Great American Donut Shop, Bowling Green KY

Marie and I enjoyed a nice weekend visiting friends after dropping the girlchild off for a week with her mother. It was a five and a half hour haul from our place in Marietta to Owensboro, where we had lunch, and then we made our way back down the William Natcher Parkway. This is an amazing seventy-mile stretch of absolutely nothing, through farmland and... well, nothing. There are exactly two exits on the whole road with gas stations, and they're one right after the other, 25-odd miles northwest of Bowling Green. Make sure both you and your car are ready for this drive before you get on the parkway!

We didn't give Bowling Green much more of a look than we did Owensboro, so I don't know much about the town yet. Hopefully, one of these days, I'll have the chance to rectify that. It's the home of Western Kentucky University, which, on this Saturday, was hosting the Blue Raiders of Middle Tennessee State, so there was lots of tailgating going on as we drove by campus towards a disagreeable commercial strip. There were several shuttered restaurants and businesses on this leg of US Route 31 West. Interestingly, this is a north-south highway that splits in two between Louisville and Nashville, running alongside Interstate 65. I guess this means that if you get bored of the three-hour drive between those cities on the freeway, you've got two alternates. I was a little disheartened by what looked like so many failed restaurants in such a small stretch. The next day, in Nashville, we had lunch with my friend John, who works at the Corvette plant on the other side of Bowling Green, and he told us that he's heard that the city has more restaurants per person than any other place in America. With the recession hitting communities like this one as hard as it did, something had to give. The city's entry on Wikipedia suggests that things are on their way back up (or that area residents wish for Wikipedia readers to think so), but with so many signs reading "closed" in such a short space, they seem to have a ways to climb.

I'd hoped to stop in Bowling Green to experience some kind of food here, and asked around for a suggestion for a snack. I figured that we'd have a large and satisfactory lunch in Owensboro and I was planning for an awesome supper in Nashville, and hoped that western Kentucky might be home to some small fast food chain that we can't get here. Unfortunately, none revealed themselves. I was urged to give Judy's Castle, a meat-and-three that we saw on Nashville Road, a try, but I was thinking about a snack, and not a second lunch. Serendipitously, Urbanspoon says that the number one user-ranked restaurant in town is a doughnut place. That's just what I'm talking about.





Great American Donut Shop specializes in low-priced, dirt cheap, sinfully good doughnuts. While probably not quite the equal of Atlanta's Sublime, they seem to cost about half as much. I had a strawberry cake which was pretty wonderful, and a chocolate frosted which knocked my socks off. I can't imagine going through town without stopping for some of these again.

I apologize that this isn't really much of a restaurant review, but then again, that wasn't the intention of this blog in the first place. What "reviews" there are are sidelines to the more important part, which is to just tell stories about our time spent eating well. As this restaurant doesn't have a web page and the girl at the counter was swamped, busy and just a little surly, I didn't see the opportunity to learn anything about the restaurant's history. All I have is the taste and it's a wonderful one.

So chalk this up as one of the shorter chapters in this story, but don't take it as a reflection on the food's quality. These are really, really good treats, and absolutely worth a visit for anybody wanting a pit stop and a chance to stretch their legs on this part of I-65. How WKU students don't gain thirty pounds a semester from eating here, I can't imagine.

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Old Hickory Bar-B-Q, Owensboro, KY

Of course, the problem with doing road trips and eating at new places the way that we enjoy is that we need to balance our traveling between the diametrically opposed points of my foolishly impulsive nature on one peak and common sense on the other. When I first read about barbecued mutton, a common dish in the northwestern Kentucky town of Owensboro, I was halfway out the door. Stark reality soon took hold, and it just made more sense to wait patiently, until I could find some genuine reason to actually be in Ownensboro.

I've mentioned before that my son has been staying with his mother in the occasionally gorgeous city of Louisville for a chunk of his middle school days, while my daughter stays with me. I've agreed to do what I term as a "prisoner exchange" every once in a while, and don't mind making an overnight journey and a meal or two out of the travel. Owensboro is just an hour from Bowling Green, making it a five and a half hour trip from our base of operations in Marietta. I asked my son how he felt about trying some barbecue mutton and burgoo, and, good man that he is, he replied "Heck, yeah!" His sister was not convinced. That's fine; one less mouth to feed and all.

As the home of the International Bar-B-Q Festival, held every May, and the self-styled "Barbecue Capital of the World," Owensboro talks a big game for such a small town. Admittedly, we saw very, very little of the place - just the restaurant where we had lunch and a comically horrible used bookstore - and have no basis to judge, but honestly, one lunch was enough to demand we return and come to that festival. May 2011, however, is kind of impossibly booked, what with us having a baby around that time. Damnation!





Anyway, determining where to get some mutton in Owensboro was pretty fun. The town is apparently stocked full of barbecue joints, as any self-identified barbecue capital of the country should be. My favorite resource is Roadfood, and according to that site, Moonlite Bar-B-Q is the place to try - it's actually the only Owensboro restaurant listed on Roadfood, an oversight surely due addressing. But between all the good-natured debates and arguments online about the city's favorite dishes, Old Hickory emerged as the most promising.

We arrived right at eleven, local time. The restaurant proved very easy to find, and in a very tastefully designed building with a simple sign out front. It's clearly popular with travellers, as we saw plates from Arkansas, Missouri and counties all over Kentucky in the large parking lot. Inside, there's a cafeteria-like carry-out counter and register in the front room that you pass through on your way to the large dining room. The tables are garishly decorated with ads for area businesses and trivia about barbecue and the restaurant.

My son has decided to go emo, or something, or whatever thirteen year-olds think they need to go. I last saw him two months ago and his hair was as white as InuYasha's. Now it is black like shoe polish. Actually, that's precisely what it looks like, as though he'd just scrubbed his head in some bootblack. Anyway, I tried to contain my giggling - it's not like his old man didn't do one or two silly things with his hair when he was a teenager - and asked whether he was ready for some mutton. "Yee-ay-uh," he says, making a four-letter word have three syllables. Well, when I was a teen, every sentence contained the words "like" and "man." He had a chopped mutton sandwich and mac and cheese, and I had a chopped mutton plate with burgoo and slaw. Marie had a chopped pork sandwich with baked beans. Everything was delicious.

Burgoo is the local equivalent of Brunswick stew. In Georgia, there are so many dozens of recipes and variations that leave the finish product looking and tasting like anything from mulligan soup to corned beef hash, with colors ranging from black to orange depending on where you order it. My experience in Kentucky is far more limited - I've just had it here and in one barbecue restaurant in Louisville - but I understand burgoo is most typically a soupier dish that normally includes potatoes, carrots and occasionally peas along with two or three meats. Again, this International Bar-B-Q Festival sounds like ground zero for experiencing the dish in many varieties.

As for the mutton, it certainly met my expectations. It was chopped very finely and was incredibly smoky. I did not think to order it dry, however, and wish that I had specified that. I would have enjoyed trying the meat on its own before adding the dip. The locals do not call their black sauce a sauce, oddly. It's refered to as dip, and the mutton is fairly drowned in it. I thought it was quite wonderful, although the experience did prove me wrong when I wondered, some months back, whether Wallace Barbecue here in nearby Austell was using a Worcestershire base for their thin, piping hot sauce. This dip is a little thicker and quite black. Our server pointed out the squeeze bottle on the table and said "And here's some dip if you need some more." Really, the mutton had quite enough already, although I did enjoy squeezing a little more dip onto my bread just to enjoy the taste of the sauce separate from the meat.

Overall, this was a fine little trip to enjoy a regional specialty that we cannot get anywhere around Atlanta. I'm totally in favor of every opportunity to get out and do this. Marie and I probably would have enjoyed it just fine by ourselves, but it was great to eat with my son, and also to visit with my kids' half-brother, who is four, and who wanted to tell Marie all about the museum that they were going to visit. The old toys' exhibit in some Louisville museum called the Frazer is "hosted" by the stars of the Toy Story movies and the little fella had an awful lot to say about them. He didn't want to try my mutton or burgoo. When you're four, who has time for eating when you have got to talk about Woody and Buzz? And talk, and talk.

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Tandoor Restaurant, Marietta GA

I'm still reeling from the closure of Moksha. I must be; there's no other explanation for this grim lack of satisfaction in the unavailability of really good, reasonably-priced Indian food in the area. Now this obviously is the sort of thing that I could have rectified already, had I put my mind to it, and I did find Desi Spice, which is pretty good, but the honest fact is that my great enjoyment of a few Indian dishes has been consistently tempered with the persistent awfulness of the restaurants that serve them. I don't wish to list a walk of shame, but I think you've all eaten at the kinds of places that turn my eyebrows. I'm talking about the ones that feature the cloth napkins and nice tablecloths under the clear plastic, with the ill-fitting tuxedos totally failing to turn a server's disagreeable and bored demeanor into anything classy. If Atlanta's got one too many of anything, it's the Indian equivalents of those damn fool China-This and China-That places. I've really, really got to be in some more kind of mood for rogan josh to put up with that burning mediocrity of presentation.

Moksha was really nice, but it was genuinely upscale and not plastic, with gorgeous interiors brightly lit by huge windows letting in the light and a super staff of smiling and helpful servers. Heck, even the gents' was classy. I wanted to know where the heck they bought that sink so I could install it in my own home.

There is nothing in Tandoor's decor that I want in my home, but the experience is so many leagues preferable to the surly artificiality of the typical Indian restaurant in the region that it scores highly on my scale. The food's all right. It's just okay, really, but it's priced very well and they don't make any pretension about it. Why can't more places be like this?





At any rate, the decor in this place is pretty darn downmarket, which is a very nice breath of fresh relief or something like that. It's in a strip mall on Powers Ferry Road which looks like it should have been a good location once upon a time, but it's struggling. Despite the high-end car dealer on one end, most of the spaces are vacant. In fact, the storefronts that sandwich Tandoor are both closed up.

Tandoor's prices are very nice, but you have to navigate the menu in odd ways to make things work. They have some "combo meals" to save money and give guests a broader choice of flavors, but these come with some restrictions. The $8.99 combo comes with a vegetable dish, one curried meat, rice and naan. I found this a little restrictive, sorry to say. Based on Chow Down Atlanta's excellent review of this place (where it is described, with some hyperbole, as "the best Indian/Pakistani food in the city"), I was looking forward to trying the chicken boti. Unfortunately, this dish does not qualify as one of the meats that you can get in this combo.

Hoping to maximize my dollar's worth, I asked for the girl at the register to recommend another chicken entree. She suggested that I might enjoy the chicken karahi instead. Unfortunately (again), difficulty understanding each other meant that my request for "boneless" was not made clear. I've since learned that karahi is typically prepared bone-in, as this meal was. It was, indeed, quite tasty and in a very good, thick, spicy, brown sauce. It wasn't quite what I had in mind is all.

I did get to try Chow Down's suggestion of palak paneer, a dish that I may have only had once before. This was indeed very nice and creamy and a rich, natural green color, without any artificial additives. I won't swear that I'd order it every time, but it was a good change from my usual routine.

It was not completely satisfying. There was far more rice than I could ever eat, at the expense of the other dishes. Yet everything was flavored so nicely that I didn't mind much. The small, downmarket decor was not a problem, but I found myself focusing on patchy, broken paint on walls that needed a new coat. I suspect this is a popular destination for lunch; at two in the afternoon, it was still mostly full. I'm afraid I've still got a lot of work ahead of me trying to replace Moksha, but this wasn't bad.

Allen's, Athens GA

Last week, I went down to Allen's for a twenty-five cent beer. I didn't get one. Honestly, you'd think, having been immortalized in song thusly, a place would keep its drink specials. Even if the song was twenty years old and reflected on a scene that was a decade and change in the past already.

I didn't even get a burger grilled by the governor, although I have had one of those. Back when he was an undergraduate at UGA in the 1950s, future guv'nor Zell Miller worked the grill at Allen's. This was not long after the restaurant first opened, in its original and iconic location in the Athens neighborhood of Normaltown. When Miller began his career in politics in the 1970s, Allen's became a regular stop for his statewide tours. I was working at the town's student paper, The Red and Black, in 1994 and got word that Miller would be in town flipping burgers for a while as part of his reelection campaign tour. I got in line early with two or three other people that morning, got to shake the governor's hand and enjoyed a really good burger. For a place that lived and died on its drink specials, the food here was surprisingly good.

Four years later, my dad asked whether I planned to support some richer-than-sin jackass in his bid for the governor's seat against Roy Barnes, who, in 1998, did not look like Jabba the Hutt's pale cousin. I asked my dad whether the jackass planned to cook me a burger. Dad said that he didn't think so.

"Zell Miller cooked me a burger and I voted for him. I reckon if your man wants my vote, he'll do the same," I said. I stand by that to this day. Nevertheless, my dad, who, agonizingly, was some kind of campaign coordinator for some part of Cobb County or other, couldn't persuade Mr. Billionaire Scumbag to find the time to cook me a burger and get my support. He lost. Eventually, he quit throwing good money after bad and stopped trying to run for office.

As for Zell Miller, while I fondly retain the good memory of sitting at the bar, joking with him about my press credentials and enjoying a quite good burger, he really did lose his freaking mind around 2004. I have since notified all and sundry of my standing offer to return that burger to Mr. Miller at his convenience. I've never actually purged, but I reckon any more than twenty seconds' consideration of the content of his embarrassing book A National Party No More would do the trick.





Allen's closed on New Year's Day, 2004 after the building's owners decided that a parking lot or something would look better on the property. To be honest, I forget the reason. The original owner, Danny Self, had passed away a couple of years previously. Honestly, I never ate there all that often anyway. When word got out that Allen's would be closing its doors, I made sure that I got the chance for a last visit. This would have been December of '03 and I had just started seeing this girl who lived in Madison - references in these pages to 2004 being a mistake-filled year would mostly revolve around her - and I wanted to make sure that she had a chance to enjoy this little slice of Athens history before they shut for good. I remember that it was awfully cold that day, and I remember how very well her daughter was behaving. That was a fine day to tell an institution goodbye.

Allen's returned under new ownership in 2008. They're now located on Hawthorne, in front of a very odd strip mall that seems to only house a beauty school and a uniform supply company. While this isn't all the same feel as Allen's lovely original storefront location, the vibe inside is similar to what fifty years of locals remembered, albeit with a bit more of a nostalgic bent on the walls. There are framed Rolling Stone covers of R.E.M. and the B-52s and newspaper stories of oft-told major wins for the Bulldogs and the Atlanta Braves, but it's still a dimly-lit dive with flowing taps and good bar food and live music on the weekends.

I took one of my occasional midweek trips to Athens not sure what I wanted to eat. My schedule's actually going to be changing next month, and it will be Thursdays that I have off. My buddy David's also off on Thursdays and he might be able to come to Athens with me once in a while, so that prompted me to consider having a bite to eat at a place that he's already tried, and save other meals for days down the line that he can come along and get something new. Does anybody else decide where to eat this way? Please say you do; otherwise this really sounds weird.

Anyway, I had a pretty pricy lunch at Allen's. A burger, homemade chips, cup of chili with peppers and cheese and a Coke came to just under twelve dollars. I really don't know that the burger is quite worth that price, although it's certainly tasty. The chips are just wonderful, and I've always felt that Allen's serves just about the best chili in Athens. It's thick and dark and takes an agreeable forever to cool.

Charging an extra buck for cheese and peppers, on the other hand, is pretty eye-rolling. Pushing a meal past nine dollars with peppers, cheese and a soda, well, that's the sort of thing that angers my accountant. Every so often, though, it strikes me as okay to splurge, and a lunch experience as nice as this, well, it's almost reasonable.



Update: Sadly, and without warning, Allen's abruptly closed on November 29 2011.

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Cook Out, Asheville NC

We've mentioned in the previous chapters that Marie very graciously selected the restaurants that we visited on our most recent trip to Asheville, and, even more graciously, paid for them. However, I wasn't entirely ready to leave town without one last stop. About two hours after lunch, time spent shopping, letting my daughter have the run of things, and the uncompromisable trip to The Chocolate Fetish on Haywood for Marie to load up on dark chocolate sea salt caramels, we drove to the east side of town to show my daughter Tunnel Road, one of Asheville's more commercial strips, full of chain restaurants and hotels. Well, there's more than that. There is a very, very good comic shop out here called Comic Envy, a reasonably good barbecue place called Fiddlin' Pig that I'm sure we'll revisit, an independently-owned toy store, and a Mexican restaurant called Papas & Beer that has a heck of a lot of fans, but mostly Tunnel Road is clogged with chains.

One of these, however, is one of particular interest to me as it is the only Asheville location of Cook Out. This is a chain of several dozen fast food restaurants, not entirely unlike Checkers or Rally, that is only now expanding outside North Carolina after many years of success with stores all over the piedmont. I've heard reports of new stores coming up in the cities of Greenville and Clemson, but otherwise the chain seems entirely based in North Carolina. We have the restaurant's fans to thank for even that information. For some reason, Cook Out lacks a corporate web site, although there are two fan versions that show off a menu and incomplete lists of known locations. The Asheville store opened about a year ago and, as of today, hasn't made it to those pages.

Longtime readers have figured out that I certainly love small, regional fast food chains like this, or Zesto here in Atlanta, or Milo's in Birmingham. So how does Cook Out stack up against the competition?





I mentioned that Cook Out, with its double drive-through and outdoor patio seating, reminds me of Checkers, but the food more closely resembles Back Yard Burgers, a very small chain that, locally, was pretty well taken out behind the woodshed and beaten by Five Guys when that chain moved into Atlanta four or so years ago. I enjoyed Back Yard Burgers a good deal, and was sad to see them go. At Cook Out, they prepare their burgers in four sizes and suggest that for an additional 65 cents or a dollar, you order it in one of four "styles" with specific extras. My "snack" was a small burger prepared "cook out style" with chili, slaw, mustard and onions, and it was quite good, albeit even more messy than I thought it could be. The photo above is surely among the worst that I've ever composed and presented in this blog, but I didn't remove the burger from the foil. After unfolding it to look at it, I wrapped it back up and held the sandwich in it to avoid making a bigger mess, but I think that in the future, I should remember that I must exclude foil from photos whenever possible.

At any rate, the burger was reasonably good, and much tastier than any other fast food burger that I can think of offhand, and the fries were not bad either. My daughter had some chicken strips which were probably the same as everybody else's chicken strips. Cook Out has a menu that is similar to most, with grilled chicken, fried fillets, hot dogs and chopped pork sandwiches, and I found myself wishing that she had not ordered something so universally identical as chicken strips so I could tell you something different about them.

All that Marie wanted was a milkshake, and we definitely came to the right place for one. At any given time, Cook Out seems to offer about three dozen flavors, with seasonal specials and various mixes available. They're proper shakes, and not soft serve goo. Marie had a chocolate banana shake, and my daughter had one with the delightful name of orange push-up. Both were really good.

I just had a Cheerwine float. Sure, I could have concocted one at home, but not with Cheerwine from a fountain. Darn if this wasn't the second restaurant we visited on this trip with fountain Cheerwine, which I approve. Screw homogenization; every state's restaurants should offer their regional specialties in the drink machine, and if somebody wants to tell me some place in Birmingham or Montgomery where I can get a fountain Buffalo Rock, I'll be back in Alabama next weekend.

I've found that the problem with having a small lunch and then a small snack two hours later is that whatever I intend, neither of them are really as small as they perhaps should be. This left me completely stuffed for the ride home, and I wasn't hungry at all some six hours later, when Marie suggested cooking up some dinner, and we compromised on splitting a can of Progresso soup. The only real problem with these little weekend trips where we like to sample lots of different places is that it really wreaks havoc on the idea of having a 3-400 calorie meal every 3-4 hours. Who's got time to worry about health when there are great little restaurants like Cook Out demanding our attention?

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City Bakery Cafe, Asheville NC

This is Marie, contributing the latest episode which tangentially involves desserts. This visit was to City Bakery Cafe in Asheville. It was my turn to choose the restaurants to visit on this trip. I let Grant suggest one of the places he has on his list, picked a place we'd been to before, and the third was the City Bakery Cafe. Actually, what attracted me in the first place was the bakery portion of the name. I am extremely fond of cookies, pastries, and fresh crusty bread.

I have fond memories of a lovely little place in my college town, Middlebury, Vermont, that had all of the above plus cheese and other snacks, and ever since I have been hoping to find another place that makes me feel the same way. This is not one of those places (for one thing, there are more than two tables at which to sit, and the chairs do not wobble) but it is nevertheless one I can see going back to frequently. They rotate out their breads; some are everyday things and some are only made on one or a few days of the week. I especially want to try the oatmeal bread, but that is apparently a Monday recipe so it's unlikely I will get to try it anytime soon.

This particular location is the latest of three for this business. Their oldest location was flooded out and ruined when Asheville suffered a flood in 2004 that affected riverside businesses. They had apparently just branched out to their Charlotte Street location at the time and were able to consolidate there. The location we went to is the one downtown on Biltmore, the newest location, which opened in 2005. It took over from a prior cafe type restaurant and garnered some positive comments in the stories they had framed up on the walls.



Like many restaurants in Asheville, City Bakery works hard to buy locally sourced ingredients. The menu here is mostly sandwiches, In the mornings, they offer some smaller sandwiches on bagels, but the lunch menu is also available. There is a soup of the day and judging by the corn chowder that we tasted, those have to be extremely popular.

I had the roast beef sandwich and a raspberry thumbprint cookie. When we photographed my plate, I tried to hide the fact that I was impatient and couldn't resist a bite before the meal came but it's visible. Just take it as a measure of the irresistability of the baked goods. Grant's lunch photographed a little better. He had the chicken salad, which he said was wonderful, and a side of a very good pasta salad that included tiny gherkins, olives and cherry tomatoes. Our daughter had a big bowl of the corn chowder and a cupcake. We had to get her the cupcake - they had classic video game designs on them like Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Mario Brothers! Check out the cupcake page on their web site if you want a good reason to jump in your car and head over there right away.





You can order more than just a sandwich; this is a full-service bakery with wedding cakes and other treats available. You can also get an event catered, if you are close enough, or rent out an event room. This is yet another Asheville restaurant that's going to make our rotation. The city's just too full of great places to eat.

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Double D's Coffee and Desserts, Asheville NC

This latest trip to Asheville saw us really getting some exercise. After we enjoyed a terrific lunch at Luella's, we drove through the city and then west a few miles on I-40 and US 23, and then south down NC-151 to the Blue Ridge Parkway for a couple of hours stretching our legs at Graveyard Fields. In the late afternoon, we made it to our hotel, checked in and relaxed for a while before going downtown for supper. We ate at Early Girl Eatery, about which I wrote back in June, and had a very good meal, although perhaps not a match for the truly great breakfast that we'd earlier enjoyed. We passed on dessert, as we had other plans.

The downtown streets have some pretty interesting things to see, and among the cutest is a decommissioned 1950s Bristol Lodekka double-decker bus. It spent the late 1970s and 1980s in Atlanta as the party bus that I remember seeing all over the place when I was in high school. It always seemed to be full of drunk yuppies. When Ringo Starr opened a restaurant in Atlanta called The London Brassiere - yes, really - I'm pretty sure this was the bus that they hired out for the event. You won't believe this, but Ringo's Atlanta restaurant with that amazingly awful name closed inside of two years. Anyway, eventually, the bus made its way to Asheville and found permanent residence on Biltmore Avenue a few doors down from a great record store called Karmasonics. Nowadays, it's a coffee shop that also serves pastries and desserts from area bakers.





I asked where they have room to make the pastries and it turns out they come from a variety of places. The cookies, for example, come from a local delivery operation called Sugar Momma's. I simply had one of their chocolate chip cookies which felt tremendously decadent - for an occasionally pretentious and silly ass, I really have basic tastes when it comes to sweets - and had a good-natured argument with my daughter, who insisted that her peppermint bark must have been better than my cookie. Marie had a slice of pumpkin cheesecake which had each of us rolling our eyes backwards in our heads, bound for comas.

As for the beverages, I may not have mentioned this before, but I don't like the taste of coffee, of any style, at all and I wait until tea is pretty much close to room temperature before sipping it. Soup, too, if we're honest about it. Anyway, I'm unable to say whether the coffee here is any good, making me a most unreliable narrator for any discussion of a coffee shop. My daughter, on the other hand, had a peppermint latte that she greatly enjoyed. She sat in the upstairs front of the bus and shouted hellos down to pedestrians and drivers. I was perfectly satisfied with a vanilla cream soda and a few minutes to kick up my feet with Marie and watch my daughter cut up, giggle and have a blast. I have a good feeling that she's by no means the only pre-teen to decide this bus is just too darn fun for words.

Luella's Bar-B-Que, Asheville NC

We made our third 2010 trip to Asheville this past weekend, this time in part to show off the city to my daughter in the hope that she would love it like we do - mission accomplished, by the way - and in part to just soak up the mountain air, the wonderful people and the excellent food. I sort of cheated on the meal selections, however. I first suggested that Marie pick where we would eat, hoping that we'd try some new things and maybe revisit one of the places that we enjoyed on earlier visits, and then immediately started looking around myself, greedily and hungrily.

Asheville has not revealed itself to be a great barbecue town. Most of its offerings seem to be are Tennessee-styled shoulder pork with tomato-based sauce, but I did hear about Luella's, which sounded very promising. I then started hinting to Marie that this would make a very good selection, and that it sure would be nice if she were to pick it as one of her three. I really can be an insufferable ass sometimes, but Marie indulges me anyway. After lunch here, there weren't any recriminations; it was one of the best of the many good meals that we have had in the city and Marie was very glad that I suggested it.





I hate to make comparisons in these chapters, especially when one of the restaurants really didn't get a fair shake, but taste trumps logic and fairness every time. On our last visit, we tried a downtown barbecue place and thought it unsatisfying but promising, chalking up its deficiencies to poor quality control in the heat of a giant music festival. Luella's meat and sauces reminded us of that place, and not merely done right, but done spectacularly well.

The pork was very moist and tender, and the sauces just divine. At each table, they have two, a tomato-based "Pisgah" sauce and a traditional eastern Carolina vinegar sauce called Scooter's. The Pisgah sauce is pretty good, but the vinegar was really excellent. In addition, the kitchen mixes up a few other concoctions daily in smaller batches, and they'll bring these out to you as you like. I tried a "lusty mustard" which had a terrific kick and proved an awesome dip for the hush puppies, and a jalapeno-serrano-vinegar hot sauce that was the best of the lot.

We enjoyed a variety of very good sides, including vinegar slaw, red beans and rice, mac & cheese, and calico baked beans. Unfortunately, Luella's is among that minority of restaurants that does not include Brunswick stew as a regular side, but as a higher-priced offering like chili. I believe that was my only note of dissatisfaction with my meal; otherwise, everything was perfect, although I am regretting not trying the garlic green beans. This was one of the daily specials on the blackboard and right about now, that does sound awfully tasty.

I had written in July that one of the best things about Luella's downtown competitor was their soda fountain, which included both Cheerwine and RC Cola. Turns out those good people can't even hold that up as a reason to return; Luella's has the same fountain. We almost always just order water with our meals, occasionally getting sweet tea with barbecue. But hell, fountain Cheerwine or RC, now those are worth the extra couple of bucks for both the flavor and the novelty.

Service at the restaurant seemed pretty fast and attentive across the board. In a nod towards a corporate look for an otherwise down-home place, they're all all dressed in matching black T-shirts which guests can purchase from the carry-out counter. It's the sort of look which means that we won't be surprised to hear that one day Luella's might expand to other cities and start franchising. On the other hand, we were very amused to see that outside the front door, they have set aside a few games for guests to play when the lines get long, including bean bag tosses and hula hoops, which my daughter can keep going around her neck for the better part of ten minutes. If Luella's ever does go the corporate-franchise route, I really hope that they can carry their originality, their recipes and their quite lovable spark along with them. Until then, there's just the one location, about a mile north of the I-240 perimeter on Merrimon in a very cute little neighborhood. I wonder what houses go for here?

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Doug's Place, Emerson GA

Would you believe that Randy and Kimberly finally got married? It's only been a week, but we haven't heard anything about them fighting over him taking her to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, so I choose to believe the honeymoon's still on. Then again, he did write to let me know that he perceived a heck of a lot of Asian restaurants in Asheville, where they went, so who knows what they got up to.

Their ceremony was held on Red Top Mountain near Cartersville, and looking around for something to eat on the way brought up a restaurant in the small town of Emerson called Doug's Place. This opened up a floodgate of forgotten memories, none of which, it turns out, really have anything to do with this very agreeable Southern-style meat-and-three. When I found a photo of Doug's Place - the one on John Bickford's very entertaining From My Table - I suddenly remembered that when I was a child, a chunk of Interstate 75 along this stretch was closed for a couple of years while the US Army Corps of Engineers was doing some sort of digging or reconstruction of Allatoona Lake. When my parents took me along for their monthly visit to see my grandparents in Fort Payne, we would exit early and drive up US 41 through Cartersville. On about three or four occasions, I swear that we stopped for breakfast around here, and wondered whether it might have been Doug's Place.

It wasn't - suspicion now lies on a Cartersville restaurant called Cody Jay's which occupies a building that, thirty-odd years ago, was the home of a place called J.R.'s - but getting to the bottom of things was kind of fun. I first asked my mom whether she remembered what that place in Bartow County we would stop in the seventies was called. Unsurprisingly, since, to hear my mom tell it, whatever good times there ever were ended around the time Nixon got in trouble with the lib'rul media, and, perhaps not coincidentally, I was two, she didn't remember any such thing. Mom carried Dentyne cinnamon-flavored chewing gum in her purse for the better part of fifteen years, but she thinks I've made up this story to confound her, because everybody knows that she hates chewing gum. Getting her to identify thirty year-old breakfast stops is like getting her to identify Godzilla films that were on channel 17 on a specific evening that my parents had friends over for pinochle when I was nine. She's not very helpful with that, either.

Wherever we ate back then, it wasn't Doug's Place, but heaven knows I irritated two or three people trying to get to the bottom of it. Before this place became Doug's about fifteen years back, it was apparently Morris's, but the building itself dates to the 1890s. There are two small dining rooms and a large, screened porch to wait for a table, and some really delicious southern food inside.





We had an early lunch, arriving at Doug's in between rushes. There were only a couple of recently bussed tables available when we arrived, and a long line developed while we ate. The interior of the restaurant is quite small, and it's not possible to move around to the restroom or cash register without slightly jostling other guests.

The food is mostly quite terrific, although sadly, yet again, everybody else at the table enjoyed a better entree than me. I had the country fried steak with gravy, and I wouldn't call it bad, but I certainly wasn't in the mood for it after having a bite of Marie's wonderful fried chicken, and one of the truly excellent chicken livers that Neal ordered. He concluded that these livers were even better than those at Vittles, which he enjoys more than me, and I had to agree. My daughter inhaled her gumbo, leaving me unable to comment on its quality, but I imagine that it must have been pretty good for her to down that much of it so quickly.

For sides, Marie enjoyed a small cup of broccoli and cheese soup. Neal and I each had baked beans which were quite good and I also had some delicious fried green tomatoes. Each of us also ordered the creamed corn. I would not call it great - Bear's Den in Macon cooks up much better and much creamier - but I was still quite pleased. If I had taken my sides with a different entree, it would have been a superb meal rather than merely a very good one.

I am surprised that Doug's Place has managed to stay so far off the radar of people who enjoy this kind of food. Obviously the locals enjoy it and with great reason, but this is quite genuinely the sort of thing that should attract a much larger crowd of travelers who love southern cooking, meat-and-threes, or any unique roadfood destinations. I noticed that the restaurant did post an article from Southern Living where they got a little praise, but doing what they do as well as this, there should be articles from forty different magazines and regular appearances on The Food Network. For now, we'll call it one of the region's best-kept secrets.

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Forno Italian Restaurant, Jasper GA

You ever had one of those trips where you feel compelled to go home and look at a map and figure out where in the heck you were? Last week, I had one of those. Since Wednesday is my free day, I took a former boss of mine up on her invitation to take a nice drive way out, and I mean way out, in the country, where she'd moved as part of her "urban evacuation" earlier in the year. I knew that Melissa was a goodly ways north and east of Ball Ground, but when she took the wheel up and over more back roads to go from her house to lunch, whatever navigational skills that I had abandoned me.

After not too long a drive up sparsely populated trails, during which time Melissa told me about an interesting run-in, along a stretch by a weatherbeaten old barn, with a police officer who had asked her whether she had seen three ne'er-do-well hillbillies who were up to some nebulous rottenness... oh, all right, the Pickens County cops were looking for a meth lab. Anyway, we ended up in a small strip mall in the community of Marble Hill near Jasper, punctuated by an IGA grocer that caters to the vacationers at nearby Big Canoe. Alongside the strip is a quite nice little Italian place that recently found new ownership and apparently a very new menu.



This is the first time that I've run into this issue doing these writeups. Melissa suggested this restaurant based on the food that they served on her previous visits, but since she last went there, they have revamped almost completely. Previously, Forno served pizza, burgers and hot dogs with a Chicago theme. The original owner, who was from the Windy City, decorated the interior with pictures of area landmarks and street signs, along with an amusing poster explaining the various components of the famous Chicago dog. If you've been to the wonderful Bobby G's in Alpharetta, you have a general idea of what I mean, although Forno is not quite so densely decorated.

The new owner has dispensed with the old menu, although the Illinois decor remains for now. He's spruced the place up a little, and is trying to turn it into an upscale Italian-styled destination, with higher-end entrees. I'm not certain how easily such a conversion can be managed with the TVs in each booth to watch the game of your choice still reflecting the previous sports bar feel, but that's the goal.

It's really not fair to judge a place based on the quality of its buffet, but I'll plead poverty. Expecting a burger and the attendant cost, I was a hair sticker shocked at a menu full of $15-16 entrees, and so Melissa and I just had the pasta buffet. The salad was not bad, although Melissa correctly observed that most of the available ingredients also made for good pizza toppings, and the pastas, which included ziti with sausage in a red sauce and ziti with chicken in a cream sauce with vegetables, were acceptable and tasty if not outstanding, and the service was just fine.

I do have to confess a little skepticism about Forno's long-term prospects. As always, I wish restaurant owners all the best luck and success in the world, but their menu does seem awfully high priced for being out in the middle of nowhere. Of course, looking at it on the map, it's really closer to State Route 515, and the Atlanta-to-Ellijay traffic, than I would have thought, but most of its potential customers certainly live in the back of beyond. It looks like this is a place that's going to have to work very hard to convert lots of locals into regulars to stick around. My fingers are crossed for them!

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Happy Sumo, Norcross GA

One huge difficulty in doing anything around the sprawling mess of Atlanta is that the suburbs are so stupidly spread out and badly managed and maintained. Even something that looks, on a map, simple and straightforward like a twenty-mile shot east to the Gwinnett County suburb of Norcross is a forty-minute slog at the best of times, and better than an hour's rumble in the evening traffic. I don't mention this to object in any way to making a trip out that direction to a good meal; far from it, as there are plenty of good restaurants in Duluth, Norcross and points east and I'm glad to go visit them, but man, the traffic engineers who've been claiming to be at work on this job have been out to lunch for decades. At this point, there's nothing wrong with the northern suburbs that two trolleys, twelve people movers, six newly-constructed bus lanes, sixty miles of north-south and east-west heavy-rail track and that big drilling Mole machine from Thunderbirds wouldn't fix. You heard about that "Big Dig" under Boston? The northern 'burbs need about seven of those.

At any rate, I've mentioned that we try to have some weekly get-together with some of our friends. We have to alternate days to accommodate different people that we know, and last week, between people being sick and people planning weddings and people having jobs, it was only Marie and the girlchild and I who were able to meet up with Matt. Almost all of us live in Cobb County on the northwest side of town; Matt and his wife live up in Gainesville, but he works thirty-odd miles south down around Johns Creek. His commute isn't that unusual, either, which is why it's so disagreeable that the city's traffic planners have spent decades sleeping. Anyway, with the interstates, particularly the top end perimeter, a parking lot at 6 pm, we drove a wonderful back way that I know over to Roswell, and then spent a while crawling east along Holcomb Bridge Road to meet Matt at a place that he knows called Happy Sumo. Matt used to live just around the corner before marriage lured him to Gainesville, and this was one of his favorite places for dinner when he stayed here in Norcross.

Holcomb Bridge, it must be said, really is a depressing drive just for all the businesses that used to be along this stretch of road but have since closed. I counted two comic shops, one bookstore and one CD store that aren't there anymore, along with two decent restaurants that I had enjoyed. To be honest, I'd rather not find the need to revisit Holcomb Bridge for this reason alone; it's just too sad.





Happy Sumo is one of Atlanta's many teppanyaki restaurants. These are often called hibachi steakhouses, but that's not strictly accurate. At a teppanyaki restaurant, as popularized by chains like Benihana, the chef prepares the meal on a flat, iron surface heated by propane and uses soybean oil to cook the ingredients. We don't often get out to Japanese steakhouses like this, although I don't know that I've ever had a mediocre meal at one.

We got the requisite cutting up from our chef, who spun his utensils around and made an onion volcano and did goofy stunts involving Easter eggs and rubber chickens. It's impossible not to be charmed by the silliness, and it put the girlchild in a pretty good mood.

Marie and I each ordered the teriyaki steak with fried rice - watch out for an additional $2 for having your rice fried rather than steamed - and my daughter had chicken. Matt had a nice combo meal of filet mignon and shrimp. It was a little pricy of a dinner, but everybody really enjoyed their food, and the tasty sauces. It was almost as good as Inoko in Athens, which is my standard bearer for hibachi/teppanyaki, and just the sort of evening out we needed.

The drive back, incidentally, was after the evening rush had ended and the interstates were accessible again. It didn't take anywhere near as long to get home, but I still think International Rescue's big drill could make it even quicker.

Hillside Orchard Farms, Tiger GA

There's one other little place - so far - that Marie and I love to visit up in Rabun County, although I'm sad to say that this one tries my daughter's patience just a little. Between Tallulah Falls and Clayton, there's apparently a little town called Tiger. We haven't found the town itself - it's allegedly a stop sign and a post office somewhere along Old US 441 - but a few miles south of where that town is said to be, in an unincorporated community called Lakemont, you can find just about the best roadside jam-n-cider operation I've ever discovered. There are a few signs, but it's still easy to miss. It's called Hillside Orchard Farms, and if you're driving north from Tallulah Falls up US 23, look for the signs and you'll turn to the left and then make an immediate right and go about half a mile.

I think I like this place so much not just because of the quality of the canned and bottled treats, which I'll get to in just a moment, but because of its isolation and ever-so-brief feeling of peace and absolute tranquility. It's a very old-fashioned tourist stop, the sort that I imagine might have been common in the pre-interstate days. Apart from the sales room, there is a small restaurant which we have not tried yet, a cornfield maze, a nice little walk up to a petting zoo, a lazy little river that borders the property, and a "gold mine" for the kiddies complete with a little prospector mannequin. In the fall, there are some additional stands where locals sell some arts and crafts and occasionally, like this past Saturday, a bluegrass band plays for the visitors. If you think that there's anything nicer than sitting back on one of the last warm weekends of the year enjoying some beautiful scenery and bluegrass in Marie's company, you'd be mistaken.

All of this, however, bores my daughter silly. Well, she is only eleven.



Let's be fair; plenty of roadside stands have jars of jams and preserves that have suspiciously similar and cautiously-worded labels about how they're specially bottled for the operation in question. Short of an interrogation, you're probably not going to know exactly for sure whether the bottle of "vidalia onion steak sauce" you can buy at A. Schwab's in Memphis is all that different from the bottle whose label uses the same wording and the same font that you can buy at Hot Thomas in Watkinsville. It amuses me to think that there's some outfit that makes house brand sauces for big grocery store chains four days a week, and then changes the packaging on Friday to ship out to all the roadside stands to con tourists.

I can't speak for everything in Hillside Orchard's inventory, but I do know for sure, now that I've seen it, that they do have a large canning and bottling facility about another half-mile up the road. And their sales room is sitting on a pretty big plot of farmland, so I'm comfortable believing that a fair chunk of their products are, genuinely, locally-made. Now maybe that "vidalia onion steak sauce" with that tan label and italic font isn't, but when you've got a place offering all these fresh apples and other fruits along with bottles of these amazing ciders, I choose to believe the best.

The jams and preserves are all completely wonderful. We've tried quite a few as spreads for biscuits and loved every one. We have also tried a few of Hillside Orchard's ciders and enjoy the spiced apple and the peach very much. My favorite, however, is the muscadine cider. A half-gallon of that is absolutely worth six bucks, but every once in a while, we have lucked on an inventory clearance and got a big bottle for three. I did kind of frustrate myself on the drive home, though, when I realized that I had intended to pick up a bottle of strawberry cider and give that a try, but plain forgot.

Fortunately, we'll be going to Asheville again this month and will be driving right through this neck of the woods. I'm awfully curious about that strawberry cider. I wonder whether it might still be on sale?

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Oinkers, Clayton GA

The first time that we went up to hike at Tallulah Gorge a few years ago, we dragged our exhausted carcasses back to the visitors' center and asked where we could get some good barbecue in the area. The nice lady at the gift shop didn't skip a beat. "It's about ten miles up the road," she said. "Do you mind the drive?" Y'all have probably figured out that I certainly don't object to a fifteen minute trip for good barbecue.

Going north from Tallulah Gorge, where we try to visit about twice a year, Oinkers is on the right a couple of miles after that new-looking overpass that they built for the Rabun County High School. It's pretty easy to miss; if you make it into the morass of fast-food chain restaurants of downtown Clayton, you went too far. We've come to Oinkers three times now, and each time enjoyed a good Saturday lunch with an absolutely packed house and a parking lot where about half the cars sport Rabun plates and half are from out of town. US 23 runs from I-40 and the Great Smokey Mountains Expressway, near Asheville, through Atlanta and to points down south, so it's a perfect artery for travelers looking to enjoy the fall colors. In fact, we'll double-check the mileage later this month, but Oinkers seems to be right around the halfway point between our place in Marietta and the city of Asheville.

Locals and travelers alike have learned that this is a lunchtime destination, and arrive in bulk. There is always a wait, even when it rains, as it did on us about a year ago, and then you have to worry about them running out of food. Well, maybe you don't have to worry, but I've never seen a place that posts quite so many notices about how they only prepare enough food as they think they might need on any given day, and might run out. Evidently, this was once a problem, and so they've tried to get the word out that it doesn't matter how much people might want to eat here, the restaurant might well get overwhelmed.





Oinkers' specialty is chopped pork with vinegar sauce, but this is definitely a sauce that novices to Carolina-style vinegar need to sample sparingly. Fortunately, for people like Marie who prefer their sauce tomato-based, they also offer a "sweet sauce," thick and tasty with molasses. Me, I like the hot vinegar sauce, which packs a very nice, peppery punch.

After our most recent trip to Tallulah Gorge last week, we settled on having two small meals. I wanted to revisit the wonderful Hawg Wild down south in Clarkesville, but I also wanted to talk about Oinkers, so we resolved to do both. Oinkers was, as usual, completely packed, and so the staff kindly sat us at the servers' table.

Between the three of us, we had a sandwich and a plate of chopped pork, along with some fries, stew, baked beans and applesauce, with a slice of peanut butter pie. My daughter and I agreed that the pie needed a tall glass of milk, but that was about the only complaint we could levy against the "snack." Between authentic and interesting food and service which somehow finds a way to be attentive despite a madhouse of customers, Oinkers has carved out a niche as a local favorite, and if you're planning to take US 23 up to Asheville from Atlanta, you will quickly find this a very agreeable halfway point.

Mallery Street Cafe, Saint Simons Island GA

This is Marie, contributing another small chapter about a place on St. Simons Island called Mallery Street Cafe. It's brand new and has no history whatsoever; I don't even recall having seen it the last time we came down to visit. It's in the same location as a former CD and tape shop where as a teenager I used to spend what little of my allowance used to be left after the purchase of books and candy; in one of the shops that came in succession after that one, my sister bought altogether too much incense and smelly candles. Its current incarnation is much cuter than either, but not too much so.

My father and I went to this place primarily because we had suffered the shock of discovering that Dressner's, our favored breakfast location, had closed. There was no announcement, no "sorry to lose you as customers," no update to the web site...just the sign down from the wall, the window papered over, and "Coming Soon" written in very large letters on the paper. While I hope that there is a new and spiffier interior and sign for the same restaurant as the item coming soon, I rather doubt it. It is all rather inexplicable, although quite irrelevant to this entry.

There seems to be enough breakfast business in the area that this new place should survive even if the competition does reopen, as they seem quite pleasant. Mallery Street Cafe has a decent location, just at the edges of the Pier/Village area, not far enough to discourage strollers from dropping in but not in the part where parking is so awfully hard to find. That said, as with any shop in the area, it is recommended that visitors walk rather than drive there if possible. The restaurant has some tables out front with decorative potted plants scattered around to spruce up the otherwise rather bare area, and the wait staff were extremely attentive to the outdoor patrons. It's quite nice to look at.



The menu is fairly basic, with the usual pancakes and breakfast steak and eggs/toast/bacon a la carte. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they also had a nice selection of teas from the local tea shop just down the block. Of course I had to order from that selection. They offered refills of hot water, too, which was nice--especially since the loosely-packed bag is big enough for two or three mugs of tea. I was quite happy with that order.

But here I am several paragraphs down, and haven't even talked about the food. You'll also note that there was no picture of it. That is because when it arrived I dug straight in and was several bites into the cute decorative flower made out of blueberries and strawberries on top of my pancakes before the idea of photography crossed my mind. My father, who was with me, had breakfast steak and (I think) home fries, and seemed quite satisfied with them. I would like to try some of the stuffed crepes that appear to be options, and definitely would like some more of the tea. All in all, it's a pleasant little place and worth going to again.

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Shish Kebab, Marietta GA

Last week, it was Marie's turn to pick a place for one of our weekly get-togethers, and she found a little restaurant in the shadow of Marietta's infamous Big Chicken which people probably drive right past without blinking. It's called Shish Kebab and it's set up in what looks like an old Pizza Hut or some other '70s-fashioned place. You see a lot of this in the area; one of these days I need to go back to Don Taco, which is a very good Mexican restaurant built into an old Hardee's*.

David and Neal got to Shish Kebab before us. I had funny work stories to share and my daughter was impressing us by being awesomely eighties, and we settled in for some very good meals.



It's not mentioned on the menu, but it looks like all dinner guests here get a small tossed salad. Had I known that, I probably would not have also asked for a Shirazi salad. This was a blend of diced tomatoes, cucumbers and onions with olives and lemon juice. David had an appetizer called kashk-o-badmjan, which was eggplant and mint with dried yogurt, along with a small order of seven spices, which was a cup of pickled vegetables served with a very tasty blend of spices, by design so strong that the taste of the spices overpowered the vegetables.

David and my daughter each ordered chicken barg. Asked for the difference between a basic kebab and a barg, the owner explained that they were different cuts of meat, prepared in a different marinade. They also got a slightly different selection of vegetables; Marie and Neal each had kebabs - lamb and beef - and theirs did not come with mushrooms. I happily ate up my daughter's. They were prepared in a wonderful blend of oils that brought out so much flavor; I could eat those with every meal.

As for me, I was really only peckish enough for a sandwich, and so I had a gyro. It was very good, and really, the only step this place did wrong this evening was to serve it with a bag of Frito-Lay chips. They've done such a good job turning this restaurant's interior into something fairly classy and nice, and they serve such good food and present it so well, and then they give you bags of Frito-Lay? Well, the gyro meat was very good, and supplemented with some of Marie's excellent lamb and my daughter's mushrooms, I was very happy with my supper.

We were invited to return for their big Saturday supper shindig, but we had plans already. That said, the prospect of a buffet with food this good and the entertainment of belly dancing really did sound tempting! Hopefully it was a big success for them and they'll host these more often.

*Or not. Don Taco apparently closed several months ago.

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Bill Spoon's Barbecue, Charlotte NC

(Honeymoon flashback: In July 2009, Marie and I took a road trip up to Montreal and back, enjoying some really terrific meals over our ten-day expedition. I've selected some of those great restaurants, and, once per month, I'll tell you about them.)

We no sooner pulled into Charlotte, North Carolina than Marie and I concluded that there was no reason why we shouldn't come back regularly. It's a really nice looking town, and only about three and a half hours away. Nevertheless, despite all the great sounding restaurants and bookstores and things to do, the road hasn't taken us back that way since our honeymoon road trip. We agree that we have so much in the Carolinas to do and see, but there never seems to be time or money.

Of course, we've been back to Asheville twice since our honeymoon and will be up there again in a few days' time, but we're totally in love with Asheville, and merely curious about Charlotte.

I put together most of the itinerary for the trip, and where I could, I sent Marie suggestions of two or three places to pick for a meal. I knew that on our first day, we'd be in Charlotte for lunch and that I would definitely want some eastern No'ca'lina barbecue, so I asked her to choose either Bill Spoon's or Bar-B-Q King. As it turned out, Bar-B-Q King might have been a more faithful choice, as over the course of the trip, we would be eating at three places detailed in the tie-in book to the Food Network's Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. Bar-B-Q King had actually been featured on the TV show, but hadn't made the book and I hadn't seen that episode. If Guy Fieri and his writers had included it in the book, then we would have stopped there, and missed the great slaw at Spoon's!





I hope our readers will excuse the poorer-than-usual standard of photography in these flashbacks; we have had much more practice since we took this road trip!

We arrived a little early and were the first guests at Spoon's this Saturday in July of '09. We took I-85 into town, went south around the 485 perimeter and then north up I-77, then had to fiddle around on surface streets that confused us a bit. If there's any sense to any road calling itself "South Boulevard," I can't see it.

Eastern North Carolina barbecue is made from the whole hog, not just the shoulder, and it's served with a vinegar-based sauce. In Georgia, we have several restaurants that offer similar style without drawing much attention to what they're doing, particularly Zeb's in Danielsville. Obviously, I'm not at all an expert in what this region can offer, what with all of two trips to Charlotte and one to Raleigh in my life, but this is what I've heard.

So Spoon's is alleged to be one of the very best of all the eastern NC restaurants. Mr. Spoon opened the place in 1963 and his family, who continue to run it, still don't take credit cards. It's a no-frills business with chintzy tablecloths and paper plates and it's completely terrific. The pork is so tasty and juicy, and the stew is really thick and meaty, and the hushpuppies - a common affectation in the region - are a welcome little treat, but the meal is elevated by the inclusion of this amazing slaw.

I'll tell you this for free: if we get some hard evidence that mustard slaw is the accepted standard recipe all over coastal Carolina, then we might just have to abandon our plans to relocate to Asheville and look for jobs in Wilmington or Fayetteville instead. This stuff is amazing. Your standard mayo-and-vinegar recipe just does not compare at all. On its own, it's terrific, but eaten with the chopped pork, it is simply divine. What a great meal!

We didn't make very many mistakes on our honeymoon, but one was this: I know that there's a very good comic shop in Charlotte, and assume that there's plenty of other things to do and see as well, but we hit the road as soon as we finished, hoping to get 265 miles up the road to Charleston, West Virginia in time to do some shopping there. Unfortunately, the comic shop in that town which I hoped to visit had already closed; we'd have done better to have hung out in Charlotte a little longer instead. Charleston did have some other memorable treasures which I'll come back to in next month's flashback installment.

As for Charlotte, I have a two-day road trip in mind for some point in 2011 that will bring us back by Bill Spoon's. Maybe some other place, too, but it's going to have to be pretty amazing to top the meal that we had here.

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