The Great Miller Lite Chili Cookoff, Stone Mountain GA

One of the many high points on the local food calendar is a wonderful chili cookoff, sponsored by Miller Lite and benefiting Camp Twin Lakes, that is held every September at Stone Mountain. Randy first told me about it three years ago. He was staying in Dacula at the time; the kids and I went and got him, learned that there is nothing that resembles a simple path to get from Dacula to Stone Mountain, marveled at the spectacle and the festival atmosphere and ate our weight in chili.

The following year, Marie had moved in, and the two of us took the kids for another afternoon of overeating. There were 300 vendors; to sample one ounce from each of them would mean 2.34 gallons of chili, and that's before you consider that a little over half the vendors also cook up some stew, and some of them cook up more than a single variety of chili. There are also food tents, evidently because some people really want to pay ten dollars to have all the chili they can eat and also buy a catered barbecue sandwich from Sonny's. Three bucks for some roasted corn, now that I can get behind, but not a big paper plate of enchiladas and rice. I understand this place is a lot like a carnival, but there's common sense involved.

We didn't go in 2009, because they forecast rain and I didn't want to risk it. I spent that whole weekend being grouchy since the metro area might have received sixteen raindrops that day. This past weekend, I was bound and determined to make it back. The weather cooperated, but Marie's job didn't. She got called in for a Saturday morning meeting. The vendors and contestants start serving at 11, but Marie and our friend Samantha and I didn't make it into the park until almost one, by which time the parking nearest the meadow where it is held was completely full, and so were a good half of the 15,000 people who came to eat hearty.





I have to say that this was the first year that I was a little disappointed in the experience, although I did enjoy some really good tastes along the way. There were notably fewer contestants this time out. One vendor told us that he heard that there were only 250, down from 300 the last several years. This was borne out by the results, which indeed showed 249 entrants. Unfortunately, the organizers did not use the full space available - a "back row" on the far side of the shady meadow lanes was simply not occupied - and so this meant that more of the 15,000 visitors - that number up a little from previous years - were pressed into a smaller space. Plus, with more guests jockeying for chili from fewer vendors, plenty of people ran out quickly. We got our first taste about ten minutes after 1 pm, by which time a good quarter of the contestants had already ran out of the four to six gallons of chili that they'd each prepared. The lesson learned here is to make damn sure you arrive early. The event opens at 10, and the vendors are told to be ready to serve at 11. If we make it back next year, we will have spoons in hand at five till.

Ever since I started telling people about this event, I have been asked the most remarkably idiotic questions about it. My favorite has been "What kind of chili do they have?" At least four people have asked me that. Well, "they" are, this year, 249 different people or groups offering up 249 different recipes for chili, using every ingredient from celery to venison. It's a cookoff, not a restaurant. I didn't think that was very complicated, but you never know about people.

Each guest gets the opportunity to vote for their favorite chili. We all agreed that this year, Mike & Terry Metzler's Grateful Red Chili was our favorite. They placed # 35 out of the 249 entrants. The winner was the Howard Crew's Chili and Stew, which I recall also enjoying. Another one that I really liked, and which almost stole my vote from Grateful Red, was Cousins Chili, which placed # 17.

In the Brunswick stew category, my favorite was The Hall Brothers, who placed # 55 out of 152 entrants. The overall winner was Bob Sims of Dos Gringos.

There are several vendors who come every year, and I suppose, now that I'm looking back on this, I might have done a considerably better job of reporting on this escapade had I actually acted like a reporter and interviewed one or two of them. Some of the regulars, like Pirates of the Chili Bean and Trailer Trash Chili, go all out with elaborate booths and costumes and play to the crowd with several friends in character participating in the madness. Most of the others, it must be said, prefer to kick back on lawn chairs and watch the football games and socialize while members of their group take turns greeting the public and passing out the little one-ounce chili cups. Still, with all the garish booths and hoopla, the overall effect is somewhere between a state fair and Dragon*Con.



Within two hours, we were spent and the vendors were wiped out. Only a very few still had any food left, although there was still music to enjoy. The event books four bands for each shindig, each of which are cover bands that specialize in classic rock recreations. To my mind, this is not an event where you wish to be booked last on the bill, by which time the chili is gone and the visitors are departing. Two years ago, I was curious to see a Paul McCartney "tribute" called Band on the Run, but they weren't going to take the stage for almost three hours after we finished eating. This time out, we arrived while an Eric Clapton "tribute" called Slowhand was playing, and left as The Alabama Blues Brothers were finishing their set.

I mention this because one of the vendors, and, confirming my slack job at reporting, I didn't note which of them, really got into Slowhand's set. I enjoyed some wonderful chili and stew and love spending time with Samantha and with my gorgeous wife, but I think the memory I'll take most from this cookoff was this one guy singing along to "I Shot the Sheriff" with his own take on the lyrics... "I cooked the chili / But I did not cook the Brunswick stew!" Fellow almost got my vote over Grateful Red for that line alone.

Boardwalk Fresh Burgers & Fries, Sandy Springs GA

Here's an example of a restaurant that just crept into town. I think that the manager has done everything that anyone in his position is meant to do to get the word out - there's a whacking great billboard right above his shop - but it hasn't taken and people aren't talking about it. This is a huge shame, because Boardwalk Fresh Burgers & Fries really is worth a visit, and worth a lot of talk.

Admittedly, sometimes it takes a little while for word of mouth to build. Boardwalk has been building very slowly, with most of their business over thirty years confined to sports arenas and fry carts around the mid-Atlantic states. The conversion to a "fast casual" burger joint came in 2007, and they now claim nine restaurants in six states.

The french fries are definitely this place's draw. Don't get me wrong; they cook up some very good burgers, but Atlanta is, as we've established, more than awash in very good burgers and it is tough to stand out. But these fries, well, darned if I can think of any other burger joint in town to offer fries this good. There are better burgers in Atlanta, but I don't believe that any of Boardwalk's many competitors in the field have such good fries.





Last week, Marie and I met up with Samantha and with Neal, who had just returned from his California trip. We all drove separately, and Neal and Marie each mentioned something which might be blocking the restaurant's hopes for success: nobody can find the place. Marie, using Google Maps and Neal, using GPS, each got bad directions to a place which should be incredibly easy to find. I just tried it myself on Google and it says, quite wrongly, "destination will be on the left" when coming from downtown Atlanta. That's not true. Going north on Roswell Road from the perimeter, it is less than a mile on the right, just past the El Azteca in a strip mall in front of the Lowe's.

Once you do find the place, you'll find a menu board that's not hugely different from the industry standard. Customers can order a basic burger with one or two patties and an assortment of toppings or one of a few different specialty items with the extra-priced toppings added. Honestly, I don't see the need to pay for mushrooms or bacon when I have come to sample ground beef, unless I want something considerably different. Neal went with the chicken, but the rest of us just had single patties with basic lettuce and tomatoes. I had ketchup and their chipotle sauce on the side. This turned out to be the only disappointment of the meal; as a little bit on the bottom of my burger, the chipotle was unmemorable and brought out nothing, but as a fry dip, the sauce had no tang at all to it, and the flavor did not mix with the potato.

Five Guys is the obvious comparison point here. Despite the flashy design and colorful interior, Boardwalk feels like it is following in Five Guys' shadow, but they excel in every way. I enjoy Five Guys, although I have not eaten at one in a very long time - they are big enough that they don't miss me - and they provide a good baseline for acceptable quality in a good burger. Marie, Samantha and I all agreed that this was a better hamburger, and far less greasy than what Five Guys offers. It is certainly on a par with Cheeseburger Bobby's.

But these fries, well, these are superior to Five Guys in every possible way, and miles better than the awful fries that the otherwise great Bobby's makes. Unfortunately, I made the calamitously bad mistake of ordering chili cheese fries. These were not bad, but I assure you, these fries need neither chili nor cheese. The restaurant suggests that you eat them "Maryland style" with vinegar and Old Bay seasoning. Fortunately, Neal and Samantha each had more than enough fries to share for us to try those add-ons. I like Old Bay seasoning a lot - it's basically celery salt with mustard, black and red pepper and pinches of another ten things - and if I'd ordered fries without chili and cheese, I'd have blanketed 'em in Old Bay.

Neal bought a dessert for us all to share, probably because he was still smarting from the funnel cakes that he didn't get to try out in California. Boardwalk's "funnel fries" are (and there's no way to explain this without repeatedly using this word like a bad, novice journalist, hence this lengthy parenthetical comment to break them up) fried to come out in a fry shape and covered in powdered sugar. Because we're all trying to find some compromise between watching our weight and eating the bejezus out of everything wonderful that comes our direction, one order of funnel anything is plenty for four people.

Besides, with the overeating planned for the weekend, nobody needed more than a quarter-order of funnel fries. More on that next time.



(Update 11/29/11: Sadly, the Sandy Springs store closed this month. Boardwalk is continuing to open stores in the New England states, and a second Atlanta location has opened in midtown's Ansley Mall.)

(Update 3/25/12: But wait! Another franchisee has reopened this store! Better luck this time, fellows!)

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Top Spice, Vinings GA

Did you miss us? While Neal took over day-to-day duties with his reports from SoCal, those of us still back here in NoGeo continued having a great time and eating well, and I enjoyed having a few days not having to worry about what I was going to write. This has allowed me the chance to stretch out a little and get ahead of my personal deadlines between here, my book review blog and my LiveJournal. Maybe we'll do this again in three or four months.

At any rate, we continued to eat well over the last several days. A few weeks ago, Samantha suggested that we meet up for supper at Lemon Grass in Marietta, and proceeded to order some really excellent food. I remembered this when NoGeo was invaded by several out-of-town friends whom we don't see nearly often enough for Anime Weekend Atlanta. Now in its sixteenth year, AWA was founded by my best pal, Dave, who has lived in Toronto for the last six years. On the Friday night of the con, Marie and I went to supper with him and with our great friend Brooke, whom you may recall lives in Nashville, and who is the executive director of that city's upstart GMX convention. A little shop talk was shared.

Cons being the schedule-crazy things that they are, it's difficult to get away somewhere very close by for a good meal, particularly in the Cumberland Mall area. Not only is there pretty slim pickings in the immediate vicinity of the convention center, getting to a better restaurant - and one with no wait and prompt service - might mean navigating awful traffic and dozens of red lights. If you're in the convention center at the Galleria, Big Chow Grill - formerly The Real Chow Baby - is a decent idea, but the place does get amazingly loud and crazy on Friday nights. No, for some place you can enjoy a good meal and not have to scream across the table, your best option is probably Top Spice, about a mile south on US 41.

I was not at all biased by a desire to try some more nam sod and coconut soup like Samantha had the week before. Really.





Top Spice has three locations in Atlanta. This one is the furthest out of the city center, still inside the perimeter in the outskirts of the Vinings community, and oddly placed between a Toys R Us and a post office just behind the Akers Mill shopping center. Their web site is absolutely no help whatsoever in learning about the restaurant's history. At a guess, they opened within the last decade. The interior is very lush, with deep red walls and quite nice furniture.

The food is quite good, although I'm afraid that Lemon Grass might have spoiled me for nam sod. Top Spice's is still very tasty; while not at all spicy, it is moist and full of ginger. Lemon Grass's version has a little more kick, is a little less juicy, and I preferred the cabbage that it came with. Definitely a case of a good meal suffering only by comparison.

Marie had the shrimp pineapple fried rice and really liked it. She shared one of her shrimp and I thought it was perfectly fine. Really, for the price, they provide a simply excellent meal, and, again, it's better than any other option by the mall without driving a lot farther, particularly if you want a quiet place to catch up with old friends.



There are two other Top Spice locations in Atlanta. One is on North Druid Hills:


...and the other is on Piedmont, near Monroe:

The Port of Los Angeles Lobster Festival

(While Marie and I take a week off from food writing, our friend Neal concludes his week of filling in with some notes about his trip to southern California on business. Enjoy!)

On my first night in Los Angeles the plan was to go see Marina & the Diamonds at the El Rey Theater in Hollywood. Three of Nate's friends, Vance, Heather and Elise joined us for the show and dinner beforehand at Marie Callender's. Yes, that would be THE Marie Callender's you see in your grocer's freezer except that the food at the actual restaurant is a gazillion times better. This particular location is adjacent to the LaBrea Tar Pits which I sadly did not have time to visit on this trip. Silly me wasn't prepared and forgot to take a photo of either the restaurant or the food so I won't be reviewing it here. Although, I did have a mac & cheese dish with bacon that would cause you to slap your mother twice.

I only mention it at all because it was during our dinner at Marie Callender's that we found out about the Port of Los Angeles Lobster Festival currently in San Pedro for four days. The festival is held to mark the official start of lobster season and you can get a full lobster dinner for $18. This includes an entire lobster, two sides, a roll and a bucket of melted butter. It did not take much to convince us we should check it out.

After a full day of sightseeing and DVD and music shopping on Saturday we loaded up the car and headed out. San Pedro is south of Los Angeles and makes up the western most edge of the Long Beach shipyards. The giant cruise ships come into Long Beach, and the Queen Mary is kept there. San Pedro gets all the cargo freighters and fishing boats. A small village has popped up along South Harbor Blvd called the Ports O Call. Here you can shop for lighthouse themed trinkets and grab some seafood at one of two dozen restaurants as you watch the shrimp boats come in to port. For the festival they close off the huge parking lot at the fish market and put on a respectable little fair. Parking is a bit of a challenge though. We had to drive a mile past the site and ride a shuttle bus back. It was well worth the journey.

Admission to the festival for one adult is $9. That gets you in the gate. After that you have to pay to play the games and eat, so a family of four could easily drop some serious cash here. We were there for the lobster so we didn't dally too long at the bean bag toss or that silly game where you shoot a water gun into a clown's mouth in order to pop a balloon. They did have some cute sad lobsters for prizes, and made a fortune selling ridiculous lobster hats for $5. There was also an impressive list of musical acts over the four-day weekend featuring a bunch of LA bands that I've never heard of such as Gram Rabbit, Leslie Stevens & The Badgers and Saint Motel.

The lobster feast was set up at the back. There was a tent for the food and then a tent full of tables. The process was pretty simple. We presented our ticket and were handed a plate full of food. Next we had to move to the side where a team was ready to chop into the shell with big knives so it would be easier to crack open. I've never eaten a whole lobster before, much less one that hadn't already been opened up and prepared for me by the fine staff at my local Red Lobster. For a minute I just stared at the thing, not sure how to proceed. Vance's boyfriend Jay gave me a quick lesson and I tore into it, feeling a bit like the carnivore that I am.





For sides they provided a container of slaw and a container of potatoes. Both were edible but not very memorable. I've had better at Folks, a chain of Southern-styled restaurants around Atlanta. The roll was nasty so I left it alone and focused on my crustacean. This lobster was something else. The tail cracked open nice and clean so when I pulled out the meat I had one huge dripping mass of goodness that was easily six inches long. I managed to get the claw meat out in one piece as well. I don't know that I've ever had a bad lobster in my life. I've had small ones, and rubbery ones, but the flavor is always wonderful. This was by far the best lobster I've ever eaten.

Somehow, after putting away our obscene lobster feast we were still hungry for dessert. Vance wanted a funnel cake so we made our way over to their tent only to find that no less than two hundred people had the same idea. I am not exaggerating here. Two hundred might be a lowball estimate. The line for funnel cakes stretched almost the entire length of the festival. A quick meeting concluded that we did not want funnel cakes nearly as much as we first though. The ice cream truck was looking much more appealing.

The Coolhaus Ice Cream truck serves gourmet ice cream sandwiches out of vintage mail trucks and they are taking Los Angeles by storm. They drive around LA and park at high traffic areas, then Tweet the location and the masses descend upon them. The concept is pretty cool. You choose your cookie and then choose your ice cream and they put it all together in an edible wrapper. The truck at the fair had 3 cookie options: Chocolate Chip, Snickerdoodle and Oatmeal. The ice cream options were more intriguing: dirty mint chip, brown butter w/ candied bacon, chocolate chipolte and balsamic fig w/ mascarpone. I saw bacon and had to try it, so I asked for a snickerdoodle with the brown butter w/ candied bacon.

Oh.my.god.

It sounds a bit nasty but it was truly divine. The picture above I yanked from the web but you get the general idea. I've had bacon chocolate bars and now I've had bacon ice cream. Is there anything that can't be made better with bacon?

The festival is held every year so if you find yourself in San Pedro some cool September weekend stop by. You won't be sorry.

Hennessey's, Los Angeles CA

(While Marie and I take a week off from food writing, our friend Neal continues filling in with a week's worth of reading about some of the meals that he's enjoyed while out in southern California on business. Enjoy!)

When I planned my trip to California this year I made a point of telling my friend Nate that I wanted to have breakfast at Hennessey's Pub in Manhattan Beach. He had first taken me there four years ago when Tim and I were in town for the Madonna concert and I had their Cap'n Crunch French Toast for the first time.

The first Hennessey's opened in 1976 in Hermosa Beach. Since then their expansion has been slow and deliberate, focusing mostly on California's coastal communities where a good neighborhood pub is a hot commodity. They found their niche and have made a very successful go of it. I suspect a large part of their popularity is the French Toast. The Manhattan Beach location is roughly one-tenth of a mile from the pier so they get the local beach crowd in every morning. With the front windows opened and sea breeze coming through it is the perfect place for morning coffee before heading to the beach down the street.





French Toast is my favorite breakfast food and most places do a decent job with it. Once in a while you find someplace that overcooks it and you wind up with hard toast covered in syrup. Good French Toast should be soggy with egg and buried in syrup. At Hennessey they crumble up my favorite breakfast cereal, Cap'n Crunch, and dip the soggy bread in it before plopping it on the griddle. As a result you get soggy toast with a sweet crunchy coating. Drown that in syrup and there is nothing better in this world on Saturday morning. I was so looking forward to it in fact that I ate one piece before I remembered to take the photo.

Hennessey's has lots of yummy looking things on their menu but I fear I may never try any of them. I can't imagine coming here and not getting the French Toast. Maybe I can talk a friend into giving me a bite of the California Benedict some morning. For dinner they have the usual Irish pub fare such as Shepherd's Pie and Corned Beef with Cabbage. The pastrami burger sounds good too.

After breakfast I recommend a stroll down to the pier to watch the surfers. It'll do you good to get some fresh sea air in your system and the walk back up the hill to your car will help burn off your meal.



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The Pink Taco, Los Angeles CA

(While Marie and I take a week off from food writing, our friend Neal continues filling in with a week's worth of reading about some of the meals that he's enjoyed while out in southern California on business. Enjoy!)

On Saturday I let my film geek flag fly high and proud and spent most of the day driving around Hollywood on a tour of filming locations from some of my favorite old movies. I've been itching to do this for years, but finding someone to do it with can be a challenge. Not everyone gets excited over that sort of thing. Thankfully my friend Nate who lives in Redondo Beach shares my particular brand of madness and was more than willing to play chaperone. Nate's friend Vance tagged along as well.

We started the day at 20th Century Fox Studios. My friend knows the director of marketing for Fox and he was generous enough to call in a guest pass for us. After some minor confusion over where we were supposed to park we finally got settled and began wandering around. I took lots of photos and we did some damage to our wallets at the Fox Studios Store, but this is a food blog so I'll skip all of that.

On the way out I mentioned that the lot seemed rather small. I was informed that the old lot was much much bigger, but it was downsized considerably in the 1970s. What used to be the old backlot is now a bunch of office buildings called Century Center. It was at Century Center that they shot the iconic final battle in Conquest of The Planet of the Apes. The spot where apes and man collided is now the plaza of a shopping mall, but the bones of the structure are still there.

After a quick stop at the Apple Store we started thinking about lunch. We had Mexican on our minds so Vance suggested The Pink Taco. This is one of those "fusion" places where they serve Mexican food that has been Americanized, or in this case, Californified. They only have one location in Los Angeles at the moment, but plan on expanding to Hollywood, San Diego and Miami in the future.

Nate ordered us a pitcher of Sangria Roja to cool us down while we scanned the menu. I had barely opened it when Vance mentioned he was getting his favorite dish, the lobster enchilada. My ears immediately perked up.

"Lobster enchilada?"

Both Nate and Vance rolled their eyes back and made that moaning sound that people make when reminded of a meal that gave them great pleasure. I closed my menu. "Say no more."





The lobster enchiladas are indeed as heavenly as it sounds. They serve them in a bowl topped with brandy chipotle cream sauce and sprinkled with mozzarella cheese. When the sauce mixes with the juice from the lobster it tastes almost like a spicy lobster bisque. Some places offer lobster dishes and then skimp on the meat just so they can upcharge you (I am looking at you Red Lobster). Pink Taco is not one of these places.

This dish isn't cheap, but for $16 you get two enchiladas, both of them full from end to end with thick, juicy chunks of lobster. On the side you get a plate of beans and rice. After one bite of the enchilada you will forget about the sides completely even though they were very tasty in their own right.

I saw some other items on the menu that enticed me to plan a second visit to this place when I'm back in Los Angeles. They offer a pork & pickled onion taco with arbol salsa, guac, lettuce and sour cream that is worth a look. Also, their signature taco with pinto beans, arbol salsa, grilled chicken, pickled pink onions and avocado sounds amazing.

Lee's Sandwiches, Irvine CA

(While Marie and I take a week off from food writing, our friend Neal continues filling in with a week's worth of reading about some of the meals that he's enjoyed while out in southern California on business. Enjoy!)

Grant doesn’t normally allow negative reviews on this blog, but this is a tale I felt was worth sharing. I’ll leave it up to him if he publishes it or not.

Our rule of thumb when visiting the Irvine office is we don’t eat anywhere we can eat back in Atlanta. I think it is a generally good rule for any sort of travel really. Why bother with Friday’s when you can eat at Rudy’s? So when the subject of lunch came up on Wednesday I deferred to the locals. Almost immediately it was suggested we head out to Lee’s Sandwiches at UC Irvine. My coworker, who shall remain nameless, insisted they had fantastic food at unbelievable prices. Two others immediately backed out of joining us for lunch when we mentioned Lee’s. “I’ve never tried it because I can’t get past the smell.” This should have been my first warning.

Lee’s shares a parking lot with the In-N-Out Burger we visited earlier in the week. Thinking back on it now I have a vague memory from a past trip of another coworker pointing it out and remarking that they had very good food but that it was a specific, unique taste that one had to get used to. They are also a cash only establishment, so we had to roam the shopping plaza for an ATM before heading in.

Lee’s is set up like a cafeteria. The cheap sandwiches, most under $3, and their proximity to the UC Irvine campus make it a popular lunch destination for the student body. The menu seemed harmless enough at first glance. They had grilled chicken, grilled pork and turkey. My buddy recommended the grilled pork and then he innocently asked if I had ever heard of durian. I had not, so he said “Dude, you have try the durian smoothie. It’s awesome. My wife and I love those things.” I immediately placed my order. Then things started to go horribly wrong.

While we waited on our food my coworker continued to talk about durian. “Most people don’t like it because of the smell, and it really isn’t a fruit but I don’t know what else to call it. It also has a very strong taste and well, there is the smell.”

I blinked, my mouth agape. “This would have been useful information two minutes ago when I ordered the damn thing,” I tell him.

“It’ll be fine. Trust me,” he replied.



I look around and take a deep breath. “Is that what I’ve been smelling in here? Durian?” The air in the place was thick with some sickeningly sweet odor. I had been trying to ignore it but I was beginning to understand why the others had backed out. I also noticed that everyone else in the place was Asian.

“Partially. You also smell the sandwiches,” he tells me.

“What?”

“It’ll be fine. Trust me.”

My food arrives and it doesn’t look too appetizing. The pork reminded me a bit of burnt bacon. On top of the pork was an odd assortment of onions, peppers, jalapeños and lots and lots of cilantro. The smoothie looked innocent enough, and I didn’t immediately notice an odor coming from it. I reached for it and my friend stopped me.

“Wait, before you taste that let me read you the info from Wikipedia on durian.”

“You aren’t instilling any confidence in me that this won’t make me sick,” I say.

He ignored me and went on. The wikipedia entry on durian is long, so I’ll only mention the portions that alarmed me.

“The edible flesh emits a distinctive odour, strong and penetrating even when the husk is intact. Some people regard the durian as fragrant; others find the aroma overpowering and offensive. The smell evokes reactions from deep appreciation to intense disgust. Its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock. It can be smelled from yards away. Despite its great local popularity, the raw fruit is forbidden from some establishments such as hotels, subways and airports, including public transportation in Southeast Asia.”

He finished his tale of woe and smiled. “Now you can taste it.” I suddenly realize I had been set up.

The odor was as bad as Wikipedia had warned it would be. So bad my eyes watered a bit, but I pressed onward and took a big sip. In contrast, the flavor takes a moment to build on your tongue. At first it seemed fairly bland and my immediate thought was “well it isn’t the best thing I’ve tasted but I could certainly finish it.” I let it sit for a moment and took another sip. At this point the flavor had begun to come alive, and began to eat away at my tongue and the inner lining of my mouth. I suddenly had the sensation that I was licking a fish that had been swimming in a sewer, rolled in the dust that collects underneath your refrigerator and then placed into a year-old sock. Combined with the smell it became too much and I pushed it away.

“Dude, that’s just not right.”

“You don’t like it?”

I got myself a Diet Coke and set out to tackle my sandwich, which turned out to be as terrible as the smoothie. The bread was rock hard, the pork tasted like shoe leather and there was so much cilantro that I feared I may never get the smell out of my head or my clothes. For the rest of the day I revisited this hell lunch every time I burped. I made sure that most if not all of these gaseous emissions took place near the coworker who tricked me into ordering illegal pungent fruit.

Lee’s website claims they are the number one Vietnamese & Euro-Asian sandwich shop in the country. That very well may be true, but UrbanSpoon says they have an 84% like rating, and given that their clientele is almost exclusively Asian, and only 49 people vote I am inclined to think that if only 84% of 49 Asians like the number one Euro-Asian sandwich shop then that isn’t a good indicator. The final verdict, if you know what you are getting into and you know you like a pound of cilantro on everything then Lee’s is probably the place for you. If you are a tourist wandering in off the street then you should probably take the few extra steps to In-N-Out instead.



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Lucille's Smokehouse Bar-B-Que, Tustin CA

(While Marie and I take a week off from food writing, our friend Neal continues filling in with a week's worth of reading about some of the meals that he's enjoyed while out in southern California on business. Enjoy!)

It may seem a bit silly to travel 2500 miles to southern California and then seek out a "southern" barbecue joint when there are dozens of them back home in the real south. SoCal certainly has plenty of places to sample their local flavor, but after a disastrous lunch the day before I was in the mood for some comfort food, and I was admittedly a bit curious about what people in Orange County considered "southern" barbecue. I presented my lunch demands to my coworkers and was met with blank stares. Sadly, barbecue does not cross their minds often as a viable lunch option. It is tragic really. I had to resort to the Urban Spoon app on my Droid. When I locked in Irvine and barbecue and gave it good shake Lucille's was the first place to come up. Only one person at the office had eaten there and she is the worst food snob I've ever met. She wrinkled her nose and declared that Williamson Brothers back home in Marietta was far superior, but that as far as barbecue in Irvine was concerned we weren¹t likely to find anything better. Not exactly a glowing review but I was determined.

Lucille's is located at The District in Tustin which is one of the many open-air shopping centers here in Irvine. It backs up to the old Tustin air field where two enormous wooden zeppelin hangars still stand. They are so large I am told that small storm clouds form inside during especially humid summer days. I'd love to roam around inside one sometime.

Lucille hails from Greenville, North Carolina where she learned the secrets to good barbecue from her grandmother. The war and her husband brought her to Long Beach where she was unable to find anything close to what she was used to eating back home, so she opened a shop and began selling slow cooked, Carolina barbecue. Sixty or so years later Lucille's has turned into a moderately successful area chain with a dozen or so locations scattered across Southern California and Arizona. It has that corporate look of trying too hard to look haphazard and shabby with random artifacts littered across the walls that have nothing to do with barbecue or food. I don't really care for places like that as they have no character but if the food is good I can forgive bad décor and the smell of the barbecue cooking quickly distracted me.





The menu was a bit daunting. In addition to barbecue they also serve shrimp, steaks, catfish, pork chops and "Jambalaya Me-Oh-My-A" All of it sounded wonderful but I was there for barbecue, so I went with the chicken and rib tips platter. The lunch portion comes with only one side, and after seeing the choices I couldn't pick just one. I got the BBQ beans and then added an order of the Honey Roasted Peanut Slaw. Each plate comes with biscuits and their famous apple butter which I renamed Magic Butter and proceed to smear on everything I could find to put in my mouth. This stuff was heaven in a ramekin.

Unlike the main writer on this blog, I am unable to distinguish between the various regional barbecue styles and flavors. I prefer my barbecue sauce sweet and I like lots of it. My meal was prepared with "Memphis style" sauce but they provide three additional sauces available; spicy hot, Memphis and Lucille's Original. I figured since I planned on reviewing this place I should try her signature sauce. It turned out to be a wise choice. The Memphis sauce was okay but her original recipe is thick, sweet and smoky and everyone at the table chose it as their favorite.

The real star though was the Honey Roasted Peanut Slaw. I love good coleslaw and this was unlike anything I've ever tasted. The cabbage was left in large pieces instead of shredded and it was coated with a rich honey glaze and mixed with peanuts. I would go so far as to say it almost reminded me of something you'd get at a Thai restaurant if it hadn't been so sweet.

Rumor has it that Lucille makes a mean fruit cobbler but I was nowhere near able to enjoy any, much less walk after I finished my meal. Overall I think the food snob was right; better barbecue can be found back home in Atlanta, but Lucille's certainly holds it's own out here in the land of swimmin' pools and movie stars.

In-N-Out Burger, Irvine CA

(While Marie and I take a week off from food writing, our friend Neal will be filling in with a week's worth of reading about some of the meals that he's enjoyed while out in southern California on business. Enjoy!)

In-N-Out Burger is one of those places that people say you have to visit when on the West Coast. I first tried it earlier this year and I was sad to say I wasn't terribly impressed. As far as burgers go it wasn't any better or any worse than a dozen other places I could eat back home in Atlanta. It was good though, just nothing to write home about. On this trip I figured I would give it another try, mostly because I knew Grant would enjoy a proper review of the place, but partially because I suspected my first visit was a fluke. I wanted to give it another chance.

When I landed in Irvine today I was starving. My seat on the plane was in the last row and by the time the lunch cart reached the back of the plane all they had left was a tiny bag of peanuts and a Diet Coke. I wasn't due to land until 12:45 so I assumed my coworkers would be eating lunch before picking me up. I was prepared to have to wait till dinner to get any food, so imagine my delight when they arrived and informed me they had waited. They immediately asked what I was in the mood for and I quickly said In-N-Out Burger. A good burger sounded like exactly what I needed.





This chain began in 1948 as the first fast food chain with a proper drive-thru window and the menu has not changed since. To the uninitiated the lack of choices seems a bit daunting. I am not kidding when I say that the menu lists 3 sandwiches; the Double Double, the cheeseburger and the hamburger. For sides you get fries or fries. And for a beverage you can choose from the usual soft drinks, tea or milkshakes. That's it. There isn't a chicken sandwich in sight. They do offer other variations on the basic burger, such as the Protein burger which is just a hamburger wrapped in lettuce instead of a bun, or the 4 X 4 which features four all beef patties, but this is a burger joint and nothing else.

Seeing as how I hadn't eaten since 7am Eastern Standard time I opted for the Double Double, which unless you specify otherwise comes with lettuce, tomato, cheese, onions and their famous "spread." This tastes a lot like Thousand Island dressing melted down a bit. I added an order of fries and a real vanilla shake.

In-N-Out prides itself on everything being fresh, and we waited quite a while for our food. This particular location is adjacent to the University of California Irvine campus and gets quite a large lunch crowd during the week. Given the near perfect Southern California weather (it was 73 when we ate lunch today) I was a bit disappointed to see that the did not have patio seating of any kind. The dining room is agreeable enough though, looking a lot like a revamped Steak-n-Shake with their stainless steel counters and white tile. The staff still wears the white soda jerk outfits too, complete with the paper hats. It was charming to say the least. The service overall was outstanding.

I left this time feeling a lot better about the place. My burger was very, very good. I still think that Five Guys back home is better, but In-N-Out is definitely miles better than anything I've ever had from Wendy's. The unfortunate part of this is that their fries are terrible. Yes, they are fresh, but they are slimy greasy things that hang limp when you pick them up and don't have any kind of seasoning on them. I had to bury them in ketchup just to get to the bottom of them. The shake on the other hand was marvelous. It's hard to mess up a vanilla shake.



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Googie Burger, Atlanta GA

If you've been reading since the beginning, you might recall that Marie and I used to enjoy having lunch together once a week. Unfortunately, her job packed up and left downtown to go outside the perimeter, but we used to try and meet up on Mondays in Centennial Olympic Park. Since she had a longer lunch than me, she would get our burgers from Just Around the Corner, and we would dig into those at the park's dancing fountains.

Now that Marie's job has taken her into Dunwoody, she is missing out on Googie Burger, which opened in August. It's in the pavilion right next door to the fountains, which means that motorists can get all grouchy about having to find some parking and walk to get here. It also means that some of our fellow restaurant hobbyists can get all too-cool-for-school about Atlanta having yet another boutique burger place. I say, bring 'em on. I'm of the opinion that Atlanta's burger "scene" is by far the best in the country, and we should encourage all these newcomer restaurants that are doing such a great job with hamburgers. It's not like any of the better ones are visibly hurting for business.





I usually brown-bag it for lunch - not that, between leftovers of the amazing suppers that we cook and Boar's Head deli meats, I am hurting in any way - but I wanted to give this place a try so I walked over to Googie Burger for lunch yesterday and really enjoyed it. Fortunately, I did not have a very long wait so that I could get back promptly. I'm told that the wait can get up to about half an hour between 12 and 1.

Unlike some of the city's other hawt new burger joints, Googie has a very simple menu of just four sandwiches: classic patty with the usual fixings, a ramped-up version that adds smoked pork and bacon, a chicken sandwich, and a black bean veggie burger. I had the classic with fries and, for dessert, a peach milkshake. Googie has also embraced the "spiked shake" trend and offers some seven-dollar vodka or creme de menthe shakes that sounded tempting. My job, however, is awesomely laid back, but it's not that laid back. I stuck with the peach shake and was very pleased to see a slice of peach buried in whipped cream. It was so good that I might have to get it again next time, instead of trying that fun-sounding PB & J shake.

The burger itself was very good. It reminded me in the best way possible of a Five Guys burger. It was really juicy and flavorful and didn't need another topping, though I was slightly disappointed by the gigantic hunk of iceberg lettuce that they used. On the other hand, the red onions were sharp and tangy and absolutely divine. I didn't have a long wait; just enough time to take some photos of the building. It was just cool enough yesterday for a pleasant patio meal in the shadow of the CNN Center, munching away on some peanut oil fries.

It's a meal that I'd really love to share with Marie. What the heck can we do about downtown real estate prices to get her company to move back down here?

Country's Barbecue, Columbus GA

Our day trip to middle Georgia and Alabama brought us back to Columbus after some time spent shopping at Hastings. We spent better than an hour enjoying the city's Riverwalk along the Chattahoochee before going to visit our friend Cheryl, who had recommended we stop at Mrs. Story's earlier in the day. We had a good time telling stories and hearing about her new stepdaughters before we decamped to get some supper at one of the town's roadfood heavyweights, the incredibly popular Country's Barbecue.

Now, it's possible that some other regions have a small chain with as much local loyalty as Country's has in Columbus, but I'm drawing a blank. The first Country's was built in 1975, promptly burned down, was rebuilt, burned down again and finally emerged in the late '70s as an incredibly popular powerhouse that the local folks really love. It has expanded to eight locations in the region: three in Columbus (one of which, downtown in an old bus depot, uses the frame of an old Trailways bus as a dining room), two in Montgomery and one each in the Alabama cities of Opelika, Prattville and Troy. The other barbecue chains in the area, 13th Street (which I have heard is quite good) and Mike & Ed's (which I know for a fact is), are operating in Country's shadow.

Around 2002, Sonny's Real Pit Bar-B-Q moved into Columbus. This is a chain with 138 stores in nine southeastern states. Now, normally in this blog, I don't like to name restaurants where I've had a disagreeable experience; everybody's got to make a living and restaurant owners have it tough enough without upitty bloggers badmouthing them. Sonny's, I couldn't care less about their feelings. Chains that big can go sink, especially when they serve food as mediocre as this place does. Anyway, Sonny's moved into a space off US 80 with hoopla and raised eyebrows. My friend Matt, whose hometown pride can be firey, got really aggravated that they would dare invade Country's turf, but he was also confident that the locals would see Sonny's off. The store closed inside of two years. The lesson learned: if you want to sell on Country's patch, you'd better have some superior product.





As the parking situation in the photo above demonstrates, the original Country's, which is just off Macon Road, exit 6 on I-185, is an incredibly popular Saturday night destination. There is always a wait, and there's often live music. This past weekend, there was some excellent bluegrass in the background. Unfortunately for us, most of our meal came in between sets!

I mentioned in an earlier chapter how Columbus is home to the scrambled dog. There is another local concoction that I don't know that I have seen anywhere else, and these are the barbecued onions. They're pictured above and I always get them as one of my sides at Country's. They're incredibly sweet, grilled onions served in a thin sauce. Nobody's going to want to smooch with you after a bowl, but you'll live.

The pork is very moist and very smoky and really doesn't need much sauce at all, unless you're like me and are anxious to drown your meat in it. They have a pretty good tomato-based sauce and an excellent mustard-based one, along with a very hot "back-fire" mustard sauce that you have to request be brought to the table.

Marie was especially taken with her meal here, and wondered why the heck I haven't been taking her to Columbus more frequently so that she could have been enjoying this barbecue. I suppose I've eaten at each of the three Columbus locations at least twice, maybe nine times overall. The next time we are down this way, I really need to try something new, but I might end up petulantly wishing I'd stuck with this wonderful pork and that mustard sauce instead.



There are two other Country's locations in Columbus. The popular downtown one is on Broadway and built inside an old bus station. We've also visited "Country's North," which is a whole exit or three away and prompts confusion about why we would want to drive "so far." I love my Columbus friends, but they have a curious perspective on distances:


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Toomer's Drugs, Auburn AL

In the previous chapter, I mentioned that a long-term goal for us doing this blog is to visit each of the twelve SEC cities, and write up one restaurant from each town. We accomplished this in Auburn on Saturday when we visited Toomer's Drugs, one of the oldest soda fountains in the southeast. It was opened in 1896 across from what was then called the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama, which is why Bear Bryant typically referred to Bama's instate rival as "that cow college." He was probably just jealous that he couldn't get a lemonade this good in Tuscaloosa.

We lucked into a terrific parking space right beside Toomer's, and on a Saturday, when downtown parking is free, too. We weren't quite hungry yet, so Marie and my daughter and I enjoyed a nice walk around all the storefronts in the neighborhood. Downtown Auburn is quite small, but what the little village lacks in awesome record and comic and used bookshops like any college town should have, they make up for in downright friendly people. Nobody, no matter how decked out in orange and blue, even looked twice at my Bulldogs shirt. They were probably a little concerned about running up against that Lattimore fellow at South Carolina who was breaking tackles all afternoon long.

The ladies visited several dress boutiques, we turned up our noses at a disagreeable number of chain restaurants, we browsed textbooks at the unbelievably, delightfully jampacked J & M Books and eventually, having exhausted every possibility of a way to kill time short of wandering around campus looking for the stadium (which is a fine one, as 11 of 12 SEC stadiums are), we returned to Toomer's Drugs for a snack.





As snacks go, this midday meal was one for the scrapbook. They sell a few sandwiches and light treats for lunch, but this is where you go for an incredibly decadent midday treat. My daughter had that ice cream sandwich between two very good chocolate chip cookies and Marie had that IBC root beer float. The beautiful black-and-white ice cream soda in the center was all mine, and it was amazing. It's so easy to do a half-baked job on my favorite ice cream treat, so I'm especially pleased that Toomer's knocks these out of the park. They even bring the steel mixing cup to the table, like they do with milkshakes at the Grill in Athens, to let you top off your treat as you get low. Man, that was tasty.

I have to say that after that amazing soda, the lemonade was a minor letdown, but don't think that's in any way a dismissal. We took both a limeade and lemonade with us and sipped on them all the way back to Columbus. Both were incredibly sour and wonderful, freshly squeezed right in front of us, and I imagine that one of these along with a chicken salad sandwich could well be the best meal on the plains.

Toomer's Drugs doesn't appear to be much of a drug store anymore. It's really the soda counter and a few sundries, Tigers memorabilia and greeting cards, that sort of thing. They also do a roaring trade in toilet paper, for those tailgaters who didn't wipe out the region's discount stores on their way to town. It's Tiger tradition, after a home win, to paper the trees of Toomer's Corner. The streets are apparently packed with thousands of fans "rolling" the trees and buildings. I guess their mamas never taught 'em.

Mrs. Story's Dairy Bar, Opelika AL

I don't know whether we'll ever manage it, but I had it in mind, a month or so ago, that Marie and I might could visit all of the SEC schools and feature at least one restaurant from each in this blog. On the one hand, we're in Athens, Knoxville and Nashville kind of regularly anyway, but on the other, that would mean a trip to the benighted Gainesville, Florida. Auburn, however, seemed like a decent test of the waters, since it's only about an hour west of Columbus. Plus, I have a very reliable guide to the town in the form of my friend Cheryl.

I'll tell you this for free; for a chainsmoking Auburn fan, Cheryl is all kinds of good people. Well, I jest; my dad's best friend is a Tigers fan, too. So's the co-owner of the business where I worked from 2006-09, and he's a super guy. Either I've been lucky or the school seems to attract a very good class of fan. I had hoped Cheryl would be free to accompany us to Auburn, but she had plans already. Nevertheless, she wasn't about to let us drive to the Plains without letting us know about a much-loved tailgating treat that we needed to try. She told me that whenever she and her daddy go to see the action in Jordan-Hare Stadium, they always stop in at a roadside shack in Opelika for some ice cream and a footlong.





Located just south of Opelika proper, Mrs. Story's Dairy Bar is a little roadside stand that sells just hot dogs and ice cream and absolutely thrives on the community's love. During the short time we were there enjoying our second small lunch of the day, close to a dozen cars pulled up and drivers of all ages hopped out for a soft serve cone or a milkshake. The restaurant opened in 1952 and, as it approaches its sixtieth year, is still family-owned.

We had eaten only an hour or so before we pulled up, but planned accordingly and split a scrambled dog for the earlier meal. These hot dogs - boiled and served in a steamed bun - come as foot-longs or "shorts," and naturally we each had a short. Marie's was the chili and mine was the slaw. They were certainly ugly hot dogs, but they were quite tasty, and I think that mine, topped with that wonderful, creamy slaw, might have been the better of the two.

As far as the ice cream treats, I don't know that soft serve goo is all that different wherever you find it, but my daughter dug into a Butterfinger flurry and could not finish it, although she agreed it was very tasty. We were all pretty full, and our next meal was only about fifteen minutes away. Clearly we needed to do something to pad the time, so I took a few moments to thank the young lady with a Bama ball cap and her manager and snap some photos, and then lazily continued the drive down Pepperell Parkway, which becomes Opelika Road, looking for some way to pad out our afternoon a little.



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Dinglewood Pharmacy, Columbus GA

Did I ever tell you about the time that I drove two hours for a chili dog? It was 2002 and I was living in Alpharetta and woke up one Saturday morning in the summer with no particular plans but an insatiable craving for a scrambled dog from Dinglewood Pharmacy, about two hours' south of me in the middle Georgia city of Columbus.

A scrambled dog is like a chili dog on steroids. If a chili dog is a hot dog with a ladle of chili on it, then a scrambled dog is a bowl of chili with a hot dog in it. The hot dog is sliced up, buried in chili and covered with cheese, onions, pickles and oyster crackers. Some of the locals will take the ketchup and mustard squeeze bottles and darn near empty the things, leaving streams of color streaked across the deep red chili.

This isn't just any chili. It's Lieutenant Stevens' special recipe. Generally credited with concocting the dish, Stevens humbly deferred to a short order cook at some place he had worked as a teenager, but got the praise all the same, and enjoys considerable celebrity in Columbus. The chili, however, that was his own recipe, and it's completely amazing. It's so darn tasty, and rich with spice in every bite of that finely chopped ground beef. A co-worker of mine, born in Minnesota but a longtime resident of Columbus, once gave me an AP article about Lieutenant Stevens' retirement in 2004. His associates at the Dinglewood Pharmacy lunch counter, helped by hundreds of community well-wishers, gave him a big, shiny chili pot full of money. "This is the kind of chili I like best," he said. Word has it that he will occasionally shuffle back behind the counter to get a pot started some mornings before making his way back home to one of the most well-earned retirements that anybody ever had.





My buddy Matt, who you may recall now resides in Gainesville, had invited me to come down to Columbus in 2000 to meet his pals down there, see the sights and avoid drunken bar brawls with soldiers from Fort Benning. I thought that the city and the people were great and the food quite memorable. We had a scrambled dog at Dinglewood the second trip down. Many places in Columbus offer them, but if you want the original and the best, you go to Dinglewood. Well, a few weeks after that second trip, I woke up craving that chili. An hour later, we were on the road.

It took a while to find the darn place, because I was not paying very much attention when Matt was driving me around his hometown. I remembered that if you got off one of the I-185 exits between 10 and 1 and went right, you'd find it about two miles along on the right. I got it correct the third try, on exit 6.

My son was five and my daughter was three and a half, and after the typical Saturday wait for a table, we settled in for a great meal. As we dug in, I told them what I knew of the dish and pointed out Lieutenant Stevens, and told them, wrongly, but we'll let it slide, that he concocted the scrambled dog. "I want to thank the old man," said my daughter, not quietly.

It should be remembered at this juncture that the only sounds louder than my daughter are jet aircraft and atom bombs. The jury's still out on her younger half-brother, who also really packs a pair of lungs. It remains baffling that my son is usually a quiet, dry, Jack Benny-type, because two of my first wife's three kids are the loudest humans on the planet.

Well, I took her hand and walked to the counter and interrupted the chaos to get that good man's attention. "Excuse me, Lieutenant? My daughter wanted to thank you for the meal."

And she bellowed, causing a startled driver outside to crash into the fence around the Aflac parking lot across the street, "THANK YOU, OLD MAN!"

I went pretty red as Lieutenant crouched down with a huge smile and patted her shoulder and shook her hand. "Well, thank YOU for coming to visit, young lady." What a super guy.

Well, after lunch, I had no idea what the heck else to do. This was before I had a cell phone, and I didn't know how to get hold of any of my friends down there, nor where they lived, nor how to get to that (long-gone) record store called Slip Disc* (I think) with the hundreds of thousands of 45s, nor how to get to that (also long-gone) comic shop that wasn't very good**, so we headed home. It was a hot spring day and traffic on I-285 was oddly heavy, and WRAS was playing "She Bangs the Drums" as I almost got sideswiped by a truck. We went to visit my parents and my mother gave me an earful about driving all the way to Columbus for a chili dog. "It's not just a chili dog," I chided. She wasn't amused.

Not very many years later, my dad would ask my mom to drive him down to the other side of McDonough for a martini. A story for another time, perhaps, but she hasn't brought up the chili dog since.

At any rate, Marie and I drove down to Columbus yesterday with the loud young lady to split a scrambled dog as part of a day full of eating and walking that we scheduled, and which I'll share over the course of the week. Despite her appreciation of the old man's concoction, my daughter chose to have an ice cream sundae for lunch.

Our scrambled dog was every bit as tasty and spicy as all the ones I've enjoyed over the last few years. By 11:30, all of the tables were taken by families and tourists, and darned if my daughter was not the only one there who didn't have a scrambled dog in front of them. This would prove to be an ice cream-heavy day for my daughter, and looking over the menu, I noticed for the first time that Dinglewood has their own take on a Boston Cooler. These are typically made with Vernor's ginger ale and vanilla ice cream, but they make them here with Sprite and lime sherbet. I may have to try that one of these days.

I did notice one unfortunate change at Dinglewood, however. Used to be, they carried Golden Flake brand potato chips, but nowadays they have Frito-Lay like darn near everybody else. I think that's a huge shame. One thing has not changed: there's still a wall of antacids perfectly positioned for guests who've enjoyed too much chili to take to the cash register with them.



*It was actually called Flip Side, Matt informs me. Slip Disc was the one in Anniston, Alabama that I liked a lot.

**Matt also informs me that I am mistaken and the comic shop is still there, despite my inability to find it when I took my son to Columbus in 2009 to see Jeff Dunham. I don't think I missed out on anything.

Lemon Grass, Marietta GA

Oh, here we go again. Another chapter in which I experience menu envy. This time, nobody should be surprised. We gave a Thai restaurant a stab, and frankly, I never know what to order when we're trying Thai. I was reasonably certain that I'd enjoy whatever I got, and I certainly did, but somebody else at the table really had something amazing.

I'm deeply inexperienced with Thai food, and readers might have noticed that I have yet to feature a single entry from one of the ostensibly amazing restaurants from Atlanta's culinary wonderland that is Buford Highway. Really, I just don't know where to start or what to try, but I've half a mind to keep my ears open for some other local bloggers having a get-together on that side of town and see whether Marie and I might join them. The overwhelming consensus, however, is that what we have here in darkest Cobb County is Americanized and not very traditional. Lemon Grass, here in Marietta, still manages a few thumbs up from the locals, despite a carry-out menu full of letter/number combinations and little "pepper" icons for the hot dishes like every Americanized Chinese place in town that leaves a menu on your mailbox. I wonder whether these restaurants all get their tri-fold menus from the same printing company?

At any rate, my main experience with Thai food would be from the dearly missed Thai of Athens, which closed about three years ago. I haven't seen my favorite meal there, salt and pepper suegai, on anybody else's menu. On one occasion, my son and I successfully convinced his sister that our satay chicken was actually fried spider. Last I heard, QuikTrip was looking into building on the old Thai of Athens location. They should make them track down the former owner, a lovely woman who was friends with a girl I used to date, and get her recipe for iced tea as a concession for whatever zoning must be addressed on that site first.





This past week, it was our friend Samantha's turn to choose something for us to do, and she suggested this place. She discovered it about six years ago. The restaurant itself opened in 1994 in a very neat little hidden area in the East Lake shopping center on 120, just outside the loop. The shopping center is, unusually, two separate buildings which curve away from each other and create a little outdoor plaza leading back to the small patch of woods behind the property. There's a Wild Wings Cafe on one side that takes advantage of the architecture to create a "luau"-themed back patio, while Lemon Grass shies away from pedestrian traffic like a quiet, discreet oasis.

There were six of us for supper, and while my daughter was in some sort of mood and tried to bring everybody down with tweenage surliness, we all really enjoyed our meals. Marie and I tried the chicken tom yum soup and it was not at all bad, but I did not enjoy the lemon grass in the bowl at all. This proved to be the only disappointment of the evening. David had the traditional hot and sour soup and it was better than most of the bowls that I have tried at Americanized Chinese places. Neal and Samantha each had the coconut soup, and that was, clearly, the best of the lot. When I return, I am definitely having a bowl of that.

As for the entrees, Marie and my daughter and I split one of the chef's specials, the pineapple duck curry. This is boneless duck cooked with coconut milk, pineapple, tomato, onions, basil and bamboo shoots in a curry sauce. I thought this was really terrific, and Neal, who had an order himself, agreed. We also shared a bowl of laad na rice noodles, with chicken cooked in a thick gravy with broccoli, carrots and mushrooms. I preferred the duck, but this was certainly quite nice. David had a beef salad, with ribeye served over a bed of lettuce, mint leaves and cilantro that he enjoyed, but Samantha, who knew exactly what to order, brought the best thing to the table. She had the nam sod. This is prepared in a similar way to larb, but it mixes finely ground pork with ginger, peanuts and onions with lime juice and it's served with raw cabbage, the idea being that you can use that for a wrap or just scoop the pork mixture onto it. They hide this treat away on the appetizers menu when I would happily enjoy that as my entree.

My daughter eventually explained that she was grumpy because she concluded that she was going to starve to death because everything here was going to be too spicy for her. I'm pleased to report that she is still alive, liked the laad na noodles, and most of our meals were only lightly spiced. The menu, incidentally, offers five levels for diners: mild, medium, hot, Thai hot and "crazy hot." They add that crazy hot is not recommended. I've rarely been the sort of person to listen to that sort of recommendation, but when sharing dishes with family and friends, it's polite to not make them suffer the way you'd sometimes like to burn yourself. Maybe some other time.



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Jalapeno Charlie's, Atlanta GA

If we can afford a little leniency when a big festival draws gigantic crowds and puts a restaurant and all its servers under undue stress, we should probably give a little extra praise when a restaurant handles the spectacle with ease. This past weekend, downtown Atlanta was host to a pair of gigantic crowd-generators: the Dragon*Con convention and the Chic-fil-A "Kickoff Classic," this year between LSU and North Carolina. Jalapeno Charlie's, located on the corner of Peachtree and International and across the street from the Hard Rock Cafe, handled the crunch extremely well. We arrived during a comparatively slow period, so it wasn't too wild, and we agreed that their food was not bad, and the service was excellent.

Dragon*Con brings buddies to town from all over the southeast, and Marie and I get the chance to say hello to friends and family who've come from Athens, Jacksonville, Memphis, Nashville and Starkville, among other places. The actual paid attendance of the con is something like 40,000. Unpaid attendance of people who've come to ogle the thousands of costumers is probably about the same. Our friends from Nashville are frequently among them. Tory, whom you may recall from our last trip to that awesome city leading us down an alleyway past dumpsters to a Greek place for lunch, had colored her hair Draco Malfoy-blonde but was wearing a different house's colors. Looking like Draco is all the rage in Gryffindor this year, apparently. I've known her and Brooke (hair colored blue and purple) for ten years now and they've taken me to many good restaurants in Nashville, and were already nailing down some places for me to go when I head back that way later in the year. Fortunately, one of those trips should be on a Wednesday so I can enjoy the weekend-unfriendly Mas Tacos.

Anyway, Marie went down to get right in the thick of the Dragon*Con madness and, for Sunday night supper, rounded up her brother along with Brooke, Tory, Brooke's boyfriend Matt, and their friend Holly from Kentucky. I got to the restaurant before them and snagged us a large table, although not, sadly, one on the balcony overlooking Peachtree.





Jalapeno Charlie's is a chain-in-waiting. It's a "concept" owned by the people behind Fire of Brazil, and while the only location, currently, is in downtown Atlanta - in the space just above Fire of Brazil, in fact - you can tell that the corporate minds are looking forward to open the new stores in other cities soon.

As for the food, it's not at all bad, but the menu, which purports to offer "Mexican-Latin fusion," kind of needs a kick in the backside. Really, this town is quite used to having complementary chips and salsa brought to the table; charging five bucks for it in a restaurant like this is just tacky.

And that's a shame, because the food is quite good, with a number of neat dishes. Marie's brother, Karl, really went for the interesting concoctions. He shared an appetizer of fried plantains topped with chicken and melted cheese that was quite good, and just enough of a tweak from the usual "cheese nachos" that you always see at these sorts of places. But his entree was the real surprise. Called a molcajete, this was a bubbling "soup" served in a thick black bowl shaped, for some reason, like a pig. It was a stew of chicken in a tomato-based sauce with carrots and celery and served so darn hot it needed to sit for a few minutes before Karl could dig in.

I had the fish tacos, tilapia with a mild ranchero sauce, and they were very good, even though they provided more evidence, as though more were needed, that I probably need to take a class on how to photograph food, because every time I try to shoot tacos, the picture looks awful. The only failing on my dish was the half-thought inclusion of a handful of blue corn chips. Not only were these tasteless and bland, but they drove home how nice it would have been to have a nice basket of fresh chips and salsa. Marie had a chicken quesadilla and was very satisfied with it. They really piled the ingredients high and didn't scrimp on the fillings.

To be honest, I was enjoying the company so much that I'd have suffered a far worse meal with no complaints. It's always wonderful to visit with out-of-town friends, and I think that the Jalapeno Charlie's crew did a great job managing the weekend crush. If one ever opens in your town, it's probably worth a visit. Just bring lots of friends and plan to talk about the latest Doctor Who rumors and Harry Potter costumes.

Metro Cafe Diner, Atlanta GA

This is Marie, returning to my usual specialty of sweet things. This entry is on the Metro Cafe Diner in downtown Atlanta. As we've mentioned previously, it's really not terribly fair to judge a place based on its performance when there is a convention the size of Dragon*Con right around the corner. On both corners, actually; it's a huge con. Nevertheless, the place did well. I actually had breakfast there twice in one day due to the sleep schedules of the folks I was meeting, and it was fine both times. The service was a little faster in the early morning before all the tables were full, but only very slightly. There was less amusing rushing around, though.

The place is something of a hybrid. There are black marble walls, and there is a bar on the ground floor where apparently karaoke is inflicted upon the diners. I can't imagine the acoustics are all that great, but we were able to converse comfortably at the tables despite the music so I may be wrong. You walk up this odd triangular staircase past a display of cakes big enough to rival the Marietta Diner's offerings, and then get packed into one of two little side passages filled with booths. It is not the most spacious of places.





The prices seemed a trifle high, and they didn't even boost them for the crowds. However, presentation is pretty and the quality of the food was good. I enjoyed my French Toast with strawberries sans the usual Radioactive Red Stuff that comes with such fare. The slices of bread were thick and buttery and if they could possibly have done with a bit of my favorite cinnamon, that is only because I like my cinnamon just a little hotter than usual. My brother seriously got into his Eggs Benedict Florentine. The eggs were cooked perfectly.

Overall this is a place I would recommend, especially since my sister reported favorably on the cakes, but it is a little on the odd side.



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