Bon Appétit: Spaghetti with braised kale

This is Marie, whose usual contribution to the culinary delights detailed in this blog is eating something on the menu different from what my husband ordered, so we can share. Today I am contributing a recent success in the "what can I make with whatever's on hand" cooking technique. I happened to have some kale on hand and my original plan to use it was increasingly impractical with the change in the weather, so I searched for inspiration and decided that this recipe, available here, looked like a good candidate for experimentation.

I called over my guinea pig husband and he made positive noises so I put it on the "do soon" list. I am definitely interested in more interesting ways to use pasta since Monday is pasta day and as much as I love my basic spaghetti recipe, every so often one has to do something different. This is simple, quick, and very tasty. If the subject of kale hasn't scared you off already but you still have some reservations, my vegetable-phobic stepdaughter took seconds, and wants to bring leftovers to school tomorrow for lunch (she didn't, but the enthusiasm was still appreciated).



Kale was in the freezer; it had been waiting to be mashed into potatoes, but what with spring progressing as quickly as it has been, it seemed likely there would be no mashed potato weather again until this upcoming fall. Some may have noted that the recipe was from last October, but the recipe is definitely suitable for warmer days. Garlic we had in plenty due to a previous recipe, and needed to be used up as it had also noticed that spring had sprung. Onions are always on hand, as are various options in cheese. I kept the changes to a minimum. I decided it needed some chicken seared in my nice Italian spice mix. The kale cooked down very well, and though the recipe called for being exceedingly careful not to let it get too dry, that wasn't too much of a challenge. Mind you, I used slightly more olive oil than called for. It's a healthy fat, after all!

On a whim, and because the plates needed some color, I decided that the strawberries that were supposed to be for dessert would be on the dinner plates instead. That worked surprisingly well. This is a recipe that goes very, very well with sweet/sour flavors. A citrus salad or cranberry relish would also probably do well as a side.

Normally I do more to alter a new recipe, but in this case the original is so simple that it seemed better to fiddle with the sides. However, in the future I plan to try mushrooms and/or pine nuts, possibly with a dash of balsamic vinegar. My sister also mentioned an interesting variation on this theme, using spinach instead of kale.

Just Around the Corner, Atlanta GA

I'm going to be so depressed when Marie's job moves out to the Perimeter Mall area in the next month or so. Once a week, we meet for lunch downtown. The original idea had been to meet in Centennial Olympic Park and enjoy a nice picnic outside, but she has a longer lunch than me, and, honestly, I got a little tired of rushing back to work with a belly full of lunch and spending the next two hours feeling like I was going to lose it. So now she picks up our grub and we eat here at my job and it's much more pleasant. Maybe this week, we can enjoy a nice meal on the tables outside.

More often than not, Marie picks up a burger and fries from Just Around the Corner, a teeny little place at the intersection of Spring and Marietta. I've actually only set foot in the place once, so I really can't tell you much about it. It's got just the sort of look to it that let you know, correctly, that they're doing something right. It's like one step up from a hot dog cart, with only room inside for perhaps five people. And in much the same way that some of the best meals come from street vendors - I don't know that there have ever been falafels anywhere as good as the ones that this one Turkish fellow used to serve from a little cart just below Leconte and Park Halls on the UGA campus in the mid-90s - the burgers at Just Around the Corner are just dripping with character and style.





Over the last decade or so, Atlanta has really nicened up the area around the park, trying to make the place much more attractive to tourists. The whole area's so much cleaner and family-friendly than its reputation holds. Nearby parking is usually under $10, and with so many museums and activities to check out, I imagine that you can easily find plenty of things to do, and have a really nice, juicy burger to top it off. And if you're coming into town for an afternoon Hawks or Thrashers game, it's certainly better than your options inside Philips Arena, and a lot cheaper, too.

Looks like the dogwoods are blooming in the park today. Yeah, maybe we can sit outside and enjoy our burgers with nature before it starts erupting with pollen too terribly. I've probably only got about 72 or fewer hours left before I will want to dig my eyeballs out with spoons, so I might try and enjoy the weather while I can, you know?



Hey! We've moved! Come see us in our new home!

I have to tell you about this soup.

The best soup that there's ever been, in the history of food, was the gazpacho at the late, dearly lamented Mean Bean in Athens. If you never had this soup, then you'll never know what the best soup in the universe tasted like. Now about ten months ago, down in south Georgia, I did have a bowl of gazpacho which seemed to me to be in the same general hemisphere of coma-inducing wonder, but I was also a little distracted, what with being about five hours away from getting married, so I might have been exaggerating things just a little. I'll have to try it again and see whether it holds up.

Assuming that it does, then it stands to follow that the third best soup in the world is the creamy tomato soup at Sweet Tomatoes, a national chain known on the west coast as Souplantation. And I can see disappointment in the eyes of a few readers through the screens of their laptops, as it's just a month into this experiment and I'm already talking about a national chain. Tsk!

Obsession with the creamy tomato soup is widely known as writer Mark Evanier's recurring joke, and I'm not trying to hem in on his well-worn territory, but I do have to thank him for cluing me in on the place. Depending on his mood, he'll either casually mention it or go into full-bore rave when the soup returns to the restaurant's rotating menu. This usually happens every March and for one week in the fall. I've never understood this. There are a few soups available here year-round. One of these is their signature deep kettle house chili, which is the blandest and most disappointingly ordinary chili I've ever had, and they serve that slop all the time?

Oh, and I'll tell you what's worse: they've also got some soups which are on an even sillier 15-day rotation. So if you go in the first half of March, you can alternate bowls of creamy tomato and their shrimp bisque, which is also outstanding, but in the second half of the month, they replace the shrimp bisque with clam chowder, which I can't eat. Now what's fair about that?

So anyway, about four years back, Mark was raving about this soup and I decided the kiddos needed some more vegetables, so we made an evening out of it and I was sold. I mean, this soup is really, really good. It doesn't seem possible that anything made in such quantity can be so tasty, but I had something like six bowls of the stuff that first night. Then I remained sitting there for a very, very long time.





To be honest, Sweet Tomatoes is one of those places that flatly is not worth a visit unless you check the website beforehand and confirm that there's a good soup on the menu. Now Marie likes the place regardless, because she enjoys making a nice salad to her specifications, but I never feel like I've gotten my money's worth unless I can enjoy several bowls of soup. The creamy tomato and the shrimp bisque are certainly deal-clinchers, and I also really like their El Paso chicken and lime. I'll go to Sweet Tomatoes without a grumble if any one of the three are present. I mean, the day hasn't come where I've dropped my fork in shock and raved about the lettuce and spinach I've just had, plus their pastas are uniformly disappointing, so there needs to be good soup.

Luckily, Marie's birthday happens to come in March, so we can usually justify two or three visits during the month. I need to do a better job remembering to go at the start of March, however. Sunday night, we got a group of friends together to celebrate. We all arrived in the middle of a huge downpour, exactly the sort of weather that requires two or three bowls of soup.

Well, we were nine in total and an astonishing amount of soup was consumed. Neal had several bowls of their black bean chili, which surely must be superior to their regular deep-kettle-thing because it cannot possibly be worse, and was comatose for the next sixteen hours. Between us, my wife and I built a small fort of little red soup bowls. She didn't have space on the table to set her gift cards down. That's one of the advantages to having children; you can send them back to the line for more soup. Just keep it coming, with some of that cheesy bread to dunk in it. More tomato soup, and nobody gets hurt. Maybe we'll go back Saturday afternoon, before they replace the creamy tomato with something inevitably inferior.



Other Sweet Tomatoes locations in the Atlanta area include Alpharetta:


and Gwinnett Place:


Hey! We've moved! Come visit us at our new home!

The Real Chow Baby, Atlanta GA

There probably won't be quite so many features in this column about restaurants as unabashedly corporate as this one, but since The Real Chow Baby is, at this stage, just a local chain with only two locations, I think it will be acceptable to write about it. I'm willing to overlook the small army of attractive young servers in matching black t-shirts and headsets, although they do reinforce the feeling that somebody's investment in these restaurants is far more financial than emotional.

Real Chow Baby opened its first restaurant on Howell Mill some years ago, and a second in 2008 in the Cobb Galleria Center, giving area residents, at long last, a reason to actually set foot inside this misbegotten mall other than the annual Anime Weekend Atlanta convention. The Galleria's been an embarrassment for a really long time now. When I was in middle school, it was opened with so much hoopla - an upscale mall! an AMC theater with eight screens! a video arcade with an airlock! - but it languished, a sad suburban wannabe that looked longingly at Phipps Plaza and just wished it could be that cool.

I guess about ten years ago, Cobb County finally took pity on the diseased beast, which had been coughing blood since the cinema closed, and gutted the upper floor of the mall, transforming it, quite impressively, into an extension of a mid-sized convention center that connected, above and across the shopping area, to the Waverly Hotel on the mall's far side. There is still, nevertheless, a lot of vacant real estate inside. The excellent Sky City blog provided a terrific photoessay about the Galleria last October, which you can go read. The mall hasn't changed a jot since those photos were taken, indeed since the top floor was converted to conference rooms and the Eckanakar people put in a reading room years ago, except that a gallery of horrible art across from Jock's and Jill's closed . And Sky City's writer is quite right: unless a trade show's in town, you'd think this mall had long been abandoned.

I overlooked the Real Chow Baby when we first noticed it during AWA 2008, but last year, Marie and I found ourselves free from children for a few hours on Friday and elected to have supper there, since it was so close to the con and looked reasonably nice. I was so taken with it that I asked whether she'd mind excusing ourselves and going back for lunch the next day. I never, never do that.





I've been so taken with The Real Chow Baby that I've eaten there probably twenty times since the con last September. They serve a stir-fry buffet, where you build a bowl from a huge array of ingredients. You can start with white or brown rice or four different pastas, work your way through dozens of veggies, add ladles of seventeen different sauces, about seven meats and then about a dozen spices. The potential for experimentation, while not mathematically endless, is pretty darn huge.

Fortunately, Marie likes this place almost as much as I do, and it didn't take a lot of arm-twisting to persuade her that bowls full of stir-fry were exactly what she wanted for her birthday dinner last week. (She had two birthday dinners, because she's that awesome, and I'll tell you about the second in a couple of days.) Our daughter and I met Marie after work on Friday, where there is usually a pretty good crowd of weekend revelers and families. We each sampled three bowls and enjoyed all but one of them.

Now, three bowls of stir fry sounds like a lot, and it would be, if you foolishly piled high with the food. You see, a one-trip dinner order at Real Chow Baby runs you $11.99 on the weekends - lunch is only eight - but for a buck more, you can have unlimited trips to the buffet. This is one of the city's best-kept secrets. If you make yourself just a teeny bowl with no more than two ladles of sauce, then you can sample several different flavors, and mix and match sauce offerings without worrying about whether you've gorged yourself stupid. I like to start with a medium-sized bowl, very heavy on the hot spices, and then have two smaller bowls with milder taste.

Marie's second concoction of the night mixed black bean sauce and hot mustard over white rice. None of us liked it very much, but it didn't really matter, because you can abandon something you don't enjoy and try something different. If you can exercise enough willpower to keep your portion sizes reasonable, then this is definitely a place to provide you with an excellent meal or twenty.

(Update: On July 19 2010, this location split off from the other and became known as "Big Chow Grill.")



The Real Chow Baby also operates locations on Howell Mill:


and on Ponce:


(Hey! We've moved! Go visit us at our new home!)

Cheerwine Milkshake

Ah, to be eighteen again. Once upon a time, when I went to school at the University of Georgia, I started paying attention to all the many soda possibilities that were out there. Used to be, there was a sandwich shop called Steverino's that would deliver the most amazingly tasty giant subs I've ever had, and would bring along a choice of some unusual beverage that I'd never had before. I led a sheltered suburban childhood; IBC Root Beer was so outre that a friend's crazy mother once chased another friend down the street for coming to her door with a brown bottle of it, screaming that she didn't care what kind of beer it was, he should know better than to ring her bell holding a bottle. I mention this because it really was a powerful, eye-opening experience, knowing that you could take an 11 pm study break on a Tuesday and call for a twelve-inch special and a bottle of Vernor's, or Buffalo Rock, or the mighty Budwine.

Buffalo Rock immediately became my favorite soda; I'm scheming for a trip to Montgomery as soon as it's feasible to bring back a couple of twelve-packs. But Budwine... wow, I'd never had anything remotely like that before. It looks like the company, originally called Bludwine, was founded in nearby Watkinsville in the 1900s. They changed the name of their beverages in the 1920s, by which time an imitator, Cheerwine, had cropped up in the Carolinas. For decades, the two companies dueled in competing regions. Cheerwine had the Carolinas and Virginia, and Budwine was sold in Georgia, Florida and parts of Alabama and Tennessee. Eventually, Budwine petered out and the business closed in 1995. Cheerwine gradually moved into the region, and while it is still uncommon, you can find it in twelve-packs in Publix grocery stores.

While Budwine was around, though, there was a little secret that everybody in Athens got to know by word of mouth. The Dairy Queen on Oak Street, between campus and the bypass, would sell you a Budwine milkshake. It was just what it sounds like: they'd pump their vanillay soft serve goo into a steel mixing cup, open a bottle of Budwine and pour about a third in, then do whatever Dairy Queen magic was necessary and what you had was a very light, very sweet cherry milkshake that tasted better than anything else on that menu.

For fifteen years, I told people who never had the pleasure that those were the most wonderful things you'd ever tried. It never once occurred to me that, with Budwine's better-known copy readily available and DQs dotting the landscape, there was nothing stopping me from recreating the taste here in Marietta. Well, nothing except the incredibly rude manager.

Earlier this week, I was poking around the Roadfood.com forums and realized that I had never noticed the Beverage Forum, and certainly not the "Favorite Discontinued Sodas" thread, which started in 2006 and has been periodically brought back to life by necroposters ever since.

The thread's pretty amusing, particularly with all the well-meaning nostalgists who genuinely thought their favorite soda was dead only to learn some other region was still enjoying it. I was pleased to see that the legendary Ort.Carlton, who used to write such wonderful columns about beer and post offices and aimless roadtripping for Athens' Flagpole magazine, contributed to the thread and mentioned Budwine. Finally, those two misfiring synapses finally clicked. There really wasn't any reason why I shouldn't try to get myself a Cheerwine milkshake!







So Tuesday, I picked up a 12-pack of Cheerwine, got my daughter from school, took her to the allergy clinic, and stopped into the DQ on the way back. We periodically do this as a treat for her; they sell half-price shakes from 2-4. They're not exceptionally good shakes - soft serve goo just isn't as good as, say, ice cream - but they do for a treat.

There's a teenage girl who has been there for months, and today she was training some nervous newbie. My daughter ordered her shake. They made it and I said "And I would also like a vanilla shake, but I'd like you to open this can and pour about half of it in."

I think that a teenager, even a nervous newbie, could have accomplished this without incident. Unfortunately, she was being discreetly watched by some manager, who, in that stereotypically loud, excited and singsong manner, jumped from somewhere I didn't see her and shouted, without additional hyperbole from me, "No, no, no, no, no! You cannot do that!"

I really wouldn't want to have been on the other side of me when I said "Yes, you can," in my most emphatic and withering tone.

"If you want to put your Coke in, you can do it after we give it to you! We cannot do that for you!" she said, not politely. Well, a little something about her manner, probably that it was poor, didn't mix well with my intense dislike of having anybody in food service tell me what I could or couldn't do with the food I was paying for. Plus she called a Cheerwine a Coke; she was clearly a nitwit.

So I don't mind telling you that I instantly discarded my otherwise unfailingly polite demeanor and told her, in no uncertain terms, that I used to have these all the time at Dairy Queen when I was in college, that the soda has to be mixed in for it to taste right, and that I was paying for the milkshake and I wanted it made my way. Okay, so there was probably some nine hundred page franchise contract that she and her husband - he's usually sitting on the far end in a wooden chair - signed which clearly states that franchisees may not alter the formulae of Dairy Queen soft serve goo through the addition of whatever customers pass across the counter. But geez, just because you beat Tastee-Freez out of the local market in 1979 doesn't give you the right to act like a horse's ass.

Well, she caved. Common sense prevailed and I got my Cheerwine milkshake. My daughter, who's sworn for years that she can't stand the stuff, gave it a sip and wowed, "Oh! That's SO GOOD!"

And she was right. I think the girl poured too much of the can, but it was otherwise a reasonable facsimile of what I remember. You should take a can to the DQ near you and give it a go. Maybe you'll even avoid the dingbattery of the lady who thought she was trying to run the one by me and enjoy your shake without having to engage in formal debate over it.

(Hey! We've moved! Check us out at our new home!)

Bon Appétit: Bison and red wine shepherd's pie

This is Marie, whose usual contribution to the culinary delights detailed in this blog is eating something on the menu different from what my husband ordered, so we can share. However, on intermittent Sunday nights I am doing something a bit more special than just the daily "what can I make with whatever's on hand" cooking technique.

For these meals, I am entertaining myself (and with any luck my guests and family) by making a meal out of recipes from Bon Appétit magazine and serving them to my friends. So far the results have been tasty, although not always terribly photogenic. This week's endeavor was the Bison and Red Wine Shepherd's Pie. The photo below was borrowed from Bon Appétit's site, where you can read the recipe. I've made bison chili before and liked the results so this looked like a good opportunity.

I am constitutionally unable to attempt a recipe without changing something. In this particular recipe I changed a fair amount. That can be dangerous, especially when your victims/friends will be there pretty soon to proof the results, but on the other hand it makes the recipe a bit more "mine" (my own, my precious). The most significant change was that the recipe called for bacon, right at the beginning. Also, the cut of meat needed was not available; there were no bone-in options. Those two things could very easily change the entire meal. The bacon was presumably there to add extra flavor notes and possibly some fat, and the bone...well, there are few stew-like meals that can't be improved with a bit of gelatin from a fresh bone. The meat was fairly well marbled so the fat wasn't an issue. The compromise I came up with was to throw in a bit of chuck hamburger to compensate for the lack of bacon.





Our daughter came along to help with the shopping. She was in charge of checking all the displays for free samples while I picked up potatoes, onions, pearl onions, some really nice sweet organic carrots, and went on a wide-ranging but ultimately successful quest for parsnips. She was also in charge of hitting one bunch of celery with another to mime the fate that should befall all celery, followed by a deep philosophical argument regarding the exact status of celery as food and whether anything else (besides celery) that was not originally a food item could be improved with peanut butter. I did not feel this particular recipe could be improved with peanut butter; fear not. However, considering that another part of the recipe involved turnips, which I hesitate to use, celery and turnips were both passed over in favor of some frozen sweet corn. Oh, and my paprika was not sweet, it was smoked, but I figured that would also help compensate for the lack of bacon. In fact, there was a disturbing moment for me as the meat was originally browning, when a smell arose from the meat that nearly (but not quite) triggered that part of my palate that revolts violently to the presence of that particular cut of pig. Thankfully it passed quickly, but if you are a bacon fan, you would probably not want to follow me in leaving the pig out of this recipe!

At this point it seemed that any further changes would make the whole point of the exercise moot, so I tried to follow the rest fairly exactly. One of the first rules of recipes is to add an hour of prep time to anything that has more than about 5 ingredients or which requires stages of cooking. This was no exception, and another half hour or so could have come in handy as the pie went into the oven just about the time as the guests walked in the door. The neat chopping tool my in-laws gave me might have cut down on the time, but I was rather attached to the idea of having the carrots be neat discs of the same general size, rather than irregularly-sized bits. Anyway, once everything was bubbling away and looked to be cooking down well I realized that there was going to have to be some compensation for the lack of a bone. A small amount of corn starch seemed to do the trick. The girlchild also provided some good encouragement along the way, as "Ewww, bison?!?! Is that like a buffalo?" turned into wide-eyed "Man, that smells good! How soon 'till dinner?" Eleven isn't necessarily a terribly experimental age, so I assume resistance; if it changes to enthusiasm I get extra points.

Everything went very well up to the point where the last touch was added. The potatoes had an egg wash that was supposed to brown and make the peaks all pretty, but the gravy was bubbling so vigorously that I didn't dare leave the pie in the oven long enough for the really pretty browning to set in. Even the garlic toast didn't brown well. Therefore, there is no picture of the untouched serving dish. However, everyone took at least seconds and some took thirds. The corn went very well with the other vegetables, retaining a bit of a crunch. The pearl onions were almost as sweet as Vidalias. Dessert was pumpkin bread that baked while we ate dinner. Overall a successful evening, even if the aesthetics weren't quite up to standard. The important thing is that we had a good time and the food was appreciated.

(Hey! We've moved! Check us out at our new home!)

Blue Willow Inn, Social Circle GA

To help navigate around this blog, but also keep it simple, I decided that each restaurant entry should have just two tags, related to the type of food and the town that we've visited to eat it. Assuming this blog maintains my interest for a good while, eventually readers can get ideas and suggestions about where to eat by clicking a tag. I think that of all of them, the tag for Social Circle might end up being the least frequently troubled*. Marie and I drove out here with our daughter Saturday and, other than nine hundred police cruisers maintaining order, we did not see anything whatsoever of interest other than the Blue Willow Inn.

Social Circle is about 45 minutes east of Atlanta out I-20. Louis and Billie van Dyke opened their restaurant in a gorgeous old home a couple of blocks north of Social Circle's tiny downtown in November 1991. Among the framed articles on the walls of the main hallway, there's a feature article from the inspirational magazine Guideposts that tells how their first few months were really tough, but a raving review by the late, great Lewis Grizzard turned things around almost overnight, and the restaurant has routinely served 200,000 visitors a year. They recommend that you make reservations, otherwise you might end up sitting in a rocking chair on their front porch for a while.





Blue Willow Inn serves up a really nice Southern-style buffet. The price is quite reasonable - just under $20 a head - and includes everything from ham and chicken livers to what might very well be the best fried green tomatoes that I've ever had. And I'm awfully particular to fried green tomatoes. The salad was pretty disappointing - uninspired iceberg lettuce in a concoction not unlike what you'd find at a Huddle House - but the rest of the vegetables more than made up for it.

Even though the restaurant is bustling with people, its layout is so nice that each room is comparatively quiet, allowing you to relax and take your time. Everybody there seemed to really be enjoying themselves, knowing that they were doing something particularly nice for lunch. We arrived a little bit before a birthday party started in one of the upstairs rooms. My daughter, who was making her way back from the buffet with seconds, put on a show of faux indignation and asked, of two people going upstairs with gift bags, why she had not been invited. The older ladies replied "Well, of course you're invited, dear, come on up." So my daughter put her plate on our table and ran skedaddling up to join them. Apparently she gave the birthday gal a big hug and wished her well before rejoining us, beaming. This is why, when my daughter feigns shyness to get out of something, we know she's lying.

Desserts consist of a million billion calories in a series of decadent cakes, pies, brownies and forty pounds more banana pudding than I should have eaten. When we left, we made it as far as the porch before I had to commandeer a rocking chair for several minutes. Then we got as far as the koi pond and gift shop before having to stop again.

The parking lot is behind the restaurant, and behind it, there is a small, classy-designed strip mall. Actually, I was exaggerating earlier when I said there was nothing of interest other than the Blue Willow Inn around the area; there is also a small nostalgia-minded soda fountain in that strip mall which might have been worth a look had I not already consumed forty pounds of banana pudding and a slice of chocolate cake buried under whipped cream. How the dickens that place is meant to stay in business with the giant dessert buffet of the inn on the other side of a parking lot is anybody's guess. Next door to the soda fountain, there's one of those museums about Adam and Eve and the Jesus horses, for those of you who enjoy throwing up in public.

*Obviously, this well-intentioned idea did not last long, and I later elected to use dual-county tags for out-of-the-way places like this one.



(Hey! We've moved! Come see us at our new home!)

The Mad Italian, Chamblee GA

As longtime readers of my LiveJournal know, I am fascinated by local restaurant chains, especially the ones that never leave their home base. Atlanta has been home to several, and one that has sadly been hit like a freight train during the current recession is the Mad Italian. This wonderful restaurant opened in 1973 on Peachtree Road and claims to have been among the first to serve up New York and Philly-styled sandwiches in the city.

The original location is long gone, but for most of my life, there were two others, in Chamblee and in Smyrna. Around 2005, they opened one in Marietta where a short-lived barbecue restaurant had been (nobody seems to remember the name), and in 2006, a fourth location in Alpharetta moved into a site vacated by a McAlister's Deli. The Marietta store quickly became my daughter's favorite restaurant, and it somehow fooled my son into thinking that he liked alfredo sauce. Since everything else from Ragu to sauce packs to the offerings at other restaurants have failed to meet his requirements, he eventually gave up and concluded that what he actually likes is Mad Italian's alfredo sauce and just quit trying to order it anywhere else.

Then again, who knows what extra ingredients are in Mad Italian's alfredo recipe? I took a young lady out for supper there late one Saturday evening in 2006 and we had a blast with the staff, since everybody on duty that night was even more baked than my date's lasagna.

So it didn't come as a great surprise when the Marietta store closed in 2008, though it was a huge shock when the venerable Smyrna location, where high schoolers used to congregate after Wills High School football games in the eighties, shut down at the same time. Then again, there hasn't been a Wills High School since 1989 either. Late last year, the Alpharetta store followed them, leaving the Chamblee location as the last man standing in what used to be a northside tradition.





For all my lovin', Mad Italian's had a curiously poor reputation among locals for years. Back when Atlanta Cuisine had a messageboard (come on, Tom!), the announcement that the Smyrna and Marietta stores had shuttered had met with really curious glee. Well, sure, any place where the staff can spend even one night visibly stoned stupid can't say they didn't have it coming, but I always liked everything on the menu, from the sandwiches (made on very light bread by Cassone Bakeries of New York) to the pasta fagioli soup (tomato-based, with shells, red and white beans) to the incredibly yummy meat sauce. I'm not savvy enough to say whether the pasta itself is any different from anybody else's, but I really don't believe I've ever had meat sauce as consistently good as Mad Italian's, despite regular experimentation.

The sandwiches have always been terrific, too. I really have not ordered their cheesesteak often enough. There are better in the region, but any of their six-inch sandwiches, served with a small salad and a bowl of spaghetti, will give you a truly satisfying meal. How the Mad Italian has suffered while that Artuzzi's chain is still around utterly baffles me.

My daughter has been pestering me for some time to revisit past triumphs, and since she's been pretty good lately, I agreed to indulge her. This past Saturday, she and I took a long drive out for lunch here with our frequent dining partner David, whose restaurant choices are consistently good. I believe his family went to the Smyrna location many times in the past, but got out of the habit ages back. Marie wasn't with us this trip; she and her brother went to Athens to raid that deli I was talking about the other day.

I don't have a lot more to say about the trip. It's a huge, aggravating shame that the Mad Italian's fortunes have dipped so badly lately, and that a nearly forty years-old enterprise feels like it's on its last legs, but it's still a perfectly reliable place for a really decent sandwich or a big bowl of pasta with good sauce.

On the other hand, well, since Marie moved in, we've had her unbelievably good sauce recipes with a variety of meats and spices and, to be bluntly honest, as good as Mad Italian's spaghetti with meat sauce is, I can't swear that I've missed it. It's a place that does everything pretty well, but there's not one thing on the menu that I can't get better someplace else. And honestly, when your nostalgia for a place's fun history is louder than your present-day enthusiasm, and chuckling about stoned servers is more fun than the meal in front of you, it may be the ultimate sign that you've moved on.



(Hey! We've moved! Come see us at our new home!)

Marietta Fish Market, Marietta GA

One of Marietta's local heroes is Gus Tselios, a fellow whose group owns four restaurants in the area. The world-famous Marietta Diner is the flagship of his empire, and the others are Pasta Bella, the Cherokee Cattle Company and the Marietta Fish Market, which opened in December 2008. There's absolutely no way that anybody in Atlanta can even be a quasi-serious foodie and not come to Cobb County to try out at least one of these places.

The basic gist of the restaurants is family dining, with an emphasis on freaking enormous portions. You can usually expect to spend $20 a head here, but your Jackson will buy you one supper and at least one leftover lunch. All four restaurants have menus so thick that they'll probably stop a bullet, but the secret is simple: order from the specials. On the inside front cover of each menu, there's an inserted page typed up that day. Unless you're really in the mood for a standard, as I admittedly often am, you just want to focus on the one page. What Tselios and his chefs have concocted for that page will probably knock you on your backside.

All four restaurants are usually pretty packed - there's a wait at the Diner 24/7 - but we decided to brave the Fish Market Friday night. Even at 8 pm there was a forty minute wait, but Marie's brother was in town, and, observing Lent, wanted fish for supper. Frankly, Atlanta does not have very many seafood restaurants worth visiting, so our options were, flatly, accept a long wait or brave the drive-thru at Captain D's. The Fish Market, happily, is just five minutes up the road and worth the wait.





Friday evening, I was in the mood for a standard - shrimp and scallops. The Fish Market has a "lighter appetite" section on their menu, where you get about half the food for two-thirds of the price. It's not the most economically sensible policy unless you're just trying to save a couple of bucks, and things admittedly are a little tight. Besides, they still give you so darn much as to provide leftovers for Saturday night. So I had fried baby shrimp and grilled scallops over dirty rice with cole slaw, following some pretty good fried green tomatoes and zucchini fries that we all shared and a Greek salad. Normally, we don't splurge on appetizers, but Karl was in town, and it's usually very difficult for Marie and I to resist any kind of fried vegetable. Fried green beans are her particular kryptonite. I don't know that I've had zucchini prepared like this before. A basket is big enough for four, and those are darn tasty.

My plate would have been perfectly satisfactory had Marie not ordered from the specials. She had the red beans and rice with jumbo shrimp, and friends, you've never had it this good. The beans are cooked in this unbelievably good sauce, very tangy and sweet. I was pilfering beans and sausage all night just to let that sauce roll around on my tongue. Karl also ordered from the specials, and had a whole red snapper brought out on a huge platter and a bed of sauteed vegetables. He made out just fine, too.

The only member of our group not to be totally satisfied with supper was my daughter, who keeps claiming that she doesn't actually like seafood despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, and, sighing, got an order of chicken strips from the kids' menu. To be honest, these weren't all that great, but they were the biggest chicken strips I've ever seen and could clobber your next door neighbor into unconsciousness, and frankly anybody who'd order chicken in the Fish Market probably could stand to be walloped upside the head with one herself. But that's okay; the next good meal we'd share was one that she requested.



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Two Brothers Barbecue, Ball Ground GA

I was out of town yesterday on business, hoping-to-earn-a-little-extra-money-business, with Randy, who, apart from an unfortunate willingness to eat at those gawdawful Chinese buffets, isn't at all a bad egg. The road took us north through Ball Ground, a town, they say, which was mostly owned by a miser named Oscar Robinson who died in 2005 with an incredibly complicated estate. Robinson owned most of the buildings in the small town and filled them with rocks. He'd sell them, of course, but that's what the buildings housed: rock stores. Apparently there are still millions of dollars left unaccounted for, and some of it's probably holed up in one downtown building or another. The current owners are in no rush to tear down anything or let somebody clear it out, for fear that a big sack of money might be under a staircase or in a wall or something. On the one hand, Robinson didn't seem to do very much for bringing economic development to Ball Ground, but on the other, he kept the Wal-Marts out of town. Frankly, we all owe that man a beer in heaven.

The road took us to Two Brothers, a place I left in a fit of completely unjustified pique about eight years previously. The interior of the place is done up like a whacking huge tool shed, full of rusty old farm equipment, those glass insulators for power lines that you always see in places like this, and old soda bottles lining the walls. Eight years ago, I had my eye on a bottle of Kickapoo Joy Juice from the late sixties. This was a Ski / Mountain Dew clone made to cash in on the Li'l Abner comic strip, and sold at the (now abandoned) Dogpatch USA theme park, along with shops throughout the region. These days, it's bottled with a paper label and sold in specialty stores for nerds like me, some of whom like to pretend that they can tell the difference between it and Mountain Dew. Anyway, I like the original bottle, and they wouldn't sell it to me, and so I walked off in a supposed huff and didn't come back because they were so "mean." Plus, they're in Ball Ground.

Well, I'm willing to let bygones be bygones after eight years, especially when I'm the one who lost out by not eating this great food.





Lunch and supper are served here Thursday through Sunday. You go through cafeteria-style and usually have seven or eight sides to choose, with pickles, onions and chow-chow available by the register. The stew - I'm not picky about stew, I just want to see it available as a side - is a thick one you can eat with a fork, similar to the hash you get in Athens and the Carolinas. They have a mild and a hot tomato-based sauce and they're pretty conservative with it.

This is a good little place, ready to fill you up for about ten bucks. Admittedly, every time I look at the paper-labeled bottle of Kickapoo on my mantle, it sticks in my craw a little, but I think I can justify stopping by more often than once every eight years. You never know; I might need some rocks.



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Chicken Mull, Danielsville GA

How the heck did this craziness come about? One by one, I walked up the chain of command at the Danielsville Volunteer Fire Department until I got to Chief Perry. He's in his late fifties, a big guy, wearing a yellow apron with his name on it. He told me what the heck I was doing here, and I told him I sure was glad I came.

My wife and daughter and I were among dozens in Danielsville Saturday night eating an enormous amount of chicken mull. There were long tables set up inside the fire station's bays, with axes and memorabilia on the walls and pickles and onions on the plastic tablecloths. The DVFD does this once a year; they invite the community for their fundraiser and dozens come for miles, paying seven bucks a head to eat all the mull they could.

Mull is a surprising and tasty little dish. It's like a stew, but thinner than I was expecting. They debone the chickens and cook it up with saltines, milk, butter, salt, pepper and some other things they're not willing to share. They get 150 pounds of chickens to pull this off, and they serve it with some amazing slaw prepared with a good bit of vinegar and enough sweet tea to drown in. It is wonderful. In a fair and just world, there would be some barbecue restaurants around that offered this as a side instead of Brunswick stew, just to keep things interesting.





So anyway, I asked Chief Perry to tell me how the heck this got started. He told me that he grew up eating rabbit mull, that it used to be a common dish here in northeast Georgia. Twenty-seven years ago, when the fire department needed to raise funds, they considered holding a barbecue, but everybody up there does that, from little leagues to the Keep Cornelia Beautiful committee, so they needed something to stand out from the crowd.

He asked whether we were from around there, and I told him sadly, no, we live in Marietta, and that I read about the fundraiser at Online Athens. I can't remember who referred me to it; probably Hillary at Flagpole, but I can't find it just now.

Chief Perry thanked me for coming and told me he hoped we'd come back next year. I thanked him for having us and thought about the pineapple-and-cherry pie that Marie brought back to the table. I'm trying so hard to think about sensible portion sizes, and the third bowl of mull really was pushing it, and it was time to have a small dessert and call it quits. I'd been conservative, though: I just added a spoonful of onions to my mull, and just had a few Premium saltines and my pickles - and damn, those were good pickles - on the side.

The lady next to us, meanwhile, dumped about two dozen pickles and half the bowl of onions in her mull, then crushed up a big handful of crackers and stirred the thickening soup with a really generous helping of Texas Pete. I felt robbed. I said to myself on the way up from Athens that I couldn't see myself making this trip again unless we were going to revisit Zeb Dean's, which is a trip we're long overdue for making. Then I looked at this lady's thick, orange-and-green mull and how good it looked mixed up like that and realized we'll be back in Danielsville at least twice more before I'm done with the place.

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