Delia's Chicken Sausage Stand, Atlanta GA

When Marie and our friend Victoria were each in the later stages of their respective pregnancies, we met up near their new apartment in the East Atlanta neighborhood for ice cream at Morelli's, and resolved to get together again after our babies were born. Victoria and James were raving then about Delia's Chicken Sausage Stand, a collaboration between Delia Champion, who started our city's much-loved Flying Biscuit Cafe, and Molly Gunn, who I understand co-owns The Porter. Weeks went by, babies were born and I started getting impatient about when the heck we were going to get together so's I could try one of these dogs. Or slingers, as the restaurant would like to term them.

Make no mistake, though. These may be called slingers or chicken sausages, but they are definitely from the same mold as hot dogs. This is a good thing, as Marie and I certainly love good hot dogs. The new take on them here is incredibly neat and fun and very tasty. Champion and Gunn are using buns baked by the popular Holeman & Finch and locally-sourced, organically-grown chickens for their meat. The results are just a little different from even the best hot dog places in town - America's Top Dog, Barker's, Brandi's - and make for a very interesting and unique taste. Plus, they're open absurdly late. Like four in the morning late. If I lived in that neighborhood, they'd be seeing me pretty frequently in the middle of the night!





The one thing about Delia's that does not please me is the lack of seating. There's only a small indoor area with air conditioning to place orders, and six picnic tables outside to eat. As Atlanta enters its utterly miserable summer, this is going to keep us from paying them another visit for a few months. This is a real shame, because the food is quite wonderful.

Acting like I had not eaten anything in a month, I ordered both a Naked Slinger - far from naked, it was the sausage with their "comeback" sauce and a little of the firey five-pepper mustard - and their signature Hot Mess, a slinger buried under melted cheese, chili and jalapenos. This really is too messy a thing to eat in polite company, but somehow I avoided spilling any of it on Victoria and James's couch.

Honestly, though, the sausage is so good that it doesn't need all the crazy toppings. I really preferred the Naked Slinger, and thought that the meat's flavor was really brought out by the mustard. Meanwhile, my daughter enjoyed eating the chicken as traditional sliders, and Marie had the Italian Stallion, which has the slinger served with onions, peppers, mozzarella and marinara sauce. Everything was really quite excellent.

I just amused myself, wondering whether the slinger could turn into an iconic Atlanta variety of dog, just like half-smokes are in Washington. I wish I had a TARDIS so I could pop forward a few decades and check that out.

The Varsity, Kennesaw GA

Over the last eight chapters in the blog, I have written about the four-day trip that we took to visit Marie's brother and sister in Mississippi. These were posted here slightly out of sequence, as I was anxious to share some stories about places outside our regular stomping grounds around Atlanta. Not that anybody other than me is keeping track of these, but the next four entries (plus the next Honeymoon Flashback, later this week) are about some places that we visited before this road trip.

First up is a place that we visit with something approaching frequency, the Kennesaw location of The Varsity. I’m sure this is not a place that needs much introduction. It is as iconic as American restaurants get, and the downtown location, which I’m sure I’ll revisit and write about one day, is a major tourist attraction for the city.

The Varsity has done more things right than wrong over the years – moving their beloved Varsity Jr. location from Cheshire Bridge out to Dawsonville, because serving a long-established neighborhood is not as profitable as snagging outlet mall shoppers, must surely count as a “wrong” – and one of their neater ideas has been building satellite locations along each of the northern arteries that feed into the city. Whether you’ve followed the sprawl into the suburbs up Interstate 75 or 85 or GA-400, there’s a Varsity for you, and each of these stores do a darn good job capturing the feel of the original.





Usually, if we are in the mood for a burger, and don’t feel like making a production or a caravan or a road trip out of it, we just hop over to Cheeseburger Bobby’s, which makes one of the best burgers in Cobb County. The Varsity, let’s be fair and honest, is a fairly weak competitor in those stakes, but their fries are better than Bobby's, and so are their onion rings, and so is their chocolate milk – you just won’t believe how well chocolate milk over ice goes with a burger until you try it – and they also add one thing that I sure do wish that Cheeseburger Bobby’s would consider for their own patties: pimento cheese.

I mentioned a few chapters back that I greatly admire the writing of John T. Edge. About a week before our trip, I read his delightful Hamburgers and Fries, one of a short series of books, very Calvin Trillin in feel and flavor, in which Edge flies around the country trying regional takes on the most classically American of foods. He has slug burgers in Mississippi and steamed burgers in Connecticut and, most drool-worthy of them all, pimento cheeseburgers in South Carolina.

I know virtually nothing about South Carolina. It’s always been a state that I have driven through; I have never stayed overnight in the state. I recognize this as a deficiency that needs correcting, and longer visits and more detailed investigations of South Carolina are on the long-term agenda. From what I understand, though – and, admittedly, a good chunk of what I understand is what I have read in Edge’s books – many of the older hamburger joints throughout the Palmetto State have long offered pimento cheeseburgers. It is apparently one of that region’s specialties.

I’m reminded of the similarity between the Varsity’s hot dogs and chili and the ones that you can get at Macon’s Nu-Way. When the Varsity’s founder, Frank Gordy, was first driving around the south nailing down ideas for what he wanted his restaurant, then called The Yellow Jacket, to serve, it’s suggested that he decided to replicate the Nu-Way experience. That was somewhat lost when the Varsity expanded and grew to its current enormous size, but you can still absolutely see Nu-Way’s influence. I wonder whether in 1928, pimento cheeseburgers were common in Atlanta, or did Gordy find a place or two in South Carolina that inspired him to do them here?

Every so often, I find myself craving pimento cheese on a burger, served all hot, gooey and greasy. Marie doesn’t often remind me that she’s a damn Yankee, but when she quickly corrects my order of pimento cheeseburgers and asks for her own with a slice of cheddar, I remember all right. Ah, but it's those differences that keep us interesting, right?

Jack's, Tallapoosa GA

I'm not going to name any names, but when I made an announcement - someplace that I won't identify - that I finally went back to a Jack's, a guy who runs a blog that I enjoy reading very much just turned up his nose quite publicly at the notion. Never mind all the good and interesting restaurants that we enjoyed on our trip through Alabama and Mississippi that I described, the only thing worth a reply, and a nose-upturned one at that, was my visit to a Jack's.

That's okay. This is not very good food. It would appear that, after fifty years in business, Jack's has quite successfully managed to make a perfect clone of Burger King, and nobody calls that good. But it's very interesting food, to me. Jack's is wrapped around my childhood in a way that I will never extricate. I find this chain absolutely enthralling, even though they have not done very much to earn it.

When you are a child, you have a very different perspective on space than as an adult. Throughout the 1970s, my parents would routinely take me to visit family in Fort Payne, Alabama. We'd go out there once every four or five weeks. The path would almost always wind through Cartersville, Rome and Coosa, but then often take one of several different directions, depending on whether Dad wanted to get there in a hurry, or if nostalgia for his own misspent youth would send us to Fort Payne via Boaz or some other small community. I swear one was called "Blood Bucket," but I can't find any evidence of it anymore.

Once we were in Fort Payne, we might use my Pappy's house as a staging point for trips to visit any number of places in northeast Alabama. None of the towns that I see looking over Google Maps seem familiar, but we would often drive to old businesses and speak to old acquaintances. There was a Jack's in every town. I'd know that red circle logo anywhere.

When you're a child, of course, you can't really work out that "this is a chain almost totally exclusive to north Alabama." You just figure that there are Jack's everywhere, and when you are at home, Mom and Dad just don't drive down any roads that have them. I don't even know how often we actually stopped to eat at one. Probably not often, as I had an Aunt Rosie who wouldn't dream of allowing anybody to eat a fast food hamburger when she had forty pounds of fried chicken, turnip greens and potato salad to feed all of us. I just know that Jack's is part of my seventies restaurant memory the same way that the Krystal Kritters and the initial use of that creepy Burger King and his R2D2-knockoff French fry robot are.





About a month before that last bolt clicked into place and we started up this blog to document our travels and the fun we have eating, I took a drive out to Carrollton after a short day at work to try a Jack's for the first time in a really, really long time. The restaurant had come up in conversation a few days previously when I was visiting Dad and some other friend of his had stopped by. This friend had heard, erroneously, it turns out, that a Jack's was coming up in Douglasville or someplace nearby. That got me curious, so I drove out there, and had a... decentish meal. I imagine that it's probably about the same caliber as the better-known (and confusingly similarly-named) Jack in the Box or Whataburger, each of which I have damned with faint praise in this blog's pages before.

On our way back from Mississippi, I made sure that we stopped again. Marie and I had noticed this location about a month previously, when we visited Tallapoosa to try the excellent barbecue and stew at The Turn Around. It is apparently one of only three Jack's in Georgia. There is one in Corinth, MS and sixty-some odd in northern Alabama. Around Birmingham, there are some very neat interstate exits where the local chains Jack's and Milo's duel it out alongside their better-known national rivals like Burger King and Wendy's.

Jack's isn't essential eating, of course, but it's always interesting to me to visit a restaurant like this that I can't get at home. Driving I-20 through Alabama takes you past about a dozen or more exits where travelers can sample one. I think it's worth a visit once in a while.

Tasty Dip, Heflin AL

In the previous entry, I noted how I have done a terrible job remembering where I heard about or got the notion to visit a restaurant. Tasty Dip was another heartbreaker, and the "version 1.0" of this entry reflected that.

Several weeks ago, I ran across this simply wonderful web site that I couldn't find again, until I finally did about two hours after I posted this! Roadside Rustic is a gorgeous collection, laid out blog-style but resembling the current, popular tumblr schemes of photographs, taken by a small group of contributors. It features classic restaurant architecture, old barns, fading downtowns and other ephemera around the southeast. The blog introduced me to both Tasty Dip in Heflin and a fascinating barbecue restaurant in nearby Anniston called Goal Post which has one of the most amazing neon signs I have ever seen photographed. I look forward to swinging through Anniston one day after sunset to see that neon sign in action.

I'm glad that I stumbled across Roadside Rustic again. Seriously, check out their photos of Tasty Dip and tell me that you don't want to visit!

Anyway, Tasty Dip was scheduled to serve as a place to stop in for a quick snack about forty minutes after we left Leeds. It's off the same interstate exit where we found Marie's BBQ House on our last trip back from Birmingham, about two miles further north and east along US-78. It's been in business since the late 1940s and looks uncannily like the long-lost sister restaurant of Mrs. Story's in Opelika, AL or Jiffy Freeze in Canton, GA.





Much like Mrs. Story's and Jiffy Freeze, sadly, there's nothing drop-dead amazing on the menu here. This is an incredibly reliable place for yummy desserts and snacks for people in the area, but, unless you are looking to photograph examples of this old architecture or the restaurant's wonderful old neon sign, there's no need to go very far out of your way for a visit. The hot dog, in particular, was a disagreeable throwback to the sort of snack you might find at the concession stand at a little league ballpark. We were all pleased with our ice cream, but I didn't manage more than a couple of bites of that footlong chili dog. I suspect I might have been spoiled on the hot dog front, however. You can get really, really good hot dogs in Atlanta these days.

I kind of regret not trying the restaurant's "upside down banana split," which sounds like a really terrific way to make a milkshake, but most times I just like to keep it simple. My favorite flavor of ice cream is either vanilla or peach. I can't decide.

There was a pretty good crowd for 3.30 in the afternoon on a Sunday here. Most people got their meals to go, or sat in their air conditioned cars. I think every community needs a place like this for a midday ice cream treat. I should have just snapped more photos of that lovely old sign to share with you.

I would also like to give a shout-out to Retro Roadmap, which I discovered while looking around and trying to find Roadside Rustic. They've also visited both Tasty Dip and Goal Post and have a similar eye for fun old architecture. I highly recommend both sites, and won't lose track of them again!

And now, another longer-than-normal break, friends and followers! We'll be back with a new chapter Monday. Thank you for reading!

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Rusty's Bar-B-Q, Leeds AL

This is the first of two entries this week in which I will mention a restaurant that I can tell you less about than I would like. In fact, I can’t tell you the most important thing about it: where we heard about it. Well, I suppose “Is it any good?” might truly be the most important part, but as we typically don’t go in for negative reviews here, the fact that it gets an entry at all should be evidence that it’s a good place.

Sometime a few months ago, somewhere, somebody told me that I should stop by Rusty’s BBQ the next time I was in Birmingham and give their white sauce a try. I have found that I’ve been making some pretty serious errors in noting places like this for road tripping lately. People will send in recommendations to us, or I’ll read about them somewhere, and I’ll add the restaurant’s web page to my bookmarks, or I’ll put it on my Urbanspoon wish list. It might be months or even years before I’m able to visit the restaurant – I don’t know when, if ever, I will be in Morgantown, West Virginia, but by thunder, I know where I’m going to eat when I get there – and by that time, who knows where I heard of the place. You’ll be glad to know that I’ve taken steps to rectify this problem, and now have a little document saved in my Google account specifically devoted to telling me who told me to eat where.

This doesn’t do me much good now, sadly. Somebody, somewhere, told me to swing by Rusty’s and give their white sauce a try. That somebody is surely do a wave of thanks. Well, whoever you are, I didn’t like the white sauce, but man, that chopped pork sure was good.





Central Birmingham is just an hour east of Tuscaloosa, and the suburb of Leeds maybe fifteen minutes further. Knowing that we might need something to break up the meals we would enjoy on this drive, we made plans to stop by the Penzeys Spices store in Birmingham’s Homewood neighborhood. We had been to this location once before and bought our combined weight in pepper and Cajun spice, but, well, we use a lot of pepper and Cajun spices at our dinner table and needed restocking. Plus, the Penzeys people had sent us a pair of coupons that we just couldn’t pass up. We learned from the only girl working the register that morning that Penzeys will soon be opening a store here in Atlanta, about two exits away from Marie’s work, in Sandy Springs. That will certainly make it easier to obtain several pounds of their pepper and Cajun spices.

Rusty’s wasn’t much further down the road, but we found something very interesting along the way. You take exit 140 off I-20 and go south not quite two miles. You will pass two other barbecue joints – Huck’s Rib Shack and Old Smokey – along the way. That’s three barbecue restaurants literally within a mile of each other on the same road. Rusty’s, happily, is open on Sunday while the other two are not.

Our destination was set up in what appears to be an old Burger King building. It’s a relatively new place, I think. Not too much history there yet. They weren’t that busy when we arrived, which was probably a few minutes before the church rush was thinking about starting. Some of their desserts were still either in the oven or cooling. Marie and I have an understanding with my daughter that when we do these silly days with four or five meals, she can just have a snack at each one. It’s cheaper for us and it keeps her happy, albeit perhaps disagreeably sugared-up. She ordered some kind of odd, sloppy cake or something, a “gooey cake,” I think it was called, and had to wait impatiently for it to arrive. Very impatiently. Girl needs to learn to relax.

I had the chopped pork plate with deviled eggs – these seem to appear regularly as sides in north Alabama barbecue restaurants – and spicy baked beans. I ordered my meat dry and got a chilled bottle of white sauce and everything was completely terrific until I put the sauce on. If you’re new to my blog, you may not be aware that I went completely gaga for good white sauce when I tried it last year at Hawg Wild, an excellent place outside Clarksville in the north Georgia mountains. I’ve since tried the white sauce at some Birmingham restaurants and love it completely. I’m afraid that the white sauce at Rusty’s really did disappoint me. The best that I can tell you is that it tasted stale. I’m sure it wasn’t, but it ran dirty shoe marks all over my tongue all the same. Happily, I only put a little on my meat. The chopped pork, which tasted rich and smoky, was absolutely fine either on its own or with the house spicy red sauce, which really brought out a lot in the meat. Marie, still satisfied from the ribs at Dreamland nearly two hours earlier, just had a small sandwich slathered with their mild red sauce and was also very pleased with it.

Actually, one other thing about my daughter’s snacks struck me later. When we visit barbecue joints, she typically just orders Brunswick stew. This trip helped me see that this is much more of a Georgia specialty than I had previously thought. Over four days, I visited one barbecue place in Tennessee, two in Mississippi and two in Alabama, and not a one served stew. Well, shut my mouth. Certainly, I have been to many places in other states that don’t have stew on the menu – or, in Kentucky, they might have burgoo, which is a lot like Georgian-style Brunswick stew with more veggies – but until this trip, it never once occurred to me that this might be because this restaurant is not in Georgia. Do Texas-based food writers come to Georgia and make special note that here, customers may order that well-known Georgia treat called Brunswick stew, in much the same way I will mention the deviled eggs in north Alabama?

(And that’s not even getting into the distinct difference between Georgia-styled Brunswick stew, as exemplified by that served at Harold’s in Atlanta and Speedi-Pig in Fayetteville, and Virginia-styled Brunswick stew, which I believe might best be sampled in this state at Sprayberry’s in Newnan and Zeb’s in Danielsville. Much more research is required. Howzabout a grant from Mobil?)

I thought it was charming and cute that the thing that must have brought us to this restaurant ended up being the one thing that let me down. This would definitely have been worth a stop even if white sauce had not been on the menu, and I am very glad (shouts, exclamations, hoots, hollers) that they are open on Sundays so that we could visit as we came through town. I hope that Rusty will understand and accept my burning curiosity about trying as much as I can, however, and be all right with me stopping by Leeds on a Saturday next time, so I can sample his two competitors up the road. Sadly, I don’t think we’ll be out this way again for quite a few more months, though.

Dreamland BBQ and Taco Casa, Tuscaloosa AL

My dad never went to Tuscaloosa. I always thought that was weird.

When he was younger, he saw his beloved Crimson Tide play many times at Legion Field in Birmingham, and, once he and my mom moved to Atlanta, back when Georgia Tech was in the sort of proto-SEC, he'd see the Tide play in Atlanta at Grant Field. Yet he never saw the Tide at what is today Bryant-Denny Stadium, which is briefly visible, towering over the trees, as you make your way down Tuscaloosa's main commercial strip, McFarland Boulevard. At least, I think that was the stadium. I'll feel a bit silly if it wasn't.

You might have seen the images of devastation from the tornado that leveled a chunk of McFarland in late April. Seeing it first-hand, all the businesses at this one crowded intersection turned into matchsticks, chalk dust and giant, mangled letters that once formed signs, was shocking. Looks like it came about twelve feet from knocking down a hospital. Better the Hobby Lobby than that.

A big part of me wanted to swing by Bama's campus on our way back through Tuscaloosa, but I had too hard a time thinking of Dad to manage it. Just being in that town at all, making our way to the legendary Dreamland BBQ, was rough, and I got choked up at one point, missing Dad. He loved Bama so much that being in that town, with crimson everywhere you looked, was a little overpowering.

I knew that it would be; that's why I wore a UGA shirt.





Dad never came to Dreamland, not even once the owner agreed to a chain of franchises with expanded menus. One opened in Roswell about a decade ago, and instantly brought in dozens of the region's Tide faithful to watch Bama sports on TV. I couldn't even get Dad to come watch a game with me there; he had long passed the point where he just wanted to watch his games on his TV, in his house, where he could yell and whistle all he wanted. I tried telling him he could do all that in the restaurant, too, but he liked to be home, and he liked to be in charge.

The Dreamland franchises are really not much like the original store, which is very near McFarland, but tucked away next door to a small church and catty-cornered to a mobile home and a field of kudzu. The original is absolutely a barbecue temple where the faithful make pilgrimages. When we left, out-of-state license plates outnumbered local ones by 3-to-1. The franchise stores serve up a full menu of chopped pork and every possible trimming, but the original just serves ribs, bread, sauce, banana pudding, slaw and beans. That's it. You don't come here unless you're ready to dig into some ribs.

Marie likes this place more than I do. Don't get me wrong; it is a treat, dark, loud and full of bric-a-brac and celebrity autographs, and the ribs are excellent, but Marie just likes ribs more than most people do. She does not order them often. She's just genteel enough to grin and say that she feels like a barbarian gnawing down on them. The ribs are indeed excellent, but honestly, I could eat all day on white bread and their unusually spicy orange sauce. I heard an informed guess once - from a native Alabaman who co-owns a barbecue restaurant in town - that the secret ingredient in Dreamland's sauce is turnip greens. This is not listed among the ingredients on the label of the take-home quart, but I choose to believe it anyway.

We keep a quart of this sauce in the fridge; I find that it goes well with damn near any meat. Shortly after the baby was born, Marie's mother came to stay with us and cook for a spell. She makes some really excellent meatballs that are meant to be eaten with spicy mustard. Marie's mother is far too polite to say anything about it, but I could see the look of sheer horror in her eyes when my daughter and I spooned a good quantity of Dreamland sauce all over her meatballs. I'll tell you the truth, though: it made excellent meatballs even better.

Marie had the lion's share of the ribs that we ordered, in part because, perhaps with the stubbornness of a heretic, I had something to eat on the way over. We learned as we drove through Tuscaloosa on our way to Mississippi that the city is home to a small chain of Mexican fast food joints called Taco Casa. There are seven dotted around the town. Y'all know me and teeny little fast food chains, and I just had to check this out.





Look at that sign! I understand that my fascination with small-market chains is not universal, but you must admit, that is one fantastic fast food sign.

Taco Casa started up in 1974, serving the same sort of menu as Del Taco and Taco Bell. It's very much the same sort of food, not quite as good as Del Taco and a million times better than the Bell. Del Taco, you understand, is my absolute favorite fast food not available near me, although we are hearing serious scuttlebutt about a store opening in the suburb of Snellville later in 2011. "Not quite as good as Del Taco," is, from my mouth, pretty serious praise.

I did spot something interesting on the menu. In Athens, there's a not-miles-removed little chain of places called The Taco Stand. Some years ago, they upgraded and corporatized their menu and removed an item called a sancho, which was basically a deluxe burrito without sour cream. I have never seen sanchos on anybody else's menu until we stopped here. I wonder whether the Stand didn't pilfer the idea from Taco Casa.

I think it is important to note when you get really great service at a restaurant, particularly a fast food place that doesn't necessarily employ the best and brightest. I wanted to double-check directions to Dreamland from the kids behind the counter, especially since I lost track of how many of the seventysomething miles along US-82 we'd already driven. These guys were so unbelievably nice and helpful that Google should employ them. They told me every landmark to look for along the way, yet I'm not entirely sure they understood why in the world I was wasting time on a little dinky fast food place like them when I could be stuffing my gullet with ribs.

My heresy continues. As we returned to I-20, I was still licking my lips with the spicy tang of the Dreamland sauce. In time, the taste faded. Half an hour east of Tuscaloosa, I started tasting the delightfully spicy ground beef of Taco Casa. I fought the temptation to turn around. It was not easy.





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Starkville, Mississippi - part two

So I've been talking about our trip into the Deep South and finding some pretty good food along the way. Nothing in Mississippi had really completely knocked me for a loop, but Starkville might just not be the right place in the state. All the evidence points towards the Delta region, or Hattiesburg, being full of interesting places to eat.

But that's not to say that Starkville is completely without charms. We certainly didn't have any bad meals here, although the stunning number of crummy national fast food joints on Highway 12 will make anybody slowly shake their head. The first full day was pretty good, but the discoveries of the second day were even better.

For breakfast, Marie and I took the kids to the small downtown area for a meal at Starkville Cafe, which is apparently a fairly old business that had been shuttered for a few years before a reopening in 2008. I am very disappointed in myself for not sampling the owner's homemade syrup, which he calls duck butter and comes with an order of waffles, but I really was not in the mood for waffles, and just wanted some biscuits and gravy. It had been a while since I'd indulged.





Nothing about Starkville Cafe really shines as truly remarkable, but it's a very good place for a proper southern breakfast, probably not bettered in the area, with a regular clientele and awesome service. When I asked about the restaurant's history, our server told us a little and directed us to the second dining room, to see a few quite old framed photos of Starkville's downtown over the years. These, most dating from the days that Mississippi State University was still a college, were pretty fascinating, and got us ready for the next part of our morning. Marie dropped my daughter and me off on campus, near the stadium, and she and the baby went to go play board games with her brother and sister. The girlchild and I had some exploring to do.

Mississippi State is one of the smaller SEC schools, but it still has a fine stadium and some wonderful old buildings and trees. Actually, they don't have nearly enough trees on this campus. My daughter and I spent the better part of four hours walking around and sweating and wearing out the right side of my right shoe and while I'm glad for the exercise, I was more glad for those occasional moments where we took a break and sat in the shade. This was an orientation morning for dozens of incoming families, and I reflected, sadly, how soon it will be before my older son takes off for school, and how very badly I am prepared, emotionally or financially, for that day.

For lunch, we walked back up University Boulevard and met my wife and her siblings at The Little Dooey, which is arguably the city's most well-known restaurant for out-of-towners to try. This excellent barbecue shack proved to be the eatin' high point of our time in Mississippi. It was recommended, as many good restaurants are, by an acquaintance on the Roadfood.com message boards, Littleman. I think I asked him for a suggestion about a year ago, because that's about how long I've been penciling in a trip to Starkville to visit with Marie's brother.





I thought this place was just terrific. It gets a good crowd of travelers, including a small mob of older bikers who roared in just ahead of us. Dimly lit and cozy, it's a very relaxed and laid-back place, and they serve up some fantastic chopped pork. I thought the meat tasted even better than the good stuff at Petty's the previous evening. There were two sauces, a very disappointing and incredibly sweet mild sauce - "You'll like this," I teased Marie. "It's from Hershey." - and a much tastier hot sauce with good bite.

The sides were also really terrific. I was especially taken with the corn salad, which was in a light seasoned dressing with tomatoes and peppers and reminded me of the corn that I really miss since Dusty's BBQ here in Atlanta closed. Somehow, my daughter got an extra helping of it instead of the corn on the cob that she ordered. The server was good enough to bring her a replacement cob and I helped myself to more of the corn salad since my daughter, madly, didn't enjoy it.

By this point, the temperature, as displayed by the signs in front of banks around town, had peaked at 104. It seemed like a perfectly good time for my daughter and I to duck into a movie theater and enjoy some air conditioning for hours, while the others resumed their board games. We should have seen two movies instead of just one. Not very long after we emerged, talk turned to supper, and it was eventually decided, after they played several more games, that we should go to a Cajun-themed sandwich place called Oby's.





I really enjoyed Oby's, too. Sure, given the right meats it is difficult to mess up a sandwich, but the half-muffuletta here, priced extremely nicely at under six bucks, was as good as any I'd had at Logan Farms, and the side cup of jambalaya was completely wonderful. Karl had a big plate of red beans and rice, and Marie and Anne both enjoyed the Cajun-spiced roast beef.

Oby's was the closest place to a drive out in the country that we made from Starkville. If you can imagine the university as a big block on the east side of town, with a stretch of student-priced housing and similarly-oriented retail and restaurants stretching west towards downtown, then the whole shebang is effectively bordered, or scissored, by "Old 82," which is rather rundown and weathered on the north side and by MS-12, the commercial artery with the larger grocery stores and fast food on the south side. There are reasonably nice neighborhoods and schools below this artery, and Oby's is down this way. In a community as small as Starkville, driving from the west edge of town down here feels like really getting out of the way, but at home, we seem to drive at least this far just to get to the interstate. It does make me feel like the next time we come to Mississippi, at some point we need to leave Marie and the baby behind for gaming and I'll take whatever other kids are with me and get out exploring.

Having said that, though, just exploring the campus in that heat in the morning utterly did me in and caught up with me hard. After supper, I laid down at Karl's place for a quick nap. Marie kicked back to rock the baby to sleep and pretty soon we were both passed out, feeling our age and, in my case, looking it, while everybody else played games and let the fogeys sleep. My daughter reported that she battled her way to an unlikely one-turn win in some card game or other.



In all, this was a pleasant getaway. It was awfully hot and a little more limiting than I was anticipating, but we know better for our next trip what to expect and what we might do. I definitely want to return to the Little Dooey, but I also want to drive around a bit more, and visit Columbus, Brooksville or West Point, and see what they might have to offer.

Before we left town in the morning, we stopped at the local Shipley Do-Nuts, right across from the hotel, for a quick little breakfast. I've noticed stores from this chain in Nashville a time or two, and I suppose it's sort of the regional equivalent of Dunkin. Given a blind taste test between either store's chocolate frosted, I couldn't tell them apart. Just as well I like Dunkin, really! I had a chocolate frosted doughnut; I do like chocolate, I just like it best on a doughnut.

The road trip back would prove to be considerably longer than the trip there, as we had six planned stops to make. More on that in the next chapter.

Starkville, Mississippi - part one

Not long after moving to Starkville, Mississippi, my brother-in-law Karl joined the local chapter of a fraternal organization. On our first evening there, we got to meet some of his friends from that group when we went to their usual Thursday evening post-meeting dinner retreat, the Central Station Grill. This is one of the city's nicer, in the "clean and upscale" department, restaurants, the sort of place that most undergraduates at Mississippi State probably "take" their parents for a nice dinner in the hopes that Dad'll get the tab. The food here was pretty good, but my children had better not try that scam with me. Wherever they go to college, and I hope that they will go far away and cultivate memories unencumbered by my own, they should know to "take" me to someplace with a lot more soul than this.

Having the brief opportunity to chat with older, local men, I asked them about local specialties. Like a lot of us in this hobby, I've been reading the work of John T. Edge, a Georgia boy who apparently holds the position of Professor Emeritus of Eating Real Good at Ole Miss, up in Oxford. Adhering to the "publish or perish" rule, Edge has written several extremely good books, including the downright indispensable Southern Belly, and co-ordinates The Southern Foodways Alliance, which I heartily encourage all of my readers to explore in depth. It's certainly raised Ole Miss a rung or two in my estimation; enough that, when my daughter and I were in a Mississippi State college gear store, I just had to tut-tut when I saw Ole Miss labeled as "The Ugly" alongside Bama's "The Bad." I wonder what Starkville has contributed to our love and understanding of food in half the time that Oxford has.

So, anyway, I've been reading Edge's books and the fascinating oral histories on the SFA site, and had in mind, while I was in Mississippi, to track down some local specialties. I had a particular desire to try some slug burgers and some hot tamales. Unfortunately, Starkville is in entirely the wrong place, according to Karl's friends, to sample either. In one case, they would be proved wrong, as we'll see below. The older gentlemen had a lot to share, about the Slug Burger Festival up in Corinth, and how one of their number could probably cook up a pretty good batch of tamales himself, but any in the region were probably trucked in from Greenwood, but mainly how if I wanted burgers at all, my best bets locally were either restaurants called Mudbug's or Grumpy's, neither of whom could be relied upon to serve slug burgers or dough burgers or even really knockout caliber burgers, period, but they were usually pretty good.

They also had a great anecdote about my brother-in-law being so doped up on dental painkillers once that he forgot where he lived, but that didn't help much.





At any rate, the food at the Central Station Grill sort of got dominated by a few minutes' conversation with strangers, the sort of which I would have loved to continue for much, much longer. It's a decent enough place for what it is. It's one of five properties managed by a company called the Eat With Us Group, ranging from high-end dining at Harvey's, with three locations in Columbus, Starkville and Tupelo, to student-budgeted meals at the Bulldog Deli. Marie had a burger that she said was pretty good, and I had a decent chicken pesto pasta salad along with a cup of tomato florentine soup, which is sort of what you'd get if you served a bowl of spinach ravioli cold, and my daughter had a plate of nachos that she enjoyed. It's comparable to an Applebee's, but preferable in that, while visiting Mississippi, you should want your food dollars to pay for a local payroll.

We slept horribly at the hotel, in part because the road trip kept our baby asleep all day and he finally woke around 11 pm and had no intention of going back to bed until he'd told us at very great length how exhausting it was to sleep for an entire day. He was in a little better mood in the morning, when the four of us dragged our carcasses from the hotel room to get something to eat before going over to Karl's apartment. I read a good thing or two about City Bagel Cafe, so we gave that a try.

I was a little aggravated by the music here. I was, on the one hand, very pleased that they were playing Mississippi State's student station, WMSV. On the other hand, 91.1 apparently programs any given hour by looking at an Atlanta 99x playlist from 1994. The Bodeans were playing when we walked in, and that "Tell me all your thoughts on God" song immediately followed. I was counting the seconds until we heard "Breakfast at Tiffany's" by Deep Blue Something.





We each had bagels here, although mine was a second choice. I usually wait until Marie orders before placing mine, but, indecisive in the face of such a large chalkboard menu, she asked me to go ahead. My daughter had already asked for a pizza bagel which she ended up liking a lot. I asked for egg salad, and Marie said "Oooh! That sounds great! I want one of those, too."

"Then change mine to cream cheese and lox with tomatoes, capers and red onions," I said, knowing that Marie knows very well that I would cave, wanting different things, and be satisfied with a couple of bites of her egg salad. This worked out all right; my salmon and veggies turned out to be much tastier than her bagel.

This is a really good student spot, with lots of coffees and smoothies and fresh-squeezed orangeades, several tables and magazines. It gets pretty loud during peak times. Running a little early the next day (Saturday), my daughter and I popped in again and found it every bit as noisy and full of life. This is a good place, though heaven knows how any of these students get any work done.

They're certainly not working when they are visiting Grumpy's, which is on MS-182 (the old part of US-82). This is a very student-oriented bar and grill with a big backyard to book live bands to play while students enjoy drink specials and burgers.





I imagine that most college towns have a place like Grumpy's. It reminds me very much of the Loco's on Baxter Hill in Athens. You can get a pretty good burger there, too. Grumpy's has an enclosed patio with an air conditioning unit about the size of your car keeping it cool and a super-sized screen on the side of a building behind it showing ESPN. We watched the Mississippi State baseball team finished getting manhandled by Florida while enjoying some good food. Unsurprisingly, all the entrees have cute names. I had the basic burger, served on a swirly bun that allowed mayo to escape onto my hands, which is called a Starkville City Jail. I wondered whether this town will still get you / because they have a curfew.

I've certainly had worse burgers, and this is a place that I could see myself frequenting if I were a local, but I was still hoping for something with a more Mississippi flavor. Happily, that came at our next stop, which proved to be one of the best meals we had all weekend. The previous day, when she went to check into our hotel while Karl and I left to go to Memphis, Marie had spotted this little place called Petty's BBQ on MS-12. This proved to be a damn memorable experience, mostly for the right reasons.





The downside to Petty's, and it's a very disagreeable one, is that they really would enjoy nickel-and-diming their guests to death. Somehow, the lady at the window who took our orders did not note that my daughter wanted a cup of ice water. When we returned to the window for it, more than forty dollars poorer, they asked for fifty cents for the cup. When I returned to the window for a refill of sweet tea, they demanded another fifty cents. I have certainly seen people on food-oriented message boards draw lines and refuse to visit restaurants that charge for basic amenities. I'm not certain, but I found that experience so aggravating that I might well join them where this place is concerned.

That's a shame, because the food is super. My chopped pork sandwich was quite good, and I had the thick, black, sweet sauce on the side, but the real winners were the two hot tamales that I ordered with them. Tight and packed densely with spicy pork, these were every bit as good as I had hoped, and I was so pleasantly surprised to try them, since the gentlemen I had spoken with the night before did not know about Petty's. They were not at all what I expected, however. I've seen photos of tamales, and enjoyed them at a Mississippi transplant's short-lived restaurant in Austell, Georgia, that were made from corn husks. These were made from corn tortillas. I was satisfied, but obviously the next time we come to Mississippi, I'm going to have to leave Marie and the baby in Starkville to play games with her family while I go northwest up to the Delta region and try lots more than just this.

I was the only one of our group who dug into the chopped pork, but that was okay, because this place fries up everything and does it well. Marie and her brother each had pan trout, absolutely delicious with wonderful sides, and while we all passed on the frog legs - oh, I wanted to, but the thought of all those little frogs on crutches, you understand - we were very taken with the excellent fried pickles and especially the fried green tomatoes. It's all very good food, and I sure was pleased to get to try some Mississippi tamales.

I was entering a food coma over the scope of supper, but I somehow managed to direct the car back up the road to Bop's for us to get dessert. Bop's is a small chain of frozen custard stands that operates twelve stores in Mississippi and one in Louisiana. The first one opened in Jackson in 2000. They specialize in "concretes," sundaes mixed so thickly that you can turn the cup upside down and not lose the contents. I had a vanilla shake, and it was not at all bad.



I'd like to think that we ate pretty well in Starkville, but we were not done yet! We had more eating to do on Saturday, and a campus to visit. Give me a couple of days to write that up and I'll tell you about it next week sometime.

The Bar-B-Q Shop, Memphis TN

Here's a restaurant that I genuinely waited a year to enjoy. When Marie and I went to Memphis to visit her younger sister in June of 2010 - "Never again visit Memphis in June," I told myself, "because it's too darn hot." Shows how I listen. - Anne suggested that we eat at The Bar-B-Q Shop. She and her boyfriend and her housemates all agree that this is the best of Memphis's many amazing barbecue restaurants. Unfortunately, we had Sunday free for eating out, and this is one of those aggravating places that closes on Sunday. We ended up at Jim Neely's Interstate instead, and I had no complaints.

As we put together plans to take our new baby over to visit Marie's brother and sister, Karl mentioned that he could drive up and collect Anne. "Wait until we get to Starkville and I'll ride to Memphis with you," I said. I ended up doing the driving, across US 82 to Winona and north up I-55, and didn't mind at all. Karl has a smooth ride that probably doesn't rattle audibly until the other side of 120 mph, and I kind of liked being in control of when I was going to get some of that barbecue. So, after a good few minutes of baby-hugging and play, Marie and the baby and our daughter enjoyed the air conditioning in Starkville while we got back on the road for the six and a half-hour round trip.





My goodness, friends. This place was worth the wait. I may claim to prefer Carolina-style barbecue, but the two places that I have tried in Memphis have been just spectacular. This place absolutely lives up to its reputation. The sadly-still-on-hiatus 3rd Degree Berns gave the Bar-B-Q Shop his highest award, one of only five restaurants to make that grade, and he's in good company. I'm not certain when this place opened, but it has become one of the city's best-known and best-loved barbecue temples.

I had a pulled pork plate with beans and slaw and it was absolutely everything I could have hoped for. I remembered to order my meat dry, and I'm very glad that I did, because the Memphis way is to absolutely drown everything in sauce. The only disappointment was the mild sauce, which was sweet but very tame. The restaurant and its competition team bottles this sauce and sells it in grocery stores under the label "Dancing Pigs" and it's not so different from anything that Kraft bottles. The hotter sauce has much more character and bite. I understand that the usual Memphis way to enjoy pulled pork is on a messy sandwich, lost in so much slaw and sauce that you can't eat it without gloves and a bib, but I'm just fine trying my pork dry, so I can appreciate the perfect mix of smoky and moist that makes for the best barbecue.

The slaw was made with a strong vinegar base and was really terrific. I prefer vinegar slaw to mayo-based, and on a sandwich, mixed with the sweet sauce, I bet this really does blend well together.

The service here was a trip. Our server was a former Atlantan, and you've never met such a motormouthed queen in all your days. Hearing where I was from, he told us that he used to know a fellow who worked on the household staff of Zell Miller, back when he was governor and before he lost his marbles, and probably would still be regaling us with tales of political hoedowns and foolishness and shortcuts from one city to another if we hadn't called time to get back on the road. Marie's little sister had a new nephew to meet, after all.

Mix, Birmingham AL

Over the course of the next several days, we'll be telling you about the fun trip that we took to Starkville, Mississippi, to visit Marie's brother and sister. Karl moved there after serving a few tours in the army, and Anne, as readers who were with us last year, lives in Memphis. We had a terrific little trip, taking the baby out of state for the first time. Starkville is five hours' drive from our place, not including the stop in Birmingham for breakfast, and once we got to Karl's place, and visited for a little bit, he and I got back on the road to go pick up Anne, and get some barbecue.

But I'm getting ahead of things. We needed to get breakfast in Birmingham first off, and, sad to say, the usually reliable regulars at Roadfood.com did not have any immediately good suggestions for a quick breakfast on our way through town. I sort of rolled the dice and picked Mix as the best available option.





I really enjoy Birmingham. Marie and I visited twice last year with the girlchild - her older brother has managed to miss three trips here now! - and I hope that we can make another long daytrip out here soon. I'd like to stop in at a Golden Rule to try them out, and we drove past a barbecue place that I had not heard of before that I thought was called Lola's. At least I think that it was; it was either on 5th or 3rd Avenue South - one continues onto the other - and I can't find it again online.

When we pulled past Mix, it looked closed. Downtown Birmingham has areas that look completely dead all of the time, but this place, just a block away from the McWane Science Center, isn't one of them. We pulled into the nearest surface lot and sent my daughter to go look into it. She said that she saw somebody inside but the door was locked. It was 7:45 and even though the menu on the door said they opened at 7, she couldn't get in. So I wandered over, saw customers inside, but confirmed that the door was locked, walked around to the other entrance, on 19th Street, and entered there. The fellow at the counter was baffled as to how the door got locked.

(There was additional odd confusion about how in the world you were meant to pay to park in this surface lot when none of the numbers on the asphalt corresponded with any of the numbers on the little slots, but I don't want to discourage anybody too much from thinking about stopping by for breakfast, so just find a deck. It's probably cheaper and you'll be out of the sun, anyway.)

Mix's interior is very low-key, spotless and uncluttered. In the mornings, it's a place to pick up pastries, doughnuts and turnovers on your way to the office. At 11, they start serving lunches and they seem to have a good amount of space to accommodate a good crowd. Breakfast pastries run between $1.50 and $3 and everything here is really tasty. Between us, we enjoyed croissants, apple turnovers, chocolate frosted doughnuts that deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Atlanta's mighty Sublime Doughnuts and honkin' huge cookies that get gooey chocolate all over your fingers while you try to drive.

We didn't have the opportunity to linger; we'd got an annoyingly late start on the road anyway and spent longer on the surface streets getting to Mix than I planned. By the time we left - based on my experiences, evidently I-20 is much easier to get back onto going west than east from downtown - we were still a little behind the planned timetable and had another half the drive to go. I licked chocolate off my fingers - I got a lot of chocolate on my fingers - and put the pedal to the metal.