The Noodle Shop, Asheville NC

One of my worst traits is my stubbornness. I'm working on it, but basically, when I get a mind to do something, it takes an act of Congress to get me to reconsider. I don't even consider reconsidering until it's too late. I think this really worked against me on this trip to Asheville, and we had lunch on Saturday at a very good place that we would certainly have enjoyed more some other time.

When we were in town in early June, we were walking around the city in the evening and I noticed The Noodle Shop in Pack Square. "We should go there next time we're in town," I said, and by damn, that's exactly what we were going to do. That the next time we would be in town it would be during Bele Chere, with the city boiling under record temperatures of nine hundred degrees was irrelevant to my insistence, we were going to have giant bowls of piping hot soup anyway!





So, yeah, feet aching, back aching, sweating buckets and generally as miserable physically as one can be while emotionally riding high on the wave of great music and thousands of happy people in a high-energy atmosphere, we were not, honestly, in the mood for bowls of hot soup, but it didn't occur to me to try anything else and Marie was sweet enough to let me "follow my dream," mad as it was. Luckily, the place is excellent, and made us feel very welcome, and didn't mind that we drank about three pitchers of ice water, each.

I had given my son lunch money and told him to go have his own fun, but he found us after seeing an act called Heartdrive and buying both their CD and a great big walking stick with a mohawked skull on the top. I think that "lunch" might have actually consisted of a bottle of water for him. That might explain why he tracked us down and asked to try our soups, because they looked really good.

I don't know that there's anything that out of the ordinary at The Noodle Shop; they offer several varieties of noodles, including a glassy mung bean that I enjoyed. I picked a vegetarian selection and Marie added chicken to her spring bowl and we were very pleased with the quality of the meat. It was a fine little meal, but we certainly would have enjoyed it more had it been cool enough to sit outside. Well, I say that, but honestly, plenty of people were enjoying the outdoor seating. It's just that we needed a break from the sun and wanted some air conditioning before we ventured back out to see The Mad Tea Party on the Haywood Street stage.

Outside on Pack Square, our favorite street performer, the Silver Drummer Girl, was playing. Behind her, there was some ugliness. Bele Chere attracts about two hundred thousand fun lovers, but it also brings in the Westboro wannabes, and four of them took up position behind the Silver Drummer Girl to shout through a megaphone about sinners and fornicators and whatever the heck else got in their underwear drawer that morning. I didn't mind at all the sounds of the crowd and her snare drum making their way into the restaurant; it's what we were in town for. Those jerks, however, really put me off my meal. They say there's a place in hell for me for whatever I did wrong sometime, I say there's a place in hell for them for distracting me from my mung bean soup. That's just how it is.

Ed Boudreaux's Bayou BBQ, Asheville NC

I admit, concede and confess that it is really, really unfair to judge a restaurant based on its performance during a giant downtown festival that brings a couple of hundred thousand people right outside and keeps the wait staff and kitchen working overtime, all the time. However, the northern Alabama-styled white sauce at Ed Boudreaux's Bayou BBQ on Biltmore Avenue in downtown Asheville is really, really terrible. It's the worst, the pits, the lousiest, and I was so looking forward to it that I am aggravated enough to mention it first and foremost.

Hopefully, readers who have been following our adventures have noticed that we don't feature negative reviews here. I certainly enjoy reading well-written criticism, and I've been known to dole out the harshness on my book review page, but I think that it runs counter to this blog's mission, to tell stories about a life spent eating well. To that end, we've deleted photos and crossed a couple of places off our list that we're not going to revisit, but otherwise I've kept quiet about it. Ed Boudreaux's, however, is pretty darn good, and I fully intend to stop in again many more times to come, for some good reasons I'll get to.

That white sauce, however, it's just godawful.



If you've been following along, you'll know that since I discovered the stuff in the spring, I've been crazy about white sauce. I've loved the recipes found at Hawg Wild in Clarkesville, Georgia and Miss Myra's in Birmingham, Alabama. I was stymied in my plan to try the white sauce at a place in Hamilton when we drove up to Memphis last month, because the darn place is - get this - closed on Saturday. Since there's no finer time for eating barbecue than on a summer Saturday afternoon, I still don't know what to think about that.

Ed Boudreaux's big shtick is their ridiculous number of sauces - we think there were fifteen of the darn things, all available from pump stations at a serve-it-yourself bar. The restaurant itself reminds me of the taverns on Broad Street in Athens. It's a big space, high-ceilinged, dominated by a bar and it's really loud, and everybody contributes to the noise going back and forth to try more sauces. Most of these sauces were very disappointing, but there were some winners among them. My son really liked the Georgia Peach, Marie liked the Memphis-style and I liked both the Kentucky Black (Worcestershire) and the Rebel Uprising (mustard) sauce.

Most of the other sauces, however, especially the white, were ruined by either far too strong a vinegar, or far too much of it. The cider vinegar used here was so strong and so pungent that it overpowered everything else in their respective recipes, and about five of the sauces tasted exactly the same as each other. I genuinely could not tell the difference between some of the cups that I brought back to the table. I'm willing to grant the place a little leeway - during a festival as wild as Bele Chere, I can understand eyes coming off the ball - but only because the meat and the sides, particularly the baked beans, were so darn good. I really like those baked beans, and will have them again.

And honestly, Ed Boudreaux's provides another reason to visit that you don't see at most restaurants. Check out this amazing soda fountain:



I know of one other place that serves draft RC, but I don't think I've seen Cheerwine or Sun Drop in a fountain before. This is the sort of attention to detail that I applaud in a business, and frankly, that's reason enough to stop in every time we visit Asheville. Fountain RC is terrific!



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Krispy Kreme's Cheerwine doughnuts

Word had filtered down the pipeline that Krispy Kreme, purveyor of thousand-calorie snacks, had teamed up with that other North Carolina institution, Cheerwine, for a special month-long treat at their Carolina stores. Faster than anybody was able to connect to the internet five years ago, I already had the location of a Krispy Kreme store in Asheville pulled up on Google Maps and was phoning them to confirm that store was participating in this promotion. Several people in our circle of friends found the news and forwarded it my way. "I heard about that," I wrote a half-dozen times, anticipation rising. "I can't wait 'til we go to Asheville." It got to the point that I was looking forward to a damn doughnut almost as much as the rest of our vacation.

Several years ago, a fellow on a message board that I visit once described Krispy Kreme's doughnuts as "sugar-engorged lard pucks." He's absolutely right, but I like the darn things anyway. We've already discussed in this blog how good Cheerwine is, and how it can be used to make a quite decent milkshake. I figured that the two great tastes here would go together better than any two since Reese's mixed chocolate and peanut butter. And I was right. The creme is mixed very well and it tastes just like a rich, cherry-flavor-filled doughnut should.





I'm not sure there's a whole heck of a lot more to say. We got a dozen - actually we got eleven and a lemon creme, because Marie likes to be contrary - and enjoyed three right then. Then we continued down Patton Avenue to our hotel and stuck those bad boys in the fridge. They made splendid late-night snacks and early-morning breakfasts, and we even brought one back for our daughter, who missed this trip since she was away at camp. The next time that Krispy Kreme offers these treats, you should take that as your heads-up to visit North Carolina.

Green Acres Restaurant, Carnesville GA

Marie had one of those bad feelings that work often gives you. We were supposed to get out of town around ten Friday morning, and suddenly there was a one-hour meeting scheduled at ten. I suggested we just leave half an hour early, my son and I would drop her off for the meeting and play some mumbledy-peg while she made sure the corporate world survived another week. Then she concluded she should probably go in at seven and get some work done. Before she knew it, she'd be talking like that fellow in Clerks about how she wasn't even supposed to be here, and we didn't even leave Atlanta until most folk were coming back from their lunch hours.

Fortunately, I had already asked around for a backup plan in case her job exploded like this. I was hoping to get on the road and make it to Spartanburg for lunch at a well-known place, but since we left so late, we stopped instead in the small town of Carnesville, about fifteen miles this side of the South Carolina line. This marks the second time this summer that we had planned to get lunch in South Carolina while on our way to Asheville, only to have to revisit plans and eat in Georgia instead. I'm not sure what's going on with that.

At any rate, there's a very helpful fellow at roadfood.com who goes by the handle "Littleman" who apparently keeps a remarkable spreadsheet of every interesting hole-in-the-wall, high-end and hidden restaurant in the southeast. Green Acres Restaurant has only been around, in this incarnation, for nine months, but it's already made it into his research and I'm glad it has, for this place is quite neat, and exactly the sort of thing people who don't know better would drive right past.





From the road, Green Acres doesn't look like much of anything. Somebody took a house on a huge plot of land and bolted on a business add-on. From the inside, this proves to be a clever and actually quite attractive bit of architectural magic, but from the outside, it sure isn't photogenic.

We arrived a little after two, more than ready to eat. Sadly, the late hour meant that we couldn't justify ordering either of the house's crazy specialties, half-pound burgers with two sides with the ridiculous names of Cheezy Weezy and Zip Burger, which each require a twenty-minute prep time. These are apparently deceptively difficult to finish and thwart more attempts than people think, although there is a photo on the wall of some mad teenager from the nearby town of Commerce who handled four of the blasted things in a single sitting. Sixteen years old and he already looks like a character from a Judge Dredd episode.

We each ordered different things to share. Marie had a regular burger with potato salad and some very good corn on the cob, I had two chili dogs with fries and mac and cheese, and my son had chicken tenders with black-eyed peas. Sad to say that Marie didn't like her potato salad much, but everything else turned out to be very good, particularly the burger, which was cooked exactly right and was flavorful and juicy. I quite liked the chili on the dogs, and I like the way they serve it with the little bowls of diced onions and shredded cheese. There's a hint more Sysco in the fixings and condiments than would be ideal - whoever you are and wherever you are, you've had these fries before - but the owners have done a splendid job putting together a fine little community family restaurant. I imagine that this place is pretty friendly and quiet most of the time but gets really busy and wild in the evenings; the photos on the wall of Zip Burger victors indicates this is a great Saturday evening out, particularly with the all-you-can-eat catfish on offer that night.

Actually - and this is not to knock the perfectly good late lunch that we enjoyed - the best part of our visit was learning a little about the place. It's family owned and operated, and takes its name from a restaurant that the owner's grandfather opened in the Gwinnett County town of Buford in 1951. She brought out an old menu from the old place - a wonderful little treasure and artifact from the days before digital photography and social media made such things so commonplace. The restaurant was destroyed by fire after a few years; family lore holds that it was the work of a certain white supremacist hate group you might have heard of. I'd hate to find many more tales as awful as that in the histories of restaurants, but we're having fun learning about them as we go.

Zesto, Atlanta GA

I think that one of the most interesting little facets to following the world of restaurants is finding little fast food chains that only exist in a city or two. Last month, I mentioned Milo's in Birmingham, a chain better known for its amazing sweet tea, and how it co-exists in north Alabama with another chain called Jack's. Each of them manage to survive on the same interstate exits as the better-known national chains like McDonald's and Burger King. I'm not saying you'll get really great hamburgers at places like this, but I firmly believe that they're important, that they give regions their own, special identity, and that anybody - traveler or resident - who'd stop at a national chain over a small regional one when they just want a quick $3.99 value meal has got a seven-inch screw loose somewhere.

There are probably a lot more of these types of restaurants than anybody really knows about. Locals will often overlook them, mistakenly figuring that national success is a measure of quality, and treat these restaurants as oddball minor league wannabes. On the other hand, because the foodie subculture emphasizes (a) independently-owned single locations and (b) really great meals, regional chains only rarely come up in the conversations. They just don't fit the topic, you might say. I noticed that in Asheville, there is at least one outlet of the Greensboro-based Cook Out, a chain 75 units strong that has not left the state of North Carolina. I'm very curious to try that one day, but honestly, can anybody count just how many superior meals we'd be skipping if we stopped into Cook Out over all the other really great places in Asheville?

Similarly, Atlanta has at least two chains that nobody ever talks about. Neither will serve up spectacular meals, but they'll do them quickly and cheaply and, hopefully, with a lot of local character. One of these days, I need to tell you about Martin's, a chain of fifteen stores that's only open for breakfast and lunch. Twelve of their stores are all northeast of the metro area and only one is as far south as Clayton County, and it tastes a lot like Hardee's did before Carl's Jr. bought them out. Martin's basically illustrates my definition outside Atlanta's I-285 perimeter, and Zesto is what I'm talking about inside the perimeter.





To be strictly accurate, while Zesto, today, is a regional chain with six stores, back in the 1940s its ancestor corporation was about as large as a national chain could get in those days. According to the fascinating history on its web site, there were Zestos selling soft-serve ice cream in 46 states. I imagine that it and Tasti-Freez were the two biggest competitors to Dairy Queen.

By 1955, the corporation and its franchises dissolved their agreements, leaving the stores to make it on their own. Almost all of the old Zestos were probably gone within a few years. There are still pockets of otherwise unrelated restaurants here and there throughout the country that use the old name but don't offer the same menu or ingredients, including three around Columbia, South Carolina that appear to be uniquely owned, but the Zesto restaurants in Atlanta have thrived and grown a little.

There are five Zestos in the city, plus with a more recent arrival in the teeny town of Tyrone, which is somewhere between Atlanta and Peachtree City, and each of them plays up the "1950s diner" experience. In the case of the store on Ponce de Leon, it really basks in the glow of nostalgic chrome and neon. The food is not at all bad, although nobody ever dropped their Chubby Decker back onto the wax paper in impressed shock at how amazing it was. There's an amusing story about how the better-known Big Boy threatened to sue Zesto in 1961 over their imitation burger, named, then, a Fat Boy. I've always found Zesto's burgers to be a little dry; adding a little slaw to a Chubby Decker really brings a refreshing flavor to it.

Zesto flirted, for a time, with the "fresh-mex" concept when it became popular in the late '90s. The restaurant did the unthinkable then and converted their location on Piedmont Road into a sister restaurant called Burrito Brothers. In time, this was scaled back, and now three of the six stores are discreetly "co-branded" this way, offering tacos and nachos on the menu along with the burgers and chicken. I have never got around to trying these, actually. I guess Zesto is just first in my mind as a burger place.

In Marie's mind, however, Zesto is a milkshake place first and foremost, with burgers just an appetizer to the real thing. So a couple of weeks ago, my daughter had complained that we had not enjoyed a Zesto milkshake lately, and I said we'd get around to it. (Children, as ever, think parents are made of money.) On Saturday, Marie was due to return to Atlanta from her family business in the Netherlands around 7. I figured, rightly, that she was due some pampering after all those sky miles and would appreciate a chocolate banana malt, so the kids and I picked her up and stopped at the Zesto on Ponce for supper.

I had a chili burger that dreamed of being a Varsity chili burger when it grew up and split an order of quite good chicken fingers with my daughter, and my son had a Chubby Decker and slaw. We all shared fries and heard about Marie's trip and then we indulged in some quite good shakes. I usually either get the caramel or butterscotch, have trouble deciding between even these two simple choices, and have already forgotten which it was. My son had the blueberry, which was awesome. And Marie should have had a chocolate banana malt, only I forgot to ask them to add malt powder and I don't think that she liked it as much, only she was too polite to mention it.

It's good to have her home. I mean, we have to go back to Asheville in two days for a festival and more eating, and her being in the Netherlands would make that kind of difficult.



Other Zesto locations in town include the one in Little Five Points:


and this one in East Atlanta:


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The Butt Hutt, Athens GA

I've been absolutely fascinated by chicken mull since we first discovered it back in the spring at that fundraiser up in Danielsville. It really shines a light on my deficiencies as any sort of food writer, doesn't it? I lived in Athens for a dozen years and, despite the "think global, act local" bumper sticker, I never heard of the stuff for a decade after moving. That said, it's certainly not a common dish in the region, nor is it even really known far and wide under that name. Wikipedia has an entry for it, but there it's called Southern chicken stew. They may not make it with squirrels or turtles anymore, but mull is one of the region's last, best-kept secrets, and not very many restaurants keep it on the menu.

A couple of months ago, I e-mailed Hilary Brown, the food writer for Flagpole, which is Athens' alt-weekly paper, to ask whether she knew of anyplace else that served mull, as the only evident "best bets" were a barbecue place that I never liked and the old Gateway Cafe north of town near the bypass, which has since closed. Hilary, who also contributes to the very entertaining Shazhmmm with Garrett Martin, let me know that the restaurant at UGA's Georgia Center for Continuing Education occasionally serves it, but that I'd have better luck trying The Butt Hutt, a new barbecue joint that opened last year on the top of Baxter Hill.

One Wednesday last month, I went to Athens and stopped in to try a bowl for myself. I didn't bring in my camera or consider the restaurant as a whole for a chapter here, I just wanted a nice snack before I got back on the road home. And, oh, it was good. It was thick, creamy and chewy and probably better than the wonderful stew that we had up in Danielsville a couple of months previously. I told myself that I definitely needed to try the rest of the menu the next time I was in town.

So last week, my son and I loaded up on a giant lunch at The Smith House in Dahlonega. I figured, wrongly, that after an hour and a bit's drive and a couple of hours playing downtown, we'd both be peckish for something more. Call it an early supper or a second lunch. Well, I was peckish, but then again, I had not eaten my weight in sweet potatoes.





Athens, it must be said, is not a barbecue mecca. It never has been, although two of the best joints in the state are just short half-hours' drives north or southeast. Intown, however, there have always been somewhat slim pickings. I was too late to town to try the legendary Walter's, and didn't think much of the place that moved into its location. The Barbecue Shack and Jot 'em Down are tasty if not too inspiring, and the Athens outpost of Mike & Ed's of Phenix City did not last very long.

The very best barbecue in town, by leagues, was Carrithers, which was in that low-ceilinged red building on Milledge near the bypass. They had amazing Carolina-style hash and a hot sauce that was like rocket fuel and legend has it that Keith Jackson, the greatest television sportscaster of all, declared it the best barbecue in the world. Unfortunately, in 2005, Carrithers became possessed by the spirit of a last lunch and impending breakup with somebody that I never, ever wanted to see again, and I figure it was the lingering bad vibes that shut the place down within a year. I have that effect on restaurants.

I mention this because, in a town where "pretty good" is about as good as it gets, it's possible to damn with faint praise. But the Butt Hutt, despite its ridiculous misspelled name, really is something special. This is easily as good as Carrithers at its best, and they serve mull as well.

The place is teeny, and it's decorated with the sort of dorm room minimalism you'd expect from any business located within spitting distance of Russell Hall, with a Blues Brothers poster greeting guests. There's a small table outside that nobody in their right mind would use in the middle of July, or, since the table is a pebble's throw from the gas pumps of the convenience store that occupies the same building, any other time, either. Who the heck wants car exhaust and gasoline fumes interfering with their meal?

The pork is really quite good, although the serving is a little smaller than I'd like. There are four different sauces at the tables, each of them very tasty. Between us, my son and I enjoyed some yummy curly fries and some amazingly good baked beans in a lip-smacking sauce, and this heavenly mull, which he got to try for the first time. I can't tell you how much I enjoy the mull. Crunch up some saltines and that becomes an absolutely perfect little side, and honestly accompanies chopped or pulled pork served with a tomato-based sauce even better than Brunswick stew does.

People used to joke about how my son was a bottomless pit. He spent the weekend in Ellijay with Randy once while he still lived up there, and Randy and his mother still talk about how much breakfast my son put away. But all those sweet potatoes and creamed corn earlier in the day proved impenetrable, and the nap he had afterward was not enough sleep. He had some mull and about half a sandwich and a few bites of beans and the bottomless pit had his second food coma of the day. "Folk have wondered for years whether you had a bottom," I said. He raised an eyebrow and said "Huh?" in something of a high-pitched whine. "That didn't come out right," I said, hiding my face in my hand.

There are so many other good restaurants in town that I would like to feature here that it's tough to justify multiple trips to the same place on my monthly-or-so visit to Athens. I'm currently debating which of about four places to revisit when both kids and I head back to town at the end of July. But I can absolutely get behind a little snack stop at the Butt Hutt for a bowl of mull before we leave. Or a snack or two at the Taco Stand. Or... damn, there are too many good restaurants in Athens and not enough room in my belly for all the food I'd like to enjoy every single visit.



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The Smith House, Dahlonega GA (take two)

Okay, so we're driving up Georgia 400 to the wonderful little town of Dahlonega, and a few miles past that first, always-surprising, traffic light a few miles into Forsyth County, there's a billboard for the Smith House that encourages traveling diners: "Now, more than ever, rediscover the tradition."

Roll that around on your tongue for a minute. What the heck is that supposed to mean? I get that, thanks to WSB radio, "now, more than ever" has become a de facto motto for the sleep-challenged suburbans in this region who've spent the last decade in fear of the next attack by terrorists or Muslims or Martians or whatever, as used in "now, more than ever, you need to listen to our talk show hosts indulge your paranoid fantasies of impending doom." So it's likely that, trading on a slogan with proven potency, the Smith House is just piggybacking. I can imagine carloads of people just accepting it without realizing what an incredibly ridiculous sentence it is. That's one of my favorite pastimes, making fun of goofy advertising that we see on the side of the road. I'm not sure what the goofiest thing in this region is: that billboard, or the gigantic Pink Panther and Inspector out front of that jukebox store near Dawsonville.

Suffice it to say that I saw the billboard the last time I drove to the Smith House, but the words nevertheless failed to register. This marks the first occasion that a restaurant gets a second entry here on our blog, because the last time I went, I left unsatisfied with the quality of the vegetables, and was certain that coming back in the summer would result in a better meal. The other problem was that my son, who came here on a school trip two years previously, had pitched a fit that his sister and I were going to eat here without him. This would be the same son who was living in Louisville, Kentucky, at the time. Sometimes, the only way to quell the insane competition between this boy and his sister is to act like they're both much younger, like Barney & Friends-young, and make sure that everybody gets to share. Of course, this does mean that I got to enjoy two very good meals instead of just one, yet once again I left a little unsatisfied.



This time around, the disappointment was entirely my fault. I spent the whole hour's drive from downtown Atlanta salivating at the thought of more of that pot roast, and it didn't even occur to me that they might not serve that every day. That was a real letdown, being told that I would just have to make do with some of that good fried chicken and country fried steak. I've learned my lesson, and the next time I come eat here, and I will, I'm going to phone ahead. I will come one day in the summer, when the veggies are at their best, and pot roast is on the menu, and I will have a superb and amazing meal and will not claim disappointment. I'm sure of it.

At any rate, the Smith House serves up an astonishing pile of food. As my son and I were the first diners and no others immediately behind us, they used smaller serving bowls than they do for larger groups, but they still laid out far more food than any two people could eat. Actually, I did have another disappointment: I let myself down. I saw the menu upstairs, and I guess my thoughts about the pot roast overpowered my common sense, because I saw collard greens listed. Neither my son nor I will eat them, and yet it didn't occur to me to ask the server not to bring them. We may not like them, but there's no sense in wasting them, either.

The food was mostly excellent, really. The meats were pretty good, but the creamed corn, okra and green beans were just amazing. I also really liked the cole slaw and lima beans. My son ate almost two full bowls of the sweet potatoes, along with whatever creamed corn I couldn't finish. Sadly, I am allergic to yams and had to pass, but I figure if a kid eats that much of them, he's probably not lying. In fact, he had two drumsticks and a breast and so many veggies that, reminded that he had not sampled the steak and gravy, he just moaned a little, helped himself to a single bite, rolled it around and quietly said, "Boy, that's good," before retiring. I was pretty impressed. If somebody had told me seven years ago that the secret to getting kids to eat their veggies was just bringing them to the Smith House, I'd never have tried all those failed experiments with radishes and carrot and raisin salad. You've never seen a child prolong the agony until you've seen them try to eat a serving of carrot and raisin salad one sliver at a time.

So Marie was not with us this time. This is the second trip I've made here without her; she wasn't going to be able to come anyway because we'd planned this trip while she was at work, but a death in her family has taken her out of the country for a week. I had been briefly amused by making another trip without her, because I'm mean that way, but then they brought out this blueberry cobbler for dessert and I was really saddened that she couldn't be here for this. She loves good cobbler and this knocked me on my butt. I don't know that I've ever had better, and I know that she'd love it.

My son briefly dug in to the dessert, whined "it's not fair... I'm too full..." and passed his bowl over to me after about three bites. I gladly finished his, briefly entertained the server's offer of another helping, reconsidered just how much green beans and corn I'd already put away and sadly declined. The servers, incidentally, wear shirts that proclaim Southern cooking makes you good looking. They don't say anything about making you slim, although they do, cruelly, stick a steep staircase between you and your car. I reckon they get their kicks watching overweight clowns like me dragging themselves up it after eating too damn much food. We somehow made it to the parking lot and got on the road to Athens. My son was asleep inside sixty seconds. He doesn't do anything by halves, especially not food comas.

The Bulloch House, Warm Springs GA

Marie and I had set aside a Saturday to take a day trip with the children somewhere for lunch. We decided against anywhere south down I-75 as she and my son had just come back from that direction the week before, so I turned to roadfood.com for a little help. I decided that as long as we're still living in Georgia, we should try and hit each of the restaurants in the state to get featured reviews on that site. Except the one I've heard awful things about, which you'll just have to figure out from its regular and consistent absence from this blog. This time out, we moseyed down to the town of Warm Springs in Meriwether County for a lunch at the Bulloch House, so you can cross that off the list of "Places Marie and Grant are not going to visit."

I'd been to Warm Springs only once before, when I was around my son's age and we took a school trip to the Little White House, where Franklin Roosevelt kept a home, and where he passed away. I think we had packed brown bag lunches; we certainly didn't have a meal as good as the buffet here. It's a classic Southern-styled selection, on this Saturday featuring three meats and a variety of veggies and a salad.

It reminded me of the better-known Blue Willow Inn up in Social Circle, although it must be said that the Blue Willow, with its much larger selection, is the better of the two. On the other hand, the Bulloch House still has much to recommend it.

Truth be told, this is exactly the right time to be enjoying big country lunches with lots of fresh vegetables. The salad bar at the Bulloch House proved to be one of the best I have had in ages, with really wonderful tomatoes, pickles and bell peppers. The fried apples were extremely good, as was a soupy serving of spicy stewed tomatoes. Chicken livers and tuna croquettes were nice additions to the meal, and while I wasn't mad about either the pork or the fried chicken, they got better reviews from the rest of the family. Besides, with veggies this good, I can overlook personal disappointment about the meat.





I have to say that while this place is by no means outstanding, it's nevertheless quite good and probably the best restaurant in the region, making it a sensible destination for anybody touring the area. We arrived alongside several tables of bikers who were making their way through, along with some antiquers and junkers who were planning to hit the restored downtown of Warm Springs. The place went into a steep decline after the president's death, the closure of the old spa and swimming pool and the shutdown of the railroad, but it began crawling back to life in the late eighties. The Little White House and grounds is said to be a really attractive park and good for a nice hike, but probably not in the middle of July. We did just a bit of looking around before making our way back home, and it seems like an attractive getaway from the city, really. There's an old hotel with a teeny little ice cream parlor in one of the front windows, and a couple of bed & breakfasts in the region, and it's all very cute and quiet. I could totally see the attraction in making this place a fine little escape destination.

Actually, and I'm sure the good people behind the Bulloch House won't appreciate me saying this, but no matter how good the lunch was, the best part of the trip came a few minutes before we arrived. We got off I-85 near Hogansville and took GA-100 down to the town of Greenville to get there. I had my fingers crossed that if we found a grocery store that close to the Alabama line, we might get lucky and find some Buffalo Rock. Sure as shooting, we did, at an old Piggly Wiggly store which must hold the state record for most anti-vandalism signs pasted up outside a retail establishment. We brought home two twelve-packs and some Grapico as well, and I figure that if I tell enough people that you can buy my favorite soft drink this close to Atlanta after all, then maybe they can afford a night security guard or something.

The 4th of May Cafe, St. Simons Island GA

This is Marie, writing because I took a trip without Grant. The young man and I went to see my folks and my brother on St. Simons Island for the 4th of July holiday. We had a great time and as usual on the island ate very well.

The 4th of May is named after the birthdays of the founders of another place entirely, with the same name--this is a spin-off of a different sort of restaurant which doesn't exist any more because some of the founders retired. It's a neat little place that has changed a little as it got more business. Originally you could see over the counter where the desserts are stored to watch the cooks prepare your food, but now there is a wall (painted with pictures of vegetables) that has only a small window to pass the prepared food through.

When I first started going there you could also buy loaves of bread to take away and make your own sandwiches. Since they started after I had left for college, I only did this once, and was disappointed when trying to take some with me on a following trip. Apparently they don't sell loaves any more, although perhaps they still will if you know them. This may possibly have something to do with being popular enough to need what small loaf storage space they have for making the sandwiches people order for lunch. The sandwiches are very good. In fact, all the baked goods are excellent. Once I bought two portions of their blackberry cobbler to take home with me after a weekend trip because 5 hours is a bit long to drive to top off your dessert and I needed more than just the portion I'd had with dinner.





On this particular visit, I had the Sunday lunch special. It was quite tasty, though I would have preferred to show you the picture of our son's sandwich instead of my meal. Before he picked it up and dropped the contents on his plate, it was more photogenic than mine.

The one disadvantage of his meal, though, was that he didn't get the pumpkin muffin as a side. That's almost as good as a meal by itself. My father and brother accompanied us and Karl, who arrived late, seemed perfectly satisfied with a small fruit bowl and a muffin as a snack. My father, who proclaims himself a "reluctant omnivore," nevertheless tucked into his meal, which included as one of his sides the corn you see in my picture, with considerable fervor.

Although there's another place on the island that generally steals our breakfast business, if we were hobbits and inclined to second breakfasts in the same day, we'd have to alternate between them. Also, I need to figure out how to make those pumpkin muffins because, as with the cobbler, it's a fairly long trip to get a snack.



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

Taqueria del Sol, Decatur GA

Last weekend, Marie and our son took a trip back down to St. Simons Island to visit her family, and had a couple of good meals that she will tell you about presently. In their absence, my daughter and I joined David for a day of record selling - it's like record shopping, only you come home with fewer things that you didn't need in the first place and a little more money - and had a pretty good lunch at the Decatur location of Taqueria del Sol. I've been meaning to eat at one of these places for ages, and actually tried a couple of times but gave up for lack of parking, so I'm glad we finally got the chance.

We didn't even have to stand in the line very long! This place is pretty infamous for its long line, but, as the Mendoza Line once sang, it moves quickly. Taqueria del Sol serves simple food very fast, so there's never a long wait for your meal. I figure that's how they know who ordered what without giving your table a number or card for the server to find you. In the time it takes you to order your food and get your water and silverware and sit down, your food's almost finished being prepared, so the server maybe only has two or possibly three different tables which could be the destination.



I genuinely do not care at all about reporting news about which fancy restaurant is employing which big-name chef, and my eyes glaze over whenever I see such business in blogs, but in this case it is worth a mention. Taqueria del Sol's menu was devised by a guy named Eddie Hernandez. Once upon a time, he was in charge of the food at a wonderful place called Sundown Cafe on Cheshire Bridge Road where I never ate enough. I'm happy to note that the food is very similar at the taqueria, which was devised as sort of a quickie kid sister to Sundown and eventually took it over. The table salsa - available as a separately-priced Salsa Trio on the taqueria's menu - seems to be the same, for starters.

Mr. Hernandez never really stops experimenting, so there's apparently always something neat to try here. Sundown Cafe was known for having wonderfully eclectic and fun specials, and this tradition carries on here. Last week, they were offering tacos with the chicken fried in a potato crust, and I found these to be very tasty. I had one of those along with a fish taco and a "Memphis" (pork and slaw, natch). The tacos are very tasty, served quickly and cost only two bucks and change each. If it wasn't for the line, you could call it fast food, really. Skip the chips and salsa and you've got a fine meal for seven dollars.

Taqueria del Sol has expanded to a small chain with four locations: the one we visited in Decatur, which is across the street from Farm Burger and one of our town's best record stores, Decatur CD, the original on Cheshire Bridge, one on Howell Mill and one on Prince Avenue in Athens. It's certainly worth another visit soon; I have more tacos to try.



Tacqueria del Sol has two more locations in Atlanta, on Cheshire Bridge:


and on Howell Mill:


with a fourth location in Athens, on Prince:

The Vortex, Atlanta GA

You know that saying about how I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend your right to say it? And how sometimes, people say and do things obnoxious enough to give you a little bit of pause and make you wonder whether you really mean it? I'm not necessarily talking about politics, though heaven knows certain BP apologists in Texas really make a man wish that "gag orders" actually entailed the use of ballgags.

The Vortex is an example of what happens when you stick by that rule. It's democracy in action. You can praise a restaurant for having the greatest, most lovable, take-no-prisoners attitude about stupid customers in the city, if not anywhere. You can cheer when a business stands up and says that, actually, the customer is not always right, and lets you know that in their house, you will follow their rules or get lost. You can shout from the rooftops that finally, there's a place that gets it, that won't compromise principles and will not allow idiots to waste their time when they have a business to run. When their business involves selling the best hamburgers that I've found in Atlanta, it's even easier to say "Damn right, the Vortex is exactly the place for me."

Then you get to stop cheering with your fists in the air when they enforce a rule that you don't like at all. Hey, mac, you're the one who demanded that freedom in the first place.



Some years back, the state of Georgia enacted one of the few laws that our legislature has ever come up with that was worth a damn when they restricted smoking in restaurants. Basically, they told restaurants that if they insisted on allowing idiots to smoke, then they couldn't allow anybody under 18 in their place. The Vortex was one of those places which figured they'd handle the loss of family customers by becoming a haven for smokers, and really didn't appreciate the government telling them how to conduct their business.

It annoys me that of all the weird predictions that the Judge Dredd comic has made about our society that have come true, we're stuck with riot foam and constantly expanding waistlines and artificial food, while the best future invention of all has yet to appear. In Dredd's Mega-City One, smoking is only allowed in buildings called smokatoriums, and nowhere else. They don't sell the best hamburgers in the city in a smokatorium and they don't have the best bartender in the city there, either. Her name is Carla and on those very rare occasions I visit the Vortex, it's an absolute pleasure to sit at the bar and be served by somebody so damn perfect at her job as she is.

It's not just that I object to smelling cigarette smoke. Heck, I dated a smoker for a few months in 2004, but, as I've mentioned a few times previously, that was something of a mistake-filled year. No, it's not just my own objection to smoking, though I remain convinced that the best burger I've found in the city would be even better without that stench in the air, but that I can't take my family. Marie gave it a try one early evening a couple of years back before the haze got thick, concluded that their burgers are indeed amazing and left in a flash, blinking in the sunlight and breathing with her head between her knees. The kids? They're not welcome. The signs in the front lobby restating that no, seriously, they really will not seat you if you're under 18, and that if you have a problem, take it up with your congressmen are hilariously worded, but they're also a little saddening.

One day last week, I sat at the bar and enjoyed the living daylights out of a Spanish Fly, which is an amazing hamburger served with ground chorizo and Monterrey jack cheese. On this occasion, I had some fries as a side. I only visit maybe once a year, and usually I can't help myself and order some tater tots. I think the Vortex is principally responsible for the citywide trend of offering the darn things. I don't know why I ordered them for so many years. It's not like you're getting anything from tots other than the nostalgia factor of saying "Hey! I had these in public school," so heaven knows what the appeal might be. I need to quit that and try the potato salad or something next time.

The Vortex offers a huge list of burgers, and gleefully emphasizes the ones that just aren't good for anybody. Bacon, fried bananas, eggs, habanero relish, peanut butter... it really is a remarkable menu full of delicious, dangerous things. I'll really enjoy taking my son in about five years' time.

I've thought about placing a carry-out order for burgers and having a picnic with my family over in Freedom Park. That way, everybody gets to experience how good the food is, but we miss out on the thrill of being in the place. The interior is a trip, a wild, loud, dark, bric-a-brac filled mess that's somewhere between a dive bar and a very weird diner. So by mixing such a fun design with incredible service, excellent food and their uncompromising attitude, this should be the best restaurant in town.

If only if it wasn't for that "allowing smoking" business...



The Vortex has a second location in midtown:



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

Ale-8-One

You might have noticed that I've enjoyed finding sodas that we don't get locally for a very long time. Perhaps one very small downside to the internet is that research has become so much easier. It used to be a bit more fun to have to ask around to find out what the heck the thing you'd just found in the convenience store cooler was.

In 2006, the children and I went to Toronto to visit our good buddies Dave and Shaindle. We went up via Pittsburgh and Buffalo and came back down I-75 through Detroit and Cincinnati. We stopped for the night in a motel in Kentucky, a state I had not visited in more than twenty years, about four miles south of the Ohio River. The next morning, we gassed up and investigated the soft drinks to see what treats awaited us.

Ale-8-One is Kentucky's soft drink, introduced in 1926 from what was said to be a secret recipe that G.L. Wainscott, already a successful soda distributor of two decades' standing, obtained on vacation to Europe. His business, based in the town of Winchester, grew slowly over the years, and in the 1960s, he discontinued all his other brands, including the company's flagship Roxa-Kola, in order to focus all his attention on Ale-8-One.

It's a very interesting ginger ale. While my beloved Buffalo Rock stands out as being one of the strongest ginger beverages you can find, Ale-8-One is very mild, with a light, barely-there citrus taste. It's mildly sweet and incredibly satisfying.

I brought back some cans of Ale-8-One on that trip, and supplemented them with stocks coming in via the children's mother, who moved to Louisville around that time. There have been a few grumbling trips to that city over the last few years that I really wasn't completely keen to make, but the reality that we can bring back some Ale-8-One has sweetened the pill a hair.



Several weeks ago, I spoke with my son's mother on the phone and expressed some good-natured frustration that the darn kid was supposed to bring me back a twelve-pack when he came down for the summer. She said something about how I should have heard that they're going to start selling Ale-8-One in Georgia and I paid it about as much heed as I would a similar report that they're going to start selling bottled unicorn tears. It was a pretty unlikely story.

Shortly afterward, I got confirmation from Matt, who's taken to passing the time in the town of Gainesville by reading the local news a lot more attentively than I read mine. He saw the remarkable news that a startup company called Southern Beverage Distributors has landed Ale-8-One in a handful of stores in Hall, Barrow and Gwinnett counties and immediately forwarded the news my way. It always helps to have a crowd of people looking out for this sort of news. I vaguely remembered having that conversation with some woman with whom I might have been married once about some soda or other, but, then again, I am easily distracted. They're selling it in bottles, too. If it's good in cans, it's excellent in glass bottles, and even more amazing poured over ice cream. They call that a "Kentucky Cooler."

A few weeks ago, I was up in Athens and so I looked over Southern Beverage's list of locations, learning that a grocery store called Quality Foods in Winder was selling the ginger ale. I stopped in on my way back to town and got a real kick out of this place. In the Atlanta area, all the grocery stores look the same: they're modern and spotless but also a bit antiseptic. Which is fine, I like antiseptic when buying groceries, despite an old habit of stopping by the filthiest convenience store in Tennessee for Double Cola, but nobody ever found any character in a modern Kroger.

This Quality Foods looks exactly like the old Big Star on South Cobb Drive where my family shopped for groceries in the late seventies. The layout is precisely the same, down to the customer service desk bizarrely placed somewhat above the action, so that if you have a question, the manager literally gets to talk down to you. It's pleasantly strange, looking around a place that looks dated and downmarket and realizing that, once upon a time, all grocery stores used to look like this. The Quality Foods is probably cleaner than the Big Stars and Food Giants of days past, but it still has that old linoleum floor that never, ever really gets clean.

Southern Beverage Distributors is currently looking for new locations to carry Ale-8-One. I wish them the best of luck and an even broader portfolio. (Can you imagine how happy I'd be to have Ale-8-One, Buffalo Rock, Double Cola and Moxie all in one supermarket!? I wouldn't know what to bring home.) But honestly, just between you and me, I kind of like having a beat up, cool old store in Winder to buy this stuff. I'll be swinging back by in a week and a half for another pair of six-packs. (Of course, what I really need to do is find a reason to go through Kentucky that way and stop in Ale-8-One's hometown of Winchester for lunch at Hall's on the River. Maybe some other time.)

Frankie's Italian Ristorante, Marietta GA

I don't remember exactly what prompted us to stop into Frankie's that first time, only that the situation was awful and my kids, very small at the time, were upset. They'd suffered some disappointment or other, their weekend went wrong and they were cranky and aggravated and wherever we were going to eat supper was closed or something. I figured Frankie's, a small place on Canton Road north of us, would be an expensive dinner, but one which might just cheer them up a little. Indeed it was pretty pricy, but it was excellent and did the trick perfectly. I then spent the next two years with my wallet locked away with the kids whining that they wanted to go back.

Honestly, I protest too much over a reasonable evening out for a nice meal - dinner for four will cost you about $60 - but this was back when I was raising the two children by myself on a pretty tight budget. Until I got my student loan paid off, I didn't have the extra dollars. I bought a lot of garbage I didn't need and deprived myself of some good meals, but we all make poor decisions.

That first trip, we had pizza and sandwiches. As befits a New York-styled Italian-American joint, they do these extremely well, but it wasn't until Marie and I started dating quite some time later that I came back. I discovered the chicken scarpariello then and I don't know what the heck else is on the menu anymore. This stuff is amazing.



Have you ever had chicken scarpariello before? It's said to mean "shoemaker's chicken" and it mixes sausage and chicken with mushrooms, olives, potatoes and pepperoncini in a thick, slightly spicy brown sauce. It's not really Italian; it apparently was first concocted in Boston. I found a recipe for the dish at Almost Italian; that site suggests making sure you have bread to sop up the sauce. A wonderful blend of olive oil, wine, lemon and spices, I've been doing that for quite some time now.

After we got back from Memphis, we didn't eat out for a couple of weeks, save to two places that we've already written up here in this blog. Last weekend, I suggested that Marie pick a place that we haven't written up, either someplace new or an older favorite we haven't visited in a while. It didn't take her long to come up with Frankie's. We have an excellent meal every few months here. It's a small place, cozy, with a small parking lot. They have a second location a few miles away on the other side of Marietta which I've never visited. This one does us just fine. With its cute caricatures of Italian-American icons like Dean Martin and Don Corleone, it skirts the side of tacky but it pulls it off all right.

Marie usually has the pasta primavera. The kids don't have favorites yet, but I think my son might want to have the stromboli again the next time he goes. It does the same things that the big chains do - endless garlic bread, bottomless salad - but it does it a whole lot better and with a really unique and classy style. Why anybody in Marietta would want to eat at an Olive Garden instead of Frankie's is beyond me.

We've enjoyed meals here with each of our families and, last year, when we returned from getting married down on St. Simons Island, this is what Marie and I had for supper our first night back. I could stand a 20% off coupon every once in a while, but you know the place you enjoy your first married supper together and the place you eat with your folks? That's a special place, really.



There's a second location in Marietta, just a few miles away:

The Greek Touch, Nashville TN

Normally, when I really like a restaurant, I try to make sure to remember how to get there, so that I can tell people, especially the ones who find Google Maps challenging. The Greek Touch is easy to find. What you do is park in downtown Nashville in the library deck, preferably on a Monday when the library is closed (budget cuts) and there's an extra space or two. Then you walk to a coffee shop called Provence and wait for about twenty minutes for our friend Tory to get time off for lunch. She'll come get you and take you through the lobby of the Fifth Third Bank building, out the loading dock, down past the dumpsters and you'll take a left in some alley and wind up in a shopping arcade. You'll take a right and it's a little past the post office on your right.

I imagine that Google Maps could probably get you there with a little less intrigue, but who'd want that?





This was the last stop on our road trip, and I do wish we'd have been in more of a mood to chow down and get into it, but honestly, after all those great meals and that blistering heat, neither of us really had much of an appetite left. And that's a shame, because this food is indeed very good, and considerably better than a few similar quickie Greek restaurants in the Atlanta area that I have tried. It really deserved more attention and love than we could bring it.

Tory recommended the chicken, but both Marie and I wanted to try the gyro meat, so we both ordered the same thing, which we almost never do. We each got the combo meals, which have chicken and gyro with rice and a salad. I'd say the chicken's not at all bad, but the gyro meat was better, and very tasty.

When I was in college, I would frequently eat at the old Gyro Wrap on Broad Street downtown, before that chain morphed into Great Wraps and started trying to sell everything, badly. The Greek Touch reminds me of the great quality of the food back then. It's very good, no-frills, quickly-prepared lunches for workers in the area with little time to spare, most of whom are going to rush it back to the office. There are maybe five tables in the place and two outside. It's cramped and not entirely comfortable, but I could spend hours here smelling the food and listening to the noise of the crowd.

The line died down as we had almost finished our meal, and had successfully distracted Tory from her awful morning's work with even more awful jokes and puns. (Have I ever told you the one about Patricia Whack's first day in the loan office? Remind me some time.) With a brief lull in the business, the owner stepped out from behind the grill to stretch his arms and asked us how everything was. We said we liked it and thanked him, and he asked where we were from. I told him Atlanta and he grinned widely and said "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that."

I wasn't remotely offended. Oftentimes this town wants to drive me from it and I have, on a couple of occasions, gone to Nashville to just get away from everything. 2004 was one of those occasions. Nashville's so packed full of great things that we were really considering moving here, until Asheville stole our hearts.

Then again, neither of those cities has a Frankie's, about which more another time.



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