Sugar's Ribs, Chattanooga TN

I started visiting friends up in Nashville a little over ten years ago now, and so I've seen a particular building off I-24 in Chattanooga on the way home many, many times. It was a breakfast place for ages, but in 2007, it became Sugar's Ribs, and the combination of neon and a great big sign proclaiming the Big Time BBQ available therein made the place irresistible.

Marie and I are not really versed in the restaurant scene in Chattanooga - I can name just three other places that I've tried - but until somebody convinces me otherwise, Sugar's is our favorite restaurant in town, and a fine destination, should the road to Nashville or Knoxville or back home see us in the city at mealtime. Chattanooga is unfortunately inconveniently placed for traveling foodies like us. As it is ninety minutes from Atlanta and just about two hours from those other destinations and all the great restaurants they have to offer, it's kind of difficult to schedule a mealtime stop here!

On Saturday, we had business in town, so we drove the ninety minutes up there in the company of a daughter who discovered that she had forgotten (a) her cell phone, (b) the ear buds to her portable DVD player and (c) her purse. It's amazing how an eleven year-old girl will make everybody else on a road trip regret her poor memory and organizational skills. We were relieved when we finally got to Chattanooga.

Sadly, our favorite server was not present on this visit. There's this one woman who is a complete trip: a sassy, exuberant, very loud lady who seems to love her job more than anybody else loves theirs'. She has a little spiel about the five different sauces which is just full of "honey" and "sugah" and "Mmm-hmmm!" She really brings extra character to a place which has plenty to spare. The view from the patio is truly wonderful. While you're eating, you can look out over the sprawl of downtown Chattanooga and the mountains beyond, and the goats beneath you. This is the only restaurant, to my knowledge, that employs a staff of goats to keep the grass on the hilly slope tidy. After you finish your lunch, you can take your corncob outside and feed them.



Unfortunately, Sugar's location on the side of a hill makes it a little difficult to photograph the restaurant unless you drive somewhere else to do it, as the parking lot is on the side of the building. Marie and I have taken a few snapshots from the car on the interstate; these are never satisfactory. You blog visitors will just have to make do with the lunch picture instead.

At Sugar's, you can order sandwiches in two sizes, or build a plate from a large menu of differently priced sides. This time out, I got two small sandwiches - pulled pork and smoked sausage with a very neat whiskey glaze - with a bowl of awesome chili and grilled okra. Marie had a large pork sandwich with corn, and this was more than enough to fill us. More than an hour later, we stopped by a Bi-Lo on our way out of town and were still so stuffed that we voted against some roasted corn some fellows were cooking up in the parking lot.

Sugar's owners also run two other restaurants in the area. The Boathouse, an oddly long drive away from downtown on the banks of the Tennessee River, is very satisfying. Well, it feels long if you're completely unfamiliar with the area and trying to find it at night, anyway. Their third restaurant is the renowned Canyon Grill, over the border in Dade County, Georgia, and we have not tried it yet. Although, looking over their menu, that really seems like a mistake that Marie and I need to rectify one day soon.

Chilito's, Kennesaw GA

Wednesday was one of those rotten days full of delays and lane closures and slow drivers. Contrary to what you might suspect from this food blog, Marie and I do eat in more often than we go out, although in my case, since she's the wizard in the kitchen, it often means sandwiches and leftovers. However, I do allow myself one lunch out a week, and I was looking forward to it that morning. My destination was, typically, closed. Then it was every student driver and testing failure in Cobb County getting in my way as I headed home to reconsider my options.

I was listening to Contra, the new album by Vampire Weekend, and it cycled back around to the opening song, "Horchata." That reminded me that I hadn't been by Chilito's in an incredibly long time. They brew up some really good horchata, but I was in the mood for sweet tea. I mention it just because I wouldn't have even thought about the place were it not for that song.

You don't see many restaurants like this one opening anymore. It's a remnant of the "gourmet burrito" craze that started in the late '90s and lasted for about a decade. There are certainly a few regional chains that I don't mind at all - Barberito's, Qdoba and Willy's all serve reasonably tasty food - but the better examples of single-store ideas didn't last long. Raging Burrito in midtown was very good, and I also quite liked Extreme Burrito, which lasted for maybe nine months on Baxter Street in Athens. I'll always remember an incident there in the spring of 2000 when a friend of mine who would probably prefer to remain nameless started flirting with the waitress there and I suddenly understood why that reporter bellowed "Oh, the humanity!" when the Hindenburg caught fire.





I think that Chilito's tried to become a similar regional chain, but it didn't get very far. Its first store was on Bells Ferry Road near I-575, perhaps in 2005, and closed two years later. This one opened in 2006 in some unnecessary identikit development on Chastain Road and has been hanging in there for a while, mainly serving the Kennesaw State University community with promotions and student-targeted discounts. I'm not aware of any other expansion, and the restaurant's website is, shall we say, unhelpful.

At any rate, Chilito's is kind of like Moe's, only not terrible. ("Always remember, kids, you can't spell mediocre without m - o - e!") You walk down a line having somebody on the other side of a sneeze guard slap various ingredients onto your tortilla or shell. You hope that the tortilla has not been steamed so long that it's trapped water, and that the cilantro has been diced finely enough so that you won't be picking a stem out from between your teeth, and you bristle that you have to pay an extra forty cents for corn. You go get salsa, some of it quite good and some of it blandly inoffensive, from another little bar with a sneeze guard with little plastic cups that are too darn tiny to be much good. There is nothing remarkable about this place, and you leave equally grateful for a low-priced meal with a "buy ten get one free" bribe card as you do for the quality of the food.

It's a long way from outstanding, but I've always found it perfectly serviceable, even if I don't go there with any regularity. The bribe card that I mentioned is finally, after Wednesday's trip, full. It has taken me four years to get it there. This trip, I had a chicken taco salad, because that was their daily special for $5.99. The fellow on the other side of the sneeze guard filled it with black beans, not-especially-spicy chicken, queso dip, lettuce, pico de gallo, cheese and costs-forty-cents-extra corn. Not at all a bad price, especially coming with chips and a drink. (Sweet tea, and, surprisingly, awful. I had half a cup of Mr. Pibb to wash the taste away.)

Chilito's offers fish tacos and these are, honestly, very good. I should probably get away with eating these more often. Honestly, though, the reason I haven't eaten at Chilito's often enough to fill up a bribe card in under four years is simple: my kids can't stand the place. I don't know what it is they find objectionable, beyond just a general thought that it's "yucky," but the psychologists tell us that children's minds are still cooking and not fully formed yet. I try to remember that when they occasionally protest that they'd really prefer mediocre Moe's to a nice Chilito's fish taco.



Chilitos has contracted from four locations in the region to two. The second is still in Kennesaw, but a couple of exits north:


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Old Hickory House, Dunwoody GA

When I was a kid, before I knew better, I always ate cheeseburgers at barbecue restaurants. My parents frequently went with friends to one of two places in Smyrna, Old South Bar-B-Q on what's now Windy Hill Road, but what Neal reminds me was then called Cherokee Street, and the Old Hickory House that, if I remember correctly, used to be on 41 near I-285. It was one of those restaurants across the street from the Steak & Shake and the Lexus dealership - which itself used to be a Service Merchandise - and I think that my parents started having occasional Friday night suppers there after the Red Sirloin closed. You probably don't remember Red Sirloin. We ate there almost every Friday at 6 pm for years, and I agonized every single sortie for two of those years that we were going to miss Wonder Woman on CBS at 8.

But I'm not talking about Red Sirloin, I'm talking about Old Hickory House. In the late 70s and early 80s, this was something close to an Atlanta tradition. I believe that there were at least ten of these dotted around the suburbs, and they regularly advertised on TV and radio. Everybody who grew up here remembers their old jingle, "Put some south in your mouth, at Old Hickory House..."

The chain of restaurants even had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment in the national spotlight. The scene in Smokey & the Bandit where Burt Reynolds first gets the better of Jackie Gleason while he's waiting impatiently for a "Diablo sandwich and a Dr. Pepper" was filmed at an Old Hickory House in Forest Park. I believe that Bandit hides his Trans Am behind the restaurant's sign shortly afterward. That location is long gone, as are most of the others. For the longest time, only three remained. One of those was in the lobby of a Days Inn just off Roswell Road in Sandy Springs, but it was replaced by a Chinese restaurant in the late 90s. The last two holdouts of this old tradition are in Dunwoody and Tucker.





This past Saturday, Marie and I went out to the Old Hickory House with our daughter and with David, who's dieting and had to think long and hard about imbibing too much in the way of sweet barbecue sauce and ruining his blood sugar. What we found feels very much like a restaurant that is still serving up some pretty good food, but also on its last legs. The restaurant looks a lot like like it was built in the 1970s and hasn't changed or been renovated at all in close to forty years; it's just aged and seems dim. Dim and grim.

It was very quiet and slow on this Saturday evening. Not many customers were dining, and we were the youngest. Considering how I spent the first three paragraphs of this chapter reminiscing about the good ole days, that might tell you something. One week previously, we had been at Zeb Dean's in Danielsville for Saturday night supper, where there were only a few seats free and the joint sparked with electricity and loud conversation. Here, most of what joie de vivre there was came from our server, an agreeable fellow named Junior, who made us feel very much at home.

It just didn't feel much like a home where we wanted to stay for long. The food was not bad, although the sauce was far too sweet and mild for my liking, and the fries, which were just terrific, really reminded me of my misspent youth, foolishly eating cheeseburgers when I could have been trying barbecue, except that "it looked weird" or some other childlike excuse for not eating what you came to a restaurant to eat. The Brunswick stew here is quite good. One neat standout on the restaurant's menu is their dressed dog, where they smother a dog with Brunswick stew. I haven't had one of those in a really long time.

The experience somewhat reminded me of what we felt after lunch at the Mad Italian a couple of months ago; the memories of a restaurant's glory days were more pleasing than the meal itself. Maybe the next time we ask David to join us for something to eat, we should make sure it's a restaurant too new to be compared to its more interesting past.



The Old Hickory House's second remaining location is in Tucker:

Hostess Fruit and Pudding Pies

Several weeks ago, I read the most remarkably odd thread over at Roadfood.com. People - sane, rational, sensible people - were discussing Hostess Fruit Pies and the various regional varieties available in their market. This just did not strike me as a sensible use of anybody's time. I'd long ago written off the entire Hostess corporate entity as a huge disappointment, and couldn't see why anyone was raving about these pies.

I don't think this was snobbishness on my part. When I was a kid, Hostess was always a treat. I grew up eating King Dons, if you remember those. Apparently, they had that name in the southeast, as opposed to Ding Dongs or Big Wheels in other places, to avoid confusion with Drake's Ring Dings. I always got a kick out of Hostess's funny little comic book ads, where Batman would foil the Penguin's latest scheme by throwing a Twinkie, a Cup Cake or a Fruit Pie at him, and grumbled that since King Dons were better than any of the others, they should be advertised in those pages, too.

Also, you could usually count on getting three baseball cards on the bottom of a box of King Dons. It wasn't just that they were chocolate, or that you could roll the aluminum foil wrapper into a little marble-sized wad and pelt somebody with it, you could get a Rollie Fingers or a George Brett card if you looked at the bottom of every box in the Big Star and shouted "Mom! Mom! This one!"

But at some point in the mid-80s, Hostess cakes just started tasting terrible. Whether the local bakery started changing the recipe or puberty made its first freewheeling jigger with my taste buds, I just didn't want to eat King Dons or Twinkies about the time I started high school. They didn't taste like cake anymore, and that creamy filling, once so very delicious, took on the flavor of the sort of stuff that came out of the ground at Love Canal. The company just became synonymous with "chemical sludge," basically. Last year, I had a "Dinah Finger" at the great Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, New Hampshire and was overjoyed. That was what Twinkies tasted like before they got all chemically.

Fruit Pies, however, I never liked as much as the cakes in the first place. This is perhaps unsurprising. I was a stupid kid.

So anyway, I was reading all these yahoos raving about the taste of Hostess strawberry Fruit Pies and figured that either they're all completely crazy or they're onto something. And the Hostess / Interstate Baking people have an outlet store about two miles from my house.



They haven't finished switching over all the names yet, but Interstate Baking officially changed its name to Hostess Brands in November of last year. This incorporates Hostess, Drake's, Dolly Madison, Merita and who knows how many other little brands that have fallen before the behemoth that is Twinkie the Kid. So I popped in after work two weeks ago and navigated through shelves of Wonder Bread and Moon Pies - not, I don't hesitate to tell you, including the rare and wonderful orange flavor - to find a lovely bunch of Fruit Pies, nicely priced at eight for $5. I figured that if I didn't like them, then I'm sure my daughter and her friends would eat them.

Oh, no. Random neighbor children will not be getting their hands on these babies. They are wonderful. They are four hundred and freakin' fifty calories of wonderful, but they are not for kids. They're for Marie and me. Maybe my daughter can have one or two.

The pick of the patch is the strawberry pie. These are seasonal, while lemon, apple, cherry and chocolate are baked year-round. Missing from the local region is blackberry, which is only available, apparently, in the northwest. The shop near me did not have chocolate on the first visit. They get deliveries every Monday and chocolate was promised the second visit. Honestly, it really wasn't worth the wait; I just didn't care for the pudding.

But these fruit pies are just amazing. Heat one of these for about twenty seconds and eat it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and tell me that's not a more delicious dessert than the last thing you shelled out for at a restaurant. I like the strawberry and the apple best, but the others are still really good. Just, you know, don't plan to eat one every night.

So thanks and congratulations, Hostess, for proving that some memories from childhood are still absolutely worth revisiting. Now, if you could only see your way clear to having the bakeries here in Georgia ramp up some blackberry pies as well, I'm sure we'll get along just fine.

---

Several months later (November), I found one of the rarely-sighted peach-flavored Hostess pies at a truck stop in Franklin, Kentucky:



Now all I need is time in my calorie schedule to justify eating the darn thing before it goes stale!

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Curry chicken salad and grilled gouda sandwiches

This is Marie, whose usual contribution to the site is to get something different from my husband so he can have menu envy, or to write about something I cooked. This is the latter option.

Tonight's dinner was curry apple chicken salad and grilled cheese sandwiches, and it was in no way as plebian as that sounds. The girlchild had her heart set on grilled cheese and soup, so she ate a slightly different dinner (and somewhat inferior in my mind, but she seemed quite satisfied and did have a little chicken salad on the side).

The chicken salad came from a recipe passed on by my aunt. We had our first encounter with the stuff on our honeymoon trip when we were going to spend the evening at her place in Philadelphia on our way to somewhere else. Since she didn't know when we'd be showing up or how hungry we'd be when we arrived, she felt that it was the ideal thing to have in reserve. She was correct. It's made with green apples, onions, diced peppers, and of course chicken. The original recipe calls for cooking the chicken by boiling it with a number of vegetables (making a really tasty broth in the process) but we didn't need quite as much as that would make, so I just cooked a couple of chicken breasts with curry powder (a lovely blend by my favorite spice company, Penzey's, called Singapore Spice) and let that cool overnight before slicing it and mixing in the diced apples, onions, and sweet red peppers, along with some of the white pepper I bought on our honeymoon. Left to my own devices I would add raisins to the recipe as well, but my family is unaccountably hostile to dried grapes. The salad is quite flexible. Others might add nuts or celery.



The grilled cheese sandwiches were made with some lovely gourmet Gouda that I mail-ordered from a dreadfully expensive but oh-so-good place called Zingerman's. I think about the only thing that would get me to buy more from them is winning the lottery, because that's about all I can think of that would let me afford their prices on a regular basis, but boy is their stuff good. I originally tried this particular cheese because I was doing an internet survey of cheeses for my father. He likes Dutch farmer's cheese made from unpasteurized milk, and I was going on a quest to get him a whole or half wheel of something or other for Christmas. It was quite a delicious quest as it involved trying out a number of cheeses that he might possibly like, but had to be researched first. I knew on the initial order that it was NOT going to be affordable in the quantity desired, but tried anyway, and promptly became addicted. And no, as of yet he still hasn't had any of this particular variety (at least from me). One of these days, when my willpower is high enough, he'll get a box in the mail with a pound or two.

Anyway, each time I get an order I discover yet another way in which it is perfect and wonderful, and tonight's meal was another addition to the list. Melted into toasted bread, in all the tasty variations, is my favorite choice. In this case, I found that alternating bites of the spicy curry and sweet/tart green apple with the crisp sandwich brought out the richness of the warm cheese, and the creamy Gouda made the curry pop. It was an entirely satisfactory meal but what's particularly good is that some of the cheese is still left for later nibbling.

Zeb's Bar-B-Q, Danielsville GA

At some point in the early '90s, I drove from Athens to Greenville, South Carolina up US 29 and passed by Zeb's Bar-B-Q, a little roadside restaurant in the oddest location. It's about seven miles north of Danielsville, about halfway between that town and Franklin Springs, in between nothing whatsoever and a field. I thought that delightful, hand-painted sign out front was laugh-out-loud charming and quaint and wished Zeb well indeed as I sped on by. I don't know what I thought I would be doing in Greenville, but I'm reasonably positive that I wasn't going to eat as well there as I could have, had I stopped here instead.

A couple of years later, Zeb's got a favorable write-up in the Flagpole Guide to Athens that I mentioned in a previous entry. I made the first of what would be many return visits, for Zeb's became one of my favorite places. Maybe it was a little too far away for a regular jaunt, and up a road without much else to do, so I never became a regular, but if I were to rank them, I'm certain Zeb's would certainly remain in my top ten list of barbecue restaurants in the state.

Everybody else seems to have a quibble. Marie doesn't much care for their slaw. More than ten years back, Randy came up here with me and hated the sauce. My first wife said this was the only stew in the state that she didn't like. Everybody else, frankly, is crazy and wrong.





Taking objections in reverse order, this is indeed the only stew I've ever eaten made from a creamed corn base. It is utterly unlike anybody else's, but not for the faint of heart. Zeb's is so confident that you'll love this thick stuff that when you order a large plate, you can call for a second helping of stew. I've often had the desire, although never the room, for a third. Sensibly, they do not call their stew a Brunswick stew; it isn't.

And the sauce, well, that's pretty amazingly neat, too. It is a vinegar-based sauce, with a lethal mix of pepper sunk to the bottom of the glass bottle, which the server brings to your table piping hot. The bottles are a mix of knickknacks from various antique stores, so sometimes you get a cubical crystal decanter, and sometimes a great bulbous bottle. If you like your barbecue mild, you just give the sauce bottle a gentle shake to mix the ingredients a hair. The more vigorous the shake, the spicier the outcome. If you start a tornado in the bottle, then your meal will end with incredibly satisfying crackling pepper explosions throughout your mouth and in pores of your tongue that you didn't know were there.

As for the slaw, it's made with vinegar that has never heard of mayonnaise. I think it's incredibly tasty, and one of the few occasions that I will say that Marie is just plain wrong about a matter. On the other hand, she raves about the pork, the stew and especially the sweet tea, which she claims is somehow even better than Paul's. She's not right, but it's not a point I feel compelled to argue.

Zeb himself passed away more than twenty years ago, but his restaurant has been going strong in its third generation of family ownership. It's said to be much the same as it was when it opened in 1946, and, back in the good old days when Clemson and UGA played each other every September, there was a line far out the door on gameday, as travelers from one town or the other stopped in for tailgating supplies. This place gets pretty packed on Saturday evenings, too, as it's just about the only restaurant of note for ten miles. Well, I am curious about this one place that I think might be called Napoleon, back down the road in the Danielsville city limits, but for inexpensive, family eating surrounded by Bulldog and Dale Earnhardt memorabilia, this is the local favorite.

I rarely have barbecue twice in a day, but it had been a really long time since we came out this way for this wonderful sauce and stew, so we made this our supper after having lunch forty-ish miles down the road at Paul's, spending the afternoon in Athens, shopping, visiting friends, and walking at the State Botanical Gardens. In fact, the last time I was here, Marie and I had only been dating for a few months, so it's been close to three years now. Funny how time slips away like that. It's every bit as good as it was in the late '90s, and honestly, if there's a more satisfying ending to any meal in northeast Georgia than that wonderful slow burn of your tongue after you've ladled on that well-shaken sauce, I can't think of one. We need more excuses to pop up this way. Somebody open up an unbelievable old six-story bookstore in Danielsville or Royston, okay?

Paul's Bar-B-Q, Lexington GA

At some point in the mid-90s, I started taking an interest in what I know today is classified as "roadfood," and decided to cast my net wide and learn about some fascinating restaurants in the small towns that surround Athens in and around northeast Georgia. I sat down with the Flagpole Guide to Athens and, for the first time in my six years in town, read the darn thing cover to cover. The restaurant listings just amazed me. There were dozens more places to eat than I ever knew about. Most intriguing, in the barbecue section, was Paul's Bar-B-Q in Lexington, which, the listing promised, was only open on Saturdays and on the Fourth of July.

Something about that statement really appealed to me. Only two questions remained. Where the hell was Lexington and how fast was Saturday going to get here.

This must have been 1995. For the next five years, I was down here once a month or not more than six weeks. Lexington is about twenty miles southeast of Athens down US 78. I used to pick up a couple of my comic books at a really small store at the intersection of 78 and Gaines School, and so I'd stop by there after lunch on the way home and maybe pick up a movie at the Video Library next door. Neither shop is there anymore; that whole strip mall looks a lot like a graveyard these days.

When my daughter was born in 1998, she had to spend more than a week at St. Mary's because she was so jaundiced and cranky. That first Saturday, my parents came up to meet her, and we went down to Paul's for lunch. There's not a lot in Lexington these days; Oglethorpe County really seems to be suffering the current recession, but Shaking Rock Park is always worth a visit. One of my favorite photos was taken that day: my dad climbed up on one of the rocks with me and with my son, then 18 months old. Dad's been taking a beating from cancer and certainly couldn't get up that rock anymore. My son is old enough to no longer need any help getting to places that high.





I absolutely adore Paul's, and for years insisted it was the best 'cue in the state. However, my parents, who prefer Alabama / Memphis-styled barbecue, were really not completely thrilled with Paul's, who serve up North Carolina-style. They use a vinegar sauce and while they claim they offer stew, it is really No'ca'lina hash. It's thick enough that you can eat it by sopping it up with white bread. If there's any finer, I have not found it yet.

Paul's is the only place where I insist my fellow diners use the hot sauce. It's not a recommendation; their mild sauce is merely okay, and so I insist that the hot sauce is used. The hot sauce is absolutely essential to the experience. It used to be that Paul's offered the third best pitcher of sweet tea in the state. With both Carrither's and the Mean Bean now gone, Paul's now stands alone as the best tea that anybody brews. I've had the same plate of pork, hash and slaw every visit for fifteen years now and never had a disappointment. It's just a perfect lunch, made with love and class.

The only reason I've ceded Paul's title as the finest in the state is because some years later, I found a place in Buford which I'll tell you about some other day, sometime in the summer maybe. The afternoon that I concluded that I liked it even better than I did Paul's, I genuinely wept a little. But you know, I kind of like the experience of Paul's a little better, even if one place outdoes them just a touch with their meat.

I wish there was a little more to Lexington than a bunch of closed-up antique stores, but the countryside is so full of gorgeous old buildings and churches, and this time of year everything is just lovely to see. I've taken better than a dozen people out this way for lunch over the years, and as this family-owned business enters its ninth decade selling lunch to tailgaters, hunters, picnickers and foodies, I've no doubt I'll be bringing many more. They're only open on Saturdays and, often but not always, on the Fourth of July. That only gives you 53 chances a year for a lunch this downright great.



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Roy's Cheesesteaks, Smyrna GA

Here's another restaurant that I'd never have known about were it not for the old Atlanta Cuisine message boards. I thought that I liked a good cheesesteak as much as the next guy, but it turns out that I had not really enjoyed the real thing yet. I'd enjoyed some pretty good cheesesteaks in my time - The Mad Italian serves up a splendid one, and I've heard for years that Woody's, on Monroe, should be a destination - but now that I know what the real thing should be, I've reconsidered what we'd had in the past.

I feel good about calling this the real thing because Roy grew up in Cherry Hill in South Jersey and knows what a good cheesesteak should taste like. He gets his bread in from a Philadelphia bakery called Amoroso and offers a variety of cheeses for his sandwiches. Most people probably just get it with white American, but if you want Cheese Whiz, like some folk from up there prefer, they will gladly do that for you, too. I tried a sandwich wit' Whiz once and wasn't completely sold, myself.

For those of us who enjoy hard-to-find sodas, there's an even better reason to go: Roy's may well be the only restaurant in the Atlanta region to still serve Fanta birch beer, which I believe is the best soda that Coca-Cola has ever concocted. Once upon a time, Roy started up the regional chain of Philly Connection restaurants, but franchising and overexpanding turned those into a regular disappointment. Back when Roy still ran some of those, you could get Fanta birch beer from them, but the last few times that I've popped my head in a Philly Connection's door hoping for some birch beer, it was a Pepsi soda fountain that greeted me. So if you want a birch beer, and believe me, you do, make your way to Smyrna.





We've only been to Roy's about six or seven times. They don't keep extremely friendly hours, although I can't blame them for taking an early supper and closing on Sundays, considering their location. This really is, unfortunately, a place you have to know about to find. It's off South Cobb Drive, very near I-285, up a little road called Highlands Parkway in an easily-missed strip mall with a gas station and a nail place. The interior is very franchise-friendly -- you can easily imagine some sign company retaining the schematics of everything inside, from menus to giant photos of the streets of Philly and the Liberty Bell, to refit any similar-sized space in the city -- but, as of this writing, the Smyrna location is the only one.

This past Friday, my dad took me to lunch here. It turned out he wasn't very hungry himself, so he just had some pizza bread, an Amoroso roll baked with darn good sauce and parmesan cheese, while I got a small loaded cheesesteak, as I always do. A small is more than enough to suit me, especially packed as this is with onions, peppers and pepperoni, with a bag of Zapp's chips and a short rest before returning to the register to buy a small pack of Tastykakes. The experience just wouldn't be the same without three peanut butter Tastykakes for dessert.

I still haven't got around to trying Roy's hoagies and other sandwiches, because I like the cheesesteaks so darn much. As a final point of emphasis on how tasty these are, and how authentic, last summer, I visited Philadelphia for the first time. On the recommendation of our buddy Chris in Jacksonville, Marie and I stopped by the Little Hut, a tiny takeout place in Ridley Park that his family has sworn by for many years. Roy's and Little Hut are so similar, and so wonderful, that I can't pick one over the other, and are absolutely a match in terms of quality. This does do Chris a small service in that Roy's is something like 512 miles closer to him, the next time he needs an authentic Philly experience. If the Tastykakes people only sent their pies down to this market, we'd probably see him up here twice as often.



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Baldino's Giant Jersey Subs, Marietta GA

One of the most amusing feats of eating that I've ever seen attempted came at a Baldino's Giant Jersey Subs about four years ago. This is among my favorite sandwich shops, and it's hidden so that just about nobody knows that it's there. It's in one of the little outparcel strips in front of the Harry's Farmer's Market on Powers Ferry and 120, just a couple of doors down from a big Yoga center. Between that place's packed classes and the restaurant's constant overflow of officers and airmen from the nearby Dobbins ARB, parking here is often a challenge.

Baldino's is a small chain with only eighteen stores. Eleven of them are in Georgia (seven of which are in and around Savannah) and the other seven are in North Carolina, dotted around Fayetteville. Unless I'm mistaken, the owners have found their success in targeting their ads, specials and word-of-mouth marketing at the troops stationed at nearby military bases. The Savannah stores serve Fort Stewart, the North Carolina stores Fort Bragg, and the Marietta store is set up for a constant flow of uniformed men from Dobbins.

At least one of those men has a ravenous appetite.





I was there one evening as the store was getting ready to close. They've always kept very odd hours. These days they're shut on Sunday and close every other day at seven, making a living on a huge lunch rush and a trickle of take-out orders for supper. One evening, the kids and I got in about twenty minutes before they wanted to lock the door and sat down to our usual meals. I almost always get a half Sicilian, a sub thick with delicious bread and stuffed with ham, pepperoni and capicola, and a small side cup of pasta salad. My son likes the turkey and cheese and my daughter, forever forgetting why we've come to any given establishment, usually gets a plate of spaghetti. Happily, it's made with pretty darn good sauce and it's quite cheap, so I've never made a fuss.

Satisfied that we were going to be the last customers, the two fellows behind the counter quickly put together their own dinners and sat down at a table a few feet away and synchronized their watches.

"You fellows going to eat all that food?" I asked, because they each had two absolutely enormous sandwiches in front of them.

"There's this guy," I was told. "He comes in three times a week and orders two whole number 25s. He sits down and eats both of them in twenty minutes."

"Three times a week, he does this," his buddy emphasized. "We're going to try to do it."

"I can barely finish a half seventeen. This I have to see." Marie can barely finish a half of a half herself.

Oh, they tried. They gave it as good a go as any two championship eaters with a huge prize at stake. I think that you have to straddle a deeply uncomfortable line between speed and pace, because if you eat slowly, your brain will start listening to your belly's "full" notice before you're ready to stop, yet you have to keep a steady pace, because too long a pause and it's goodnight, Vienna. Too late a pause and it's hello, men's room.

They each finished their first subs in good time, but nevertheless behind schedule. About two bites into the second, they started tapering off and slowing down. Time was called, their twenty minutes were up, and each of them left behind more than what I'd call a meal's worth. They were as done as I'd ever seen a man. They had much to say about the constitution of this regular champion eater.

"How big is this guy?" I asked. "Fit. He's in good shape. Tall."

I'm not sure who I have to kill to get that man's metabolism. My doctor won't give me any more than 150 micrograms of Synthroid. I figure if only he'd up me to 600, I could eat two whole subs like that fit, tall mystery man.

Gus's Hot Dogs, Birmingham AL

That last time that I went to Birmingham, years and years ago, on a night that Bob Dylan was coming to town to play, I had no idea whatsoever where I was going, apart from a general recommendation that I should ask around and find Reed's Books. This was before Google Maps, and since I've never cottoned to buying an atlas or anything like that, traveling anywhere back then meant pointing my car in the general direction and seeing what turned up. In Birmingham's case, it meant driving back and forth down the mostly deserted downtown streets marveling at what appeared to be a heck of a lot of hot dog restaurants. The impression that I got was during the working week, the city has a thriving financial base which supports nine or ten hot dog businesses. I don't know whether that's true - I've never sat down with anybody from Birmingham and really talked about the town - but that's the impression that I got.

The memory might have been cheating, but the impression was so strong that when I planned our little jaunt this past weekend, I figured we could pick one of those hot dog sellers for a midday snack before returning home. Then it just became a matter of picking the right one, and there were far fewer than I remembered - perhaps just five or six. Pete's Famous Hot Dogs is the obvious tourist favorite, with its lovely old neon sign and eccentric interior, so thin and narrow that there isn't room inside for a single chair. I read, however, that Pete's wasn't as great as it used to be - no way of knowing whether that's true - and many correspondents and reviewers suggested we stop into Pete's chief competitor Gus's instead.





Gus's is not much larger than Pete's. It's a teeny place, with window seating for maybe six and no view to speak of, unless you really like parking decks. They sell a variety of dogs for under two bucks apiece. My daughter, who has no adventure in her soul for this sort of thing and doesn't like mustard, just had a plain dog with ketchup and pronounced it better than Brandi's back home. Marie got a chili dog and raved about it for hours.

I got their special dog, which comes with mustard, onions, sauerkraut, ground beef and a mysterious, thick brown special sauce. We have no idea what's in it. My best description would be to call it a cinnamony-barbecue sauce, but that's probably not accurate. It was extremely good, but I wouldn't say it beats Brandi's.

There were two fellows working that day. The younger guy politely declined to get drawn into the rivalry between this store and Pete's, saying that whose dog was better was entirely up to me. The owner, a white-haired guy named George who speaks in a ringing Greek accent, was a trip. He just as politely declined to give me a hint on what might be in that sauce. "Is top secret!" he shouted with a twinkle and a grin. "Like C.I.A.!" George bought the place thirteen years ago and, from what I've read, modified the sauce recipe, whatever it is, just a hair to make it less spicy.

As for Bob Dylan, who was in town that one time eight years ago, we didn't see him then, although I made certain to take the children along to see him in 2006, and even obtained a bootleg of the show we missed within a couple of months. This time, we left town and, like complete dimwits, missed out on a great big crawfish boil. The B-52's played. One of these days, I'm going to actually going to look at a city's calendar of events for the day of our trip, and not just get directions to all the bookstores and restaurants we want to try.



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Buffalo Rock

I enjoy a great nostalgia for that feeling I had at age seventeen, going off to college and ready to both make whatever mark on the world I was going to make, and also desiring to brag to my parents about what wild, weird, wonderful things that I uncovered and experienced. So the presence of Steverino's was a complete revelation. Not only did they serve up the biggest sandwiches I'd ever seen, they delivered them. This changed everything.

Steverino's used to place a menu and coupons in the half-dozen free magazines where restaurants would place an ad, knowing they'd be dumped by the truckload in all the dorms. Every residents would look forward to the latest Athens Gold, TANSTAAFL, Passport and Red & Black Coupon Survival Kit, plus the others. I was going over the menus one night in my first quarter and was really interested by what Steverino's would deliver along with your sandwich. They'd send fountain Cokes, naturally, but they also had a variety of bottled sodas. I'd heard of IBC root beer, of course; a buddy of mine's mother once had a legendary shitfit when another friend arrived to pick him up while drinking from a bottle. "I don't care what kind of beer it is" remains the greatest, most myopic, ass-covering retort any crazy mother ever screamed at an innocent root beer drinker. But these other sodas, I'd never heard of any of them. Vernor's? Budwine? Buffalo Rock? I went for that one; it sounded the oddest.

Sandwiches from Steverino's came wrapped in tin foil, the bread toasted and the edges ever-so-slightly charred. They were packed absolutely full of food and I don't know that I've ever found ham anywhere that was quite like what Steverino's delivered. They were terrific sandwiches. And this Buffalo Rock, this just knocked me on my backside. It came in a little ten-ounce bottle with a green and yellow label. It looked like a cola but it tasted a little more like ginger ale, but not very sweet at all. The ginger flavor was very strong, with a real spicy kick, bearing only the faintest resemblance to the Canada Dry or Schwepps brands with which I was familiar. The dark color really threw me; I coined the term "ginger cola," which isn't technically accurate as it doesn't have any cola flavor in, to visualize it and later learned that others have done the same.

My dad grew up in Fort Payne, a small town on I-59 between Birmingham and Chattanooga. I mention this because I phoned home not long after that dinner delivery, full of certainty that I'd found something completely wild and new and utterly unique, something that was mine, a discovery I'd made in the great big world on my own, and told him "I have discovered the greatest drink in the world. It's amazing. It's called Buffalo Rock!"

"Oh," he said, "I haven't had a Buffalo Rock in years. That was the only soft drink your grandmother would ever touch."

That nostalgic period I mention, in other words, was that run of about three weeks when I was naive enough to imagine that there was something new under the sun.



I don't really understand the inner workings of soda bottlers and distributors, but what I gather is that these days, the Buffalo Rock Company is the Pepsi bottler for Alabama and small parts of Mississippi and Georgia. This may not be completely accurate, but apparently since Pepsi does not have its own ginger ale, grape soda or Dr. Pepper / Mr. Pibb clone, the Buffalo Rock company can supply three additional beverages to area retailers that are not sold anywhere else. Their house brand "ginger cola," Buffalo Rock itself, apparently predates the Pepsi arrangement, and was first sold in 1901. Grapico, another very old brand, was bought from another manufacturer some years back, and Dr. Wham, as they call their clone, was introduced just a few years ago.

When I lived in Athens, you could only find Buffalo Rock at a handful of places which enjoyed selling oddball sodas to nostalgia-minded folk like me. I'd frequently get a bottle from the dearly missed Barnett's newsstand downtown, but I could never find it in grocery stores. Honestly, it never occurred to me to hunt for it like I should. Some years later, I found it at a Lewis Jones Food Market in Columbus and I started looking into getting it on a more regular basis.

Buffalo Rock has become much harder to find in Athens, but it's still around Columbus, and in most grocery stores in Alabama. A year ago, I brought back three 12-packs from a Publix in Montgomery and had the notion, sensible, I thought, to have the Publix where we shop order it in regularly. They were able to do this for me with Ironbeer, sort of an "orange cola" common to south Florida, which I probably like more than you do. I had discovered that entirely by chance when I stopped into a different Publix, in Alpharetta, to pick up a bowl of cantaloupe for breakfast one morning, and grabbed a six-pack because I cannot resist these things. Wanting more, I asked my Publix to order it, and learned to my surprise that the Ironbeer shouldn't have even been on the shelf in Alpharetta; some delivery driver had made a mistake, just waiting for the serendipitous arrival of somebody like me.

Sadly, my Publix was not able to get in Buffalo Rock, because of some nebulous distribution shenanigans that were never really explained. I didn't press, thinking it rude; I just slowly watched my supply dwindle and came up with a plan B.

When we were in Birmingham, we dropped by a Publix and I took three cases to the customer service desk and asked the girl whether they could just start shipping them to Marietta, where they'd be appreciated. She replied that we'd need to special order them, and I mentioned that I'd tried that in 2009 and had no luck. She said that whomever told me that was wrong, that Publix would gladly ship any product from any store to another.

So I stopped by a different Publix yesterday and related my tale. The fellow looked it up and said that he'd try to get it. My fingers are crossed.

Now if I could just convince Marie to get her friend in Vermont to keep a steady supply line of Moxie coming, everything will be just fine. You wait and see.

Miss Myra's Pit Bar-B-Q, Birmingham AL

A few chapters previously, I mentioned how the discovery of mayonnaise-based white barbecue sauce in Clarkesville, Georgia had changed everything. "Oh, yes," some people say, "that's what they have in northern Alabama," but that isn't true. White sauce is still extremely obscure and not at all common. One of my co-workers was born and raised in Tuscaloosa and he'd never heard of it until I asked him about it. Heck, the girl we spoke with at a fair trade importer right in the heart of downtown Birmingham had only a vague idea what we were talking about. I don't know that it's as accurate to call it a regional delicacy as it is some weird thing that only a scattered few oddballs know about.

At any rate, as soon as we returned from Clarkesville, I looked over the calendar and Marie and I agreed that this past Saturday would be a fine time for a day trip to Birmingham. Actually, I think it wasn't so much agreement as it was Marie seeing the fire in my belly glittering through my eyes and electing to go along with it to keep me from sulking exploding with the white-hot intensity of a newborn star. I'd only visited Birmingham once before, about eight years previously. It's just under three hours away and full of interesting places to eat, so we really could have come out this way again before now. On the other hand, once you get around the town of Anniston, I-20 is so broken up and full of potholes that it looks like it's been used for mortar practice, so it's just as well we don't go all that often. We can only afford so many tires and alignments a year.

A little research pointed us to Miss Myra's, in the Birmingham suburb of Vestavia Hills. It's considerably more than a neighborhood, with a population of more than 30,000, but even though it's inside the I-459 perimeter, the town really feels like it's still part of Birmingham, in much the same way that Decatur still feels like a neighborhood within Atlanta. We drove through a nice, upscale mall area full of the usual outparcel chain suspects before finding Miss Myra's on one end of a tiny little strip, clearly constructed in the 1950s, populated today by cute stores, boutiques and a locally-owned coffee shop, each of which have the smell of that pit smoke lingering all the time.





Miss Myra is retired, but her daughter and granddaughter still run the place, which, in the 1980s, was a filling station and jot-em-down store. Eventually, the barbecue that they started serving became successful enough that the gas pumps got in the way and the family turned it into a full service restaurant, the walls covered in Crimson Tide banners, memorabilia, newspaper stories of Iron Bowl wins and, oddly, a single lone Tigers plaque, perhaps a concession to one employee with misguided loyalties. I wore one of my Bulldog shirts, of course. I don't often visit rival SEC teams' home turfs, but when I do, I feel it necessary to dress the part. That reminds me, I really do need to try out that pharmacy and soda counter in downtown Auburn one of these days.

At any rate, I came to eat white barbecue and not talk sports. That will come in the fall. (Oh, Marie, we should do a tour of SEC cities one day! The ones that aren't Gainesville, anyway.) I was afraid we might have been a hair early since we arrived at 10.30 local time, but no fears. Miss Myra's got in the habit to open at seven-something every morning in order to feed picnickers and tailgaters, and serve breakfast as well, so after a quick detour for my daughter to look into the cute shoe store, we went on in. The very first thing I saw, and no kidding, was a plastic squeeze bottle of white sauce set on every table, shining brightly against the low light and red and brown interior.

Miss Myra's sauce is apparently a little simpler than Big Bob Gibson's. She once claimed that she restricts her ingredients to just mayo, vinegar, salt and pepper, and that she likes it as a dip for pretzels even more than as a sauce for pork. It didn't occur to me until just now to double check, but I don't remember seeing pretzels on the menu, and I don't like to think that Miss Myra was holding back on us. Maybe I'll pick up a bag of Snyder's of Hanover and try it out on that pint of sauce we brought home with us. It's extremely good. Folks, I'm not kidding. Her traditional tomato-based sauce is also remarkable, but this white sauce was everything I'd hoped for, and I used a hell of a lot of it. You remember that cartoon message from the ABC Nutritional Network on Saturday mornings with Louie the Lifeguard singing the song about not drowning your food, in mayo or ketchup or gook (yuck!), because it's no fun to eat what you can't even see, so don't drown your food? I never heard it. When only a final forkful of pork that I wished to save for last remained, I squeezed sauce onto my bread, one bite at a time.

Oddly, Miss Myra's serves neither stew nor hash nor even burgoo as a side. On the other hand, you can get deviled eggs here as a side, and I genuinely can't remember right now any barbecue restaurant in Georgia that serves them. They should. Those, the beans and the vinegar-based slaw were all absolutely excellent. It was a fine lunch at what I must say is among the best barbecue restaurants I've ever visited. She's up there with Jomax and Hot Thomas, basically. It will be very hard to return to Birmingham and not make another trip, and yet there are so many other restaurants that I want to try! I can think of four others I'm half-tempted to go back and sample in a couple of weeks, and I've even got my fingers crossed that I'll find a hundred bucks under the mattress so we can visit the Hot & Hot Fish Club, but actually, the next time we'll be going through Birmingham it will be in the early morning on our way to Memphis next month to visit Marie's sister.

But there's a little town called Hamilton about an hour's drive west and north of Birmingham, and I might have found some more white sauce up there that needs trying.



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Moksha Restaurant and Bar, Roswell GA

"I found this amazing Indian restaurant," Randy told me. I was skeptical. "They have an amazing lunch buffet," he added. I was doubly so.

I have a tolerate-hate relationship with Indian food, because I've found so little of it that rises above a very low batting average. I think I like the idea of it more than the reality, at least locally. Here, quite a few Indian restaurants, more than most of them, go for the fine dining experience, and I almost never feel that the quality of the food warrants the price tag. Since I emphatically do not need to be served by tuxedoed waiters nor eat from fine china and fancy tablecloths, eventually I started to resent paying for it.

Now there was once a lovely little place in Smyrna which did it right: a no-frills presentation of extremely tasty food in styrofoam containers, and you could get out of there, extremely satisfied, for under seven bucks. I got to eat there only twice before I arrived once to see an "under new management" banner out front, fancy tablecloths masking the rickety and unbalanced tables, and a buffet. I don't know that anything good had ever come from an Indian buffet in Atlanta prior to about a year ago. That was the first time I've ever chewed the manager of a restaurant out. I gave him an earful, telling him that raising the prices and making his restaurant exactly like the four restaurants that I drove past to get to his was amazingly stupid. I don't know whether it was worth it or not, but I seem to recall they shut down within a year.

I've tried lots of places in Atlanta. It seems that what passes for Indian cuisine in this town is, regardless of the trimmings and the tablecloths, pretty similar to the El-This-Los-That faux-Mexican meals that we used to get everywhere before enough of a Hispanic population developed for the owners to stop worrying about courting the Anglos and focused on people who knew the food from back home. That's a topic for another chapter, I think, but it was a very similar experience: the restaurant would be called "Calcutta" or "Bombay" and claim to serve "authentic north Indian cuisine," and have the same menu and the same flavor as another restaurant twenty miles away called "Taj Mahal" or "Sitar" which claimed to serve "authentic eastern Indian cuisine." The sole, lone exception was a place in Chamblee called Himalayas, which was a little higher than the average, and where I had rogan josh for the first time.

I'm not claiming that any of it's really bad, but rather that I knew that my periodic cravings for sopping up a really hot vindaloo with fresh naan would be no different anywhere I went, much in the same way that I could indulge a really intense desire for chips, salsa, rice, beans and some kind of meat at any one of three hundred identikit Mexican places. Thank heaven I found Maizetos brand chips and Garden Fresh Gourmet salsa, otherwise I'd still be wasting money at some "El Sombrero" place once a week.

And the buffet. Don't get me started. It wasn't just that I know about Randy and his all-no-fool-would-ever-eat Chinese buffets; one right after another, for years, everything on every Indian buffet in Atlanta came from the same damn kitchen.

I give you this backstory to explain why it was, with a heavy heart and healthy skepticism, I agreed to accompany Randy to this buffet.



Holy bajole. This place is amazing.

Randy discovered Moksha because a buddy of his married into the owner's family. That meant that Randy joined nine hundred and twenty people for a gigantic meal catered by them. He went to the restaurant, concluded that among Roswell's many very good restaurants, this was a standout, and insisted that I join him.

Now I must say that the city of Roswell clearly does not care how amazing a treasure their city has. They have made finding this place a complete headache via an ongoing, ages-long road construction project that has worked its way up Old Roswell Road all the way back to its intersection with Warsaw and has left one lamebrained detour after another in its wake. Old Roswell has, in fact, been shifted away from the restaurant, which now sits quietly at the end of where the street used to be, hidden well away from traffic and any potential impulse eaters. Moksha is now a place you have to search out; you cannot find it by accident.

Despite the fact that its location cannot be good for business, it's excellent for a quiet getaway. The restaurant is in an old farmhouse in the woods, with an event hall behind it. Randy remembers that the property used to belong to a fancy Southern cooking joint called Lickskillet, and it has a polite, isolated charm to it that lets you forget that you're just a thicket of trees away from a bank and a dozen car dealers on Mansell.

Inside, there are tablecloths and a buffet. I tried to remain strong, and was rewarded by a simply terrific meal. It is, by leagues, more flavorful and tasty than any other Indian cuisine that I have found anywhere in metro Atlanta.

I don't even pretend expertise, or even knowledge, of what I should be looking for in Indian food, but I'll tell you this: the buffet is considerably smaller than most. The lettuce they use in the tossed salad is quite disappointing. Everything else is amazing. They have about four wonderful sauces for the salad which overcome the lettuce's deficiency, and another little mix of chickpeas, onions and tomatoes in a light sauce which is incredible.

For my main meal, I usually get some fried vegetable pakodas along with a big spoonful of rice, and then fill up with ladles of curry. They've had chicken tikka marsala each of the three times we've gone, and occasionally rogan josh. This time, it was lamb korma, cooked in a thick, spicy cardamom sauce with onions. The flavor is so strong, with a hint of mint.

Desserts vary; often they have rice pudding, but not this time. Actually, I did really well this time and didn't overdo it. The last time, Randy and I went late and they were ready to take away whatever we weren't going to eat, so we ate everything. We got as far as the little airlock lobby and sat down again for about as long as we'd spent eating the meal. We were just about ready to call Marie to come get us, because neither of us could face driving home for quite some time. On Friday, I was much more sensible. I was still so stuffed at supper that I had about four bites of chicken and a forkful of rice and called it a night, but I didn't have to undo my belt after lunch, either.

I'm sure we'll go back again. Maybe one day we can even go with Marie. We just need to time it right and not feel compelled to finish off every drop of the chicken tikka marsala's creamy tomato curry. Temptation like that, I just don't need.



Sadly, Moksha closed at the end of August, 2010.

Cheeseburger Bobby's, Marietta GA

I've done our favorite quickie burger joint a disservice by mentioning them in the very first chapter and not returning to them for so long. Cheeseburger Bobby's is a surprisingly great little place whose owner, once upon a time, inflicted the godawful Stevi B's Pizza on the planet and evidently felt the need to do the food world some justice and come up with a much better concept. His debt paid in full, we consider him forgiven and shall move on.

Atlanta, as I have mentioned, is a little crazy for burgers, and we have a handful of local chains, notably Canyon's, competing for attention. Cheeseburger Bobby's first store, in Hiram, was a smashing success in 2007, and they've opened a further four locations in the northern suburbs, with two more due this year. They have not yet troubled the perimeter, forcing Atlantans who want to try one of the best burgers in the region to venture outside 285.

The Marietta store opened last year in a space vacated by a Great Wraps. There's not very much seating available, and there is regularly a small crowd. This past Thursday, my daughter and I dropped in for an early supper. We do this often.





Cheeseburger Bobby's promises that their beef is delivered fresh daily and never frozen, and they provide a fixin's bar with, among other things, three types of lettuce, dill or sweet pickles, and red or white onions. Theirs are certainly among the best burgers in the region (possibly top five, definitely top ten), and unquestionably the best priced. Two people can eat here for under twelve bucks, and they have both a bribe card program to get you back in and a stack of coupons that never seems to reach the bottom. They also do custard, and I've taken to turning down the dollar custard coupons, as my wallet is bulging with them.

They also grill up a mean hot dog, one of the four or five best in town, and, sensibly, have celery salt on the fixin's bar. A liberal sprinkling of that, ketchup, mustard, white onions and relish and I'm happy as can be.

Every so often, we'd splurge on a little dessert and get some custard, but a few weeks ago, they introduced one of the weirdest and most wonderful concoctions around the city: a Twinkie milkshake. It's unbelievably rich and served with whipped cream and half a cake. I'm never going to lose weight with these things on the menu.

I think Bobby's has been in this space for a year now and it really worked its way into our affections without much effort or muscle, just doing the right thing and doing it very well for a nice price. It's the immediate default when we're thinking about a quick meal and don't want to either drive anywhere or spend a lot of money. They seem to be making out okay, with an incredibly upbeat and friendly staff and a dining room that rarely lacks customers. It's our neighborhood place - long may it thrive!



There are other Cheeseburger Bobby's locations in Hiram:


Canton:


and Suwanee:


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