Mayflower Restaurant, Athens GA

The last time I went to Athens, in January with Randy, we stopped at the very good Bar-B-Q Shack. Upon reflection, what we should have done then, for thematic reasons that I like to keep in order, was gone to the Mayflower Restaurant downtown. That's because Randy's father, a wonderful man who was lost to us in a stupid traffic accident about eight years ago, had been a student at the University of Georgia in the mid-1950s, by which time the Mayflower was already established. In a town with restaurant turnover as brutal as Athens, finding a place that's been around for twenty years is uncommon. A place like the Mayflower, which opened in 1948, is one of a kind.

I plan all this nonsense out well in advance, and was wondering while at the Bar-B-Q Shack what I might have when I next came to town. As we left, Randy asked me whether I knew where the Iron Horse was. Of course, I did, so I drove him out there. The Horse has been a point of interest in his family's stories, because Randy's father was actually a resident of Reed Hall when a big group of outraged, mocking students lit a fire underneath the ugly thing outside his window in the spring of 1954. There's a school of art department thought - it actually fueled a documentary that I have not seen - that this incident was a crime against the art world. See, some fine arts teacher figured, wrongly, that 1954 Athens was exactly the place for an eleven foot high abstract sculpture of a horse, and planted the very ugly beast in the residential quad nearest the football stadium. Sanford was only about a quarter of its present size at the time, but if you stood in the top bleacher on the north side and threw a rock over Reed, you could have hit this horse.

This was 1954 and Athens was a podunk town with a segregated state university. Elvis Presley was two years from a top ten single and Jerry Lee Lewis three. For anybody to have got the idea that the place was ready for abstract art, particularly this monstrosity, I'd suggest mental illness if Marie wasn't telling me to quit being mean. It is an ugly and ungainly thing, the sort of thing Duchamp might have made, only Duchamp wouldn't have been so vulgar as to call it a horse. He'd have called it "A Chorus Line" or something.

I mention this because when you sit in the Mayflower, you can see the ghosts of undergraduates from fifty years ago. They're blond and crew cut and they wear flannel and they say "Barney's uncle's got a mattress and I can get a few buckets of pine straw and tonight, we're going to set that stupid horse on fire."





In other words, if the Mayflower has changed at all in the last half-century, heaven knows how. I suppose the prices have gone up, but that is about it. The original owner, Clarence Fulcher, sold the business to the Vaughn family in 1963. It's been in its second generation of family ownership since Ricky Vaughn took over in 1991. Over the years, there have been many more traditional meat-and-three places to open within walking distance, many of them bringing a contemporary touch to an old-styled southern meal. At the Mayflower, they do the classics and they do them the classic way. It means that the restaurant is often overlooked in favor of younger and more exciting places like Five Star Day or Mama's Boy, but if you want chicken livers, collards and lima beans, you're almost certainly going to get the best meal of that type here.

I've had lunch at the Mayflower only a few times over the years, but never had breakfast, which many other writers have said is really special. I probably should have done something about that on my visit last week, but was really in the mood for some mac and cheese. I was by myself on this most recent trip; I'd invited David to come up with me, but he passed on coming along, leaving me alone to finish reading Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, a book which my father had treasured, probably because if he could have turned our family's home into a crazy old southern junkyard like the one described in this book, he would have. Dad would kind of miss the point of books like this.

The Mayflower offers burgers, chicken and sandwiches every day of the week, but their meat and veggies change daily. Fortunately, I came on a mac and cheese day, although sadly not a creamed corn day as well. I went with country fried steak and gravy, mac and cheese and a salad. This proved to be an excellent little salad with shockingly tasty tomatoes and really good thousand island dressing, although I am kind of kicking myself for not trying their vidalia onion dressing. I bet that is just superb. For seven bucks, that was a really good lunch, and it really made me wish that I could get up here much more often. Unfortunately, with gas prices going the way that they are, I really, really can't justify more than one trip to Athens a month.

I ate here a few times in the late nineties and 2000 before moving back to Atlanta, and there has been one completely awesome addition since my last visit. By the door, there's a fantastic little treasure that any visitor to Athens needs to see: a caricature of the Vaughn family by Jack Davis, featuring three of its members in Pilgrim dress, which the artist drew in 2004. The Mayflower was not the first restaurant that I've visited this year with Jack Davis artwork on the wall - the Old Brick Pit in Atlanta was - and I hope that it won't be the last. Because really, some of you good readers might take my word for what makes a good restaurant in Georgia, or you might have any one of dozens of other foodies, critics and bloggers out there whose words you consider when thinking about what you might can find to eat, but when you get the Jack Davis seal of approval, you know that you have found someplace special.

Vingenzo's, Woodstock GA

Well, here's a surprise. This pizza restaurant in Woodstock completely blindsided me. A couple of years ago, when everybody was going nuts - and rightly so - about the mighty and wonderful Varasano's, this place calmly opened and casually revealed a product every bit as good, only with a wider menu and a much more laid-back and relaxed atmosphere, with no pretension or artifice. Seriously, I've had several truly great pies at Varasano's, and one visit which was a little disappointing, but Vingenzo's is every bit as wonderful as Varasano's at their best and, honestly, surpasses them in an area or two. I think that I might have found a new favorite pizza place in the Atlanta area.

Neopolitan pies are the order of the day here. Just about everything is handmade, down to the cheeses, and served up on eleven-inch pies. I think that two of these should feed three people.





On Wednesday, the four of us came up here, meeting our friends Neal, Donna and Eric for supper. My daughter was under orders not to protest or make any hints; she was on my list for overindulging at breakfast. My son, getting over a cold, had lost his voice, and so he, literally, pointed out several interesting pies from their menu that he'd like to try. I recommend that everybody try this out themselves one day soon. It's so much nicer and more pleasant selecting pizza when one child cannot protest and the other has been strongly warned not to.

We had an awesome server who went over everything and made some suggestions, encouraging us to try their mozzarella pairings. These appetizers, priced between $7-10 each, give you a good portion of cheese along with something else to complement the taste. I tried the very soft mozzarella di bufala with a little pepper, served with a few leaves of mixed greens and two white anchovies. It was completely delicious. Neal had a different, creamier cheese, Stracciatella di Burrata, that came with greens, cherry tomatoes and capers. If you're sharing, then for $18 you can get the "Grand Tasting," which gives you each of Vingenzo's three cheeses along with the small salad, peppers, capers and two types of olives. You don't get the delicious anchovies this way, but I expect that many of my readers probably don't care for those anyway.

Marie was not feeling especially hungry, so she enjoyed a bowl of pasta e fagioli soup for dinner along with a good bit of bread. You'll definitely want to try this; it's a pizza crust, basically, with olive oil and a little parmesan. The children and I, meanwhile, split two pizzas and I think that we chose well. The Regina comes with sausage and wild mushrooms and that was pretty knockdown good on its own, but the other pie, Bianca con Prosciutto e Fontina, was the master stroke. It came with prosciutto and a heap of arugula atop more of this amazing cheese. It is very similar to the excellent Nucci pizza at Varasano's, but heaven help me, I liked this even better. I don't know where the notion of mixing arugula and salty meats together originated, but I sure am glad that somebody figured it out.

Vingenzo's also makes fresh pasta - Neal said that his was wonderful and Donna and Eric also enjoyed their linguine - with a variety of sauces and toppings that all sound amazing. With an introductory meal this good and a menu this dense, this is absolutely a place that needs revisiting, and without delay. Heck, one of these days, I'd like to start working on the wine list here, too. I am really glad that we found this place, and look forward to another visit soon.

Tin Can Fish House and Oyster Bar, Sandy Springs GA

I'd been hoping for several weeks to get a chance to visit Tin Can Fish House and Oyster Bar, as several of the region's food writers have been raving about it. This past Saturday, Marie wanted to visit a maternity consignment shop in Buckhead. It was a really gorgeous and warm day - far too warm for it to really be February! - and so the two of us left the children to their own devices and drove over to Sandy Springs for an early lunch. We arrived a little too early, as it turned out - they do not open until 11.30 - and so that gave us twenty minutes to walk around the curious strip mall where the restaurant is located. The development is centered around a Kroger, but rather than a conventional strip, it's four or five short two-story buildings, all hidden above and behind Roswell Road and Hammond. It's really not that easy to find; basically, if you are standing at the entrance to Kroger, then Tin Can is ahead of you and to the right, next door to their older sister restaurant, Teela Taquiera.

Interestingly, it appears that the spot was previously taken by the same brother and sister ownership team's Italian restaurant, but back in September, they elected to convert it to a seafood place. They had previously run a seafood restaurant called Fishmonger in the same area of town. I never tried it, but it was said to be pretty good. I read an article over at the Atlanta Business Chronicle where co-owner Arte Antoniades said that our area was lacking in casual, relaxed places to get good seafood. I'd agree with that. It's all big-roomed family places full of long waits and screaming kids or high-end joints.

The closest that I can recall of a simple, no-wait place for great, reasonably-priced seafood was Blue Ocean in Alpharetta. Unfortunately, they chose to build on Windward Parkway and were part of that gigantic and regular restaurant turnover that I mentioned in this blog earlier in the month.





Tin Can certainly has the casual and relaxed part down pat. Despite the trappings of the very nice strip mall, this is a really laid-back and friendly place. Marie picked a table by the window - we missed a trick not going outside, but then again it was awfully bright - with a wobbly bit on the floor that no chair would evenly sit. She ordered grilled grouper with a salad and saffron rice. The salad was excellent - mixed greens with tomatoes, figs and walnuts in a light balsamic dressing, although the rice was a little saltier than she liked.

The grouper itself was really tasty, but I preferred my selection. I had the standard cod and fries with slaw, and if there's a better seafood meal around town for nine bucks, I never heard of it. The cod was flaky and delicate and just wonderful. The shoestring fries were almost just right; they could have used a hair of the salt from Marie's rice. The slaw was really good, with just the right blend of vinegar and thin mayo. I also ordered a side of fried green tomatoes, unsurprisingly. A side order comes with three slices and a small cup of spicy remoulade.

Honestly, the cod and grouper were as good as any I've had, and for a little bit less than I'm used to spending. It's a hair more of a drive from our neighborhood than would be ideal, but it's certainly worth another visit the next time we are in the area. And relaxing with some good food like this put me in a much better mood than I had been, just in time to spend the next hour or so thumbing through baby clothes. See, told you I'd be diverting some of our disposable income and dining money on clothes for the kid. I'm not a complete beast.

Thumbs Up Diner, Atlanta GA

The problem with mile-long to-do lists, like mine, is that I cannot remember how on earth some of the things that have been on there the longest got there in the first place. Take Thumbs Up Diner, for instance. I haven't been in Decatur in months, but one time I was there, I pointed out the Thumbs Up location there - it is one of five in the Atlanta area - to Marie and told her that I had heard you can get a really good breakfast here and that we need to stop in one of these days. Not long afterward, our friend David, who's always looking out for a good place to eat, forwarded me a link to the restaurant's web site. "Yep," I said. "It's on the list!" So are, if we're honest, something like fifty other places. I have really got to get up to Cincinnati to take care of the three or four places up there I want to try.

The problem, as ever, is finding the free time and the pennies to make it to any place at the same time that my enthusiasm and curiosity push a place up to the top of the wishlist. It helps that Thumbs Up has a location about a mile from where I work, and so, with a short day last week, I decided to drive over to the Marietta Street location for a late breakfast. It has a beautiful view of the midtown skyline, except some guy at Georgia Tech decided to stick the backside of some big athletic facility in the way.





I spent what seemed like a lot of time trying to figure out what I wanted. I hear that their pancakes and waffles are really good, and thought about trying one, but I went with one of the house specialties, The Heap, instead. This is a skillet filled with cheesy potatoes, scrambled eggs, onions and peppers, and I added chicken. I'm very glad that I resisted the temptation to get a waffle with it, because the Heap alone was considerably more food than any one person needs, and I was not able to finish it. It wasn't at all bad, but it needed some salt and pepper and Texas Pete hot sauce to bring things to life. It came with a very tasty biscuit. That, I did finish.

My little breakfast was a very pleasant getaway. I didn't learn anything much about the diner; even if the waitresses weren't busy refilling coffee throughout their near-full house, I really just felt like relaxing in a nice, reasonably quiet place and watching the world pass by. Sadly, there's not a lot of pedestrian traffic on this stretch of Marietta Street, so I couldn't do much in the way of people watching. But for sitting back with a good book and watching the world go by, this is a fine place to do it. Might have to do it again sometime soon, now that it's no longer collecting dust on a to-do list.

Bradley's BBQ, Sweetwater TN

When I learned that I'd be making a second out-of-state trip in two weeks, I was really pleased. I realized a little more than a year ago that my dream job would be driving around the country and eating. If I could get out of town with some family or friends three times a month, I'd do it. The problem - and I use that world loosely - is finding the new things that would make this adventure perpetually thrilling. Over the year or so that Marie and I have been doing this blog, we've been eating at known favorites less and less in favor of trying new places. There are one or two big favorites of ours in Atlanta that we haven't revisited all year.

Take Knoxville, for instance. With my son and I in town for some family business, I knew that I would like to enjoy two small meals alongside a little of the shopping that I enjoy in that good city. Before I started the blog, I might try one new place, but then swing by Petro's Chili and Chips for a snack on our way out of town. But because my focus is on trying more new things, I looked a little further afield, and thought that maybe we should find someplace new to us. So I got a couple of ideas around I-75, and decided to let my son pick, based on how hungry he was. We could either stop for a barbecue sandwich in the town of Sweetwater, or he could wait an hour and we could grab something on our side of Chattanooga in the north Georgia town of Ringold. This was a sucker bet; my son was born ravenously hungry, and doesn't much care about having small portions a couple of hours apart; he'd rather have one gigantic meal and hibernate for a while, and the less walking around, the better. His body's going to make him regret that decision. Hopefully, he'll figure it out.

If you're in the market for large portions, Bradley's BBQ in Sweetwater, a round and easy-to-remember sixty miles north of the Georgia line, is what you need. I told my son up front that we had split a small pizza just two hours previously and that he could only have a sandwich and one side. He grumbled and pled for more, and looked longingly at the giant plates being brought to the tables around us. Oh, and I made him take a walk after that half a pizza and only allowed him water to drink. What cruel taskmaster am I, to try and restrict his calories and make him exercise a little?

Sweetwater is the home of the Lost Sea, one of the all-time great tourist attractions. It's an enormous cave with a freakishly big underground lake. If you want to get an idea of how big they're talking about, check out this report by a gentleman who mapped out some of the lake in 1975 before the exploration was called off due to safety reasons. There could be a live pleisiosaur down there and we wouldn't know it. I've been three times; it's terrific fun. I'm glad to report that, with Bradley's BBQ, there's a second reason to pull off at exit 60.



One of the things that struck me the most about our visit was how radically different the crowd was from the group with whom we had enjoyed pizza at Knoxville's Tomato Head earlier in the evening. Despite being around since 1990, Tomato Head is drawing a very young, hip crowd of twentysomethings. Until we finally spotted a few scattered whitehaired men and women having supper with their college-aged children, I was quite convinced that I was the oldest person there. Bradley's, meanwhile, is a much younger restaurant - I believe that it opened in 2005 - but the community in Sweetwater and nearby Athens - eastern Tennessee borrowed the names of all its towns from other states - is much older. This is very much a nice family restaurant that gets a lot of its business from people looking for a nice Friday or Saturday evening out. I was pleasantly reminded of the way that Zeb Dean's in Danielsville has its quite large crowd of Saturday night regulars. The large restaurant seems to employ a small army of servers, who somehow avoid banging into each other going in and out of some very badly-planned doors to the kitchen.

Unless I missed it, Bradley's didn't have any stew on the menu, so we each had a pulled pork sandwich. My son had his with a side of cole slaw - very creamy and not diced to oblivion - and I had homemade potato chips. The meat was very moist and incredibly flavorful, and really didn't need much sauce, but they have three on each table. I liked their vinegar best; they also have a quite thick sweet sauce and a not very lethal hot sauce. Nothing from our modest selections really knocked me off my chair, and nor was this meal in any way better than the two previous meals that we'd enjoyed in Tennessee. On the other hand, the barbecue was better than any of the three types that Marie and I had enjoyed the week before on our eight-meal tour of the Carolinas. It all balances out if you look at it that way.

Of course, now, because I'm neurotic this way, I have a new problem. I gave my son the choice between two barbecue places; this one and the one in Ringold, Georgia. Now I've got something else on my wishlist and I'm going to have to find my way back up there sometime soon. No rest for the wicked, obviously.

The Tomato Head, Knoxville TN

If you've been following our stories here, you've read that my son has returned to the Atlanta area and is living with us again. When we started the blog about a year ago, my son had been with his mother in Louisville, Kentucky, for about five months. We were glad to have him back for spring break last year, and for a few months in the summer, and anticipated him returning this coming fall for high school. He decided over Christmas break, a few days before my father passed, that he wanted to stay with us, and not return to Louisville.

We were overjoyed. His mother in Kentucky was not. In her defense, my son did not handle the communication of this transition with a great deal of dignity or aplomb, but I didn't involve myself more than necessary, frankly, because I had rather more important problems on my plate at the time than the feelings of anybody to whom I used to be married. Nevertheless, at some point, we were going to have to have a little parlay with my boy's mother to get his clothes and belongings back, and for her to give him a bit of an earful. She had asked that we meet up in Knoxville, and I was pleased to compromise and meet her there. I wasn't pleased to be a mute witness to what very little that the wind allowed me to catch of their discussion, but I figured the least I could do is give him a good man-to-man pep talk and take him out for a really good meal at someplace special.

The initial plan had been to go for a Knoxville-style steamed sandwich like we'd enjoyed back in the summer at Nixon's. I selected a place near the University of Tennessee campus called Gus's that came highly recommended, but about an hour before I was due to leave, I read that Gus's is not middle school-age friendly. So I figured that pizza would be a good idea instead.

Marie's loss was my gain. By that, I mean that Marie would raise an eyebrow at trying any pie in Knoxville other than her beloved Pizza Palace, but since it was just my son and I going to Tennessee, I could try someplace else. The Tomato Head, located downtown in a very neat and lively pedestrian plaza called Market Square, has been getting rave reviews from people in the area, so I chose this popular spot, and was very glad to get there just before the place filled up. We had been shopping at McKay, the fantastic bookstore on Papermill Drive, until just before six before we drove downtown, found some parking and got the last table before the line started.





I thought this place was some brand-new eatery to be attracting the young mobs that it does on Friday nights, but it's actually been around for more than twenty years. It opened in 1990 as The Flying Tomato, a no-frills paper plate lunch place, where the owner, Mahasti Vafaie, served up specialty pizzas and salads with fresh-to-table ingredients. Vafaie, born in Iran in the sixties, was pretty far ahead of the curve; it's only in the last decade that farmers' market ingredients have become as common as they have in places like this. It helps that apparently, the pedestrian plaza of Market Square is occasionally the site of a farmers' market.

Tomato Head has gone through a lot of growing pains, and has occupied several locations in the same plaza. At one point, they were forced to move when an interior wall collapsed - not the sort of thing that struggling restaurateurs ever want to consider. But enthusiasm and word of mouth has grown as the pasta dishes and pizzas have become more adventurous. Put another way, while Pizza Palace represents the absolute best of what we think of as a traditional American pizza, Tomato Head exemplifies modern styles. The pie that my son and I shared was topped with lamb sausage, sun-dried tomatoes, olives and capers, ingredients you're not likely to find at a restaurant like the Palace that started fifty years ago. It was completely delicious. Tomato Head also serves one with smoked turkey, spinach and red onions. I decided to save that one until Marie could be in town with me, assuming I can pry her away.

I also got to enjoy a really nice appetizer of chips and hummus. The blue corn chips were as good as any I've had and the hummus was just wonderful. My son has not yet developed a taste for hummus, which was fine by me, as it left me with more. It also tasted amazing as a dip for the pizza crust.

Tomato Head's pies are only served by the slice at lunch. In the evenings, you can order a 9-inch personal-sized pie or a 14-inch pie, which is better for sharing. Since my son and I had plans for another meal on the ride home, we just split a 9-inch, with two slices apiece.

Then we enjoyed a nice walk around the plaza and, a block away, we shopped at Mast General Store. With the avenue that I'm used to taking into south Knoxville closed for bridge repairs, we took a new way, did a little comic shopping, and then made our way back towards Atlanta, and that second supper that I had planned. It wasn't the most pleasant trip to Knoxville that anybody ever made, but it turned out all right with a meal this good.

Zarzour's Cafe, Chattanooga TN

Here's a really interesting restaurant that I supposed I would not get the chance to try. Zarzour's Cafe opened in 1918 and has a wonderful reputation for their meat-and-three meals, but, sadly, the restaurant, for years, has only been open from 11 am to 2 in the afternoon, and only on weekdays. That's not a very good window for out-of-town guests! Fortunately, they have elected to stay open a little bit longer each weekday - to the comparatively late hour of 3.30 - even though the kitchen itself still closes at 2. Guests in this last ninety minute window can still order some of their very famous burgers, grilled up by an exceptionally sassy lady who let us know how she drank her way out of college in Knoxville. Yes, this place is a dive in the finest possible sense of the word, and I love it absolutely.

My son and I had business up the road in Knoxville last Friday evening, and I realized that, if I timed it right, I could get to Chattanooga and maybe have some of that baked spaghetti that I read about at Roadfood.com. Unfortunately, I couldn't quite manage it. My daughter narrowly escaped getting in trouble over some other student's drama and, conferring with an administrator about things, I didn't leave the school with my son until after 12.30, and then forgot - I've lived here almost eight years and forgot - that the road in front of Town Center Mall is completely gridlocked during the lunch hour. So we didn't get to Zarzour's until around 2.30, and missed the day's specials.

Yeah, I know, for all that hay that I made about that recent trip through the Carolinas being mine and Marie's last out-of-state trip together, I turned around the very next week and ran up to Tennessee. I never said that I was going to have to slow down until the baby's born. Although I probably should divert at least a little gasoline and dining money into baby clothes. That would be the decent thing to do, I suppose.

So, anyway, we missed the kitchen's three-hour window on Friday, but that's okay, as it looks like they didn't have baked spaghetti that afternoon anyway. They did have flounder, which would have been lovely. And green beans. Man, just as well that was a really, really good cheeseburger.





In fact, we were kept so long in Marietta that my son was, unfortunately, able to have a school lunch before we ran up I-75. So he missed out on a cheeseburger of his own - of course I shared - and just got dessert. They offered peanut butter pie. He had a bite, put down his spoon, pulled out his phone and told all his Facebook friends - three-quarters of whom were stuck in sixth period around this point - how good a slice of pie he just had. My son uses social media to be evil.

Zarzour's is a delightful place to linger. I love the wood-paneled walls and all the framed photos of the elder members of the Zarzour family, who ran this place for decades. I'm not certain whether it is still in family hands, but respect for the past, and disrespect for the present, is very much on display here. Cautioning any diners who may wish to try and out-sass the staff, the old photographs share space with several delightful signs about how they kindly don't charge for insults. It is a small dining room, but it is absolutely pulsing with activity, happy regulars, and travelers. One older gentleman present when we arrived was wearing the amazing combination of a classy suit jacket and leather pants. Another table was taken by a young couple from Missouri, returning home after sitting out the snow during a very well-timed trip to Florida. Like me, they'd been lured in during Zarzour's brief window of operating hours by the raves they'd read online.

My cheeseburger was superb; it was easily the best I've had in weeks, and certainly on par with the best burgers available in the Atlanta area. I would love the chance to swing back by one day soon. You know, David has mentioned that he's curious to see McKay, the remarkable used CD and bookstore chain in Tennessee with a branch in Chattanooga. Perhaps one Thursday, we can get up here for another burger, or some baked spaghetti, and hit a couple of book shops before trying out Sluggo's or Good Dog or one of the other popular places in town.

Speaking of McKay, my son and I had an appointment at the one ninety miles up the road, but that's a story for another time.

OU for U Cafe, Dunwoody GA

I first heard about OU for U Cafe several weeks ago, and was excited about having such a neat-sounding place available just a traffic light away from Marie's job. Since I have a couple of short days each week, then, assuming she's not trapped all day in meetings, I could take her to lunch somewhere in Dunwoody and get her back before her employer falls apart without her.

That might just happen when she takes maternity leave.

Despite a glowing review from Food Near Snellville, it was several weeks before Marie and I could get our schedules synched enough to have lunch together. It was certainly worth the wait; if there's a better lunch place in this neighborhood, it's news to me. There's a Rising Roll Gourmet about a stone's throw from OU for U, and it's not a tenth as good as the delicious, kosher food in this deli.

(If, unlike me, you actually have a brain, the "OU" pun might have clued you into this being a kosher business. Me, I read that it was kosher, and I saw the name, but was somehow unable to connect the dots. Then again, it took me more than a decade to figure out why comics writer Pat Mills named a squabbling double-act "Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein." Being married to a punster like Marie has not helped; it's just made me close my eyes.)





Considering the suggestions made by other writers, I told Marie that both the egg salad and the falafel came recommended. That worked for her; she ordered the egg salad and a small cup of cream of mushroom soup. I thought the egg salad was pretty good but not extraordinary, but the soup was really excellent. My own lunch was sort of the inverse of hers; I had a tomato-and-stuff soup that was okay, and not nearly enough bread along with it. I should have gone with the lentil soup; everybody seems to be raving about it.

Now, that falafel on the other hand... let me tell you about this. For many years, I have told and retold the story of these unbelievable falafels that I used to get in Athens.

In the mid-nineties, there was a gentleman - I used to think he was from Turkey, but a part of me is saying that's wrong - who came to Athens to clean house for his daughter while she was in a doctoral program at UGA. During the day, he rented a cart and started serving the sort of grub that he used to have back home from a little space on whatchacallit street, beneath Park and Leconte Halls and across from the P-J plaza, a discreet distance from the guy with the hot dog cart. I had a couple of pretty good sandwiches from him and then I tried his falafel and that was that. I had another falafel for lunch from this guy every single day for the rest of the quarter. Then the term ended, my work and class schedule became stupid, his daughter got her doctorate, and that was the end of the falafel cart.

OU for U didn't serve me a falafel that good, but it was the first time in fifteen years that I've had a falafel come close enough to remind me of what I've missed. Alternating between a little extra chilled tahini from a squeeze bottle and some punch-packed hot sauce, this was a remarkable little sandwich. I would not mind another trip out that way at all.

Stonewall's BBQ, Braselton GA

When I planned our eight-meal, 600-mile trip through South Carolina, I also divided up the driving chores, optimistic that Marie and I would each handle about half of the load. However, I noticed that she was really getting tired while I was driving back down I-85 from Charlotte. She passed on a snack at Spartanburg's Del Taco, was so beat by the time we arrived at The Beacon that she wasn't sure whether she wanted lettuce on her hamburger, and, taking the wheel for what was planned to be the 120-mile leg from Spartanburg to our final restaurant destination in Braselton, Georgia, she took a deep, deep breath and gave it her best, but still pulled over before we left the state, completely exhausted and unable to stay awake. She did a terrific job, but this road trip took an awful lot out of her. I took over the driving and she closed her very patient eyes for another well-deserved nap. She missed a really pretty sunset.

Just after seven, I pulled off for our last destination, a reasonably new barbecue restaurant near the interstate called Stonewall's. This is the first Georgia location, and seventh overall, for a small chain now based in Picayune, Mississippi. The business opened in 1995 in the town of Poplarville, about 25 miles north on I-59. They started franchising in 2007 and have opened three more stores in Mississippi and two in Louisiana. This location popped up towards the end of last year, and I heard about it when Amy on Food, one of my favorite Atlanta-area food bloggers, gave it a short but rave review last month.





I'm afraid that I can't be quite as enthusiastic as Amy was about this place, though it certainly was a pretty good little meal and I'm glad that we stopped to stretch our legs here. The barbecue was not at all bad, although I really did not like the very corporate look of the place. It aims for an old west look, and it succeeds about as well as the Lickskillet section at Six Flags Over Georgia. Guests walk through the dining area - picnic tables with benches, sadly, so this place isn't friendly at all to customers with lower back pain - to order from trademark-heavy menu boards. The staff was incredibly upbeat and friendly on this Saturday evening, and the place was mostly full.

The barbecue was certainly quite good; in fact, I prefered it to the chopped pork that we enjoyed at Sconyers much earlier in the day. It had a really nice and heavy smoky taste to it. Marie again, claiming exhaustion, passed on enjoying a meal of her own. I ordered a sandwich packed with a very agreeable amount of meat, and a side of really good mac and cheese. The sauce is a basic, Memphis-style tomato-based sweet variety. It lacks a little flair, but that's okay, because one of the fellows behind the counter brought around small samples of the store's bread pudding for guests to try, and that dessert is absolutely packed with flair. Even if we're not necessarily in the mood for barbecue on our way through Jackson County, stopping here for a dessert cup of bread pudding is a terrific idea for a snack.

The strip mall that houses Stonewall's is also home to a consignment shop with what appeared to be a completely unpronouncable name. Thanks to an apparent accident at the sign company, the big letters out front clearly read "Rltzl Reruns." We had fun trying to figure out what the heck kind of language that was, and how you said something like that. We rolled a sound that was sort of like "Rulltzull" around for several minutes before realizing from the actual print on the door that those large, lower-case Ls should have been lower-case Is, and the word was "Ritzi." Okay, so maybe that wasn't really all that humorous, but it had been 500 miles and change so far, and we still had to pick up the children from Smyrna and get home to Marietta. It was a long, glorious and wonderful day, and Marie's probably going to punch me in the eye once we have this baby in May and I give it maybe two minutes before asking whether we can leave the tyke with somebody and get back on the road again.

The Beacon, Spartanburg SC

The high point of our trip through the Carolinas came with the seventh stop. We'd enjoyed some pretty good eating experiences along the way, but the most fun and most different pleasure of the tour came at a very famous restaurant in Spartanburg called The Beacon. I had heard this place referred to as similar to Atlanta's legendary Varsity, but that doesn't really begin to explain how wild and awesome it is. This is absolutely a place that everybody in the southeast should try at least once.

You're not going to get high-end cuisine here. This is the place for artery-bursting burgers, fries and onion rings. Ordering a burger "a'plenty" means that your sandwich will come buried underneath a heap of greasy, delicious rings and fries. But just as The Varsity supplements its menu with neat things like pimento cheese sandwiches and barbecue, at the Beacon, you can find some really interesting treats. While Marie, after some hesitation and consideration, settled on a burger, I ordered something I'd never heard of before: a hash burger along with a small cup of chicken mull. Happily, this little obsession of mine, best known around Athens, GA, is very much present here, although termed "chicken stew," as it is occasionally called when spotted in South Carolina. They'll even give you a free sample of it.





The Beacon's been around since 1946, and only left its founder's family's hands in the mid-nineties. Many of the same long, long-serving employees still work here six days a week. The first one a new guest is likely to meet is JC, who's been with the Beacon for decades calling out orders. The expectation here is that you either know what you want, or that you're going to accept the menu that JC hands you and get out of the way until you've figured it out.

Marie was overcome by a perfectly understandable sense of fatigue as we pulled into the Beacon's enormous parking lot. It was almost five and the Saturday supper rush was just about to start. Marie knew that she wanted a burger, but wasn't sure about much of anything beyond that. So I asked JC whether we could get a menu and stepped back for Marie to look over it.

"What's the difference between a Beacon burger and a hamburger," she mumbled to me, barely audible.

JC replied in a holler: "Beacon burger's got two patties, hamburger's got one, dressed as you like. What you want on it, darlin'?"

"I don't... think I need two patties," said Marie, somewhat untruthfully, as protein and iron were definitely on the evening's order of business.

"Well, you just get a hamburger, and what you want on it?" he asked. Marie mumbled back a small list of toppings and JC tilted his head back and bellowed her order. Somewhere in the back, a crew, tick-tocking like the finest oiled machine I have ever seen, had her burger assembled in seconds. My hash burger - served with cole slaw on a bun - took not a measure longer. We took a tray and slowly made our way down a cafeteria-styled line, picking up our sandwiches and mull. Drinks awaited us right before the register. The Beacon claims to serve more sweet tea than anyplace else. It's unbelievably sweet, and comes with lemon added. I learned later that it was the owner who was working the register and, again with the speed of lightning, had our order calculated and my change ready almost before I had my bill out of the wallet. As many people as the Beacon serves, there is no time to mess around.

As for the food, well, the hamburger is not going to win any awards. It's okay. The hash burger, on the other hand, was incredibly interesting. This was my second helping of hash on Saturday, following the side of hash and rice down at Sconyers in Augusta, and I just loved it. The chicken mull was terrific as well, even better than the gloriously good stuff that they offer at the Butt Hutt in Athens. If this wasn't an eight-meal overeating day, we'd have had the rings and fries as well, and I'm regretting not giving those a try now. Looking at the giant, greasy pyramids on our fellow guests' tables, I was craving them, but figured I had done about enough damage to my system by this point.

Looking around, it's easy to find some negative reviews of the Beacon out there. Maybe it is not as good as it once was, and maybe the decades of grease have taken a toll on the tile floor, but this place is a sensory overload of an experience, and instantly one of my favorite places. I can't wait to try it again, and get some more of that mull and some of those rings, the sooner the better.

Del Taco, Spartanburg SC

Del Taco left the Atlanta market eight years ago and - no kidding - I have been missing it ever since. I have explained that I allow myself one locally-available fast food weakness, Krystal. If Del Taco were to move back into Atlanta, I'd enjoy one last styrofoam container of chili cheese fries eaten with a red plastic fork and sadly wave goodbye to Krystal, because I love Del Taco and that would be that. So when I learned that there was one in Spartanburg, my carefully-crafted seven-meal trip swelled to eight. There was just no way I was going to drive past a Del Taco without stopping. Man, was it ever good. Often times, almost all the time, the memory cheats on you, but Del Taco is, somehow, as good as I remember it.

But wait, perhaps you're asking. Isn't this, you know... the place that's just like Taco Bell? No, not even close. This is the place that Taco Bell had to spend a lot of money to get rid of.

When I was a kid, Del Taco was one of my favorite restaurants. There was one on South Cobb Drive at King Springs where we ate all the time. It was one of those buildings with the white paint and forest green roofs that don't seem to have survived the 1980s. Of course, kids don't know what's good and what's not, but three tacos from this place was enough to keep me thrilled. My parents didn't discover places like Monterrey or El Toro until I was eleven or twelve, so I grew up thinking that Del Taco's fast food was what Mexican food was. I expect that many more people have had their perception colored by the beans-n-rice, chips-n-salsa, El-This Los-That Americanized take on things.

Actually, now that I think about it, I had my wisdom teeth out in the summer of 1990, and I remember my mom drove me by this place on South Cobb afterward to bring back lunch for everybody, so it was still standing, and still white and green, then. I also remember being briefly disappointed that my mouth hurt too much to eat anything before losing consciousness for the rest of the day.

Within a few years, though, Taco Bell evidently got tired of being second fiddle to Del Taco in the Atlanta market. It was around the same time that the upstart flexed its muscles, started the "run for the border" campaign, upgraded its restaurants in this area and built dozens of new stores. It is not technically accurate to say that they sprang up overnight, but I swear one Friday, I was giving Randy a lift from Athens to his parents' house in Roswell, and we drove past a site on Holcomb Bridge Road that was a skeleton of lumber and studs. When I came back by on Sunday to collect him, that skeleton might have been a few weeks from operating, but it was visibly a Taco Bell. At the same time, Del Taco stores, such as the one about a mile away on 120, started closing in droves. Scuttlebutt suggested that a very aggressive franchisee had been buying Del Taco stores just to close them.

Shrinking by the week, Del Taco all but vanished, and from about 1994 to 2003, you could only find the restaurants sharing space with Mrs. Winner's. There was one up in Cumming, and one right by the interstate off Chamblee-Dunwoody Road, and one on GA-92 in Woodstock, and that was about it. When I moved to this house in Marietta in early 2003, I reflected that, among its advantages, it would be a short hop from Del Taco. But by March, the Del Taco menu was removed and they were only serving Mrs. Winner's chicken. All the Atlanta area stores closed in one fell swoop. By the end of last year, most of the Mrs. Winner's were also gone. Time's not kind to second- or third-tier fast food joints.





Always interested in regionally-available fast food, I occasionally read the various Wikipedia pages about restaurants I can't get around these waters. A few weeks ago, I learned that Del Taco returned to South Carolina with a store in Spartanburg right off the interstate and had Google Maps pulled up within three-quarters of a second. The Spartanburg store opened in June, 2009. By chance, when we left the town of Rock Hill earlier in the trip, we drove past South Carolina's second Del Taco; it opened in late 2010.

We got to Spartanburg about an hour and a half after leaving Charlotte and quickly found the place. Marie passed on anything here, not quite completely stuffed, but knowing that the next stop in our trip was just a few minutes away and she didn't want to miss that. I was also a little leery about spoiling a memorable meal, and so I "just" ordered two tacos. The store's menu is a little confusing; they seem to offer the same basic tasting item in four separate sizes: a taco, a classic taco, a deluxe taco and a macho taco. We were the restaurant's only guests - even in 1980, I doubt that Del Tacos were all that busy at 4.30 on a Saturday afternoon - and so nobody got to hear me go "mmmmmmm" over my tacos drenched in "Del Scorcho" sauce. Well, I remember it as Del Scorcho. It's "Del Inferno" now.

I told the manager (I guess) how happy I was to try these again and wished that Del Taco would move back to Atlanta. He was under the impression that the franchisee who runs the two South Carolina stores is actually based in Atlanta, so it might actually be possible. Until then, I'm going to have to conspire to get back to Spartanburg again sometime, and consider how best to arrange a repeat visit. With a 24-hour drive-thru, it will certainly make stopping by in the future easier than lining up a trip to this darn supper-only joint in Jackson that we want to try, or all the countless places on our wishlist that are closed on Sundays or Mondays. In 2013, should we be living in Asheville and driving through Spartanburg on our way to and from Georgia's coast to see Marie's mother and her father, we could come or go anytime, and Del Taco will always be open. Or, heck, if we do that day trip to Charlotte that I mentioned in the previous chapter, we can swing by on our way home no matter how late.

And yes, I do make considerations on when I might visit second-tier fast food joints two years down the line. Doesn't everybody?



(Update 1/11/12: Sadly not. This location closed at the end of 2011. We'll have to wait for the pending opening of the Del Taco in Snellville GA in a month or so.)

Bar-B-Q King, Charlotte NC

A couple of weeks ago, the great city of Charlotte found itself at the center of a really dumb political debate centered around the quality of its barbecue. The 2012 Democratic National Convention will be held in Charlotte, and Michelle Obama was quoted as saying that, among other reasons she was looking forward to the event, she hoped to enjoy the city's "great barbecue." Cue The Charlotte Observer, who issued an editorial skeptical of Mrs. Obama's quote, as everybody knows that their city has no great barbecue. To get the best stuff, you have to drive an hour north to Lexington.

I haven't had the great pleasure of trying Lexington's many great restaurants myself. Absent a wealthy sponsor and an expense account for this blog, it'll probably have to wait, though I would certainly love to start one day in Lexington and eat our way east for about a week. I'll take it as understood that Charlotte is not the barbecue capital of North Carolina.

But that doesn't mean you have to trash your own city's contributions while rushing to praise other towns! I mean, come on, Georgia's best barbecue joints are nowhere near I-285 - the closest among the greats, Old MacDonald's in Buford, is thirty-odd miles north of the perimeter - but if somebody wanted to praise the "great barbecue" in Atlanta, we'd know that they were talking about Harold's and Fox Brothers and thank them for the compliment. It looked for all the world like the newspaper was just getting snarky because some Demmykrat dared say something nice about their town. And, frankly, as the home of Bill Spoon's, Charlotte and its paper's editorial board should know damn well that their city does have at least one great barbecue joint, one that the city should be proud to host.

Marie and I tried Bill Spoon's on our honeymoon in 2009. I asked her to select between that place and another that was recommended on Roadfood.com, the Bar-B-Q King drive-in. Since we ate at Spoon's on our first trip to town, I decided that our day trip up to Charlotte and back last Saturday would see us trying the other.





We pulled in a little after 2:30, and I confess that my enthusiasm had ebbed just a little bit by this point. We'd had a couple of interesting meals, one really good one, and a so-so fast food encounter which barely registered on my hobby of unusual regional chains, but a lot of boring nothing to look at, some really ugly parts of one city, suburban sprawl in another and all of one gorgeous college campus. I needed something to charge my batteries a little, and pulling into Charlotte did the trick. I think this is a super town, and we really enjoy dining in our car in an 1950s drive-in. Apparently there are at least two other drive-ins in Charlotte as well; we will have to check those out.

So Bar-B-Q King opened in 1959 in a really convenient location on the Queen City's westside, and immediately made a name for itself with a really interesting sauce mix. They use unspiced and unrubbed pork shoulder here - the whole hog variant is common north and east of town - and a sauce that starts with vinegar and has a bucketload of additional ingredients, similar to the tomato-vinegar mix that you see throughout middle Georgia. A "minced" pork plate comes with a small serving of pork drenched in the sauce, along with an awesome vinegar slaw, hush puppies and baked beans.

Marie, who had already passed on anything but a nibble of my snack at the previous restaurant, had still not recovered from the gigantic chicken sandwich and sweet potato fries a couple of hours earlier in Columbia, and so she decided to just get a slice of chocolate pie. They were, sadly, out of the strawberry that initially caught her eye. Marie and I really don't agree on the awesomeness of good vinegar slaw - and that's okay; she likes pea soup a heck of a lot more than me - but she did enjoy the bites of minced pork that she tried. It's not as good as Bill Spoon's, nor is it as good as the barbecue at Thomaston, Georgia's Piggie Park drive-in, which we enjoyed last month, but it is still pretty darn good. Marie also didn't enjoy my drink. I only allow myself one soda a day, and here, they mix up a proper cherry lemon Sun Drop, you know, with an actual cherry and lemon in it. It's too sweet and wonderful for words, though I concede that it probably would not go too well with chocolate pie.

Actually, having watched the drive-in's spotlight appearance on Diners. Drive-ins and Dives, it looks like we missed a trick not ordering some chicken here. Unusually, they fry up some chicken which is said in many places to be quite amazing, and then dip it and cook it in their barbecue sauce like they would an order of Buffalo wings. What might be needed is a tour of Charlotte's drive-ins, getting some of this fried chicken before going over to South 21 and then the Diamond, which is the new place being opened by the former operators of the now-corporate and trademarked Penguin. We could do those three in a day, if we also schedule a trip to a park for a long walk and a visit to Heroes Aren't Hard to Find to buy some comics, I bet.

Lee's Famous Recipe Chicken, Rock Hill SC

So the first three meals on our day trip through the Carolinas had been, one after another, each better than the one before. Something had to give, and it did. When I looked over the map, it looked like the only population center of note between Columbia and Charlotte on I-77 was the town of Rock Hill. I looked over South Carolina's listing on Roadfood.com to see whether they suggested anyplace worth stopping in that town, and found a chicken place called Lee's. I penciled that in and moved on, not realizing until later that the place was not quite what I thought I would find at Roadfood.com.

For that matter, Columbia itself was not quite what I thought I would find. I must caution anybody who's getting ideas about traveling from the little trips that Marie and I make (and you darn well should) to not go through Columbia the way that we did. Look, every town has ugly sides, but if you use Google to direct you from I-20 to the neighborhood with Pawley's Front Porch and then over to I-77, you won't see anything but the ugly sides. Columbia is the home of many beautiful places and historic sites, of art galleries, soaring churches, an awesome zoo and one of the nation's best children's museums, but honestly, the main point of interest on this tour was the imposing facade of Benedict College, which, with its barbed wire fences and Checkpoint Charlie entrance, looks less like a place of higher learning and more like the state pen.

Sorry, Columbia. You deserve a longer look. Maybe next year we might come back through and let you show off for us.

Things stay lip-curling as you leave this unfortunate look at Columbia's less attractive side and get onto I-77, which is a short hour and a bit hop through absolutely nothing up to Rock Hill. The countryside of central South Carolina is nothing that special and there are no interesting settlements punctuating the drive. Marie curled up for a little nap while I looked at trees. I bet people commuting between Columbia and Charlotte get tired of this drive really quickly.





Rock Hill is the home of Winthrop University, which is one of the most attractive colleges that I've seen. If we're ever out this way again, another stop in Rock Hill might see us enjoying a walk through this gorgeous campus. We did notice a couple of small barbecue joints on our drive through the town, possibly worth another stop, but we ended up eating at a fast food place. Yeah, I was pretty surprised, myself.

The Lee's fast food chain, which numbers around 150 stores today, is related to Kentucky Fried Chicken just as its founder, Lee Cummings, was related to Col. Sanders. Cummings was Sanders' nephew and partner in the 1950s. After he and the Colonel found massive success, sold the business and parted ways, Cummings developed a new recipe for fried chicken and, in partnership with Harold Omer, spent the sixties opening Harold's Take Home restaurants in Ohio and Michigan. In the 1970s, these were converted to Lee's Famous Recipe, and when Shoney's bought the chain in 1981, there were 200 stores throughout the midwest. Shoney's sold the franchise to the RTM company in 1995, who operated it in markets where they didn't have Mrs. Winner's stores. A Florida company bought the business from RTM eight years later. Their stores are currently concentrated in the states of Ohio, Kentucky and Illinois, with one or two locations throughout the southeast. There are none in Georgia or North Carolina, but a couple in Alabama and South Carolina, including this store in Rock Hill.

Interestingly, three years after buying Lee's from RTM, this Florida enterprise, called Famous Recipe Company Operations, Inc, bought 113 Mrs. Winner's stores from RTM. Last year, they seem to have shuttered about eighty of them. I kind of have a blind spot where mediocre, readily-available fast food is concerned. I had no idea so many had closed.

Lee's, on the other hand, is mediocre but not readily available to us here in Atlanta, so even once I learned that this was a huge chain, I was still curious to see it. Honestly, it is pretty rare for me to want to hunt down fried chicken in the first place, since it's just not my favorite thing. I ordered a two-piece meal, which came with a biscuit, and Marie had a couple of bites to try the flavor. It wasn't bad, as these things go. Honestly, it had been a really long time since I had chicken from a KFC or a Mrs. Winner's or a Church's, and if you were to line up a drumstick from each in front of me, I doubt I could tell them apart.

It is really only worth the curiosity factor of seeing a fast food chain for just one visit. I can't see myself needing to return. Should the boring road of I-77 take me back through the good city of Rock Hill, it will be to swing by Kickin' Pig or Burk's. If our eight-restaurant trip hadn't already been planned to include three different barbecue places, I would have done well to factor those in. In fact, we would be having barbecue again about one hour after finishing this fried chicken snack...

Pawley's Front Porch, Columbia SC

This is Marie, doing my bit towards handling the backlog due to the 8-restaurant day that Grant and I took together. Grant and I don't get to spent a whole lot of just-us-together time so this was something we had been looking forward to for a while. The kids got to spend the day getting rid of their clothing allowance with their grandmother, so a good day was had by all.

Pawley's Front Porch is in a rather unappealing part of Columbia, and the building itself isn't that attractive either, at least on the outside. Grant described it as "deliberately unphotogenic," and gave up after taking almost a dozen pictures of it. Once past the doors, however, it is a different story. The interior has wood floors and what appear to be hand-colored artwork on the chalk boards. Either they have an artistic employee or they're really, really careful with erasing the chalk! I would like to be able to visit more often to see how the graphics change on the boards. And eat the burgers, which I didn't try, but more on that in a moment. The tables have copper covers that make photography just a little challenging but make the place look warm and inviting.

One of the first things I saw was that there were random canned goods stacked on a shelf near the entrance. I also saw a sign posted about the Harvest Hope project; apparently five donated cans will redeem a free plate of fried pickles. The server told us that the business has another project going now as well, and rotates out the programs. They host an angel tree in the holiday season, for instance. It's a good way to feel good about a place before you even sit down.

The plan was that we would take turns eating a meal (or at least a large snack) while the other would have a small snack or share the main dish. I was originally going to go with a burger, but my weakness for cooked pineapple steered me to the Sullivan's and that seemed like more of a chicken sandwich sort of thing. The server also confirmed that more people take that than the meat patty when they order that sandwich. It was very good, though definitely a 4 or 5 napkin item. The guacamole will soak through the bun no matter how careful you are, so don't expect to eat elegantly. This is the kind of place you go with someone you wouldn't mind seeing you wearing some of your lunch! Luckily, my clothing escaped unscathed. However, midway through the sandwich the baby started to get pretty excited and I'll choose to attribute it to his share of the meal.





Grant had a piece of apple pie, but mostly because he knows that I love pie and he generously let me eat half of it. Possibly more than half. It's even plausible that I got most of it. He's sweet that way. Besides, what would an entry from me be without something sweet in it? The pie had a lot of cinnamon, the crust was tasty, and there was a thin layer of caramel on the top. Very nice indeed.

While we were winding down a little a parade started in the street outside. It was the sixth annual Black History Month Parade, and it made the visit appropriately festive and we got to see some of the big drums being slung around. Our son may be in a marching band sometime soon, so it was a feel-good sort of moment. And even better, the end of the parade rumbled past just as we were ready to go, so the timing worked really well. We had good luck throughout the trip, but this was the most neatly "couldn't work better if you scheduled it" thing that happened.

I would definitely go back for a burger if we happened to be anywhere near the area. Or another of those chicken sandwiches, but the burger takes precedence.

Sconyers Bar-B-Que, Augusta GA

So this past weekend, Marie and I went out on what will most likely be the last big road trip that we will take until the baby is born in May. We started with a small breakfast at Mamie's Kitchen in Conyers, and then drove east out I-20 towards Augusta.

The journey took us through Taliaferro County, one of Georgia's smallest, and the least populated. It is notable, in one circuit where I travel, as being the most difficult county in Georgia to obtain a hit on Where's George, the currency tracking project that I enjoy playing. Even though there is never a guarantee or even a serious hope that spending money at a specific point will get you a hit from it, I could not resist pulling off the interstate at exit 148 and buying a little gas at the only filling station there - for a criminal $3.30 a gallon! - in the hopes that somebody local will hit one of my bills. I have hits from 61 of Georgia's 159 counties, and I sure do hope that Taliaferro will be the 62nd. If not, I might have to go back out this way and get lunch at Heavy's BBQ in Crawfordville one day. That's where some scenes in the film Sweet Home Alabama were shot.

About three-quarters of an hour later, we were on the outskirts of Augusta, the state's second largest city and home to the Greenjackets minor league baseball team. Oh, and the Masters, I suppose. Our destination was Sconyers, an old and very popular destination restaurant that, agreeably, opens at 10 am, allowing us to plan a de facto second breakfast. I'd heard an awful lot of tourist scuttlebutt about this place over the years, including its presence on a People magazine list of the nation's ten best barbecue restaurants, and wondered whether it could live up to the hype. Part of it really did, I'm glad to say.





When Claude and Adeline Sconyers opened in 1956, it was in a little storefront with one of those cute wooden signs with Coca-Cola logos. Their son, Larry, has run the place since the late 1970s. He moved the restaurant into its current digs. It's now a huge house with a gigantic gravel parking lot. Inside, the decor is understated and classic western, like an old log cabin. Or, if you prefer, like one of those pancake restaurants in the Smokey Mountains that look like they want to make you think that you're in a log cabin. Attempting to enhance the western feel and failing quite spectacularly, the wait staff and servers all wear quite grotesque costumes. They're these hideous blue and white faux-milkmaid things that would look tragic in a third-rate rep company's production of Heidi. Never have I had such excellent and professional service from somebody dressed so garishly.

For our second breakfast of the day, we elected to split a small plate of chopped pork with hash and potato salad, along with an extra side of cole slaw. Strangely, the restaurant just crams all three of the different foods onto a single, small plate, serving that atop a slightly larger plate to catch your crumbs and spills. Trying to cut calories, I actually removed potato salad from my diet almost two years ago, but I succumb every so often for a few bites. I had heard, correctly, that Sconyers has excellent potato salad and so the couple of bites that I had were well spent.

The pork, however, was really quite disappointing, just sort of limp and moist with no smoky flavor at all, but it is served with a really excellent sauce that goes very well with it, and turns an ordinary meat into something quite memorable. The sauce is available in three degrees of heat, and it is a mixture of vinegar and mustard with a little tomato and a secret blend of spices that Mr. Sconyers still adds daily. This kind of sauce is absolutely not to Marie's liking, and I suggested she might want to pass on it, but I thought it was super.

The cole slaw was also really something - a light mayo-based blend served with sweet pickles - but the standout was the hash. Now, several of my favorite places in northeast Georgia serve up a really thick, not-Brunswick stew that is a lot like Carolina hash, but only a few, like the dearly missed Carrithers in Athens, actually called it hash. Sconyers serves the real deal, a thick blend of leftover pork and sauce over rice and it is just amazing. Even if you're just passing through with lunch or dinner plans somewhere else, you need to stop in here for a four buck bowl of hash and rice. There's a reason that Jimmy Carter had Sconyers cater a big White House event; this hash is something special.

This is the sort of restaurant where you can understand why locals have started grumbling that it isn't as good as it used to be. People turn on success and even in cities like Augusta, which seems to have an aging population and not one so interested in a vibrant foodie community, people do tend to look for the next new thing. Is it possible for a restaurant with a parking lot the size of a small stadium to maintain quality for better than fifty years? Well, I don't know whether it is as good as it used to be, but it's still okay at some things and downright excellent in others. This is definitely worth a visit, I'd say. Just get ready to giggle at those silly costumes.



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Mamie's Kitchen, Conyers GA

A few months ago, when we learned that Marie was pregnant, we knew that our long road trips would have to be curtailed at some point. Sitting in a car for hours and hours and then taking a long hike through some state park's nature trail is a bit much in the third trimester, even for somebody as enthusiastic as Marie. I suggested that we take the spring off from road tripping, but before we do that, we'd have two last long drives. We'd do one day this month, and then go back to Saint Simons Island to visit her parents in March before raising the drawbridge. I started charting out our February trip before Christmas, because I'm impatient that way. What I came up with was pretty eyebrow-raising: I estimated that the 613 mile trip would take us just over fourteen hours and see us stopping by eight different restaurants in three states. So for the next couple of weeks, we'll be recounting those stops.

At least we were by ourselves. We had the whole day to just be together, talk, hold hands, and enjoy some occasional "companionable silence," as P.D. James terms it, with the rowdy children spending the day with my mother. The kids missed some very good meals and one or two that did not completely thrill me, but even the least of the stops was interesting and curious, and I'm pretty sure that we'll be returning to one place in South Carolina many more times in the years to come, especially if we can make a move to Asheville in a couple of years and find this place about a seven-minute detour on a trip from there back to the Georgia coast to see her family.

First up was one of the remaining destinations on our list of Georgia restaurants reviewed on Roadfood.com. We had thirteen to go for a full set, and one of these is a breakfast joint, Mamie's Kitchen in the suburban town of Conyers. I always hate driving out I-20 this way. I used to know this guy in high school who lived off Evans Mill Road and pretended he was the nephew of Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Jim Shooter in order to con gullible chumps like us into thinking we could start a comic book company. He called me on the phone once, irate that "some Christians" were misunderstanding the lyric of a song by a popular eighties group called Mr. Mister, and making it all about God and stuff. Turns out he was the one who misunderstood them, and that the line really is not "Kyrie lays upon the roads that I must travel." I mention this because, for the umpteenth damn time driving east on I-20, I got that stupid song stuck in my head. This time it was particularly awful and all the time we were looking for Mamie's Kitchen, I was singing that blasted chorus to myself.





Mamie's Kitchen has been around for decades, selling really inexpensive breakfasts, and it seems that most of them go out the drive-through window. They do offer a breakfast buffet, but it seems that many people just enjoy stopping in for a biscuit or two and relaxing in what must surely be one of the most comfortable and relaxed little getaways that I have seen recently. Here, a small early morning meal in the company of friends is just a perfect way to get the day started.

We had the good fortune to visit at the same time as a table of regulars were enjoying what appeared to be a usual Saturday morning ritual for them. Four men, one about our age and the others a good deal older, were enjoying their umpeenth cups of coffee and talking in happy voices about anything and everything. On a first-name basis with all the ladies who work there, they playfully bantered back and forth about refills and harmless flirtation and foolishness. Maybe I am an eavesdropping jerk, but I just love people-watching. It does me good to know that I'm in the company of happy people.

Marie and I each had a biscuit, hers with chicken and mine with deliciously salty country ham. The biscuits were warm from the oven and so delicately fresh that they'd have liked to disintegrate with a touch. I would have gladly had another, but we really couldn't linger and really should not have indulged in more, for we had a second breakfast awaiting us two and a half hours down the road. So we left the table to its conversation about the Holy Land and whether one of them was going to whup their waitress or whether she would be whupping him first - my odds were on that outcome - and made our way. The sun was even good enough to rise while we were inside, allowing me to photograph the building. The morning was off to a remarkably good start.

K Cafe, Alpharetta GA

A few years ago, when I was a cubicle dweller in Alpharetta, I went out to lunch almost every day at one of the approximately seventeen thousand restaurants along Windward Parkway. Now, many people who enjoy talking and writing about food don't really pay attention to this corridor, as you will find very few independently-owned restaurants, or examples of farm-to-table or sustainability or the latest foodie trends, or even anything with a very local flavor. This should not be surprising, because this is a lunchtime corridor for office workers like I was at the time. Area residents simply don't come back to this strip for dinner time, meaning restaurants that want to try out here have to budget pretty closely and cross fingers for a lunch rush or die. The turnover in this area is absolutely brutal. I worked here for a little less than three years, and I bet the restaurant turnover was close to 20%.

Most of these are chains, of course, but what I have found incredibly interesting are the number of out-of-town chains that experiment with a store here first before trying elsewhere in the city. Some of these may be franchisees hoping to build into the Atlanta market or some might be company-owned and considering a footprint in Atlanta. There have been a couple of successes; I believe that the first Five Guys and Lenny's Sub Shops in this region were on Windward. Z Pizza is still hanging on, with one of its two Atlanta locations here, and Tacone Flavor Grill, from California, has had its only Atlanta store here for about five years*. There have been several more fascinating failures. Apple Spice Junction, Taxi's Hamburgers, Tin Star and Logan Farms are all out-of-towners who have tried to set up shop here on this stretch of road and bit the dust. If, like me, you are intrigued by regional chains, then there was usually something of interest on Windward to catch your eye. At least there was in 2006-2009, anyway.

Windward can't even keep a barbecue place open. I was not surprised that the very popular Pig n' Chik - not popular with me, mind you, but it has plenty of fans - closed its Windward store recently, as they might have opened in the single worst location in the history of real estate. Big D's Barbecue, from up in Dawsonville, only had a location here for about eight months. Even One Star Ranch, at one time a baseball's throw south of Windward on Highway 9, shuttered some weeks ago.

I had been intending for ages to see what was going on up at exit 11, but never got around to it. I did myself a huge disservice in not heading back that way, because the very best restaurant on Windward Parkway, the locally-owned Red Hen, closed in December. Now this place really was special, and they cooked up a really amazing hamburger, easily one of the best in the region. When I heard about that, I followed a link or two to the notice about the closure on a blog called Roots in Alpharetta. I enjoyed this blogger's writing and continued to see what he had to say about the town where I used to work. There, I found something quite remarkable.

You know Krystal, right? The only local fast food place that I'll eat, and don't you judge me, right? Since October, they have been quietly, and without promotion, hype or commentary, testing a new "fast casual concept" on Windward Parkway, in the strip once occupied by a Carvel ice cream store. It is called K Cafe, and I just had to get back to my old stomping grounds and try this place.





I popped in on Thursday just after the lunch rush, and had a surprisingly tasty burger, but the most impressive things here were the service and the ketchup, which I am still loving and tasting. It might not last beyond the prototype stage, but the restaurant opened with an incredibly neat concept: ketchup of the month. Apart from your basic, "classic" ketchup, if you will, K Cafe is testing a rotation of different flavors to go along with it. This time out, it's a chipotle ketchup which is just amazing, and goes very well with the fries. These, incidentally, proved to be the only minor disappointment of the meal. Basic cookie-cutter shoestring fries, these were not at all like the wonderfully chewy and potato-heavy fries you get at a Krystal. That chipotle ketchup would taste even better with those.

The service was first-rate. The girl at the register asked whether it was my first visit and showed off some of the sample foods prepared and resting in a refrigerated display case along with the desserts. K Cafe is not too different from a Panera or Rising Roll, just with burgers as well. They do a variety of sandwiches and salads, all of which have Moe's-like silly names. She recommended their chicken salad, but I just wanted their basic burger. While they do serve traditional Krystals here if you want them, the patties on their proper burgers here are somewhat thicker, you'll be glad to hear, and come fully dressed - with diced tomatoes, oddly - on ciabatta bread.

The other staffers who came by, including a manager who introduced himself, were similarly attentive and good-natured. I think that everybody is aware that this place is under a corporate microscope and under pressure to do well. With that in mind, Windward might prove to be a reasonable location for a place with this kind of menu. It really feels like a "lunch place," something for quick, simple, tasty and inexpensive meals. Most of the sandwiches and burgers, which come with a side, cost about six bucks, so it's perfectly reasonable and perfectly tasty. Plus there's the wonderful novelty factor of trying someplace corporate-but-unique. If the concept fails (see below), I can still tell my grandkids about it, just like some folk can talk about those long extinct Kentucky Roast Beef stores that the Colonel once attempted.

Now, some no-frills restaurants are able to make the transition from junky fast food to something a little better. Whether Krystal has managed it won't be for me to say; some corporate synergy bipartisan executive board steering committee will figure that out, but I think that it's a success. On the other side of the equation, there's the Taco Stand. I heard that this favorite from Athens had opened a store in Alpharetta, returning to this market after their Buckhead store closed a couple of football seasons ago, probably in anticipation of how badly the Bulldogs would end up playing. So I looked it up and swung by after finishing up at K Cafe, intending to grab a couple of two buck tacos and some chips and salsa. Heh.

The Taco Stand's new place is three exits south, off Mansell Road, where restaurants usually live a little longer. Around North Point Parkway and the Old Alabama Road Connector, there are lots of homes, apartments and malls and movie theaters to keep families interested in the evenings, and so the restaurant turnover between exits 8 and 9 does not appear to be quite as murderous as on exit 11. I smiled broadly as I spotted the Taco Stand's classic Milledge Avenue location's lettering and pulled in. There was a car parked out front with the engine running as I snapped a couple of pictures. The driver, a twentysomething girl, was already waiting in the airlock at the host station of the Taco Stand for somebody to notice her.

If you figured that things were going to go spectacularly wrong at the point that I used the words "airlock," "host station" and "Taco Stand" in the same sentence, you figured right. That evening, I was telling my family about my trip over a wonderful supper of lemon pepper chicken and rice that Marie had prepared. My son had already told me that he wanted to go check out this new Taco Stand. I got to this point in the anecdote, and when the words "host station" passed my lips, Marie visibly winced and my son's head instantly fell, his chin hitting his chest.

So anyway, this girl and I waited for almost two minutes before somebody popped his head in from the dining room and asked "Uhhh, two?" The girl replied "I just need a to-go menu." The fellow said that he'd be right back.

The dining room, classy, spotless, and perhaps a quarter full, looked so spectacularly unlike a Taco Stand that I started looking around for that Mr. Spock with the beard. There was a second door, perhaps to an eighteen-and-up smoking section with a bar. "This must be the upscale Taco Stand," I said to the girl, who said that this place definitely needed to get its customer service together. She gave it one more minute and left. I learned later that the store's grand opening was actually a couple of days off, and that they were just doing a soft opening to work out the kinks. I wish these guys the best of luck - I love the Stand - but I gave them one more minute and left as well. Losing two guests to an inattentive host - that's the sort of kink that needs working out. Just as soon as you figure out what in the name of Herschel Walker a Taco Stand is doing with a host station in the first place.

*(2/26/11) Tacone evidently closed about three weeks after I wrote up this entry.

(8/3/11) Sadly, Krystal seems to have ended this experiment, and closed this prototype store at the end of July. They scrubbed the concept's website and Facebook page almost instantly, suggesting that this experiment was not successful. What a shame!