Johnny's Bar-B-Que & Steaks, Powder Springs GA

Somewhat overlooked in all the talk of regional barbecue styles is that there is a little outpost of restaurants in western Cobb County and Douglas County that all have very similar takes on presentation, sauce and preparing the chopped pork. I know that I'm not the first one to notice this. I wish that I could take credit for it, but somebody who actually deserves credit - and, you probably know me, I'm just not very good about remembering where I read things - noted an interesting similarity between the chopped pork at Austell's Wallace Barbecue and a place in Douglasville that I have not yet tried, Hudson Hickory House in Douglasville. I made the connection, but didn't note it anywhere, between Wallace and Briar Patch Restaurant, which is near Dallas and Hiram. A couple of weeks ago, I revisited Johnny's Bar-B-Que and Steaks for the first time in four or five years and realized just how similar this place is to the others.

If you pull up these on a map, like the handy Community Walk one at the bottom of this page, you'll see that they're all in the same little quadrant, north of I-20 and east of I-285. Now, I can't speak with certainty about Hudson Hickory House, but I have seen a photograph of a chopped pork plate at Courthouse Bites and read a description of the meal at BBQ Biker and I think I'm on pretty safe ground when I discuss it in general terms. All four of these older restaurants serve very soft chopped pork that is presauced and swimming in a very thin, red-to-black, mild and very tangy vinegar-based sauce, while also offering a much hotter mustard-based sauce on the table. The fries are freshly-cut, whole potato-style and very greasy. BBQ Biker describes Hudson's as "floppy," which can certainly be used to define the fries at the other three restaurants. The stew at each is very thick, heavy on the onions but not too many other vegetables.

When I do get the chance to visit Hudson's, and I will, soon, I will definitely have to ask about the similarities that I'm seeing here. I'll make a note to go after the lunch rush so somebody might have a chance to talk with me. It might not be to everybody's taste, but this is an absolutely fascinating discovery. Barbecue lovers, you need to get out here and dig into this region and see what I'm talking about!





A couple of Saturdays ago, Marie's mother came to town and we had a pretty good time and enjoyed some good meals, although I think her favorite of the dinners out must have been our lunchtime trip to Vingenzo's in Woodstock. That really is some unbelievably amazing pizza. She doesn't actually care for barbecue, madly, and so, for supper, I tried to come up with someplace that we hadn't covered in the blog before that I knew also offered pretty good steaks and burgers. David had taken Neal and me to Johnny's several years ago, and while I didn't remember the details, I remembered that it was a big Saturday night family dinner place, so I asked whether we could meet at David's place and ride over there.

If you've eaten at Wallace recently, then Johnny's will give you a case of déjà vu. It's not merely the similar style of cooking the pork; the interior and the design is very familiar. The great big room with rustic 1930s bric-a-brac on the walls feels very comfortably similar, like you've been here before.

I was pretty taken with the food at Johnny's, though I would have preferred to try the meat dry. The sauce is gently tangy and not very sweet, but the mustard sauce on the table is among the hottest barbecue sauces that I have tried recently. It's a menace, and makes a great dip for the "floppy" fries. Marie had the ribs and enjoyed them very much, her mother had a burger with some really good baked beans that she liked more than the main course, and David had a steak that didn't set his taste buds alight, but he said it was pretty good.

Well, now the next question - as soon as I've made my way to Hudson, anyhow - is how many more restaurants in the area serve barbecue in this style? Four big established places in such a small radius definitely makes a trend, but I wonder how widespread it is? More research, as ever, is needed!

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Manuel's Tavern, Atlanta GA

Good grief, this place is a breath of fresh air. I visited Manuel's Tavern maybe twice, many, many years back, and never made it a habit. More fool me. The venerable neighborhood bar, which will celebrate its 55th birthday next Saturday, is an absolute joy to visit. It's a site absolutely radiant with Atlanta's history, where extremely good pub food, locally-brewed beer, and, surprisingly, some of the best burgers in the city are available. I was pleased when Roadfood.com added it to their list of Georgia-reviewed restaurants, knowing that I would need to return. I was even more pleased after my visit.

Also worth smiling about: as often as I've had to complain about the unpleasant, paranoid propaganda of Fox News being broadcast unwelcomely at regional restaurants, Manuel's Tavern is where Democrats eat and drink. Politics are not necessarily part and parcel of meals in the dining rooms, but of course, in the bar, guests will be drinking under photos of FDR and JFK.

Anyway, my boss, Krista, who loves this place, said that she'd like to join me when I made my way to Manuel's. We were not able to sync schedules, so she asked me to go without her, just so long as I had her favorite burger, prepped her way.





Manuel's was originally the site of a delicatessen called Harry's. Manuel Maloof bought it in 1956, brought his brother Robert on board to help run it, expanded it into the businesses on either side and created one of Atlanta's most beloved neighborhood joints. There seems to be room inside for hundreds, with teeny little corridors leading into rooms that guests might never know were there.

The walls are a living history lesson of the city. In 1956, the Braves had not yet relocated from Milwaukee. You can see the lineups of the 1956 and 1958 AAA Crackers on one wall instead. Newspaper stories by Ron Hudspeth relate the days when Manuel spent as CEO of DeKalb County. Any guest could spend hours studying all the memorabilia and writings posted along the dark wood paneling.

Manuel's two best-selling burgers are the McCloskey Burger - a half-pound patty with lettuce and tomatoes - and the J.J. Special, served with two cheeses and onions along with a heap of wonderful steak fries and some onion rings. Normally, J.J. Specials are served on wheat toast, but I was instructed to have one on a Kaiser roll. It was terrific. That these burgers fly under everybody's radar is criminal; they are, flatly, among the very best burgers in the city. Along with a pint of Athens' wonderful Terrapin pale ale, it was a really nice lunch.

While families are welcome in Manuel's, the clientele tends to skew older and the conversations flesh out the remarkable sense found here of the city's stories in a nutshell. Even as Atlanta razes and wrecks its history and old, beloved businesses fail - the Atlanta Book Company, right across the street, shuttered earlier this month - the oral history of the city is being retold at Manuel's tables. I raised my eyes from my novel - Gregory Mcdonald again - as four older men talked about the days when Paul Newman would race at Road Atlanta. If you're a local, then as your eyes read that line, you probably remembered the old Road Atlanta logo from T-shirts you had not seen in three decades.

This is a place where stories are told, and as new customers and families find the place, where new ones will be written. I was too drunk, too young and too stupid to enjoy Manuel's when I was 22. Today, I love it more than I can express. Fellows, we all need to meet here soon and plan to spend a long and wonderful happy evening.

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Pork Tamales from Zocalo

Last month, I shared how our trip to Mississippi found me looking, unsuccessfully, for tamales in the wrong part of the state. The tamales that I did find, at Petty's BBQ in Starkville, were not at all like what I was expecting. Obviously, regional and family recipes are going to vary, and that's a great thing, but I was sort of hoping for something in particular - thick, starchy cornmeal boiled in a corn husk - and did not get it. I resolved that at some point, I'd make sure that the road took me back to the Mississippi Delta and I could hunt around for other takes on the dish.

So I was quite surprised when, just a few weeks later, I found homemade tamales for sale at the Marietta Square Farmers Market. They've actually been right under my nose for ages at the Zocalo stand. I'm such a chump. I've been shopping at the farmer's market with Marie for all this time and occasionally snuck a few samples of chips-n-salsa and it never even occurred to me to look twice at what these good folks offer. They sell tamales, prepared the night before, in bags of a half-dozen for $15.



Zocalo opened its first restaurant in 1995. I've never visited, but evidently, I should. It appears to be one of the first Mexican restaurants in Atlanta to make the strong claim of being traditional. For many years, they didn't even serve chips-n-salsa, as that is an American tradition. The restaurant slowly grew from its location on 10th Street into two other stores. Sadly, the recession hit it pretty hard and the stores in Decatur and Grant Park shuttered. The owners, brothers Marco and Luis Martinez, needed a new revenue stream, and fast. They'd already capitulated on the chips-n-salsa issue, and began looking into placing a small variety of pre-packaged salsas in grocery stores.

I should digress here, especially since I've mentioned Mexican-style places in this blog several times this month, and explain that while I do feel strongly about traditions being upheld and want to applaud restaurants that do it the original, right way, I personally used to really, really love the pleasure of absolutely gorging myself stupid on chips-n-salsa. Times and tastes change, and red salsas no longer hold the attraction that they once did. I still keep a bag of Golden Flake brand Maizetos in the pantry, and usually eat them with Zapatas brand medium green salsa verde. The typical red ketchupy salsa usually found on tables at all the El-This-Los-That places around Atlanta, well, that's not what I'm looking to eat anymore. Michael, a buddy of mine in California, once explained, "that stuff's not salsa, it's Marinara sauce." I still sample with a smile, but the days of keeping the server at hard work constantly refreshing me are long, long gone.

So anyway, the fellows at Zocalo decided to try out a line of salsas at the farmers market on Peachtree Road. They found they were definitely onto a winner, but perhaps not necessarily one that can be packaged and shipped away quite just yet. Instead, they keep their kitchens open all night from Friday to Saturday morning, making tamales and, I believe, seven fresh varieties of salsa, and then send sales teams to something like thirty different farmers markets in Georgia, Florida and in Chattanooga selling salsa that's just a few hours old. This has proved to be a really good idea. According to a profile in Atlanta Magazine in March, they sold 54,000 units last year and are hoping to hit 70,000 in 2011.



After all this discussion, I hope I'm not hitting too sour a note when I say that the tamales were really just okay. We enjoyed some for supper the night that we bought them, along with some astonishingly good brandywine tomatoes and guacamole that Marie made from avocados that she bought that morning. We couldn't quite get the tamales to heat evenly through, although the pork, spiced with adobo salsa, really was quite tasty.

Clearly, what is still needed is a trip to the Delta and a tamale straight from a boiler, with none of this business of packing in ice and reheating. But that's okay; I am certainly grateful of Zocalo giving me the chance to try the real thing, and I made sure they knew of my appreciation. The following week, I asked Marie to bring me home a container of their amazing arbol salsa to eat at home with Maizetos. It's the least I could do.

Jim Stalvey's, Covington GA

I had not realized quite how much attention that I have been paying to Urbanspoon until I looked up Jim Stalvey's Restaurant, noted the surprisingly low user ranking (44%, if I recall, the morning that we visited), and asked myself why on earth we were going to head out that way. The answer, of course, was that the venerable steakhouse is one of those with a glowing review at Roadfood.com and we intend to hit (almost) all of the ones in Georgia, and so we just had to brave that 44% and hope for the best. It worked out just fine. 56% of the people who voted for that restaurant were quite spectacularly wrong. If you're looking for a good steak, you need to head out to Newton County and then log on to Urbanspoon and give that ranking a boost.

The building is a very old one, sort of classic suburban family restaurant design, and easy to overlook among the sprawl of US 278. I asked about it, wondering whether it might have once been a Ponderosa or something like that. It was apparently built in the early 1960s as the home of a restaurant called Bock & Kid. Jim Stalvey, a restaurateur from the north Georgia town of Rome, had already moved to Covington and opened a place in town with the horrible name of The Crest. In 1980, he moved into this site with a business called The Prado. In time, the Prado evolved into Stalvey's Restaurant and Lounge.

Stalvey has continued to open and operate restaurants along this leg of I-20, though the last few years have not been kind to them. At the end of 2005, one of his websites - not updated since then - boasted that he and his company ran seven. Presently, I count just four: Stalvey's, a fast food place called Quik Chick, and two Butcher's Block delis. Perhaps one day, we might visit the others. If they are as good as the main restaurant, they're worth the trip.





The four of us drove out to Covington with Neal some three Saturdays back. Covington has always been one of those towns that we pass through without stopping; I've been curious what else might be out here.

The must-try items at Stalvey's are said to include the onion rings and the fried cauliflower. I had the former and thought they were completely delicious. Happily, they were available as a side for my steak and not just as a more expensive appetizer. The steak was really wonderful. I had a small six-ounce sirloin, priced right at just $8.99. It was not as good as Marie's own grilling at her best, but better than many, many steaks that I have ordered in restaurants in the past.

Marie also had a steak - the filet was available as a special, also for $8.99 - and was very pleased with it. Neal had the chicken livers and really enjoyed them. He said they were not quite as good as the ones at Doug's Place in Emerson - those are the gold standard - but still very good. I'm glad that we came by for lunch and were able to enjoy them. Apparently, if I understand it correctly, the restaurant offers both steaks and a traditional southern meat-and-two menu, on a white board, during lunch hours, but in the evenings, it's all about either steak or ribs. The smokehouse is in front of the restaurant, but barbecue is only offered in the evenings.

Everything that we had tasted incredibly fresh and wonderful; the only slightly bum note came with the French dressing that Marie had with her salad and did not enjoy. Happily, the salad was made with such incredibly fresh veggies - these cucumbers are just to die for - that it did not need dressing at all.

Now, admittedly, Urbanspoon is a very poor judge of traditional restaurants like this. Its more prolific users seem to be more interested in the hot new joints in town, eating where everybody else eats, and often enjoying food that, as Calvin Trillin terms it, is always served on a bed of something else. The very low positive rating for Stalvey's probably indicates a period of inconsistency for this restaurant. What surprises me more, however, is that only 26 people had rated it at all. This is a restaurant that more people should talk about. If you can get a better steak for this price, with sides and vegetables this good, anywhere for forty miles, I'll be stunned.

Alon's Bakery & Market, Atlanta GA

Three Fridays ago - that is how far we are backed up right now! - I had my first solo lunch with the baby. Typically, I picked a place that's really not as baby-seat friendly as would have been ideal for one parent, but I did not know that when I picked it! This was Marie's first week back at work, and so, on one of my short days, the baby and I stopped by for a flying visit and a few hugs to give Mommy a nice little break from her crazy day, and then we set about finding someplace in Dunwoody to get something to eat when she had to get back to work.

I picked Alon's based on its Urbanspoon ranking. I don't know that I had ever heard of it before. It's the second location for this small market that serves up some terrific sandwiches. The original is in Virginia-Highlands, and Neal tells me that the dessert display that I passed tastes every bit as decadent and wonderful as it looks. Between that and the very impressive cheese counter, I was certain to tell Marie that there was a pretty stunning selection of treats just around the corner from her office.





I think that Alon's moved in to the space that had been occupied by Eatzi's for many years. It's a pretty cavernous room, and it is completely packed with counter space. If a guest is looking for lunch, they will enter through a patio, the blistering heat regulated by several ceiling fans, navigate an unavoidable logjam of people entering and trying to pay at the same place, and then work towards the back, where the sandwiches are made. I will agree with my fellow blogger The Toothfish, who observed that the prices are a little lower than most high-end delis while serving up considerably superior food.

I ordered a hot pastrami sandwich, and I don't know whether I've ever had one this good. The bread was just amazing; the crust was chewy and the rest was moist and so delicate that it seemed likely to disintegrate. The meat was served at the perfect temperature and just hinted at the sweetness that too much pastrami rolls about, lazily, in. The red onions tasted fresh and it was garnished with something called cannonball mustard. Googling this brings up Alon's as one of the most common results. It's nice little BBs of mustard seed in a very thin little sauce, and it goes incredibly well with the meat.

I enjoyed this wonderful sandwich with a bowl of pretty delightful gazpacho. It was not, perhaps, among the best bowls I've ever had, but it was quite good and it was just hot enough outside for this to be a perfectly considered treat. Normally, I just have a glass of ice water with my lunch, but I didn't think any would be available at this market, so I enjoyed a bottle of Boylan's cream soda. This all added up to be a pretty pricy lunch for one, but I daresay it was better than anything I could have attempted in my own kitchen.

Seating is, sadly, a real challenge here, so I would advise going outside of the peak lunch rush. The tables are jammed in a little close together, leading several people to act as though they were threading the fat man's squeeze at Rock City as they tried to get between the table nearest me and a pillar holding up the patio's roof. The staff member who said he would try to find a highchair for me promptly vanished without trace, so I ate with the baby seat on my table. My son got several compliments from people passing through, which is as it should be. He's an awfully cute kid.

Pure Taqueria, Woodstock GA

So there's this burrito place in Kennesaw that has been defying my efforts to eat there for years. I went there once and learned they were closed on Sundays. I went again and they were on vacation. I'm guessing that they take off every July 4th, because it was probably a year before Marie suggested burritos and I remembered the place and we drove that way and found them closed again. That's three times that one place has stymied my plans. They win this round.

So we went back to Woodstock for the second time that day. For lunch, we had gone to Bub-Ba-Q, an area favorite, and enjoyed their appetizer portion of burnt ends for the first time. Since I was hoping for someplace new to our blog for supper, we followed that up with a visit to Pure Taqueria in the small city's charming downtown. It's located right across the plaza from Canyons Burger Company, and next door to what had been The Right Wing Tavern, a popular local place that unexpectedly closed quite suddenly a week or so before. This wasn't a place that I was in any hurry to ever enter, but it was very surprising to learn that the restaurant that really drove that downtown's resurgence shut down so abruptly.

When I was working in Alpharetta a few years back, the original Pure - named because the small building was once the home of a Pure Oil gas station - was one of the region's foodie faves of the hour, always drawing huge crowds of all ages. The Woodstock location is one of two additional Atlanta sites. They have also opened in Matthews, NC and a fourth Atlanta store, in Duluth, is scheduled for a September opening.





Pure is one of those very rare places where we can't fault anything specific, but it's just far, far too loud and hot for us old-timers and a baby looking for a nice family dinner. The food was really quite good, and our server was incredibly awesome. Committing the giant volume of nightly specials to memory isn't the work of novices. Marie enjoyed her burrito, and I quite liked my meatballs, called albondigas, which were served in a chipotle tomato sauce. My daughter had the chicken taquitos and said that she really enjoyed those, too.

By the time our entrees were served, however, we were already sweating buckets and tired of yelling at each other to be heard over the music. Honestly, this just isn't a summertime place for us, certainly not on a Saturday night. Unfortunately, the restaurant's design, evoking an old garage with the huge doors and high ceilings, does not lend itself to really good air conditioning. My daughter finally gave up and went outside, where a light breeze made the high nineties feel more livable. I'd like to revisit Pure on a weekday evening in the fall, and maybe sit on the upstairs patio when it's cooler. If the food is consistently this good, I think that we'd all enjoy that experience a good deal more.

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Papi's Cuban and Caribbean Grill, Kennesaw GA

A few Fridays back, Marie and I found ourselves with just the baby. Our daughter had found a jawdropping sale on clothes at Plato's Closet and I had made her an offer that she couldn't refuse. If I forwarded her the next month's clothing allowance so she could fill a bag and save something ridiculous like - no joke - 75%, then she could fend for herself for supper and Marie and I could enjoy some grownup time. The baby just sleeps at restaurants - long may that continue - so we could mostly get a break from kids.

Marie was in the mood for a sandwich, so I suggested that we give Papi's a try. I had only been to this location once, right when it opened, and figured it was due a second glance. I did not know it at the time, but this is actually a small group of four restaurants, with one in midtown and three in the suburbs. They have daily specials and interesting entrees, but where they are said to excel the most is in their sandwiches.





We got to Papi's just as the dinner rush was about to get heavy, and this apparently coincides with their closing a few tables to make space for a band in the second dining room. We did not have to wait, but quite a few other people arriving after us did. This is a very popular place on Friday evenings!

My readers who enjoy unusual sodas should certainly swing by one of Papi's locations and check out the drinks on offer. They had quite a few cans of things that you very rarely see, including my beloved Ironbeer. A Cuban soft drink goes extremely well with a good Cuban sandwich.

In my mind, a Cuban sandwich is defined by its very good, slightly sweet bread, meats, lots of mayo and pickles. Marie had the medianoche sandwich with smoked pork and ham, and I had jerk chicken, and we both really enjoyed them. We were a little let down by the fries, which tasted rather too much like institutional mass-produced fries, and fried in the same grease used for the fish. Next time, we'll have a different side. There certainly will be a next time. While perhaps not quite as tasty as the relocated-to-Birmingham Kool Korner, the sandwiches are still very good, and the atmosphere is fun and upbeat. I'd like to go again one day and enjoy the live music, and an Ironbeer.

Taco Roc, Chattanooga TN

I've mentioned before that the main draw that persuades some of my local friends to visit Chattanooga with me is McKay, a frankly remarkable used bookstore that deals in the consumption of mass quantities of books, DVDs and CDs. There are three stores in Tennessee and the scale of this place is just eye-popping. It is always crowded and books are constantly moving. They made the decision years ago to treat the guests coming to sell or trade books as suppliers and not act like customers are bringing them a burden by asking them to look through a box. You know that heavy sigh you almost always get before the guy at the used record store tells you that they probably won't be able to sell most of what you brought in, but they'll take about a third of it for pennies in store credit? That doesn't happen at McKay. McKay's not doing you a favor by taking some of this off your hands; you are doing them a favor by selling them your books, and the staff acts like it. No, they don't take everything, but they take a darn good chunk of it and give you a fair price. Cash, too. No wonder we keep seeing Cobb and Fulton license plates in their parking lot. McKay is undercutting the bejezus out of every similar store in Atlanta.

Since, between us, David and Neal and I have far, far more books and CDs and things that we ever needed to purchase, McKay is a great place to get rid of it. It's a very satisfying feeling, and I never feel too guilty about using some of my cash for a celebratory snack at a restaurant that we don't have in our area. After all, if I'm going to be in a town for three or four hours, I'm going to want to eat twice, of course.

McKay is located at the north end of Lee Highway, a road that runs parallel to I-75 for about seven miles. US-11 and US-64 follow this street until exit 7, where they join the interstate. If you leave McKay and drive south two miles to Shallowford Road, you'll find one of the area Bi-Lo stores where I have frequently stopped for a twelve-pack of Double Cola. Across the street from it is Taco Roc, a place that's been impressing the locals with their traditional Mexican food. Not another El-This-Los-That joint, this belongs to the same school of cooking that we see at Sr. Sol in Athens or Bone Garden Cantina in Atlanta.





Neal, who doesn't quite follow my battle plan of mulitple small meals and consequently is in much better shape than me, passed on getting anything to eat here, and David just had some chips and cheese dip. But I wanted to see what Taco Roc could do with traditional-style cooking and ordered much more food than I intended to eat. I only had about half and a bit of each, but I ordered a chorizo taco, a chicken gordita, and a shrimp sopa. That way, I figured I could enjoy several different flavors. Everything tasted just wonderful and fresh. It's a decent quantity of good food for under seven bucks.

Impressively, I didn't even succumb to the calorie trap of having a basket of chips and trying several different salsas. I'd like to think this was because I was being cautious, but it probably has more to do with me not noticing the restaurant's salsa bar until after I finished my meal. That just gives me another reason to try those out sometime. I see from some online reviews that guests used to be able to enjoy a hot carrot dish at the bar, but that a new owner dispensed with it. Well, that sounds like a crime against food.

I enjoyed briefly talking with the girl at the register while getting a horchata to take with me back to Atlanta. I was quite taken with how they offer these. There's almost no counter space in this teeny room, and so the horchata and the similar traditional Mexican drinks are cooling in metal buckets under the glass to save room. The person working the register has to squat or lean down and get your drink out with a ladle.

It's pretty obvious that I don't enjoy Mexican-styled dishes as much as I once did, but I certainly have had the pleasure of visiting some really good restaurants in the last month or so. Maybe I'll have the chance to swing by Taco Mamacita later this year; that's also been getting some good buzz.

The Terminal Brewhouse, Chattanooga TN

As I took a nice sip of the root beer at Chattanooga's Terminal Brewhouse, I kind of had that feeling that I sometimes get that Marie would be a little envious of me once she knew what I was drinking. The thought had occurred to me that I could very well have enjoyed six or seven more pints of their oatmeal stout - it had been a bad week, I was in a lousy mood, and the stout was very, very good - but I decided to be sensible and just follow up the beer with a house-brewed soda. It was magical.

Since David joined me on a trip to Chattanooga in April, we decided to try to come back to town every couple of months. This time, Neal rode with the two of us to see what there was to buy and eat. Based on some rave reviews, I suggested we start with The Terminal Brewhouse, a fantastic operation that has set up in a building across the street from the inexplicably famous and popular Chattanooga Choo-Choo. The appeal of that place has long eluded me, but then again, I'm not taking Centrum Silver quite yet.

The Terminal was once a low-priced companion hotel to the Choo-Choo, offering cheap rooms for business travelers. I can easily imagine some itinerant salesman, like the fellow from Seth's Clyde Fans, standing out front of the Terminal in the late 1930s. Since the interior has been gutted to make room for the bar, dining rooms and brewing, it is on the other hand pretty tough to imagine what it must have looked like inside when there were actual guest rooms. Despite the historic feel to the building, it is incredibly small, and I suppose there couldn't have been more than seven or eight guest rooms on each floor, none with a private bath.





The brewmaster of Chattanooga's first brewpub is Steve Purdie, and he's come up with some really delicious beers. Currently, the restaurant is promoting and raving about their White Shadow, which I recall as the name of a TV show that wild horses couldn't make me watch as a kid. This is a Belgian white that has just a hint of citrus. Neal had a pint of this and pronounced it wonderful. I had the Southsidenstein Stout, which was really special. I don't know whether I've had reason to mention this here before - I do not drink anywhere nearly as much as I used to - but my all-time favorite bottled beer is Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout. I like stouts and porters more than any other beers, and I'm really refreshed most by something heavy like this. I might have had one or two drafts that I enjoyed more than the Southsidenstein, but I can't think of any right now. I love the tan color of the bubbles. Yes, the beer here should certainly be celebrated. Marie and I will be in Asheville in a couple of weeks; I am scheming to finally take some baby steps into that town's mighty beer culture and do some celebrating over there.

Oh, yes, we had some food, too. Neal ordered a chicken sandwich called the Frufru, which is unsurprising, as he did inform us once a couple of years ago that he is the queen of fru-fru drinks. This sandwich comes with - are you ready for this? - bacon, brie and pears. He was, again, very taken with his order. David, who drinks neither beer nor soda and was therefore sadly doomed to an inferior meal than Neal and I enjoyed, had the chicken breast, marinated with peach salsa and served with slaw and these really good grits.

I had the same two sides with my pork chop. Honestly, I wasn't mad about it. It was pretty good, but I found myself wishing that I had ordered the pepper smashed steak, which sounded a lot better in the end. I thought that the slaw - strangely termed Chuck Norris Slaw - was surprisingly mild, but the grits, topped with crumbles of bacon, were very tasty. I've been thinking about them for several days.

The root beer reminded me of the wonderful treat that we used to enjoy at Athens' first brewpub, which sadly did not last for more than a few years. I think that they were called Athens Brewing Company and they were on the Thomas Street side of Washington. I used to always follow up however many pints of stout or porter that I enjoyed there with a glass of the house root beer, too.

Marie agreed that she would have loved to have tried that. It's a shame something like that would neither last nor travel well, because it was very tasty. She said that she hoped we could visit the Terminal together sometime soon. I'm certainly fine with that; after all, I'm still curious about that pepper smashed steak that I should have tried.

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Neal's Bar-B-Que, Thomson GA

Here's a restaurant that was just plain difficult to find. Google Maps gave us pretty good directions from Statesboro up to Thomson, a large town a little west of Augusta, but the last road that we were looking for was very badly marked and we spent twenty minutes looking around for the place. I keep telling myself to study the map a lot more carefully, and not rely solely on directions. One day, I'll get it right.

We came to Neal's on the strength of a short review by John T. Edge (him again!) in the pages of a magazine with the quite remarkable name of Garden & Gun. Published in the November 2008 issue, and dissected within the forums of four or five dozen travel and food message boards ever since, "100 Southern Foods You Absolutely, Positively Must Try Before You Die" suggested that a really good serving of hash and rice could be found here, so, revisiting the article in search of inspiration back in March, I added it to my to-do list.

I certainly love good hash, but it was only this year that I had it served over rice. Around Athens, where I learned to love great barbecue in the 1990s, hash is about as common as Brunswick stew. Some of those good shacks in the northeast corner of the state are gone now - I've probably mentioned how much I miss Carrither's - and others, like Paul's in Lexington, serve up a side that they call stew but it more closely resembles hash in its use of fewer vegetables and more of the whole hog. I read recently that Hollis Ribs in Athens has both hash and Brunswick stew on the menu. Now that, I have to try.

When we stopped into Augusta's famous Sconyers in February as part of a looping day trip through South Carolina, we had hash served over rice for the first time ever. That's the default way to prepare it in this part of the country. I have to tell you, Sconyers gets all the press and all the praise, and it was a pretty good lunch, but what we found at Neal's just blew that place completely out of the water. I don't know why the heck more people don't know about Neal's. This is, flatly, one of the best barbecue joints in the state.





The prices are low here and the portions are huge. I ordered a chopped pork sandwich and a plate of hash, and watched as the girls behind the register dipped a ladle into a great big steel pot and give it several backbreaking stirs before lifting my serving out. The pork is dry and smoky and completely wonderful. Just a little bit of the house's vinegar sauce is all you need. And the hash, well, good grief. Edge, who you might recall is the Professor Emeritus of Eating Real Good at Ole Miss, was absolutely right to single this out. It is completely unforgettable. I follow Edge on Twitter. I'd love to follow him around in a car one day. He obviously knows where he's going to eat.

Another famous fellow who knows about Neal's is Jamie Oliver, who stopped by overnight during a stop on his six-part series Jamie's American Road Trip, which aired on Channel 4 in the UK two years ago. When we spoke with the owner, Lynn Neal, she told us about Oliver's visit, and that the show had not aired in America yet*. Watching the episode in question on YouTube, I'm not surprised. Links to YouTube are always extremely volatile as copyrights are enforced and users delete their accounts, but at present you can start viewing the episode here. It's fascinating viewing, but the complete opposite of the usual upbeat and fun eye candy that you see on The Food Network that celebrates eating. The show is in equal parts a celebration of regional cooking as it is a sober, harsh, and cerebral exploration of how Americans are handling the recession and Obama's presidency. The second segment of the episode - it's uploaded in fifteen-minute chunks - gets pretty heavy with the casual bigotry to be found in both posh Savannah homes and in Chatham County trailer parks. These aren't roads where Guy Fieri's camera crew often stops, anyway.

For my part, I really enjoyed the contrast. It's great fun to watch restaurant owners on Man Vs. Food or whatever talk about their wild recipes at maximum volume, but it's also compelling viewing to hear Mrs. Neal talk about the difficulty in providing for her staff, before Oliver and the camera crew go back behind the building to see the pitmaster, whose name is Barry, and work with him in getting the hogs cooked.

Before we got home to look up the episode, she told us how Jamie and his production team "borrowed" Barry for a barbecue competition in Lakeland, Florida. She didn't spoil the episode and tell us how that worked out, but she did say how very well they took care of Barry while he was away and made sure to get him back safe to resume cooking. Damn well that they did. Next time we are out this direction, we are definitely coming back to Neal's for another pork sandwich and a plate of hash. My desire to try lots of new things sometimes leaves me unwilling to make second visits out of town in favor of exploration, but that won't be happening the next time I-20 takes us east.

Well, we may need to stop at Heavy's in Taliaferro County as well as Neal's, but you get the idea.

(Also, a tip of the hat to Eat it, Atlanta, whose report on Neal's confirmed for me that they would be open as we drove through! Thanks!)



*Oliver's series was later scheduled to air in January 2012 on BBC America.

Vandy's Bar-B-Q, Statesboro GA

Sadly, Vandy's Bar-B-Q might well hold my personal, unfortunate record for longest time between being recommended a restaurant and actually visiting it. I have mentioned that, once upon a time, I maintained a small Geocities web page about barbecue restaurants in Georgia. Some reader wrote me in what might have been late 1999 - I seem to remember mentioning it to a classmate during that period - and urged me to come down to Statesboro to give it a try. Oh, it only took me the better part of twelve years, but I made it.

Over the years, I've seen many more references to Vandy's. It is one of the state's best-known barbecue joints. It was opened by Vandy Boyd in 1929, and moved to its present location in 1943. The building is quite remarkable. It manages to look like the bad side of town in a town that does not, in fact, seem to have a bad side. What we saw of Statesboro was a charming small middle Georgia college town - and yes, I do consider this still to be middle Georgia. It's north of I-16 and Savannah, so it's not strictly south Georgia in my book. Anyway, Statesboro looks like a quite nice little town, and while I'm sure there must have been a break-in or three over the decades to account for the bars on the windows and the industrial door, this restaurant looks almost comically out of place.

The business remained in family hands until Vandy Boyd's son sold it in 1984. It was sold again in 2006. It has remained an essential part of Statesboro and Georgia Southern University life ever since. It really seems that whether they eat downtown or at the satellite location at the nearby mall - which keeps much more traveler-friendly hours, is open for supper and on Sundays - everybody in the region will visit Vandy's at least once.





When we stopped in for lunch a couple of Saturdays back, apart from the mild comedic shock of seeing such an out-of-place building, we were most impressed by the Brunswick stew. This is much more like Kentucky's burgoo than any other stew that we have tried in Georgia. It was absolutely packed with extra ingredients that you don't usually see in stew, including pinto beans, carrots and peas.

The chopped pork is very moist and didn't really have the flavor that I personally prefer, but I did enjoy it all the same. It did, admittedly, go better with the sauce than dry, and this sauce is one of the region's best-known concoctions. It's a South Carolina-style mustard-based sauce, but it is both sweet and spicy. It reflects the light like honey. The sauce resembles the house sauce used at Turner's or Beaver Creek or whatever the heck that very good place out past Six Flags is calling itself this month. This was interesting and a really tasty meal. I won't hype it up and claim it is one of my favorites, but it is certainly worth checking out if you're interested in experiencing more of the striking variations in barbecue styles in this state.

I spoke briefly with our server and some of the staff behind the counter as Marie and my daughter left to get the start the engine and get the car cooled down before we loaded the baby in it. I think that we were all a little more interested in talking about my adorable son than about barbecue, so I didn't really learn much more about the place than I had read online, but I was amused by the big ole shelf stacked with loafs of Sunbeam white bread. They go through a lot of that over the course of a week.

I loaded up on sweet tea and we got back out on the road. Neither Marie nor I had really driven through much of this part of the state before. If eastern middle Georgia can be described, and not completely without cause, as nowhere, then we drove through the middle of it. State Route 17 really is something to see if you're one of those weird people who insists on seeing things that nobody needs to see. Louisville, Georgia, which, like Louisville, Kentucky is the seat of a county named Jefferson, might warrant another spin through to try a place called Purvis that I once read somebody praising. Marie had actually driven part of this run, on US-1, a few times driving from Augusta down to Saint Simons Island, but that corridor avoids GA-17.

Our last stop of the trip was, coincidentally, a place on the outskirts of Augusta, and it would prove to be the food highlight of our trip. More about that in the next chapter.

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Palmer's Village Cafe, Saint Simons Island GA

I find a lot of things frustrating about writing, and one of them is communicating that something is enjoyable, and sometimes very enjoyable, without being the number one absolute favorite thing that I've ever eaten. Part of me chalks this up to poor expression on my part, but I think that the reality is that it's really poor reading comprehension on the part of one or two people who get the wrong end of the tail. I have been blogging or journalling for more than a decade now, and I've seen it happen quite a lot, even from close friends who glance over something that I've written and completely misunderstand it. I would much rather say that I must have been unclear than blame them for being numbskulls. Well, I guess it depends who is reading. I know one or two numbskulls.

But I was bothered by something that Chris mentioned when he came up from Jacksonville to meet us on Saint Simons Island. I've only eaten at three places in that town. One of them, Al's Pizza, was pretty good, one was mediocre with excellent service, and one was probably only of interest to anybody on the planet as a neat example of a local chain with a regional specialty. I haven't dished out very many bad reviews here, as it's somewhat against the purpose of this blog, which is to recount our good experiences, and when I do elect to dole out the harshness, as I did to Johnny Rockets last month, I don't draw undue attention to it. But something about my tone of voice is clearly overpowering my intentions and drowning my words, as Chris took away from my chapters about Jacksonville a different read than I desired, to wit that I didn't like any of the three places.

This is exemplified by a commenter who read my chapter about Atlanta's Antico, a dinner that I described as "quite good" and "worth a visit," with pies that were "very tasty" and toppings that were "amazing" and "wonderfully tasty," concluding that this was "a good meal" of "simply excellent pizza," and told me that he couldn't disagree with me more, because he liked the pizza. By expressing my misgivings about the surly customer service, the bizarre house rules about moving the chairs and the lack of drink selection, factors that added up to a disagreeable overall experience, I unwittingly turned the chapter, in that reader's eyes, into a negative review.

Now, it's true that I'm not immediately planning a return to Antico, but this isn't because of anything that the restaurant did wrong. Well, perhaps apart from assigning that bored and grumpy girl to the cash register. It's simply that there are many, many excellent pizza restaurants in Atlanta, and I like at least five and probably six of them more than I do Antico. It's certainly true that you can get an awesomely good pizza at Antico. Everybody who eats there is guaranteed a really good pie. I like other people's pizzas more. That doesn't mean Antico is lacking. I blame the "snub" culture of our media. To hear pundits tell it, Susan Lucci was "snubbed" because she didn't win a Daytime Emmy until after she'd been nominated eighteen times. I read that as "Susan Lucci was in the top five for eighteen consecutive years" and consider that a pretty huge achievement. Most of us are not going to have that kind of success in our lives.

This is perhaps a long-winded way to explain that, from my perspective, it's praise when I say that something is pretty good. I'm not damning something when I say that something is not my favorite, or that other people like it more than me. Take the dearly departed Dressner's on Saint Simons Island. I had several pretty good breakfasts there. I enjoyed it a good deal. It was by no means my favorite food, and Marie and her father both liked it a lot more than I did. That's not to say that I didn't like it, but that Marie and her father really liked it. It was a restaurant with a lot of nostalgia for them, and nostalgia, as I've noted, is one of the most important ingredients to any restaurant's success.

I was sorry to hear that Dressner's had closed. The new business that moved in, well, they've got big boy shoes to fill. But Marie's got more of an iron in this fire than I do. It's always a bummer to hear that a favorite place has closed, but the place where a girl and her dad have had so many important meals together is someplace extra special, and Palmer's better not screw it up.





Believe it or not, I actually enjoyed my breakfast at Palmer's last month more than any breakfast that I ever had at Dressner's. I had a simply excellent omelet that came with tomatoes and fried, crispy onions and really enjoyed it a lot. Put another way, it really tasted like there was an extra step between the pretty good food available on the buffet at Sandcastle and the really excellent food that I got at Palmer's. Everything tasted like it was made from premium, fresh ingredients. Those tomatoes were just divine. What I could glean from Palmer's web site is that their head chef has been in the business for 27 years, and there is evidence that he likes playing with traditional offerings and guest's expectations. I'm curious to try the poached eggs over ham and collard greens some time.

Marie and our daughter both had the banana pudding pancakes. Neither of them were quite as impressed as I was with my omelet. Here, nostalgia and expectations come crashing into reality; Dressner's somehow had perfected the humble pancake. The ladies' breakfasts came out a shade darker than pancakes should.

I asked Marie whether Palmer's, understanding that it could never replace Dressner's, was an acceptable substitute for what was missing. She said that she'd have to let me know. It will take many more visits to decide. I guess that means that we'll be coming back. Frequently.

(Update, 8/14/11: It's worth noting that, while we had several good meals at Dressner's, the two meals that I've now had at Palmer's just blow those out of the water, frankly. On this second visit, I enjoyed an "Islander" omelet, with cheese, bacon crumbles and cucumbers, and it was absolutely great. This was the best breakfast that I'd enjoyed in weeks.)

Another Visit to Saint Simons Island GA

As many of our readers know, Marie and I are fortunate and happy to make four or five trips to the Georgia coast each year to visit her mother and her father, who are very happy to have a grandson come and visit. Saint Simons Island is packed with very good restaurants. There are, disagreeably, a few chains on the place, but a couple of them are local chains, so we give those guys a little business.

After finishing that gigantic snack of a pork chop sandwich in Brunswick, I knew that it would be a while before I was ready to have some supper, so it was pretty late in the evening before we took Marie's mother to dinner. They were in the mood for Chinese. I can safely say that I almost never am, and Fortune House isn't the sort of place that generally inspires me that I'm mistaken. They have a dinner buffet here, which I'm sure would please our friend Randy to no end. He does like those all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets.

About a month earlier, we had visited an Indian restaurant in Decatur with a similar buffet, and learned that if you actually wanted a particular dish not on it, you would have to pay more money for it. That sort of went hand-in-hand with that restaurant's incredibly lazy attitude, where bringing a check was perceived to be too much trouble. If you wanted them to cook something special, they were going to charge you extra for the burden. At Fortune House, however, more than half the menu was priced less than the buffet.





I did not have a bad meal at all. I selected the Singapore chow mei fun noodles, served with pork, chicken and shrimp, and it was quite tasty and spicy. I got the impression that somebody in the back knew what they were doing and found their job mostly very, very dull and boring. The menu proves it. It's exactly the same menu as every American Chinese restaurant in the southeast that caters to people of European descent. Put another way, no traditions were broken by the daring inclusion of "phoenix and dragon" as one of this place's house specialties. The number of Chinese restaurants in Georgia to claim this dish as a house specialty must stretch into the hundreds. The chow mei fun noodles were the only dish on the menu that I had not seen at every crummy restaurant in the state before I stopped bothering. I'm glad they were offered, and I'm glad they were as tasty as they were.

Time was spent admiring the baby, playing with the baby, soothing the baby and changing the baby about six times over the course of a half-hour. Grandchildren get to monopolize things that way. The following morning, Marie's father took us to breakfast at Sandcastle Cafe & Grill, where I indulged in the buffet and did not eat nearly as many pancakes as I would have liked. Afterward, Marie and my daughter and I made a valiant effort to let the baby enjoy the ocean. He did not. At all.

For lunch, the three of us spent a little while being stumped about what to eat before deciding to take Locos Grill & Pub up on their coupon offer of a free appetizer. (Actually, that's not entirely true. I knew exactly what I wanted to eat, but it was Marie's turn to pick what we ate on the island and I didn't want to start making obnoxious hints. It'll be my pick next.) Locos is a place that we've known pretty well for many years. The first one opened in Athens in 1988 and they've been expanding and franchising for many years, with eighteen locations dotted around Georgia, one in Auburn and one, oddly, in Saint Charles, Missouri. When we loved them and when they were much better, they were scruffy and slapdash. They've become very disagreeably corporate, but they still put together a pretty good meal, and some locations have a few sparks of independent spirit still clicking.





The store on the island, for instance, apart from its regular lineup of small touring acts - mostly singer-songwriters, I think - has been given the absolute finest in music room decor. LP covers by favorites like Neko Case and Love line the walls, proving somebody's got excellent taste in music. But the real eye-popper is in the bar room, where there is a really astonishing Beatles mural painted around the open "window" gaps in the wall. It's a sweeping depiction of the group's history, featuring caricatures of John, Paul, George and Ringo interacting at various points in their timeline with characters from their songs and the cast of the Yellow Submarine movie. Frankly, the food here could have been wretched and it would still be worth our time to swing by and look at this beautiful mural.

Just as well the food was pretty good, because it served as a nice bonus to the artwork. The burger that I always enjoyed the most - whatever it was called, it was drowned in barbecue sauce and melted cheese - does not appear to have survived the corporation's latest menu upgrade. Old favorites like the Looney Bird and the Gobbler are still on the menu, but I fear that The Biggest Thing We've Got was abandoned years ago.

I decided to try their new chorizo burger and enjoyed it. It reminded me of the similar sausage and ground beef patties that we loved at the dearly missed Bob-O's in Woodstock. Cooking the sausage means that the burger is a little more done than I would normally enjoy, but it's still very tasty, topped with pico de gallo and thin smears of both a red pepper sauce and a spicy chipotle sauce. I miss the playful scruffiness of the Athens stores in the early 90s, but the business seems to be staying focused on the kitchen and making sure that the food weathers the tide of an expansion that wants to make everything dull and boring.

Some hours later, during which time I completely forgot to go track down some gazpacho that I had been thinking about, our friend Chris came up from Jacksonville to meet the baby. While my daughter went out to dinner with Marie's dad, Chris bought us supper at CJ's Italian Restaurant, one of our favorite places on the island. Actually, the pizza here was not a patch on their amazing pasta dishes. While still almost certainly the best pie on the island, it's bettered by many choices in Atlanta. The red sauce and the sausages here are outstanding, and I found myself missing them.

For dessert, we walked over to one of the island's newer treats, the really wonderful Moo Cow Ice Cream. Would I be guilty again of hyperbole of saying this place is really special, and definitely deserves checking out?



It looks as though Moo Cow picked up an idea or two from Atlanta's Morrelli's. They offer many of the same unusual flavors, like sweet corn and salted caramel and candied bacon. Like Morelli's, they take the business of fun really seriously. They're doing wonders in the back experimenting with cream flavors - how I missed the candied habanero, I have no idea, but I'm pretty unhappy that I did - and this is a place that we will definitely revisit. Marie's mother and father probably need to see the baby again in the next day or two, right?

Willie's Wee-Nee Wagon, Brunswick GA

I have mentioned that I keep a little to-do list of restaurants that I hope to visit one day. Actually, it's gone a little past the point where we can call it a list. It is more like a novella. Towards the end of February, I read a short mention of Brunswick's famous Willie's Wee Nee Wagon and decided that we needed to stop by. At that point, we were actually just about two weeks from a visit to the coast, but, as you might have ascertained, Marie and I sort of plan our trips out somewhat in advance, and I already had plans that didn't include swinging past the Wagon. So I was a little surprised when we did.

Marie lived on Saint Simons Island for about four years before she moved to Vermont to attend college, so she has plenty of small nostalgic memories that can only be filled by occasionally driving around and past places. This has meant, viewing the area as a passenger as she takes the wheel around Brunswick, that there is no place in America that I have visited so often and understand so little. She can find her way from the interstate to the causeway via seven hundred and ninety-nine routes, blindfolded. This doesn't do me any good whatsoever, as every time we're there, I see something completely different. The morning of our wedding, I visited my parents at the hotel on the mainland, and spent the better part of an hour trying to find my way back to the island. It seemed like every time I tried a different road, it was Altama Avenue. It's become a pretty labored in-joke that every other street in town is called Altama. My daughter and I still find it funny, anyway.

So anyway, in early March, I hung on for dear life as Marie navigated the labyrinth and I spotted Willie's Wee Nee Wagon on the right. As we sped past, I said something like, "Hey! That's that place... I want to eat there sometime!" I didn't expect that I'd ever see it again, the way Marie tackles that city's streets, so I figured I had better say something and mark it before we lost it for good.





Our June trip to Saint Simons was almost delayed by a week thanks to the wildfires in south Georgia. Smoke from the giant blazes at the Okeefenokee Swamp has been choking the air for hundreds of miles up and down the coast. Our friend Chris came up from Jacksonville to meet us on the Friday night, and he told us that he'd been having trouble breathing because of the smoke. Marie's father told us that the day before we arrived, you couldn't even see Jekyll Island from the Saint Simons pier. Fortunately, there was a heavy rain on Wednesday night that cleared the air a good deal. It continued to drizzle on and off Thursday before really opening up at night. This was a very happy bit of timing. We were able to enjoy the coast without incident, and the ocean water felt wonderful. In the case of Willie's Wee Nee Wagon, the rain had cooled things off enough for us to sit at their picnic tables in comfort.

You've probably figured out by now that Marie and I enjoy a good hot dog better than most people do, but the real treat here was said to be the pork chop sandwich. I left Marie and our daughter to tackling the dogs while I had one of these bad boys, and it was just terrific. It's a giant, bulging heap of sliced, boneless pork with onions and mustard inside a really wonderful, tasty bun. They've been serving these up since the 1970s - every sandwich, although not the dogs, comes with a similarly giant cup of delicious tea - and making believers out of everybody. This is one of the tastiest treats that we've ever had in Glynn County.

The dogs themselves are also really good. They're perhaps on a rung below the three best hot dog places in Atlanta, but honestly, that ladder's so high, most people wouldn't be willing to complain. Neither Marie nor our daughter were feeling at all adventurous. The girlchild simply had a "kiddie" dog with ketchup, and Marie had a slaw dog. If I had room, I might have wanted to try their "bull dog," which is dressed like a cheeseburger with slaw. The "Brunswick dog" is dressed with ketchup, grilled onions and cheese. It all sounds great, and if the bite that I had of Marie's is any indication, it probably tastes terrific, too. The dogs have a little bit of snap to their case, and they're served on really good poppyseed buns. The slaw is quite green and not watery at all, and that's a perfect recipe for going really well with a hot dog.

As the next two chapters will show, this trip to the island saw us visiting some restaurants that, while good, were slightly underwhelming, and for the first time, we had better food on the mainland. In point of fact, there wasn't a dish we had that didn't leave me saying to myself, "That was pretty good, but you know, another trip to Willie's would have been better." The food is that tasty and the experience was that fun; it accomplished the implausible and overshadowed just about everything else that we ate in south Georgia.

Peachtree Cafe at Lane Southern Orchards, Ft. Valley GA

We are achingly close to a full set of the Georgia restaurants reviewed at Roadfood.com. One on their list had long confused me a little about when best to stop by for a visit. It's Lane Southern Orchards, a gigantic agribusiness about fifteen miles south of Macon near the town of Fort Valley. I wasn't entirely sure what would be good to eat here other than fresh peaches. Turns out that they do have a cafeteria, so we just needed to wait for a trip down to the coast to visit Marie's mother and her father that coincided with our state's peach season, and we could mark it off our list.

Now, regarding this cafeteria: tread cautiously. In their considerable defense, this place offers some frankly amazing fried chicken, but it seems to sell out very, very fast. We arrived shortly after eleven, behind some large tour groups from area senior centers, and got the last of it. At eleven. In fact, we were called back to the window with apologies that they had already sold out of the chicken, and asked whether Marie would like anything else. Happily, they had miscounted and Marie did get a really good order of fried chicken. It was fantastic, incredibly juicy and better than any we've had in ages.

So if you can get the chicken, absolutely do so. Otherwise, find something else in the region. The barbecue was truck plaza cafeteria slop, the sides all came from out of town, and even if you can eat this wonderful chicken, you might do so under the oppressive eye of eight or nine flat screen TVs all blaring Fox News.





Lane almost made up for my disagreeable lunch underneath vomitous propaganda with their desserts. I will forgive a lot for homemade peach ice cream. This was great stuff. My daughter had the butter pecan, which was darn close to being almost as good, and Marie had peach cobbler which would shut anybody's mouth and left even our wonderful ice creams in the dust. She came out of this visit way, way ahead of my daughter and me, let me tell you.

Of course, the visit would not have been complete without a box of fresh peaches. You can get a half-bushel here for only $25. That was more than enough for Marie to share with her family, and bring home to my mother, and set her to the very agreeable task of eating and cooking. They grow absolutely perfect peaches here at Lane. They don't need sugar and they don't need cream.

Marie has mentioned something about trying to make some spiced peach and carrot cake. I wonder how that's going to turn out.

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