Gators Dockside, Jacksonville FL

Today's chapter is going to be one of those entries that is more about us and more about life than about a restaurant. Call it an anti-review, if you will, because while I have nothing bad to say about Gators Dockside, a chain of nineteen restaurants in Florida with a location in Jacksonville's southern suburban sprawl, I don't have much that is exceptional to say, either. It is a sports bar, pure and simple, and not at all as interesting as our original destination promised.

Chris had invited Marie and me to come back to Jacksonville to meet some friends and play some games - certainly more her speed than mine, these days - and try out one of his favorite restaurants. Unfortunately, some municipal stupidity has prompted that place to open late on Sundays. Jacksonville sprawls through two counties, Duval and Clay. The good dimwits of Clay County have a really absurd liquor ordinance. There, you're not allowed to sell alcohol until two on Sundays. Apparently, they had a problem with all 207 Jaguars fans in town trying to sneak booze into EverBank Field.

And don't tell me there are more than 207 Jaguars fans in town; we saw only one fewer Florida Everblades sticker on cars this weekend than we saw Jags flags flying for a home game. And we saw just one Florida Everblades sticker.

Okay, so it's probably a church thing. These, all too often, tend to be. So Clay County wanted to help their deacons stem the flow of boozers in church, thus inconveniencing the heck out of any restaurant in their borders that thought about getting some business in with the one o'clock NFL games. So why Brewer's Pizza, the place that we wanted to go, chose to build in Clay, I've got no idea. The restaurant could open for lunch at eleven, like any sensible place would, but since (a) it is a brewpub and (b) people tend to like a beer or two with their NFL game, they probably figured they were just going to lose business to Duval County for three hours anyway and it wasn't worth the bother.

Basically, a two o'clock lunch was not going to work. Marie and her brother and I got to Chris's place in the Orange Park neighborhood around 10:45. Some of his other friends were already peckish, so we needed to pick someplace else. Sadly, the area around the mall and Blanding Boulevard is just choked with fern bars and TJ McTchochtke's-type garbage. Urbanspoon offered Gators Dockside as the best in a series of awful possibilities.

Turns out it was just another TJ McTchochtke's.





That's not to say that the experience was necessarily bad. Most of the food was pretty average and uninspired, to be sure, but there were one or two nice things, and the service was exceptional. Between the seven of us and our utterly picky drink orders - ice, no ice, sweet, unsweet, lemon, no lemon, lime - I had to apologize to our server, who was absolutely perfect and deserved an "I was perfect" award, for going to a hell of a lot of trouble to not even get any beer tips. That's the real tragedy of that county ordinance screwing up our trip to Brewer's. Even staying in Duval County, the one with a sensible alcohol policy, none of our party drank anyway. But she was a terrific server, and gave our table of seven picky guests who shared sandwiches, turned down any beer, scrimped on appetizers and passed on dessert every bit of her attention, and the management should identify and give her a nice bonus to compensate for the lower check than a similar table might be expected to ring up in a sports bar on an NFL Sunday.

So yeah, this place, it's family-friendly and corporate and there are big screen TVs to watch the game and they claim to have really good wings with several different sauces. They've recently brought their Thai peanut wing sauce back to the menu after taking it off for a while and getting it from a new distributor, but Chris says it's not as good as it once was. They offer gator tail appetizers - Warren, the Seminole fan in our party, happily chowed down on gator as his entree with all the smug, gleeful satisfaction of somebody whose team finally, unlike ours, got the hell off their bench and did something about their rivalry this season after so many aggravating years - and Monte Cristo sandwiches, which you don't often find in sports bars. As for me, I had the mahi-mahi sandwich. It was okay. The homemade chips were pretty good. It was an agreeable visit and the chain looks to be a fine place to watch several NFL games across the many big-screen TVs.

Honestly, though, it wasn't a meal that had anybody raving, and I think that we all enjoyed the fun of playing games back at Chris's place considerably more than anything on Gators Dockside's menu, though I am grateful for Chris and his friends for indulging us and driving a little out of the way for something we can't get here in the Atlanta area when a meal at a closer, mall-surrounding TJ McTchotcke's would have resulted in similar quality food. As for something more amusingly local, that would have to wait a little while for me to go out and get a snack. Couple of hours, anyway.

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(Today's post wraps up our first calendar year of Marie, Let's Eat! We'd like to thank everybody for reading, for all the suggestions, kind thoughts, corrections and additions to our blog. We will have a couple more entries before taking a short break in January, but we'll be eating well, and hope that you will, too! Happy eating, everybody!)

Jomax Bar-B-Q, Metter GA

When I was about twelve, Neal and I were sent on a trip to a summer camp on Jekyll Island - it's where we met Samantha, surprisingly - that included a glamorous stop in the town of Metter, where we were allowed to get off the bus, pick up a brown bag lunch, and return to the bus to eat it. There are, certainly, far smaller towns than Metter out there, but at the age of twelve I was unable to name a one of them. Besides, I was miserable and unhappy and didn't want to be there, wherever "there" was. I doubt that had I known Jomax Bar-B-Q was right across the street from us that it would have improved things.

Metter is a long, long way from anywhere. There's an interstate, I-16, that connects Macon and Savannah, and Metter is 2/3 of the way down it. I'm sure there are much more desolate stretches of nothing in Nebraska and the Dakotas, but this drive is inarguably one of the worst in the southeast. Middle Georgia, outside of the cities of Columbus, Macon and Savannah, is sometimes pretty to look at, but there's certainly not a lot besides trees. 104 miles after leaving Macon, travelers on their way to the coast have been known to pull over and run around their cars screaming, so I figure Metter's the best place for a small town to grow and take advantage of people's desperation for anything to do.

It's the perfect place, in other words, for one of the three or four best barbecue restaurants in Georgia to spring up. It may be 200 miles from my house, give or take, but it's in the right place to keep drivers from losing their marbles. It is also notable as being, and I'm not kidding, the only restaurant for the 150-mile stretch of I-16 worth visiting. You can certainly exit from that highway and travel to, say, Vidalia or Statesboro and maybe find something to eat, but as far as restaurants by the exit ramp, it is, almost literally, Jomax or nothing. Most of the trip, you can't even find chain fast food drive-thru places, but you can certainly find plenty of state patrol cars encouraging you to watch your speed.

I first discovered Jomax around 1998, coming back to Athens from a trip to Tybee Island. I was very much in favor of finding new barbecue restaurants for my old Geocities page on the subject. I recall that I found a good entry or two in Savannah, Tybee and Thunderbolt for the page, and just pulled off the highway for a break in the hopes of finding something else. Jomax is seriously worth the stop, and I believe that I did each of the three times I drove to the coast from Athens during those days. Frustratingly, they are closed on Sundays. Since I started accompanying Marie to visit her folks on Saint Simons - about ninety minutes south of Savannah - I've been arranging our travel times and route to make sure we get a chance to stop at Jomax frequently. If we must motor down I-16, then the least we can do is stop along the way for some of the state's best barbecue!





Last month, Jomax's original owners bought back the restaurant. They opened it in... heck, I am not sure, but they sold it in 2006. I never noticed any change in the food's quality while the other owners were there, although I believe they did have a more extensive menu, one of those full of ads for area businesses in Candler County. When we got the chance to stop by this past Friday, one of the first things I noticed was a news clipping announcing the return of Joe and Maxine to their old business, effective November 1. I suppose I should have been forward and welcomed them back and told them how much I've always loved their place, but three and a bit hours of driving with Marie's car packed tight with luggage, Christmas presents and restless kids can make a fellow a little antisocial.

Jomax doesn't do anything really abnormal or odd with their presentation. It's basic chopped pork, very tasty and smoky, served with a single house sauce. This is a spectacular tomato and vinegar mix which is surely one of the best in the state. The secret here is simply to do the basics and do them really, really well. Their potato-packed Brunswick stew is one of my favorites, and their baked beans a match for Boston's best. With everybody ordering different sides, we also enjoyed very good sweet potato fries and lima beans this trip.

The simplicity of Jomax's approach has worked very well for them over the years. I think that my first visit, the place was a little quiet and slow, but every subsequent trip, they've had a fairly packed house and a staff of excellent servers positively hopping from table to table. I can't imagine anybody traveling from Macon to Savannah not knowing about Jomax. It's just where you get lunch on this road, simple as that.

Also, I'd be remiss if I did not mention that it's an open secret that most weeks during the football season, Sonny Seiler is known to stop in on his way from Savannah to Athens, with the University of Georgia's mascot, Uga, in tow. Joe and Maxine are big Bulldog fans and decorate their place accordingly, and while I've never been here at the right time for a meeting myself, I hear the Georgia faithful will often see off our puppy with a cheer and a wave. I figure, I got to talk with Coach Richt a couple of times at my favorite restaurant before it closed, so I've had my brush with Bulldog greatness. I also once got to confirm a confused tailback's suspicion that Thanksgiving might be in November, but we won't talk about that; it's a bit embarrassing.

Pizza Palace, Knoxville TN

So I was reading the tie-in book for Guy Fieri's Food Network TV series Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives and I told myself, "Self, you totally need to eat at some of these places." A few months after that, in the summer of '09, Marie and I started talking about where we'd like to go for our honeymoon and we settled on a big old road trip. As I'm recounting in my first-of-each-month honeymoon flashbacks, this trip started in Charlotte, wound its way up to Montreal and finished, ten days later, in one of our favorite towns, Knoxville, where we met up with the children after they spent two weeks' summer vacation with their mom. There, we settled in for supper at one of three Triple-D restaurants that were featured on Fieri's show and book which we were able to visit on our trip.

Marie instantly declared Pizza Palace one of the all-time winners of road eating. This is absolutely her favorite pizza in the world, which is why it gets a spot on the blog now instead of sometime next year as a honeymoon flashback. The reality is that we don't know what the future holds or whether it's going to be easy to revisit Quebec or New Hampshire again any time soon, but we can probably bank on plenty more visits to Pizza Palace. As long as they're still with us and we're living within three hours of Knoxville, we will be pulling in for a twelve-inch pie. Bank on it.

Charlie Peroulas and his cousin Sam own this restaurant, and one of them has been there each of the three times we've visited. Their fathers opened it in 1961, back when nobody in town really knew what pizza was. We spoke with Charlie for a little while on that first visit last summer, and he was still really pleased with the celebrity that Triple-D brought his little drive-in. He said that ever since they were featured on Triple-D (in late 2007, I believe), not one day had gone by without at least one customer coming in and mentioning that the TV show had brought them. And while I don't know whether they were road trippers like us, I can confirm that when we stopped by two Saturdays ago, there were cars in the lot with North Carolina, Texas and Florida plates with happy drivers inside chowing down.

Oh, did I not clarify that? This is a drive-in. While there is a little counter seating available for take-away orders or if you just insist on not accidentally getting the best meat sauce in town on your new upholstery or if you want to say hello to the owners and tell 'em where you're from, you're meant to enjoy your pizza or pasta in the comfort of your car. I love this place.





Now, Marie's not wrong; this pizza really is terrific. I honestly prefer one or two of the places here in Atlanta, but that's no slight on Pizza Palace. They make their crusts fresh - it's an overnight process - and they top it with a homemade, secret recipe tomato sauce that just flat out embarrasses most of their competition. The sauce spreads almost all the way to the edge, so this is wonderful to the last bite. Their toppings are also really something else. We love the extra gooey cheese and the finely ground beef. Pepperoni, mushrooms, whatever you're looking for, this place does it right.

Honestly, though, there's more to this place than just pizza. I would most strongly recommend splitting a ten-inch pie and a bowl of spaghetti with your road-tripping buddy. Marie and I may quibble on whether this is either the best pizza ever, or merely fantastic, but there's no question about this meat sauce. It is definitely the best I've ever had. Again, cooking this is an almost all-day affair, using USDA choice top round, onions and butter along with that secret tomato sauce, and the result is completely magnificent.

The other signature item that we have tried would be the onion rings. Now, Marie's not quite as crazy about these as I am, but she likes the pizza a little better than me, so it all evens out. The onions are very sweet and I just love this breading. They serve these with ketchup, and the flavors mix pretty well, but the rings don't really need it. Actually, there's a lot on this menu, ranging from several salads to hamburgers to fish sandwiches to ravioli. Looking over it more closely on Saturday, I noted that you can order pretty much everything here, except possibly tomato aspic.

Three visits, three absolutely perfect pies. Perhaps you can see what I was talking about when I mentioned in the last chapter the difficulty caused by our favorites when we only go to Knoxville two or possibly three times a year. For a town to have two such good, reasonably-priced options for meals, it's going to be kind of hard to break away and try new places! Or to convince Marie of that, anyway.

The French Market Crêperie, Knoxville TN

Oh, heck, I might have created a monster here.

This past Saturday, Marie and I returned to Knoxville, one of our favorite cities, for a few hours to pick up my son for the Christmas break. We'd planned to leave my daughter in the care of her aunt and cousins, go have a couple of meals and shop and have a good time, and then collect both kids after lunch. So that left us looking for a very good breakfast for the two of us after starting the day at the very early hour of five. I kind of figured that making Marie wake that early for a Knoxville-and-back road trip was going to require penance in the form of an awesome meal.

Urbanspoon's readers have given knockout reviews to The French Market Crêperie, located downtown on Gay Street in the Farragut Building. The owners, Allen and Susan Tate, whom we met Saturday morning, wanted to bring a little bit of the flavor of the Parisian shops that they loved visiting while traveling in France to Knoxville in 2008, having ruled out Atlanta as a potential destination based, in small part, on our godawful traffic. Well, our idiotic city planners' ongoing folly is definitely Knoxville's gain. With imported wheat and flour to make their crêpes and all sorts of luscious meats and jams to fill them, the Tates have turned their small space, with seven small tables inside, into the absolute must-visit destination for breakfasts in the area.

It's so darn good that we're probably going to end up eating there at least every other visit to town. Now, you wouldn't think that would be a problem, because everybody likes amazing food, right? Except, when you add in the must-visit lunch that we enjoyed for the third time later that afternoon (about which more in the next entry), it will really make it difficult to feature a truly good selection of Knoxville's excellent restaurants here on our blog. How the heck are we supposed to try lots of different breakfast places in the city with the same one calling us back every time?





At any rate, Marie is much more familiar with crêpes than me, as she's spent quite some time with family in the Netherlands. To hear her tell it, the Dutch are crazier about crêpes and pancakes than any other breakfast food. So she came into The French Market with a pretty good idea of what she hoped to get out of it, and was knocked stone cold by the experience. Marie smiles a lot more than anybody you ever met, but it's a pretty rare day that she accompanies that killer smile of hers with a little happy booty shake after trying the blueberry crêpe on offer here. Served with lemon curd and the most amazingly decadent sweet cream I think I've ever had, this was definitely a traffic-stopping breakfast.

Well, while Marie went with a sweet crêpe, I went with savory. I had a ham and cheese buckwheat crêpe with a little butter. It was very good. Okay, so there was a little menu envy on this trip, but if I had not ordered the ham, I wouldn't be able to tell you how terrific it was. The Swiss cheese was not at all greasy, either. This was an absolutely superb breakfast. We split a croissant which was the equal if not the better of the croissants from Doceur de France here in Marietta and Marie had a nice cup of wonderful breakfast tea. For those who prefer coffee, they serve imported Italian Lavazza varieties.

We're also keen to return one day and try out their lunches. They offer a few baguette and croissant sandwiches that sound amazing. I am very keen to try their chicken salad one day soon.

Upon speaking to the Tates, thanking them for our meal, and talking of our own neighborhood French bakery, they wanted us to leave with a complementary chocolate croissant. Now that I think about it, we probably violated journalistic / blogger integrity by accepting a free gift, but in our defense, we didn't let them know that we write up a food blog, we let my daughter have the gift after just having nibbles of it, and Marie was doing her little happy booty-shaking dance in her seat several minutes earlier, so they were assured of a decent writeup already. The French Market had already won her affections as Marie's favorite breakfast in the city, and in the next chapter, I'll tell you about her favorite pizza, anywhere.

AJ's Famous Seafood & Po Boys, Marietta GA

Some years back, I played, and by that I mean, "dumped a lot of disposable income on," a collectible miniatures game - you've got the same Wikipedia I have, look it up - and would occasionally go over to Great Escape Comics and Games here in Marietta for a tournament. For the most part, I thought that the food options around this store, which is a pretty good one, and certainly worth a visit, were quite limited. There was the now-closed Mad Italian, of course, where I should have eaten more frequently, but I thought that darn near everything else up and down 120 around that shop was some dumb fast food chain. I was proven wrong a couple of months ago when Samantha shared a terrific Thai meal at Lemon Grass with us, and now I've found a very respectable, tiny seafood restaurant just across the street from Lemon Grass. AJ's Famous Seafood & Po Boys is a couple of doors down from the Kroger and I'd never have known about it had my plans not changed last week.

See, I was hoping to go to Athens last Thursday, but the region was hit by a pretty awful, albeit mercifully short, ice storm. Frozen rain came down in buckets Wednesday night and the police said that there were a thousand accidents in the Atlanta area that night. It melted off very quickly and by lunchtime Thursday, things were back to normal, but everybody's nerves were frazzled and I didn't know whether I wanted to risk any ice patches between home and Athens. So around eleven, I started getting peckish and had no idea what I wanted to eat. Well, actually, I had a pretty good idea, but that will have to wait until my next trip to Athens. So I pulled up Urbanspoon to see what might sound good in Marietta that I had not noticed before. There it was, a restaurant that I should have been visiting since they opened in 2005 and I was looking for something to eat on that stretch. What a ridiculous development!





AJ's sandwiches are available as a full-sized po boy, or on a bun, like I had. They also serve up their varied fish, shrimp or oyster options as dinner-sized platter portions with several sides. Their bread is crispy but soft, and comes dressed with lettuce, tomato, pickle and one of several spreads. I just went with mayo with my shrimp, saving their house "AJ sauce" - somewhere between remoulade and thousand island dressing and quite tasty - for my appetizer. I don't often order appetizers, unless it's a really memorable standout. An alligator taco certainly qualifies.

Now, see, this is what I love about paying a little more attention to the quality of the food that I'm finding. Five years, this place has been serving alligator, and I had no idea. I love gator; I've only had it a few times, but I think it's terrific. Apparently, AJ's will occasionally offer up a gator and sausage chili. Holy bajole, I'd like to try that. Anyway, the taco comes with a good portion of fried gator, with cabbage, onion and cilantro.

Now, my big shrimp bun was very good, but I'm not sure that I wouldn't have been just as pleased, and not quite as stuffed, with three alligator tacos and a side of red beans and rice. For a last-minute fill-in meal, this was really a nice treat, and I look forward to stopping by again one day soon.

Donut King, Snellville GA

One of my favorite foodie blogs is the "increasingly-inaccurately named" (as Douglas Adams might have termed it) Food Near Snellville. I noticed his work several months ago - he and Jennifer Zyman's Blissful Glutton have been in a war of attrition for the top spot on Urbanspoon for the Atlanta region - and even though he's based in one of this region's many traffic-clogged, sprawling messes, he gets out to plenty of good restaurants and writes with a sense of infectious fun. To celebrate his finally claiming the number one spot from Blissful Glutton, we headed over to his turf.

Okay, that's a complete lie. To be perfectly honest, Snellville, nothing more to me than that oft-gridlocked, badly traffic-managed corridor between Stone Mountain and Loganville, just happened to be on the road back from Walnut Grove, which we visited a week ago for our roadfood tour. Well, since we're never in that neck of the woods, I wondered whether there might be anything we could grab for a snack after lunch at Kelly's, just to try something a little different. And as for finding a new thing to try, I did this little trick: I zoomed in really close on US 78 in Google Maps until the names of restaurants started showing up. Donut King stood out, so I figured we'd each grab a treat there.

Yeah, sometimes here, you get lovingly-told stories of our life spent eating well and the wonderful histories that we have with favorite restaurants, and sometimes you get this. Anyway, there's some really good doughnuts in Snellville.





Honestly, other than food, I'm hard-pressed to come up with a single reason to visit Snellville. Well, fair's fair, food is, you know, second to friends as the best reason to visit anywhere, but the town is seriously lacking in bookshops and record stores. Several years ago, the kids and I were coming back from Athens this way just to have something different to see and we stopped into this utter craphole of a CD store where my son bought a VHS copy of the awful film Space Jam and the idiot behind the register wouldn't let my daughter use the restroom. Even that place is gone now.

Food-wise, Snellville looks to be a chain paradise, with only a few standouts. Sri Thai sounds very promising, and FNS gave that place a good review. Actually, doing a little research, the most interesting thing that I've learned is that the national chain Dickey's Barbecue Pit has one of its three Georgia locations in Snellville*, only it's not listed on the corporate website, while four forthcoming restaurants are shown as "coming soon." That's just lovely, I say sarcastically. There's no such thing as a good nationwide chain of barbecue restaurants. (*note: a commenter has informed me that this store has already closed.)

As for Donut King itself, I'm glad we made it an early start for the day, because this place closes at the unfortunate hour of 1 in the afternoon. It's in a strip mall with a Provino's and a Philly Connection and sixty thousand cars. It's not particularly easy to get into, and a downright pain in the neck to get out of. But the dougnuts, well, they're wonderful. Marie puts on airs of not actually liking doughnuts very much, but she found her chocolate frosted to be incredibly yummy, and the girlchild in the back seat was making happy "mmmmm" sounds as she wolfed down her eclair.

Despite their early closing time being a little inconvenient for curious eaters, the business clearly does a good job anticipating demand and bakes and fries accordingly. As you see in the photograph above, I had Marie hold her doughnut out for me to shoot. The last few times we've gone into a dessert place, I've had good results from shooting the display case showing off all the treats. Here, we arrived so late that most of their food was gone, and while my food composition skills are still admittedly meager, there's no way any photographer could bring that decimated display to life. Thus said, the community must clearly love this place to have cleaned it out so thoroughly by 12.30 that only slim pickings were left for us. They were really good slim pickings, but it left me curious what Donut King looks like at five in the morning.

Kelly's BBQ, Walnut Grove GA

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, we're attempting to visit as many of the Georgia restaurants that are featured at Roadfood.com as we can. Coming back I-20 from Madison, we had lunch at a second such restaurant in a day. Madison itself was as fun as ever, although planning to have an early breakfast there and an early lunch in another town doesn't allow you a lot of opportunities when many of the stores don't open 'til eleven. Well, we did a little window shopping at least, and enjoyed some of the pretty buildings and houses while taking a nice walk.

Now, it turns out that the roadfood list does have a small error in it. It suggests that Kelly's BBQ is in Covington, and I don't believe that's true at all. It's actually ten miles north of there in a small crossroads community called Walnut Grove, which is actually closer to Loganville than Covington. And Urbanspoon's no better; it says the restaurant's in Covington, too! It's at the intersection of state highways 81 and 138 and, sensibly, when it first opened in the 1970s, it was a restaurant called Crossroads. The man who rechristened it Kelly's took over in the mid-80s, and he sold it three years ago to new owners who have kept the menu, the recipes and, where possible, the low prices - Marie and our daughter and I ate for $15 - but have expanded the building to allow more indoor seating. It no longer looks quite the way it appears in the photos at Roadfood.com, so it's missing a little bit of the quaint, roadside stand feel.

Also missing from Kelly's these days is a giant pig. The restaurant used to have a really enormous sculpted pig next to the building that weighed several hundred pounds, but a couple of years ago, some fast-moving criminals came by in a truck in the dead of night and spirited it away. The Walton County sheriff's department would appreciate any information.

A large plate of chopped pork here gives you plenty to share. There's more than enough pork for one, along with bread, fries, slaw and Brunswick stew. There are three sauces available, mild, hot and sweet, and the pork already comes wet with the house's mild sauce. I'd recommend you order it dry and sauce it up to your liking. The sauces are all vinegar-tomato blends and guests can buy them by the bottle.





The only disappointment that any of us had was with the slaw. Now me, I like any style, variety or recipe of slaw just fine. Mayo, vinegar, red, mustard, it's all good to me. But the closer it gets to that really finely-diced, mayo-heavy Chick-fil-A style slaw, the less Marie likes it. She ordered a small cup with her chopped pork sandwich, and I knew as soon as they brought the tray to our table that she wasn't going to enjoy it. So I gave her most of my stew, which was very good, and tasted heavily and delightfully of corn.

Kelly's offers a lot more than just barbecue; they have burgers and steaks and plenty of other things which, if they're as good as the tasty chopped pork, are probably worth a try. On the other hand, ever since I was old enough to understand what the heck one is supposed to order at a barbecue restaurant, I've kind of figured that burgers are there in lieu of a kid's menu. Don't get me wrong; I like burgers more than most, but chopped pork this wonderful, tender and moist is going to win out every time.

Ye Olde Colonial Restaurant, Madison GA

Here's a place that took me the better part of eternity to get around to visiting. I first spotted Ye Olde Colonial - and yeah, let's go ahead and acknowledge just how silly that awful name is - about fifteen years ago, when I was living in Athens and occasionally visiting Madison every couple of months. There are some amazing antique stores in and around the town square, and I remember coveting some really neat walking sticks with silver wolf's heads and things atop them. I'm still not completely convinced that I should not, when I hit age fifty, always go out in a very nice, old-fashioned suit and a walking cane with a silver wolf's head. But, if we're strictly honest, the coolest thing I found back then was my Dr. Shrinker jigsaw puzzle.

I never got around to eating at Ye Olde Colonial back then, and nor did I visit during the many (oh, so many) trips that I made to Madison in 2004 during that mistake-prone period of dating some girl there, to which I've often alluded. No, while there are a couple of really decent restaurants in Madison (and one, The Flat Penny, which has sadly closed), I never ate at Ye Olde Colonial until I came out here with Marie one Saturday in 2007. We had only been dating for a few months at the time - she was still living in Athens and I was here in our "Hipster Pad" in Marietta - and we drove down to Morgan County to get breakfast and do some shopping. I recall that was a productive trip for her. Marie likes those Dutch tiles you sometimes find, and she found one in a shop here, which, our friend Devlin tells us, has since moved to nearby Watkinsville. All things being equal, that's probably a bit more of a treasure than a Dr. Shrinker jigsaw puzzle in some quarters.





I've set up a few goals for the restaurants that I hope to cover in this blog, and one of them is to hit all of the places in Georgia that are reviewed on one of the best foodie sites out there, Roadfood.com. I was pleased to see that Ye Olde Colonial - the spelling of "old" is interchangeable, one way on the sign pictured and "olde" everywhere else, including on a smaller sign at the door - is on their list, since it would give us a good reason to swing back by Madison and have another good breakfast there.

The building that houses Ye Olde Colonial was previously a bank, and by "previously" I mean "in the 1840s." Madison is a beautiful old town, almost entirely spared from the devastation of the Civil War and Sherman's march to the sea. No, the fire that hit this property came about ninety years later, when the interior was damaged by a small blaze. By that time, the bank had long closed and the building was a restaurant simply called The Grill. When the restaurant reopened, it was under its current name. The owner told me about this on Saturday, explaining that it was his late father who gave it the silly name.

The interior is still quite gorgeous, suggesting that whatever the size of that fire in the 1950s, it was not too destructive. The dining room is the former bank lobby, with a nice tiled pattern on the floor and flecked red wallpaper, along with a lovely ceiling molding. The bank's vault is still intact for guests to look in. Here, you might can see some of the old fire damage, because the interior walls of the vault are lined with a pattern made from scorched and ruined currency. I noted that Roadfood's Michael Stern described the room's tone as being "hushed" when he visited in 2002, and that is still true today. Ye Olde Colonial was not very busy when we arrived shortly before 9 on a Saturday, but there was a large party of older gentlemen, who looked for all the world like they have eaten here every weekend for decades, and a few other tables, but the room was overall very quiet. Nobody wanted to talk very loudly and risk disturbing the past.

Breakfasts here are very good, especially the grits, which might be the best I've ever had. Marie, damn yankee that she is, still hasn't developed a taste for grits, but my daughter is finally opening up to the idea, and scarfed about a quarter of my order. The country ham is really excellent, if perhaps not quite as good as Atlanta's Silver Skillet, and the ladies were each quite pleased with their pancakes. One small note of dissatisfaction came with the syrup, which comes in small prepackaged cups from Smucker's. I just can't help but feel that a proper glass bottle on the table would just look better.

Actually, it's surprising that Ye Olde Colonial doesn't have old-fashioned syrup bottles on the tables to go along with all the other antiques in their place, including shelves full of apothecary bottles in the front room. The other really neat call from the past that can be seen here is just to your left as you enter. A set of stairs leading to a basement is blocked off by a gate, but it's otherwise impassable anyway by stacks and stacks of really old newspapers, like copies of The Atlanta Journal, the old evening edition, from the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps the antiques aren't really from the colonial period, but when you add in the old wardrobes and the military treasures mounted on the wall in the dining room, you really do have a place that pays more than lip service to the past, and invites you to enjoy a superb breakfast in the company of history.

Vatica Indian Vegetarian Cuisine, Marietta GA

I'll tell you, friends, this was not the meal that I was hoping to find. It was very, very good, and calls out for investigation from more people who love unusual flavors and unique foods. Well, I knew going in that a vegetarian Indian restaurant was unlikely to replace the dearly-missed Moksha in my affections, and this didn't, but it was a very different and very positive experience all the same. This is definitely a restaurant that Atlanta's foodie community should quit overlooking and come visit.

For one thing, Vatica's owner is by leagues the most engaging, friendly and welcoming host of any Indian place that I've ever visited. Having done just a cursory bit of research into what I could expect here, I explained to him that I knew virtually nothing of vegetarian Indian dishes, but that I understood this place specialized in something called thali, which is basically a buffet brought to your table. He told me that he'd make me a very good thali and tell me all about it.

About five minutes later, I had a huge circular tray in front of me, with small bowls of a variety of foods. He told me what each was. My meal included rice, a spicy stew called dal, potato curry, lentil curry, sweet potatoed curry, an onion yogurt called raita, a pita-like bread called roti, the delicious, thin spicy wafers called papadam, a potato and onion samosa and a little fruit cup. I apologized for inconveniencing him, but I'm actually allergic to sweet potatoes. So those went, and he brought me a small bowl of curried squash instead.





This place definitely has it down right. That sounds like a heck of a lot of food, but everything was in very sensible, small portions. If you're looking for a broad sampling of flavors, you can do pretty well here, getting ten different things for nine bucks and change. I was most taken with the dal and with the potato curry, but everything was very tasty. I was further surprised when, about halfway through my meal, another fellow came by with a tray to refill whatever I wanted more of, so I had second helpings of the dal, the potato curry, the lentils and another couple of papadam wafers.

Honestly, this was a good - no, a very good - lunch, but I also realized as I ate that really, what I've come to expect, unfairly, from Indian cuisine is really tasty meat in a really spicy, scorch-yer-tongue sauce. This was one heck of a good meal, but not at all what I was looking for. I wonder where my ongoing search to replace Moksha will take me next?

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The Fickle Pickle, Roswell GA

If you've never taken my advice before, listen to me now: do not arrange to meet friends at The Fickle Pickle. You should definitely go, and you should absolutely plan to enjoy a delicious lunch in the company of your buddies, but seriously; this place has the dinkiest parking lot imaginable. It gets really busy on the weekends, at which point downtown Roswell's lack of overflow parking impacts everybody's happiness. Get everybody together at somebody's house ahead of time, and carpool in as few vehicles as possible. You'll do everybody a favor.

In many previous chapters in this story, I've shared reports of what I call menu envy, which is that particular condition of sitting down to what you thought was going to be a swell meal, only to find that somebody else at your table - or, too often in my case, everybody else at my table - has ordered something even tastier than what you got. I'm very happy to say that, for my birthday last week, just about everybody else at our table had envy over my fried green tomato sandwich. Even if they didn't know they had that envy, or were perfectly satisfied with their own sandwiches, which I'm sure were terrific, they were eating something flatly inferior to my order. This sandwich... well, let me start by saying that the Blue Willow Inn out in Social Circle probably has better fried green tomatoes, but that would be it in the region. The tomatoes are amazing. Served up on fresh bread with a tomato jam, pepperjack cheese, greens, white onions and a thin smear of basil mayo, the kitchen is making magic. I haven't had a better sandwich in a very, very long time. The only person at the table who was not envious of my sandwich was Kimberly, who also had the good sense and fortune to order one.





Everybody's sandwiches were really wonderful, and they each come with a very good side. Marie was very happy with her tomato basil soup, and I was very taken with my chili. The real winner, though, apart from the sandwiches, is the top choice on their appetizer board. The fried pickles here are to die for. They're simply out of this world, crunchy and juicy and served with a really wonderful remoulade sauce. Order accordingly: a full basket is enough for four, and you'll certainly feel very guilty letting any of these go to waste.

While I can't praise the food here enough, I also think the service is far better than the average. The owners have done themselves no favors by building in an old house the way that they have, and indeed my only dissatisfaction comes from how hugely inefficient a system they've developed. With such a popular restaurant drawing so many people into such a small space, there has to be a better way than putting names in for a table and then having your party go through a very slow cafeteria-style line to place orders and ring the table up all together. The result is confusion, lots of standing around and lots of blocked doorways. Having said that, the various servers seemed very much atop the chaos and were both very graciously accommodating for our group arriving in fits and starts throughout the hour and promptly reactive to additional orders being added to our table.

Yet I can't help but think that if the service was that good with a flawed and inefficient system, the service would become floating-on-air perfect with a more sensible one. I am very tempted to return one weekday evening and try one of these highly-praised mac-n-cheese bowls which are only available at supper, and see how the service is during a slightly less busy time than Saturday at 12:30. I'll certainly have some more fried pickles, too.

The Silver Skillet, Atlanta GA

Let me tell you how to get one of the most decadent breakfasts that you've ever had. Go on down to the Silver Skillet. It's an old-fashioned greasy spoon in Atlanta's midtown, on 14th Street just west of the downtown connector. That's what we call the stretch of Interstates 75 and 85 when they merge. The building has barely changed in fifty years, with faded prints of show horses on the walls and the old hand-painted signs with the daily specials behind the bar. You'll want country ham with red-eye gravy, and two biscuits with white gravy, and a couple of eggs, preferably scrambled. And you're probably going to want some sweet tea with it. If you're the sort who likes coffee with your breakfast, trust me this once, you'll want to pass this time around.

Red-eye gravy is most often made from mixing the drippings of the fried country ham with coffee. To hear my mother tell it, that's why in northern Alabama, where she grew up, this was called, not very appetizingly, "grease gravy." At the Silver Skillet, they apparently let their country ham, which is center-sliced and bone-in, marinate for several hours in a stew that includes - if you're ready for this - soy sauce, brown sugar, paprika and Coca-Cola before they fry it. So it's the grease from that marinate that gets mixed with coffee. I think that it works best as a dip. Have a small piece of ham dipped in gravy, followed by a small piece of biscuit dipped in the white gravy. Somehow manage to keep the current week's Creative Loafing balanced in your lap under the formica table.





This ham is, by leagues, the best country ham that I've ever had. It is tender but chewy, and incredibly salty. You're then dipping this salty meat into a gravy that's at least one part soy sauce. You are going to need sweet tea, and not coffee. Probably about three glasses. And you're still going to be licking your lips and smacking from salt overload about ninety minutes later.

At any rate, the Silver Skillet has been family-owned since 1967. The late George Decker bought the restaurant from its original owner and his daughter has run it since his passing in 1988. Open from 6 until 2 in the afternoon, there is usually a short wait during the week and a much longer one on weekends or during big events in the city that bring in the tourists. For my birthday last week, I treated myself to breakfast here. I got there just in time to claim one of two available tables, kicked back with my paper, had a very nice server call me "sweetie" and "hon" as she refilled my tea enough times for me to float away when I was finished.

Much later, after I had gassed up and stopped by someplace in the 'burbs for some Christmas shopping, I went by a grocery store where my bank has a branch. I was still smacking my lips. It was that tasty and that salty. Clearly that's not a meal for everybody, nor a meal for every day, but when the opportunity strikes to indulge just a little, how can anyone resist?

The Colonnade, Atlanta GA

If you grew up in a southern household, you simply must visit The Colonnade to have your mind blown by this menu. They serve things here that your mother or your grandmother regularly prepared and which you had completely forgotten. Last week, Marie and our daughter and I joined David and Neal for supper here. All three of us fellows had the same eye-popping reaction to the same thing. "Pears and cheese?! My mom used to make that!" With grated sharp cheddar cheese and mayo. It must have been in the secret handbook assigned by Betty Crocker to all housewives in Georgia and neighboring states between 1964 and 1975.

One of the other amazing things on the menu is tomato aspic. This savory gelatin was apparently a somewhat common dish in postwar America, until the Jell-O company turned families onto the idea of gelatin as a sweet dessert instead. "Oh, Lord," said Neal, sampling a half-spoonful of my order. "It tastes like V-8 Jell-O." Turns out he's exactly right. I found a recipe for tomato aspic which calls for tomato juice, Tabasco and bay leaf along with two envelopes of unflavored gelatin. The curiosity and novelty didn't overwhelm the reality that it wasn't very good, but as I told Neal as I encouraged him to give it a taste, when the heck else are you going to have the chance to try tomato aspic in a restaurant?

Naturally, I had to try both of these at the Colonnade, as they're both missing from the menus of darn near every other restaurant around. So is calf's liver, among others, but I had to draw the line somewhere. No, I just had your common-or-garden chicken livers. Nothing adventurous here.





The Colonnade is one of Atlanta's oldest surviving restaurants. Only the Atkins Park Tavern is older. It opened in 1927 at the intersection of Piedmont and Lindbergh, in a house that was torn down before I was born. In 1962, the Colonnade moved to its present location on Cheshire Bridge Road in front of that unbelievably skeevy motel. I know this must come as a shock to Atlantans to hear a motel on Cheshire Bridge described as skeevy, but I calls 'em as I sees 'em.

We were mistaken on one point about the Colonnade. Looking over all these old-fashioned, timelost dishes on the menu along with the fried chicken and collard greens, we all assumed, quite wrongly, that the only things to have changed here over the decades are the prices. However, in the lobby, there is a collection of old menus from earlier days, and it would appear that curiosities like the aspic and the pear and cheese are actually relatively new. Along with the menus, there are also some newspaper and magazine reviews. One of these features the ridiculous headline "PATRONS PRAISE GOOD PLACE TO EAT." When I wrote for a newspaper in Athens, I occasionally wanted to smack the copy editors around with a baseball bat for all the awful headlines they wrote for my articles, but lordy, I never had one that bad.

There has been one very unfortunate change at the restaurant, but it's not one that I knew about for a couple of days. We noticed in the lobby the requisite framed, autographed poster of Guy Fieri spotlighting the Colonnade's appearance on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. I tracked down the clip - they're on YouTube - and was surprised to see that the Food Network series visited the Colonnade during a period where they were experimenting with some really fascinating concoctions no longer available. So if you're a Triple-D fan making your way around the country hitting the featured restaurants - and a fine use of your time that would be - it looks like you cannot currently get the redneck sushi, the lobster knuckle sandwich or, tragically, the kangaroo sirloin. Look, I like chicken livers all right, but if I'd seen kangaroo steak on the menu, that's what I would have ordered. The Colonnade's brief flirtation with new, wild and a little weird has ended, and they're back to the basics, serving up fine dining the way that your grandmother knew it.

I did find one note about the fine dining experience a little unusual, however. All of the service was very good, and we enjoyed our server's choosing to answer Marie's request for a recommendation in reverse. Rather than telling her what he liked best, he told her the two dishes that he did not enjoy, suggesting that she'd like anything else that she ordered, and she did. But I was a little surprised at the register. The Colonnade does not accept credit cards. That's just fine by me; I don't like to use credit cards. (I also play Where's George?, so it's important that I keep ones in circulation!) I tried not to be confrontational about it, but I was curious about the policy. "I think that's so neat that y'all don't take credit cards. I don't use them either, but I was wondering why you don't." I guess the lady at the register gets that a lot, only rudely. "We just don't. We never have." That's all the answer that she wanted to give.

So much for curiosity, but then again, I think the Colonnade is older than credit cards, and they can make that choice. The rest of you, swing by your bank's ATM first.

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Loveless Cafe, Nashville TN

Apart from waking at three in the morning feeling pretty awful, I really enjoyed the trip that Marie and I took to Nashville a couple of weeks ago. We got to visit some friends and meet some of their buddies at a party, and see the last vestiges of fall color, and the hotel where we stayed was not at all bad. I guess one other downside was that I neglected to consider that we might have done better to check the Tennessee Titans' schedule, and not book a hotel that was on the other side of the Adelphia or, what the heck's it called now, LP Field, from our lunch plans.

Out on the west side of town, a good ten miles out I-40, the Loveless Cafe has been a must-visit destination for almost sixty years. It has been on my own shortlist for more than a year, and a recent feature in Southern Living has sent mobs back to their door. I had the foolish notion that if we got there around eleven, we might beat the crowds. I've since learned that there's always a line here, especially on Sundays. We had an hour's wait, but didn't mind very much. Well, that's not completely accurate. We actually met up with our friend John, who lives just north of the metro area in the town of White House, and he got here twenty minutes ahead of us and put his name on the list. He had the hour's wait and we just had forty minutes'.

It wasn't a bad wait. In the early 1950s, Lon and Annie Loveless turned their property into an old motor court motel surrounding their house on Highway 100. It's no longer active that way; the old rooms have been converted into shops. Most of these sell knicknacks and tourist geegaws, although the building on the west side of the property does a roaring trade in jams, preserves and vegetables like pickled beets. There's a Harley store in one of the old rooms on the east side. It was closed Sunday morning, but it's obviously in the right place; the Loveless Cafe brings in about as many bikers as they do traveling retirees in RVs, many of them set to ride the 444 mile Natchez Trace Parkway into Mississippi. After a quick look in the country store for me to buy a bottle of Boylan's birch beer and for Marie to buy some things for our pantry and some gifts, the three of us sat in the gorgeous sunshine and caught up for twenty minutes or so before we were buzzed to come get a table.





It's pretty clear that we can't experience quite what the Loveless Cafe used to be. The usual comment that I've seen around is that it, like many other restaurants, has lost a little spark in all the years of expansion and repaving and ownership changing hands. On the other hand, while we may never know how the Loveless might have tasted in its heyday, what they serve up in the present is still very good, and every order gets a plate of some knock-you-on-your-backside tasty biscuits and a few jams, including a very good blackberry. Since Annie Loveless first got the idea to make a little extra money by serving some biscuits on her front porch in 1951, and the restaurant, today, makes a lot of hay over it, they obviously see that they're putting their reputation on the line with them. I'm glad to say that these are among the best biscuits that I've ever had. I may have enjoyed a better biscuit sometimes, but not often.

Marie had fried chicken, as she often does, accompanied by sweet potatoes, which she never does, and a bowl of quite wonderful tomato soup. John chose to have breakfast and had all the usual trimmings. I suppose I was distracted by what a nice day it was and what a pity we had to spend it indoors, despite all the wonderful decorations, including a collection of garish and loveable portraits of country music celebrities done in a style somewhere between Esther Pearl Watson and the late Reverend Howard Finster, because I had been secretly hoping that somebody was going to order their famous country ham so that I could ask to pilfer a bite. I completely forgot.

Myself, between a delicious burger the night before and a not delicious but necessary chicken sandwich at three or four in the morning, I was still pretty full and scaled down my plans. I had already, cunningly, elected to avoid the menu envy that I always get by simply avoiding a main entree and just having a four-veggie plate. As I wasn't as hungry as I could have been, I downscaled that to a three-veggie plate, and I still couldn't finish even that, leaving the hashbrown casserole, the least of the three but still quite tasty, mostly untouched. But the biscuits, the fried green tomatoes and the pickled beets were all just wonderful.

At this stage, with hour-long waits and regular national media attention, the Loveless Cafe is far less something for the locals and more a major tourist attraction. Their formula certainly works; it strikes me, now that I've visited it, that Cracker Barrel, which started in the late '60s just down the road in Lebanon, seems to have modeled its whole operation after Loveless and added the words "old-timey" on some labels. Well, and they give tables a peg game instead of some superb biscuits. I'll take the biscuits; even if not particularly hungry, they're a heck of a lot more welcome than any damn fool game.



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Jack in the Box, Nashville TN

I have readers in other states who no doubt are raising an eyebrow to see a junky fast food place like this show up in their RSS reader. Hear me out, though. In the Atlanta area, Jack in the Box is a complete novelty, because this chain has very oddly chosen a curious path in its coast-to-coast expansion. Somehow, and I'm not sure this was an accident, they've hopped right over the entire I-75 corridor. Ubiquitous in California and the southwest, they expanded as far east as Murfreesboro, and then there's not a thing until you get to the Carolinas. Our friend Samantha suggests that the nearest to us is in Anderson. They haven't touched anyplace in Virginia or points north, nor Florida. It's very weird.

The other really odd thing is that they've completely upgraded their logo and appearance but the restaurants and stores in the southeast still have the older, square logo with the capital letters. Their advertising and ancillary products like take-out bags and sandwich wrappers have a new logo with a fancy J, lower case letters, and the square has become a fake cube with a solid "shadow." It's an oddly elegant design choice for food so... inelegant. It's also very weird to see multiple branding on one product. I was speaking with somebody who works in marketing a few weeks ago, and she reminded me of the confused example of Hardee's, shortly after they were bought by Carl's Jr., maintaining the old logo on some stores with their modern menu, and the new logo on stores that still used the old menu, sometimes just one interstate exit apart from each other. Jack in the Box feels like that.

I took the photos below at night, with apologies for the poor lighting. It is appropriate in its own smug way, because the best time, perhaps, to enjoy Jack in the Box is at three in the morning, drunk. This is food for alcoholics and teenagers.





Well, I wasn't drunk when I made my late-night run to the Jack in the Box across the street from our hotel in Nashville, but I did wake around three, horribly dehydrated and feeling awful. I had two cups of water, but decided that I really needed something carbonated and a little food. Fortunately, Jack in the Box stores are open 24 hours. This just goes back to what I've said all along about when and where to eat. When you're at home, never eat anything that you can find someplace else. When you're someplace else, never eat anything that you can find at home. So Jack in the Box is a curious novelty for us. I've only eaten here maybe seven or eight times and found them perfectly serviceable fast food burgers. I imagine that I might have found a better meal somewhere else, but at three in the morning, I can't tell McGavock Pike from Gallatin Pike from any other Pike in this city full of sprawling pikes and have no idea where any better three in the morning meal can be found.

While I'm familiar with Jack in the Box's serviceable burgers, I had a simply terrific one at Pied Piper six or seven hours previously and didn't wish to follow that up with a fast food imitation, so I had a spicy chicken sandwich. One amusing thing about the fast food industry is that nothing exceeds like success. Whichever chain first came up with a spicy chicken - it was possibly Wendy's - did not find themselves in the driver's seat for long, because they all have spicy chicken now. On the other hand, perhaps I've had enough habanero sauce to have burned away certain receptors on my tongue, because I have only Jack in the Box's word that the sandwich that I ordered was spicy.

The other thing I had was something that has not been imitated elsewhere. Jack in the Box's ultimate drunk food is on their value menu. Two tacos for ninety-nine cents. These are, I assure you, quite unlike anybody else's tacos. They're curious and intrigue me in much the same way that my fascination with the really disgusting "Redpop" flavor of Faygo leads me to sample it every so often, and encourage others in my company to do the same, just so I can see their eyeballs sink back six inches. These tacos can't be considered good, and not even serviceable in the way that their sandwiches are. I'm not even sure what the heck sort of meat they think they're putting in these shells, nor what they've done to the shells to make them impossible to accidentally crack in the wrapper like will happen at with a Taco Bell taco, but I imagine the whole affair must have been assembled to absorb alcohol in the stomach. If you've never had the dubious, oddball pleasure of these tacos, always two, always ninety-nine cents, just imagine deep-fried catfood with lettuce.

Every so often, when I'm visiting with friends and the subject of out-of-town fast food comes up, one or more of us will occasionally wish for some of these interlopers to move in. Wouldn't it be nice if that Burger King down the road would shutter, and a Jack in the Box, a Whataburger, a Culver's, a Roy Rogers, open in its place? We have more than enough Burger Kings in Atlanta, and no Skyline Chilis or Moby Dicks or Arctic Circles. But that would kill the novelty, and quickly. All that would be left is some place we can avoid at any time and any place.

But I'll tell you what, dehydrated and woozy at three in the morning and no pantry with food of my own, that spicy chicken was pretty darn good. Even the taco. But only one of them. Not two.

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Pied Piper Eatery, Nashville TN

I am running a little bit behind in sharing stories from our most recent road trip; we just had so much going on and enjoyed so many small, fun meals that we developed a little backlog of entries. Anyway, the road took us to Owensboro and back, with an overnight stay in one of our favorite cities, Nashville. This town, of course, has no shortage of very, very good restaurants. Since I made some friends here more than a decade ago, I've had some really great meals in their company. In the summer of last year, some our friends introduced us to Pied Piper Eatery in the Inglewood neighborhood northeast of downtown. It's the sister restaurant of the long-running, much-loved Pied Piper Creamery, and is owned by family members, though they try not to cannibalize ice cream sales at the Creamery too much by only offering one or two flavors at a time.

What the Eatery offers instead is one of the most funky, silly and eclectic interiors of any place in town. There are assuredly wilder and weirder out there, but this place, in keeping with the spirit of Music City USA, is like dining in a jukebox, with incredibly goofy music-named entrees and table space decorated with memorabilia from various famous artists. On our third and most recent visit last month, we ate at the Boy George table.





We've tried several different things at the Eatery, and I think that they are doing themselves a disservice by not hawking their burgers a little more. All of their sandwiches are good, and I'm quite a fan of their Monty Python Cristo, but if there is a better cheeseburger in Nashville, I have not found it in more than two dozen visits. I've had very good burgers in town, but these are my favorite. They also serve up some terrific appetizers, like the amazingly good fried pickles ("Mustang Sally," for some reason), and wonderful sides like corn salsa and french fries. My burger, served with peppers and salsa, was called La Bamba.

This time out, a very sleepy Marie only wanted a grilled cheese. Here, the sandwich in question is called a Clay Aiken. If you can remember who the heck Clay Aiken is, then it still might take you a second to figure out why he got the name of that dish. Maybe a more timeless name might be "The Barry Manilow." It was a great sandwich, piled with delicious cheese and tomatoes. Marie and I have a policy against letting children order grilled cheese sandwiches from kids' menus, thinking them overpriced for something that Marie can make at home. But Pied Piper does such a good job with it that we told our daughter that if she can ever join us for a meal here, then she can have a Clay Aiken.

Getting over being sick and worn out from all the road tripping, this was just what Marie needed to ensure an eleven-hour food coma back at our hotel. Myself, I didn't sleep so well, but I'll tell you more about that next time.

Anyway, it's possible that some of the names on the menu might get rotated or upgraded in the near future. Our server told us that they're going to be making some changes to the menu in the coming weeks. Whatever is planned, the great meals I've had here make me confident that under the watchful eyes of black velvet paintings of country music greats - and you should see the Elvis in the gents' - I hope guests will be enjoying terrific, fun food here for a long time to come.

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Bluegrass Kitchen, Charleston WV

(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.)

One day, not immediately, but one day soon, Marie and I are going to move from Atlanta to some place a little north of here. We've since decided that it will be Asheville, fingers crossed, but when we started discussing the future in 2007, we assembled a short list of towns that we might find attractive, and which would not make my children's distance from their mother in Louisville, Kentucky any longer than it presently is. Marie read up on some towns in that radius and suggested that we add Charleston, West Virginia to that short list. She'd never seen the place; I had passed through briefly one evening in 2006 on my way to Toronto and found the city very charming. As we began constructing our honeymoon road trip, I decided to retrace that two-day drive to Toronto and linger in Charleston for a longer stay to let us consider the town at length.

Naturally, one thing worth considering is whether there's anything to eat in Charleston. I was helped a great deal by that city's small foodie network, which seems to congregate around some really terrific blogs like the delightfully-named Fork You. At the time, I was working for a company up in Alpharetta. I would take lunch from eleven to noon (and at the time, I was earning enough to justify eating out every day, which was nice), and from noon to one, I would cover the receptionist desk while she ate. This gave me an hour to read about restaurants in other cities, sensibly after I'd finished a good meal already. I lurked on Fork You and other blogs and message boards for several days before narrowing the choices for supper in Charleston down to Tasty Fish and Bluegrass Kitchen, two restaurants owned by the same people. Marie picked the latter.





Well, we got to Charleston... eventually. We were shooting for arriving at a comic shop that I had read about online around 4.30 but the traffic delays on the interstates in North Carolina and Virginia – more than an hour – had us finding the city at 5.45, well after the shop had closed. On a Saturday. Anyway, the long-faded “Marvel Comics on sale here!” sign didn’t actually inspire me with confidence. It looks, from what I saw online and from the outside of the store like something pretty disappointing anyway, so never mind.

I have to say that Charleston’s southern areas are less than inspiring, although the McCorkle Avenue exit is pretty fantastic – it’s like exiting down a spiral slide. Charleston’s downtown is much easier on the eye. The state capitol building is really gorgeous and there’s a small, if active, urban community.

I recall that we had to drive around a bit to find parking for Bluegrass Kitchen, settling on a lot about a block away. There was already a wait despite the early hour, and we ended up, after about fifteen minutes, sitting at the bar, We had a very nice conversation with our server / bartender about the city and what she likes and doesn’t like about this little part of West Virginia, and it really does seem like a good place, with good people

I had some pretty good enchiladas and some downright fantastic fried green tomatoes. Marie had a knockdown amazing dish of “rags pasta” in piri-piri tomato sauce with shredded beef and smoked Gouda cheese. Everybody seems to like Bluegrass Kitchen, and with good reason. It’s a shame that the corner of the city they’ve found hasn’t reawakened yet. In a city like Atlanta, it’s the sort of neighborhood you’d think twice about walking around in, as many of their neighbors have closed up shop and it doesn’t give off a “returning to life” vibe so much as an “on life support” one. I hope a couple more businesses step in to that intersection soon.

We weren't quite done with Charleston after supper, but more about that next month.