out, likes to buy odd groceries from Europe, and has been telling Marie about European Deli, a teeny little place in the strip mall where Target used to be before they moved, and which is now home to the largest Dollar Tree I've ever seen. She said they have some amazing sandwiches here, so we tried them out.





There used to be a similar grocery-slash-eatery just north of us here on Canton Road, notable as being the only place I have ever seen to sell Vimto. I bought all six cans that they had, and my blasted son and a friend each opened one, sipped the odd, grapey content, decided they didn't like them and poured them out. Damn kids. Like that place, European Deli is a small room with three chairs and a counter in the window. They sell groceries and snacks from all over the continent, many with cyrillic writing, sort of like a smaller IKEA shop with a broader purview.

They make their sandwiches to order, slicing the meat and cheese fresh, and so it takes a little while to assemble your lunch. This gives you time to wander the aisles and marvel at the curious things our European cousins eat, such as curry ketchup and giant $10 boxes of Bertie Bassett's licorice allsorts. They also make crepes for breakfast, and will fill them with Nutella and fruit.

The sandwiches are very good. Marie enjoyed some Russian salami, and my daughter and I each had some Italian bologna with Provolone cheese. It was all very tasty, especially the wonderfully mild Russian cheese that Marie shared from her sandwich. They don't seem to have a very great variety of meats and cheeses, but what they do have is very tasty, and decently priced. My daughter bought some pirouline wafers for dessert, and I spent the next several hours attempting with only sporadic success to pilfer them from her.

I was pleased that when Marie's friend does go out, she goes out to places like this. Marie says the next time she goes to Athens to game, she'll take a cooler to bring some of that salami home. Maybe if I'm nice, I can talk her into bringing back some of that cheese as well.



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Big Shanty Smokehouse, Kennesaw GA

For what seemed like many happy months, I was a devoted reader of the Atlanta Cuisine message boards, which no longer exist. Atlanta Cuisine's still up and running, and a fine site it is, too, but I think that Tom has underestimated just how important those boards were to spreading the word about good restaurants. Articles do a fine job, but nothing will attract a visitor's attention quite like a thirty-page forum thread. One article tells you that Tom's excited about a place. Thirty pages of people raving about Fox Brothers or Varasano's - that's letting you know lots of people are excited about a place.

Big Shanty Smokehouse never quite managed a thirty-page thread there, but I probably would have never heard of the place if it wasn't for that message board. I've never seen an ad for it, and nobody's really raved about it at any other site that I see. It's easily missed - I mean, who the heck wants to go west on Wade Green Road at the best of times, particularly into that ugly stretch of road where all the businesses are in repurposed houses with not a lot of parking out front, the way that side of Windy Hill near South Cobb Drive still looks? Also, you have to drive past a larger, inferior BBQ restaurant to get there. That business is large enough to give any traveler the mistaken impression that it is the cue joint they were looking for, especially when there's nothing west of it but gas stations and repurposed houses.

I'm not sure why we got out of the habit of visiting Big Shanty Smokehouse, apart from being distracted by newer restaurants. We ate there several times in 2008 and then just slowly stopped. This was stupid of us; you get a lot of very good food for a reasonable price, along with some hot, tangy, Memphis-style sauce, and I believe that they serve up the best banana pudding in the region.





Marie's going to have to work on Sunday, so she was able to take yesterday off. She treated herself to a no-stress day of cross-stitching and sunbeams, and I did a little pampering once I finished a short day downtown and we drove up here for lunch. Now, one thing about Marie that still baffles me is that she doesn't like bacon. She likes ham and pork just fine, but something about the smell of bacon aggravates her, so I try not to order it around her. This makes breakfast time an occasionally disagreeable compromise, and she always has to double-check before she orders green beans. What this meant yesterday was she missed out on the skillet corn. Here, the green beans were bacon-free, but the corn wasn't. It was a very tasty corn salsa with black beans, onion and bacon. She really missed out on that.

We shared a bowl of banana pudding. I considered sharing another four or five bowls, but I figured I'd approximate "reasonable portions" for the good of my girth and left it at one. We decided against letting any schoolage girls who might be living with us, and in class yesterday, know that we had some of that banana pudding. She's eleven and complains that the whole damn planet is unfair enough as it is.



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The Red-Eyed Mule, Marietta GA

So Marie and I have been thinking for a good while about eating better, and enjoying what we eat more. Inspired by Calvin Trillin's remarkably entertaining Tummy Trilogy (which I reviewed here and which I thunderously recommend you all purchase before the weekend's out), I've decided to do a little better job documenting our travels and finds. These will be available here in LJ with the tag "marie lets eat," and I'm also going to go back and tag the other entries about great meals and restaurants that I've made in the past, so all you foodies out there can get some good ideas. And then I'm going to put all the newer, more focused entries into this separate blog as well. If you're visiting here via blogspot, you can read back into the past by clicking the above link and reading about what we ate before February 2010.

That said, we started today by having lunch at The Red-Eyed Mule in Marietta. This is a little hole-in-the-wall with a small menu of breakfast and burgers that opened on January 19th. I heard about it from the report at Atlanta Cuisine and it's really just a hop, skip and a jump from us, on the other side of I-75. It's on the Church Street Extension, in a small building between Runaround Sue's and Elizabeth Feed & Seed.

The really neat thing is that the building has been there for a really long time, and was most recently used as a storage shed by Runaround Sue's. It was rebuilt in the 1930s after a tractor-trailer ran through it; at the time, it was... well, a "speakeasy" isn't entirely accurate, but it was a place people could go to discreetly avail themselves of some liquor. The feed & seed next door is very old indeed; the business dates back to the Civil War although they've relocated several times. The current location is equidistant from Atlanta, Woodstock, Cartersville and Douglasville by old roads.

They have a small lunch menu of four different burgers on Texas toast, and we were very pleased with ours.





Marie also got a cup of white bean soup, which was served a little hotter than I prefer, but I really enjoyed it when it cooled enough. It's served with two small cornbread muffins.

The burgers were very good, and I love that they're served on Texas toast. We each just had the simple burger-with-garden option, but they have a couple of interesting varieties available as well. Any place that serves burgers with fried eggs gets thumbs-up from me. I like the burgers better than Cheeseburger Bobby's, which we enjoy hugely, and where we usually go for a quick burger in the evening. That's actually the only strike against Red-Eyed Mule. Since they close at 2 and are not open Sundays, it really limits the opportunities we have to visit. But I hope one or both of us can get back there soon.



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