Old South Bar-B-Q, Smyrna GA

The last time I wrote, I was talking about Alpharetta's oldest surviving restaurant. This time, it's Old South Bar-B-Q, which, since the closure of Fat Boy a couple of years back, has become the longest-lasting place in Smyrna to get something to eat. It's managed this through three generations of family ownership by creating some remarkable loyalty in their customer base.

Honestly, Old South is about the living definition of hit and miss. You never know what you're going to get here. I've had some very good meals, and I've always enjoyed their really, really thick original sauce, but man, can you ever tell when somebody new is in the kitchen chopping, pulling or slicing the meat. Unfortunately, everybody's meat was a little disappointing this time out. There was just too much fat and gristle on display.





Normally, I get chopped pork whenever I have barbecue, but I guess I was feeling a little contrary and, this past Friday night, asked for pulled pork instead. Marie and I were visiting my folks with my daughter in tow and Old South was my bright idea. My dad didn't really feel like going out, so I phoned in an order of quite unreasonable complexity - my brother, God bless him, has really specific requirements about how he wants his grub - and they got it exactly right.

The sides here are pretty inconsistent. While I never cared for their potato salad or slaw, their Brunswick stew is among the best around. It's an almost black brew with lots of stringy meat and corn. Some years back, I took three of my friends from Nashville, Brooke, Dash and Tory, here. None of them had tried Brunswick stew before, and I was glad to set 'em straight with the good stuff first.

Their rings and beans are certainly just fine, but I knew that my dad, who likes their onion rings better than anybody else's, would have more than enough to share. Dad loves these, especially dipped in Heinz 57 sauce. He has been doing this for better than twenty years and still asks whether I want some, because I "really need to try this." Overall, this meal was just "okay," let down by the inconsistent meat. I've certainly had considerably better meals here, but I think the next time the road takes us to Old South, I'll stick to having my pork chopped. It is, nevertheless, better than many of their competitors in this part of Cobb, although I can name two within a hop, skip and a jump that I have not yet tried. There's something else I need to get on with.



Hey there! We have moved! Come visit us at our new blog home!

Pig in a Pit, Macon GA

This is Marie, contributing a little story about a barbecue place that Grant hasn't visited. The review is for the Macon branch of the Pig In A Pit Bar-B-Que restaurant. Their branch in Milledgeville is the original one, and maybe we'll make our way there eventually.

Grant and I recall different versions of how this came to be probably the only barbecue place that I have eaten at and he hasn't. As he puts it, he just said that I should check out some places along the way to my folks' place. He doesn't seem to recall that he mentioned this place along with another as places he has not visited, and so I decided to check one of them out and report back. The other, whose name I don't recall, looked like it was too far down a side road and wasn't under consideration. So far I've visited twice or three times, and he hasn't yet. It's easy to miss, though there is a sign on the highway "what's to eat at this exit" but even that is partially obscured with a branch or something. In any case, the visit before last to my folks' place, I had meant to show the place to Julian so he could brag about eating at a BBQ place where his Dad has never been as well, and completely missed the exit. We wound up stopping at a fast food place to keep his stomach from gnawing on the poor boy's backbone, and what a poor second that made, I can tell you!

This place has some mixed reviews. The best ones seem to be for their ribs, which I haven't tried but did see on an awful lot of the other diners' plates. I have experienced a little variation in my own very limited experience with them, and the best I can say is that the one or possibly two visits I made on Saturdays were better than the last visit, on Sunday. My recollection of the Saturday visit was of a packed place with really juicy, thick sandwiches and a brownie for dessert (bought separately) that had me fighting my inner gourmand to keep from getting seconds.





On this last visit there were only two other tables full, and the meat was a little more dry than last time, but it had a little more smoky flavor to it. On the other hand, the server had the food out to me before I finished filling my cup of tea! It was excellent tea, and I was quite pained when I reached for it in the car and realized it had been forgotten.

There are four kinds of sauce: a thick, sweet variety, a hot version of the thick sauce, a mustard-base, and some Carolina-style vinegar. It's best if you mix a little of the vinegar sauce into the sweet kind, and that's despite the fact that I am the Memphis fan of the household (Grant prefers Carolina style).

The restaurant is in a fairly characterless part of town, and the location is in a tiny strip mall that (in my limited experience) has other shops that don't appear to ever be open. I've seen people inside the beef jerky and sausage store next door even though it was closed at the time, and one of the other reviewers says that place is great to visit after your meal, but maybe the weekend hours are different. After all, there's not much chance of a weekday visit on my part. However, the inside is clean and the benches and booths are comfortable.

There is the usual sort of country decor (someone went a little too country with the wooden pig cut-outs) and the bathrooms are wallpapered with old magazine pages that contain perfectly ridiculous advertisements. I would need to have a few more of the sides and maybe a couple more visits to be sure that the apparent slight unevenness in consistency isn't a habit for them, but so far it certainly wouldn't be a hardship. Especially if the brownies are consistent.



(Update, 9/19/11: I (Grant) learned today that Pig in a Pit was closed by the Department of Revenue back in February for unpaid taxed. I never did get to try it. Darn!)

Alpha Soda, Alpharetta GA

Alpha Soda is the oldest surviving restaurant still doing business in the northern suburb of Alpharetta, and is celebrating its ninetieth birthday this year. That's pretty amazing, and it's a good place to eat, but I somehow wonder whether the place's glory days are many years behind it, back before they moved to their current location and changed their format somewhat.

When it opened, it was what we'd call today an olde-fashioned soda counter and sandwich shop, although in 1920, such things were hip and modern. It has moved at least five times over the years. I heard that the original location on Main Street was later the site of another long-lived restaurant, the Dixie Diner, which closed in 2002 after several decades, but I wouldn't swear to it. After all, the first I heard of Alpha Soda was that it wasn't worth visiting, and that proved not to be true at all.

Well, I should have known better than to take the word of a teenager. Ten years ago, I was tutoring high school kids prepping for the SAT and considering moving to their community in north Fulton County. I once asked one of my students where to get something to eat and he replied "Anywhere but Alpha Soda" and went on to describe everything that the wrong-headed fellow didn't like about the place. He was mistaken on every front; years later, I gave it a try, enjoyed it thoroughly, and longed to give that kid a kick in the hindquarters for costing me several decent meals here.





When Alpha Soda moved to their present location in 1995, the latest owners elected to spruce it up a bit and transform it into a somewhat upscale family restaurant, with an inspired interior design that evokes the fashionable Art Deco style of the 1920s. The menu apparently more than tripled in size, with several additions from the Greek-American school of dining that serves many of the region's large family diners well. A meal here is quite similar to what you can receive at the famous Marietta Diner, only I find Alpha Soda much quieter and laid-back.

This past week, it was our friend Matt's turn to pick some socializin' activity for us to enjoy, and he suggested we get a small group together here, as it's a little closer to his place in Gainesville than the rest of us in Cobb County. Illness and work prevented a very large crowd, but Kimberly came by to eat before heading back into Atlanta to teach a class at Oglethorpe, and Marie came straight up 400 from work, and my daughter and I made the fun overland trek across Post Oak Tritt Road.

Everybody seemed to enjoy their meals, although I was left with a little menu envy yet again. I had the pecan-encrusted tilapia, which was okay. The beets and the cucumber and tomato salad that I had as side dishes were more tasty, and the great big order of homemade potato chips sprinkled with Old Bay seasoning were even better. Matt had a terrific-looking London broil and Marie enjoyed an ugly-but-delicious meatloaf sandwich served with a very good, thick marinara sauce. Heck, even Kimberly's big chicken caesar salad was better than my tilapia. Now what's fair about that?

Fortunately, my comparatively disappointing meal was more than made up for by the dessert. We don't often have a dessert when we go out, but, in deference to Alpha Soda's fountain origins, I felt it appropriate to have some ice cream. They don't mess around with these treats.



This was one heck of a good banana split. Marie and Ivy and I, combined, couldn't quite finish it, but we enjoyed every second of the trying. It makes me wonder what the original, olde-timey 1920s version of Alpha Soda was like, and whether it wasn't a more consistently fun and delightful experience.

Big City Bread Cafe, Athens GA

Now that I've got close to a hundred chapters of this story under my belt, I am making a more conscious effort to balance eating at old favorites with trying new places. Big City Bread Cafe is far from new - they seem to have opened their first storefront around the time my daughter was born - but they're new to me. I try to get to Athens once a month, unless circumstances call me more frequently, and maybe I can continue having a small meal at someplace that I do not know well, before going to play and then grabbing a small meal at an old favorite before coming back to town. Or does that sound too much like I'm setting a schedule? That way lies complacency, doesn't it?

Anyway, so I never got around to eating at Big City. They were serving up fresh-baked bread for a little more than a year before I moved from Athens to Cobb County, and I wasn't paying attention. There was probably a girl involved; I tend to overlook important things like really good bread whenever girls get involved. Did I ever mention 1999? It was something of an awful year. Anyway, the business found a home in an old industrial space on Finley Street and turned it into one of the most pleasant and inviting little hideaways to enjoy coffee (from local faves Jittery Joe's), pastries and sandwiches in town. And the sandwiches are terrific!





I wasn't sure what to order, but I settled on the chicken salad once I remembered something I'd decided a few months back: you can get a better idea of how good the kitchen in a sandwich shop is by ordering chicken salad. Any restaurant worth a flip can order the best deli meats and leave it to teens to assemble; it takes a little more work to make good chicken, tuna, egg or shrimp salad, and I'm glad to say that Big City's chicken salad is tremendously good. It tastes extremely fresh and, served with spinach and blue cheese on an excellent walnut wheat bread, has left me scratching my head wondering whether I've ever had a better chicken salad sandwich.

Unfortunately, it's a very expensive chicken salad sandwich. I think the only complaint I have about this fine place is that you have to pay extra for a bag of chips, and a sandwich with chips and a drink will run you eleven bucks. I really wish they could get the price down a little. The food is exceptional, and I love the building and its charming shaded patio, but after a few hours playing downtown and bagging comic books, I swung by the Taco Stand before coming home, where I could have absolutely stuffed myself for half the cost of a much smaller meal at Big City Bread. They do offer the standard half-sandwich and soup bowl that you can find at a lot of places. They're said to have an amazing tomato, scallion and goat cheese soup which I'd like to try. Maybe when I come back on a colder day, I'll give that a try.



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

Wallace Barbecue, Austell GA

Many things cross my mind about what to talk about when Wallace comes up, but first and foremost is their sauce. They have two. One is a hot mustard-based sauce that's bottled and on the table already. It's terrific, and as promised, it goes very well with the restaurant's Brunswick stew.

The other sauce is served with your order. I'd advise diners to ask for their pork dry, like David did when he and I went to supper Saturday night and ended up here. David's on a pretty strict diet for blood sugar problems and needs to take it easy with the greasy fries and sweet sauces. I probably should have done it that way myself, because I like the way that Wallace serves their sauce on the side, piping hot, in a bowl.

The only other place that I'm aware of that does this is Sprayberry's Barbecue down in Newnan, which is worth revisiting one day very soon, but possibly not this calendar year. The datebook is sort of packed. Now, the makeup of the sauce is quite baffling. I have heard that in Owensboro, Kentucky, they serve up a Worcestershire-based sauce, and kind of got a roundabout confirmation of that from the fifteen-sauce selection at Asheville's Ed Boudreaux's BBQ last month. I wonder whether Wallace might be using that as well. It's certainly very thin and pleasantly vinegary, with pepper, but I couldn't say beyond that. Our server, and you simply could not ask for a better one, politely declined to assist in identifying it. She explained that there's one fellow "locked in the back" mixing up their sauces and that nobody but him knows the recipe. I just love that.





I first visited Wallace in 2002. Back then, I was working on a well-intentioned guide to barbecue restaurants here in Georgia that I had hosted on Geocities and waiting for tips on new, or old, places to try. Creative Loafing, the largest and best-known of Atlanta's alt-weeklies, gave Wallace a good review, so I trekked down to Austell from my old apartment in Alpharetta one Saturday. That really was a haul when there's nothing at your destination but one barbecue place and a thousand traffic lights and miles of abandoned, low-rent suburban blight along the way. Driving through the community of Mableton along what used to be called Bankhead Highway and is now Veterans' Memorial Parkway has been one of the region's most cringeworthy exercises for more than a quarter of a century. There's really nothing wrong with this agonizing shithole of a road that a really powerful tornado wouldn't fix.

Sadly, I haven't found the chance to go back nearly often enough. I know that I've tried convincing my folks to have dinner out here instead of their usual barbecue haunts, but for some insane reason, my mom doesn't like the place. Really, the only thing I have against them is the extremely greasy fries, which I had completely forgotten about. They're really tasty, but I'm getting awfully close to forty and shouldn't have fries twice in one day anyhow, particularly if the second meal's fries are as greasy as this. I should have gone with the slaw.

Wallace is a pretty big place and it's extremely popular in the area. Saturday nights, the place is packed with folks having a great time. I definitely need to find reason to head out this way again before long.

St Simons Sweets, Saint Simons Island GA

(Marie writes again... having taken a quick weekend jaunt back down to the coast, she took the camera to snap a couple of pictures of a new favorite on Mallery Street.)

St. Simons Sweets is the latest store to make an attempt at the sweet-toothed segment of the tourist crowd in the Pier area of what St. Simons residents call "The Village." I am not sure why so many have come and gone, as a candy-and-ice cream shop seems a sure bet in any tourist area, but this is by far the best organized and busiest of them.

The earliest one, where I spent my allowance money as a kid, was primarily an ice cream shop with a handful of Jelly Belly flavors and a jar of gummy worms for those who didn't want anything cold. When that left, the Woolworth that was still in the Pier area then was the only place that sold candy, but they didn't have anything that wasn't sold in a wrapper so they didn't compete very well with the Jiffy stores further into the island. Some rather desperately long time after the departure of the Woolworth came a coffee shop that couldn't quite make up its mind whether to concentrate on the ice cream, the candy, or the hot drinks. They had good stuff including fudge, but it was never very busy, and only caffeine junkies as bad as my sister could stand to have a coffee at midday in tourist season.

With St. Simons Sweets, the ice cream is in the back, so you have to pass by tempting displays behind glass to get to the cold stuff that was probably what tempts most of the passers-by through the doors. On the right as you go in there is a display of fudge, with jars of huge cookies above. After that is a few shelves of glass jars containing candy store usuals like gummy whatevers and Swedish fish. You'll see my name mostly spelled in gummy letters in the picture. The R looks a little funny because I had to mangle a B to get to it.





After that is another glass case full of things like chocolate-dipped Oreos, pretzels, etc., and some more jars of candy by the pound. It's good to have the option of getting a little of this and a little of that, even if all gummy candy is essentially the same, and the there is apparently enough turnover to keep everything very fresh.

There are a few tables where you can eat your ice cream or other treats inside. In the back near the ice cream they have large baskets full of things like flavored gum balls with the store logo on them, and some standard candy like Pixie Stix and Jelly Bellies in bags. In fact, about all this store lacks is a serve-your-own flavor Jelly Belly wall, but I am not sure exactly how they'd be able to fit it in without taking out some of the tables. And considering how warm and humid it generally is in the Village area, any store with air conditioning is probably going to make some of their sales to people who really just want to rent a chair inside for a few minutes.

I heard about this place from my Dad, who is not exactly the candy hog that I am. He introduced the topic by asking whether I'd tried the raspberry fudge. Of course I hadn't, so we had to make a special trip to check it out, and I was really pleased with the results. This was my fourth visit, and my first buying only for myself. It appears they have some regular flavors and some that cycle through and raspberry is one of the peripatetic varieties. This time the option I hadn't seen before was key lime, and it is very intense indeed. The fudge is really the best thing the shop carries, in my opinion. It is rich, creamy, and intense. However, the cinnamon ice cream is also really good. The teenagers behind the counter may be slightly math challenged, but they appear to enjoy their jobs and they smile at the customers.



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

Vittles Restaurant, Smyrna GA

Over on South Cobb Drive, just below Windy Hill, Vittles Restaurant has made its fourth home. It's been around for better than thirty years - our server explained that she'd been with the business for twenty-eight of them - and has made a name for itself as a place to go when you want a gigantic pile of food for not much money. Most of their staple meals - a meat, two sides, salad and bread - are only $5.99 on the menu. How on earth they're able to maintain their quality and the portion sizes for that money is a mystery.

Neal, whom we met for lunch on Saturday, has heard a theory that the restaurant subsidizes their meal prices with sales from their gift shop, which starts in the inner foyer and explodes all over the restaurant's walls. The nicknacks here are really a sight to see. If you need porcelain plaques with Bible verses or large photos of horses with inspirational quotes, this is where to buy them. The interior is absolutely covered with these things, and should you be unfortunate enough to sit in one of the front booths, you might well be stuck underneath a shelf full of statues of sad-eyed children and puppies.

Last month, I wrote about how The Vortex reacted to Georgia banning smoking in restaurants that served minors by banning minors from their restaurant. Vittles took a different approach. They moved to the building next door and turned it into two completely separate dining rooms, with children restricted to the equally-sized non-smoking room. Now I must say that while the staff at the Vortex keep a very sharp eye out for any teens or kids trying to get in, the staffers at Vittles genuinely do not seem to care.





We tried to get a group together here one Thursday last month, but were stymied somewhat. My kids and I arrived first and were told we couldn't claim a table with room for seven in the non-smoking section because there was going to be a Bible study in 45 minutes' time. (I suppose that I should clarify that we knew up front that there's a Bible study at the restaurant on Thursdays, but I didn't realize that it effectively takes over the restaurant.) So we took a booth until Neal and Tim arrived, and agreed that we'd try a large table in the smoking section. I completely forgot about the law, and it didn't even occur to me that the kids legally couldn't enter that room, but, and here's the kicker, it didn't occur to anybody else at the restaurant either. When we eventually concluded that the smoke was too heavy for either David or Marie to find comfortable, we paid for our drinks and left. None of the four or five servers or table staff in that section batted an eye at the kids.

Well, the following week, the kids and I stopped by on a whim to give Vittles a chance while Marie was out of town, and I have to say I was glad I did. There is an unfortunate amount of Sysco in the menu - fries and a faux A-1 steak sauce whose packaging steers so close to trademark infringement as to be comical for starters - but the food - I had the pork chops that evening - is mostly quite good and there is a heck of a lot of it.

We returned this Saturday to photograph the place, and the experience was not quite so pleasant. I really don't appreciate having any politics broadcast at a restaurant, neither mine nor anyone else's. I think that it runs counter to what I'm looking for in a meal, which I think is to get away from the world, enjoy good company and good conversation, or, if eating by myself, a good book. I do not want politics interfering with my lunch. There exists a small chain of barbecue restaurants in the northern suburbs which I will not revisit because, on two separate occasions when I stopped by for supper before tutoring students in the town of Cumming back in 2000, I had to listen to some loudmouth in the back screaming his lungs off about that year's scapegoat destroying America.

The omnipresent Fox News on the TV in both non-smoking and the smoking rooms was mildly amusing a month ago, when Glenn Beck was on selling his gold scam to his audience of aging, paranoid suckers. But you know, I was really enjoying my country fried steak and gravy Saturday, and didn't appreciate the latest big-screen Fox News distraction, and certainly didn't appreciate the loudmouthed conversation behind me from one of that 18% of the country's morons who's convinced our president's a Muslim because of Sean Hannity's latest lie. It's unfair to hold a restaurant accountable for the boorish conduct of its guests, and I don't, even if they feed their paranoia by turning the TV to Fox instead of a baseball game or something.

We left and I borrowed Neal's camera to shoot a picture of the building. There's an American flag out front of the restaurant. This flag is: (a) horribly tattered and torn and ready to be honorably retired, (b) attached in some fashion to an equally tattered and torn old Georgia state flag, the one with the Confederate colors, and (c) upside down. I might have another order of that steak and gravy once they fly a new flag, and hoist it the right way up.

Ru San's, Kennesaw GA

Now this is weird. I've eaten at one Ru San's or another better than a dozen times, but I can't remember a single occasion that lends itself to an anecdote worth relating. I remember watching DJ Shockley make a spectacular end zone dive when the Gamecocks came to town in 2005 at the one in Athens, but I was wasting time with somebody who didn't like football that fall and might not have that quite right. I remember watching what must been a sixth generation VHS copy of an old Gundam cartoon at the one in Buckhead in 2004 and thinking that incredibly odd, that surely they could have laid their hands on a better copy of that. Of course I remember that my daughter shouts "Wasabi!" in the manner of South Park's "Timmy!" every time we walk into one of their locations. Perhaps sushi does not lend itself to anecdotes?

Ru San's is a small chain with six locations around Atlanta, and four others in other southeastern cities. They specialize in really low-priced sushi. I find it perfectly acceptable food at very reasonable prices - last night, Marie and our daughter and I had supper here for under $20 - and am in no rush to try anybody else's more expensive sushi, tempura or yakitori.





Ru San's is a full-service Japanese restaurant, with the expected big seafood meals and bowls of soup the size of your head, but I think that the sushi is where they excel. They have a quite remarkable specials menu where you can order three pieces of maki or one of nigiri - more than two dozen varieties - for a dollar or two. Usually, I enjoy a small salad with ginger dressing and four orders of maki. That's a quite filling meal for under $8, and I get to sample several different tastes.

My daughter's even easier to please, since she has yet to leave her comfort zone of California rolls and has yet to ask for more than three orders. And Marie doesn't actually like sushi, so she'll either have fried rice - one gigantic order of which provides her with lunch the next day - and some vegetable tempura. Even though we keep it simple, there's a lot to enjoy here. The food's good and while the place can get extremely loud - must they crank the volume on the dance music quite so high? - the service is really attentive and we've never had a bad meal here. It's always worth considering for a quick evening out.



There are five other Ru San's locations in the Atlanta area. I've also visited the one in Midtown, which was apparently the original:


And the one in Buckhead, which was playing crummy 3rd-gen VHS copies of one of the Mobile Suit Gundam cartoons while we were eating:


There's also one in Athens where I once had a memorable meal, apart from the girl I was then dating obliviously choosing to buy Gators-colored shoes that day. I mean, really! In front of me! And in ATHENS, too!


And there are stores in Charlotte, NC:


And Nashville, among other towns:


Hey! We have moved! Come visit us at our new home!

Bella's Pizzeria, Smyrna GA

It's always a little discouraging when a place that you know to be capable of giving you a good meal lets you down. We don't eat at Bella's very often - perhaps eight or nine times over the years - but it has a deserved reputation for giving you a perfectly good New York-style pie. It's certainly nowhere near the best in the region, and not in my top five, but I've always felt it to be a reliable place.

It's a sports bar, basically. I'm not sure how much of its loud, late-evening hoopla was designed and how much evolved from answering customer requests for things to do, but over time they've introduced Team Trivia and other games, and usually have live music - blues and classic rock covers, mainly - on Fridays and Saturdays. It's a very fun neighborhood pizza place. The pie's usually pretty good, and you can complement it with a very decent side salad with a delicious house dressing or some garlic knots which put most of their rivals to shame, and they offer Boylan's sodas by the bottle. It's a good place.





This past week, we had the first subpar meal we've ever had at Bella's. We had a veggie pie and a stuffed pie with meatballs and ham, and neither was worth writing home about. They were certainly better than what Domino's might like to deliver, but not at all like what I have had in the past. The dough didn't taste right, and the sauce seemed bland and canned. I thought the cheese was fine, and the veggie toppings were all quite good, but it just felt like it was made without attention to detail. It didn't have any spark.

When this happens with pizza, it's hugely aggravating because you're sharing with the group. Marie, my daughter and I met Neal here and we could all only agree that the food was "all right." Sadly, the blow to the wallet seems a lot harsher when your meal isn't a standout. Bella's seems a little pricier than most of its competitors anyway, but they do offer coupons which aren't hard to find. In fact, we got our coupon from my folks, who eat here all the time. My dad is often found shopping in that strip mall, and he loves Bella's, but he's also honest about their inconsistency. Most of the time, they're pretty good, once in a while they are outstanding, and once in a very long while, they're bland and disappointing.

I've mentioned before that 2004 was something of a mistake-filled year for me. The very last time one of those mistakes and I had supper together, I brought her and her daughter here. The pizza that night was completely amazing, although I think that the girl I was seeing was a little too distracted by her daughter's really awful conduct that night to notice. I'm willing to cut Bella's a little slack, because I know first-hand that they can do better. That and those garlic knots will knock you out.

Petro's Chili and Chips, Knoxville TN

As I was saying, I've written here before about loving the idea of regional specialties, and recipes that you just can't find all over the country. I also love small regional chains that you can't find at home. In this respect, Knoxville is one of my absolute favorite places to spot small-market fast food, particularly on a stretch of Kingston Pike where Papermill Road dead-ends. From there, of course you can see the omnipresent McDonald's, but you can also see a Mr. Gatti's, a Sawyer's, a Denton's, a Wishbones, a Calhoun's, a doughnut place whose name escapes me, and the wonderful Petro's Chili and Chips, which has been serving its amped-up Frito pies for almost thirty years. Some of these places have made their way to other cities - Nashville has a Calhoun's and a Petro's, and Mr. Gatti's, a pizza buffet place, is actually in several states - but none have made it to Georgia yet. In a country where the national chains have all the attention, this little stretch of road delights me.

That's not to say that many of these places are all that amazing taken on their own merits. Sawyer's does the same thing that Guthrie's and Zaxby's do, and Denton's Volunteer-themed "Big Orange" drink is an awful lot like an Orange Julius. I doubt that Denton's can claim any historic first; their building is, not fooling anybody, an old Checker's. Yet they are different, and therefore, neat and delightful. I wonder whether Knoxvillians are aware of just how unique this little stretch of road is. I don't know of another place at all like it.

Petro's is the only one that provides a truly unique fast food experience. Apparently, a local entrepreneur got a contract to serve these cups of chili over chips at the Knoxville World's Fair, held with much hoopla in the city in 1982. The fair's ostensible theme was energy, hence the name of the product. I say "ostensible" having wasted an hour in line for that dull Mexican exhibit wishing I could have seen more of that giant Rubik's Cube elsewhere in the fair. Anyway, a Petro is extremely good chili, served with tomatoes, cheese, onions and sour cream atop either Frito's corn chips or noodles.





Since moving from a carnival stand to mall food courts, a couple of freestanding restaurants and a place somewhere in Neyland Stadium, Petro's has expanded their menu to include hot dogs, loaded baked potatoes and a really neat side of cucumbers and onions, marinated in a little dressing of mayo and vinegar. This isn't haute cuisine, but it's so darn tasty, especially with a tall cup of their special "hint of orange" tea. About half the trips I've made to Knoxville, I've come home with a gallon of that. The other half of the trips have been on a Sunday, when their convenient location on this stretch of Kingston Pike is closed.

A few years back, I filled out a comment card and posted it back to Petro's headquarters. They asked for suggestions and I urged them to open in Atlanta. They were good enough to write back and apologize, because that wasn't then in the works. Surprisingly, this seems to be set to change. This past weekend, we stopped by for a snack and a gallon of tea. My daughter hadn't enjoyed her lunch and so, after an hour or so perusing the used books and CDs over at McKay, we came by for she and I to split a large Petro. We were greeted at the door by a sparkling corporate sign announcing a search for new management teams because Petro's is growing and needs YOUR help. You know the sort of signage that I'm talking about. It's usually an indicator that the website's redesigned and the "F.A.Q." section is now exclusively built around questions that potential investors might consider.

I chatted with the fellow behind the counter and confirmed that Petro's has finally decided to get aggressive about expanding and franchising. If successful, I can imagine, in time, this turning the chain into something of a disappointing bore, but maybe they can do it right and keep the chili tasting good. Then again, Marie got her first taste of Petro's in Nashville back in 2007. There's only one Petro's in that city, in the food court at Rivergate Mall, where we met up with the kids' mother for one of our "prisoner exchanges" seeing the kids off with her for a couple of weeks. Marie had heard me raving about Petro's for the better part of the year, and the chili at that food court location was, sadly, distinctly unimpressive.

Nonetheless, I enjoy the food so much that I told the young man behind the register that I hoped they opened some stores in Atlanta. He said that he's heard that they're hoping to open a location in Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. Well, that's not even remotely convenient, and it might not serve up better chili than on Kingston Pike, and having stores here at all will cost this stretch of road its unique and charming character... but all things considered, I like this tea and the chili so much that I wish them the very best of luck with their expansion. After all, The Simpsons taught us that all the Sun Sphere is good for anymore is storing wigs; it might be nice to hear about a real success story coming out of the '82 World's Fair.



Other Petro's locations in Knoxville include stores in Wesley:


and in Farragut:


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

Nixon's Deli, Knoxville TN

I've written here before about loving the idea of regional specialties, and recipes that you just can't find all over the country. I'm starting to see that some of these, you have to look a little to find. For example, there's Knoxville, a terrific city that I have visited better than a dozen times. Like its I-40 neighbor, Asheville, it's a city where we don't know anybody yet, and so visiting isn't quite as fun as we would like it to be, but until we befriend some locals one day, there's still a lot to do. Especially if you're a Vols fan. We're not, of course, but I think that SEC cities are always exciting and fun. Well, I say that, but it's not like I've visited even half of them. But anyway, Knoxville has a couple of good record shops, two absolutely amazing bookstores, Marie's favorite pizzeria and something we knew nothing about until about a week ago: steamed sandwiches.

There's very little information online about Knoxville's hot, steamed sandwiches, and what there is seems both dismissive and contradictory. The first Google result that I pull up (http://www.cs.utk.edu/~plank/plank/recs/rest/sandwich.html , evidently a URL registered shortly after the introduction of the printing press) is one man's chronicle of how weird and awful these sandwiches are, with some spirited rebuttals from locals who love them. Over at a site called city-data.com, a user going by the handle "SpectreBlofeld" describes the steamed sandwich as "mighty" and did not realize until he moved to Texas that the soggy sandwiches he was used to were very much a local thing, and that Texans found the notion of a soggy sandwich completely baffling. Last April, however, a New York Times food writer suggested that these were not so unique, and that steamed hamburgers have been common in Connecticut for years.

For most of us, ordering a hot sandwich will see the bread, meat and cheese placed either in an oven or in a press, but in Knoxville, they use a proper steamer. You can expect an aluminum contraption with a reservoir of heated water underneath a cooking chamber. The result should be melted cheese mixed with the meat and very soft bread. Apparently there are arguments about how moist or soggy the bread should be. "SpectreBlofeld" calls for it to be soggy, but an article at StateMaster.com (which looks a lot like it once appeared at Wikipedia but was eventually deleted on account of nobody really being all that interested) states that this is not acceptable, "and likely the result of a defective steamer."

At Nixon's Deli, one of the homes of the steamed sandwich, I would call the result pretty darned soggy, but also very acceptable.





Nixon's Deli has five locations in the city, and, along with Slappy's, is evidently one of the best places to get a steamed hoagie. On the weekends, Nixon's offers two footlong subs for $10.99, so Marie and I each ordered one. One of the comments that I read had suggested that lettuce and tomato don't go very well on a steamed sub, so I passed on those, but Marie considers sandwiches incomplete without them. Mine was a turkey and smoked cheddar and Marie had salami and cheddar. Hers turned out to be considerably more photogenic than mine.

The steaming takes quite a while to get right. The restaurant was not very busy, but we did have a pretty long wait while the two staffers prepped our food. We did not mind, as we were dropping our son off with his mother for another stay with her, and our daughter wanted to have a little time to see her, too. Also, my kids have a three year-old half-brother who wanted to show off and entertain everybody. Everybody in a three-mile radius. That kid's got some lungs.

We were quite pleased with the results. The bread was very moist and agreeably soft, though I can see the argument that this process might have only started years before to mask the taste of dry, shipped-in sub rolls. Marie said that her salami was very good, and I really liked the combination of the melted cheese and soft bread. This is definitely a meal that I can get behind revisiting.

A dissenting opinion was offered by my daughter, however. She had a small Italian sandwich on pumpernickel bread and found it incredibly disagreeable. Evidently, I didn't do my part in explaining what I meant by steaming. This despite the fact that whenever Marie steams tortillas at home, somebody has to help my daughter take hers from the rack, otherwise she yelps and whines that the steam is too hot. At any rate, she complained that the bread was wet and that she didn't like wet bread and did not finish her lunch. It worked out for the best; I was considering stopping for a snack, giving me the chance to visit a longtime favorite before we would leave town a couple of hours later, but I knew that after my huge turkey sub that I wouldn't be very hungry, but she would. This way, we would both win.



Nixon's has a few other locations around Knoxville, including Fountain City:


and Farragut:

Aretha Frankenstein's, Chattanooga TN

Last month, I mentioned that a regular at the Roadfood message board had come through with a recommendation for lunch in the town of Carnesville. I once again visited that forum for help finding breakfast this past Saturday in Chattanooga. The same guy, who goes by the handle "Littleman," again came through with a heads-up on a tiny little place called Aretha Frankenstein's that just drips with kitschy character and charm. That fellow's batting a thousand, and if I can't help you with suggestions about where to eat in any given destination, you should probably track him down.

Saturday marked the end of my son's summer with us. He returned to Louisville for another year with his mother, chiefly on account of some girl he likes. Can you believe that? He's thirteen and already changing cities and schools on account of some sweetie. College is going to be a real thrill. He'd mentioned wanting to visit a state park in Tennessee before he left to see the tallest waterfall east of the Mississippi, so we took a trip up there before meeting his mother for what I like to call a "prisoner exchange." This put us in Chattanooga around breakfast time and I'd hoped to find something fun and a little decadent before we started hiking. Aretha Frankenstein's totally met my expectations. This place is terrific.





Getting there proved to be a pleasant surprise. As many times as I've visited Chattanooga and seen everything from Lookouts games at AT&T Field to the scariest convenience store in Tennessee, I had not actually driven north of the river to the incredibly cute neighborhood on the other side of the Market Street Bridge. From there, it's a very short hop up an old residential street called Tremont, where many houses have been built up the sides of incredibly steep, short hills, to Aretha Frankenstein's. Parking is a challenge, so it's not a place you want to try at peak times. 7.30 on a Saturday morning is about right. If it's pleasant enough to sit outside, like it was this weekend, you can, honestly, I'm completely serious about this, share patio space with chain-smoking hipsters in bowling shirts drinking PBR by the can that early in the day.

Aretha's is very much a breakfast place, and they serve wild concoctions from 7 to midnight. They also have sandwiches on the menu, but their breakfast is the main attraction. Their pancakes - probably a misnomer, as they are cooked in omelet rings which leave them coming out about an inch thick and totally delicious - can be served with Maine blueberries for a wonderful taste. They also cook Belgian waffles. The children each had one of those served "Elephants Gerald" style, with vanilla ice cream, pecans and enough cinnamon for my son to accidentally inhale some. Well, we have been getting at him to sit up straight when he eats and not lean over his plate. Maybe cinnamon up the nose was the trick that we needed.

The decor is wonderful, with the same sort of fabulous bric-a-brac on the walls that I'd consider for the walls of any place that I might open. There's a DB Records publicity photo of Pylon by the restrooms, and a framed Gold Key Lidsville comic next to a lobby card from the Universal Pufnstuf film on the wall by the bar. Did somebody tell these guys that I was coming, or are they always this cool?

My daughter, incidentally, really liked the way that the "O" in the neon "OPEN" sign is a white cobweb. There's even a prominent sign asking customers outside to refrain from feeding the neighborhood stray cats who make their way to the patio. We didn't feed them - we wouldn't - but we did enjoy watching the two hanging out nearby trying to look cool. They were in the right place; maybe they just needed bowling shirts and Pabst Blue Ribbon.



Hey! We've moved! Come visit our new blog!

The Grill, Athens GA

This is Marie, talking about The Grill in Athens, GA. Technically this visit involved desserts because I had a shake for dinner, you see.

This place has been around long enough that some of their "decor" is actually just old stuff they never took out, like the juke box attachments for the booths along the walls. The place has a lot of character. Of course it has the kitschy old style signs for beverages that no longer exist or were sold for a nickel. However, they also have a divider down the middle of the room that has glass display cases full of strange antique toys, comics and collectibles. There's no way to take a picture of the stuff that would turn out, and I wouldn't want to spoil the amusement factor of seeing the old toys and silly things in those displays. I wouldn't recommend using their rest room either if you can avoid it, unless you are into the really old-fashioned kind, or you collect really bizarre bathroom graffiti.

You'll never go wrong putting a burger and shake joint near a college campus. The Grill has been right up the block from the main entrance to the UGA campus in Athens for a pretty long time (Grant half-remembers them moving to this location in 1989 and having a liquor license tied up for months), and seen a lot of places move in and out around it. Currently there is a Five Guys in the spot on the corner by the Arches that used to be the location for a really awful Chinese place ("China Eventually," Randy called it), and apparently, before that something else even worse. The Grill has enough of an identity that it never suffers from the competition. And I have to say, before I started hanging out with Grant, I didn't eat out more than every other month or so, but still managed to make it to this place now and then.





The last two times I went there, I had a shake for a meal instead of whatever else was on the menu. I really like their chocolate malt. It's pretty dangerous. If you've read last month's chapter about Zesto's, you've heard that I'm rather fond of theirs as well. However, those come in ordinary forgettable cups with plastic lids. At The Grill, shakes and malts come in the steel mixing cup along with a nifty cone-shaped paper cup balanced in a chilled metal stand, so you can pour your own serving out and make it last. Presentation is definitely a bonus here. Also, if as often happens there's a little lump of unmixed ice cream, you can smoosh the lump onto the side of the metal cup without worrying that the foam or waxed paper will suffer for it, as you would in joints with lesser presentation.

However, there was a lot more going on at the table than just my ice cream. We'd gone as a party, you see, meeting up with our friends Dave and Shaindle, who live in Toronto, and Devlin and Mandy, who don't get to see us all that often as we are inconveniently no longer living in Athens and they're unavailable most weekends. Almost everyone enjoyed various burgers or sandwiches. Apparently The Grill serves up one of the best Reubens in town.

Grant had a huge third-of-a-pound burger with peppers and onions, with those distinctive dark Grill crinkle fries that have the skin left on. They're a little different from most fries. If you are married to the brittle shoe string type, you won't like these. They're hot enough to please my taste buds which enjoy being on fire--it's probably a reason why I don't generally finish more than a quarter of any fry order. They have a fair amount of character and locals have long figured out that a small side of feta dressing is imperative to the experience. If you visit Athens and try this place, you must order a side of feta for your fries.

I make a habit of not ordering grilled cheese at a restaurant because a) I can make it at home for about a tenth the cost (so long as I'm not using $29-a-pound cheese, anyway), and b) I like mine better. Especially if I am using the really good, decadent kinds of cheese. However, I think I may change my mind about that for my next visit to this place, because someone at the table had a gooey grilled cheese that looked much better than the usual kid's menu fare. The burgers are what will keep you coming back, however. The tuna melt is pretty good, too. However, you can also get a salad if you insist. But whatever you do, don't eat too much and pass on the shake.

The Sweet Shoppe & Soda Stop, Monroe GA

I absolutely love small southern downtowns when they're done right and show off cute local businesses. This past weekend, Marie and the kids and I drove to Athens and took US 78 from Decatur, just to have a different thing or two to look at along the way. I get the impression that 78 used to go through the town of Monroe, but somebody threw some money at Walton County in the early 1980s to build a bypass around the town. Nowadays, travelers have to struggle through sprawling chains and traffic lights to get out of Snellville and Loganville, but go out of the way to find Monroe.

Once you get off the four-lane divided highway, you can't get to the proper town square without driving through more sprawl and Wal-Marts and chains. Honestly, that any business is able to survive in Monroe is pretty impressive. Customers kind of have to go out of their way and past a lot of national businesses to get to the town square. Happily, it's worth the drive. It's a very cute little downtown.



I had my fingers crossed that we'd find something like an old-fashioned ice cream store downtown to sit down for a snack rather than grabbing something at a Krystal (don't you judge me), and was not disappointed. It was a pretty slow Saturday afternoon, and this was just what the road trip doctor ordered. The Sweet Shoppe & Soda Stop serves up Blue Bell ice cream and a host of small-market sodas, including some of our family favorites like Sioux City, Red Rock, Cheerwine and Nehi. They also make their own sodas using Torani syrup.

We parked a couple of blocks away and enjoyed a short walk along with our snack. Marie got a grape Nehi and I had my standard black-and-white ice cream soda. Our daughter had a scoop of mint chocolate chip and our son enjoyed a big Cheerwine float. We also took a bottle of Sioux City sarsaparilla home, because you can make two really good floats at home with one bottle of that and four scoops of Breyer's vanilla.

There's so much to like about little places like this, where you learn a little about the town while enjoying a relaxing treat. On this particular Saturday, we got our drinks for only a dollar each because the shoppe had ordered in anticipation of the monthly "First Friday" concert on the town hall or courthouse steps (I'm not sure which), this time featuring Haywire and the Cat Daddies. Unfortunately, rain canceled the show, leaving the shoppe with an abundance of great beverages chilling in a cooler of slowly melting ice. I love learning about what's happening in small towns, and I love seeing that most of our money stays in the community that we visit, instead of helping with the corporate payroll at the home office in Saginaw or someplace.

I see that the next First Friday will feature the ever-popular South Carolina beach combo the Swingin' Medallions. We'll be busy that weekend, even with a fascinating combination pool hall and hot dog stand downtown that just begs further investigation, but if you head that way, have a Red Rock ginger ale or a Bubble Up over vanilla and let me know how it was, okay?



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