Barbecue and "Cuppycakes," Around Athens GA

I'll try not to get too detailed with silly backstory with this one, but I can tell already that it might be tempting. Y'all bear with me.

I was supposed to go to Athens on Labor Day weekend, but I picked up some extra hours instead. I hadn't decided where I was going to eat, but I was looking forward to a nice, long, relaxing day. I put it off two weeks. Then we had a daycare crisis. They kind of shut down and moved on us. So my mother volunteered to watch the baby until we found new arrangements. I felt it would be wrong to spend a day playing in Athens while my mother watched the baby, so he needed to come with me. Then he started being a real handful, evidently not enjoying the routine change while simultaneously beginning serious teething. I figured I could use some help, and my daughter had spent four weeks not getting in any trouble, so she could take a hooky day and help out.

Around the same time, I renewed my acquaintance with a wonderfully fun barbecue blog called Where's the Best BBQ?. It reminded me that there are still a pile of restaurants in northeast Georgia that I have not tried or revisited in ages, including a few along the I-85 corridor. I decided to take the children up to exit 129 and follow GA-53 through Hoschton, to Winder, and then go along to Athens that way. This would bring me past five barbecue places not yet featured on our blog. I picked two of them for meals, and I think I picked right. We might just go this way and get another two next time!*





Where's the Best BBQ? did caution that John's Barbecue is quite surprising in its lavender decor, but nothing really prepares you for how genteel and dainty the interior of this place is. From the outside, it looks like many other grizzled, old-timey side-of-the-road joints. Its sign was erected 47 years ago, and has seen many better days. It is completely smashed on the Winder side, and its interior lights ripped free when a semi truck took out the wiring. Astonishingly, it turns out that crazy accidents involving semis and trailers have happened at least twice on this small plot of land.

I talked to the owner, who goes by "Bootsie," a little about his barbecue, which is very smoky and quite dry and, if you can visualize it, flaky. It was very good, but the consistency was really unusual. That's because he smokes deboned hams rather than Boston butts. He believes that he's the only person anywhere in the region that cooks this way, and the only restaurant in Georgia that I can come up with that might is one in Toccoa***. Couch's, in Ooltewah, Tennessee, does hams, but he serves them quite differently, almost like a deli sandwich. It may not be the perfect taste for everybody, but it is definitely memorable and quite possibly unique. Since we like to champion people here who do things their own, individual way, I really must insist that my readers add John's to their to-do list!

Another notable point about our visit is that, for the first time, my baby boy had a meltdown in a restaurant and we were able to quell it. He had pitched a public fit only once before, about a month previously on Saint Simons Island, but that time he was being exhausted and darn mean, and this time he was just hungry. He probably just wanted to have some stew and slaw like his big sister. Both are quite good.

We stopped briefly in Winder to purchase some NuGrape and Ale-8-1 from the Quality Foods, and, in Athens, made our customary visit to Bizarro Wuxtry to pick up comics, and my daughter disappeared for the better part of an hour to try on clothes, and to witness somebody getting cuffed and hauled off for shoplifting. The baby was appropriately admired, and our friend Devlin wondered what flavor his fingers might be, as he spends a lot of time with at least three in his mouth. Devlin has been enjoying a bizarre candy called Haw Flakes, which sort of tastes like raisins but looks like what happens to a salami after Dr. Shrinker zaps it. I thought it was kind of tasty, but my daughter would agree with the commentary in that link above about how awful this candy is.

My daughter, like a lot of twelve year-old girls, has been cuteifying half the words in her vocabulary. She doesn't give hugs; she gives "huggles." She doesn't eat cupcakes; she has "cuppycakes." She was very pleased that we were going to get a "proper" snack in Athens, and not just stop somewhere for a bowl of chicken mull. We were actually sort of forced to bypass the mull snack this time; Butt Hutt is temporarily closed while they finish moving to a new location on Baxter. Devlin advised us that while the cuppycakes we sought might be good, we'd actually do better going out to the mall and getting a pretzel dog. I told him we might do that next time.





No, the cuppycakes came from Silver Lining, a business that opened last October and has been getting rave reviews ever since. The well-known chain Gigi's has been getting a little more attention with its gigantic towers of icing and larger advertising budget, but Silver Lining, with its more reasonable amount of frosting and a delicious, subtle, and satisfying smile of natural flavors, is emphatically the better of the two. Gigi's is just artificial enough to be noticeable. Silver Lining's offerings are baked fresh six days a week and taste nothing but natural and light.

They are pricy - $14 for six would have instantly disqualified them when I was an undergraduate in town - but the black-and-white cake that I ordered was just heavenly. Besides, I think they're cheaper than Gigi's. They seem to offer eight a day from a rotating menu of perhaps thirty, announcing the day's flavors on their Facebook page and taking special orders. This proved to be a very good choice, and a nice break from not just chicken mull, but our other common Athens snack, a Grill milkshake or malt.

We made one last stop in town - parents, if you haven't learned the secret that public libraries are a fine place to stop and change dirty diapers, figger it out fast - and then got back on the Atlanta Highway for a final bite to eat at another new place. Actually, the library in Athens, currently undergoing major renovation, is a really fine one, but there's at least one person who works there who doesn't like the cut of my jib, so it's really sort of a place to dump a dirty diaper and leave. Anyway, Big Al's BBQ Pit opened this past December in a small storefront in Statham. This is a one stop light town halfway between Athens and Winder.





I had hoped to stop by Hollis Ribs in Athens. That had been my original thought of where I might eat on this trip, but ominous rumors had been circling that they were closed, and nobody was answering their telephone. I wrote Hillary Brown, who writes the Flagpole tabloid's Grub Notes column and who can be relied upon for excellent food advice, and she confirmed that it was true, but recommended that I stop by Big Al's instead. Coincidentally, it had been a note in her column back in January about Meat Week that alerted me to Big Al's in the first place.

So this place, basically, it is unbelievably good. It is only open three days a week, and everything that they serve is knock-out-of-the-park good. Well, I wasn't really sold on the vinegar sauce, but then again, I think that goes better with chopped pork than pulled. The meat is smoked and moist and delicious, and the "stew" - really, I would call this hash - is just a hair greasy and incredibly rich and thick, and the slaw is made with wonderful, pungent mustard. Oh, I haven't had good mustard slaw in such a long time; this was fantastic. And you want to talk about a nice price? How about just $6.25 for a plate with two sides? Incredible! I don't know how Al Calhoun does it, but he's doing it right, and should be supported. Especially with Hollis gone, there's another reason for Athenians to drive the seven or eight miles out of town to try this place, and for travelers to swing through while investigating all the great barbecue around Athens.

I've said before that while the city of Athens itself is not necessarily home to much in the way of fantastic barbecue, the region thirty miles around it is absolutely worth investigating further, and worthy of considered study by anybody who thinks they know good barbecue. Big Al's definitely belongs in the good company here.







(*The three places on this corridor that we did not visit this time were Carol's BBQ Shack in Hochston, Smokin' Po Boys in Winder, and one of the two Fresh Air stores in the area, between Bogart and the outskirts of Athens, where I have eaten many times in the past. Since we started the blog, I have always intended to go to the original Fresh Air near Flovilla and write up that**; the other two are on the to-do list. Y'all don't let me forget about them, though.)

(**Since writing the first draft of this entry, we have actually gone to that Fresh Air location. Look for that chapter in a couple of weeks!)

(***That's incorrect. Hickory Hut in Dallas also smokes hams.)

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Amos's BBQ & Biscuits, Ball Ground GA

When Marie and I go out to eat, we like to think of ourselves as being pretty unobtrusive. Forgettable, even. We don't want to draw any attention to ourselves, particularly when we start photographing food. I sort of like to think that, should a restaurant's owner or staff Google their way to our writeup down the line, they won't necessarily connect the chapter that we have written to the faces that were in their store some time previously. Our trip to Amos's, however, well, that was kind of unforgettable. We have no doubt that, should anybody on the staff of Amos's ever read this entry, then one or two of them will nod and say, "Oh, yes. I remember them. They had that baby. And that accident."

We first noticed Amos's on a Sunday seven months ago, before the baby was around to cause trouble. I took Marie out for a Sunday Valentine's Day date that included a drive through Cherokee and Forsyth Counties up GA-372. We noticed Amos's then, grumbled that it was closed on Sunday, and made our way to the Poole's Mill Covered Bridge Park.

It has been on my to-do list ever since, of course. You just don't drive past a barbecue joint without telling yourself you'll try and get back sometime. Well, a few Saturdays ago, we had planned to go to Columbus and Phenix City to visit friends, but that was a very, very, very trying week - we had daycare problems of the sort I wouldn't wish on anybody and that stress left us exhausted enough to catch mild colds - and we knew we were just going to want to sleep in on Saturday and not mess with a road trip. We put it off a week, and I'll tell you about it in a few days. So we slept in and woke refreshed and had a late breakfast over at Stilesboro Biscuits. By the time noon rolled around, we were thinking lazily about lunch. I was all for getting at least a little ways out of town. The last three plates of barbecue I'd had were all overpriced and I just wanted to see something other than suburban sprawl getting there. That's why we drove up to northern Cherokee to find Amos's.

I rang Melissa, who lives not far away from the place, and invited her to join us. She was not free. This turned out to be for the best. She missed a fantastic little meal - oh, this place really, really is good - but as we drove away, laughing off the embarrassment, I reflected how if she had been able to come, we could have followed her back around these crazy mountain roads to her place, wherever it is, and maybe Marie could have taken a shower.

Yes, internet travelers, sometimes your search results tell you what you wanted to know about a restaurant and little else besides that, and sometimes they tell you about baby accidents and a little bit about a restaurant. This is how our blog works. So, that said...





Amos's is actually in a really neat old two-story house that had been located in the Dunwoody area back when that was all woods in the late 1800s. The building was relocated to the mountain foothills about forty years ago, and has been used as a restaurant for the last several years. It's actually a little easy to miss. The sign is not quite as visible as the gigantic wall of logs. It looks less like the fuel for their smoker and more like a spectacular perimeter fence. The property is gorgeously landscaped and features a really attractive brick and gravel lot. There's a huge front porch, shaded on one side by trees. Three or four degrees cooler and we would have sat outside.

The food here is simply excellent. After several underwhelming and stupidly expensive Atlanta takes on barbecue over the last couple of weeks, it was so nice to get out in the country and taste some chopped pork that feels, smells and tastes just right. The fries are hand-cut, the Brunswick stew was tangy, soupy and had just the right kick of spice, and the slaw was a nice, green, vinegar-based recipe. Everything was totally delicious. They have two sauces, a traditional brown ketchup-based sauce that goes just perfectly with the meat, and an orange habanero sauce that doesn't quite nail it, but clears sinuses all the same. My daughter begged off to visit with friends at the mall. Kid missed out, big time. This was an excellent meal, the best I'd had in some time, and considerably better than the last three barbecue places in the city that I visited. Even the best of those three - Community Q, which I liked - was not a patch on this.

Marie had finished about half of her sandwich when the baby, sitting on her lap, had an accident. Not just a small one. This is my third baby; I have seen something like this only once before, and I have told myself ever since that I must surely have been exaggerating. This is going to be held over this kid's head on every date he ever brings home to meet us. Sometime in the 2030s, I will, indeed, be telling my future daughter-in-law about how epic the failure of this diaper was, leaving Marie in a mad, fruitless dash for the restroom.

Parents of younguns should always, always have emergency changes of clothes for themselves in the trunks of their cars. We hadn't quite got around to that yet. Oh, the baby's diaper bag had about four outfits for him, just nothing for a mother on the receiving end of that kind of eruption to wear. Marie, peeking her head out, asked whether Amos's happened to sell T-shirts. They do not, but a kind server went upstairs, where the restaurant keeps some storage, and retrieved an emergency cleaning shirt for Marie to wear. There came a point where I couldn't help, and resumed my meal. Marie had to take half her sandwich home, having understandably lost a little interest in eating, but she added a few dollars to the tip jar on the counter for the shirt, and finished stripping off in the car.

Returning home, we didn't get to stop by that barbecue trailer parked outside a knicknack and antique store about four miles back along GA-20 on the way back to I-575. Marie, half-naked and giggling, told me not to dare stop. Well, I was also going to swing by that Best Buy in Canton and get a new iPod adapter for the car. "Home," she ordered. Now, of course, we've got a barbecue trailer on the side of 20 that we need to try some other day. You just don't drive past a barbecue joint without telling yourself you'll try and get back sometime.

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Grand Champion BBQ, Marietta GA and Hot Dog Heaven, Woodstock GA

A few Fridays ago, my plans got stymied and so I decided to try out a new suburban barbecue joint that's getting a lot of press and hype. It's called Grand Champion and, while elements of it were admittedly pretty impressive, it was an expensive lesson in not necessarily letting the hype of the day overwhelm common sense. Let's get one objection to this place out of the way first thing. Somebody at the post office has assigned this place the 30075 ZIP code and has been making the pretty bold claim that it's in Roswell. It is not. I've lived here for many, many years, friends. This is Marietta. Cobb County. The Pope High School district, to be precise. In a pig's eye this is Roswell.

Grand Champion is the latest place to claim lineage from the old Sam & Dave's BBQ of Marietta. Co-owner Robert Owens worked there for a spell, before Sam and Dave split up. By my count, there are now five restaurants in the region that are run by members of this team. In fact, Owens apparently bakes his mac and cheese per David Roberts' recipe. I actually tried Roberts' mac and cheese at Community Q just a few days before and didn't like it very much, so I passed on it here. Speaking of Community Q, I think that might be my ceiling. They charge eleven bucks, even, for a pork plate there. Any higher than that, and I'm going to start asking why. It costs $11.50 at Grand Champion, before tax. They're located next door to a Dollar Tree, so please don't tell me they've got steep ground rent to cover.

I went with a pulled pork plate with collard greens and Brunswick stew. Sadly, it appears that Owens picked up the most obnoxious lesson from Huff and company, and considers Brunswick stew a "premium" side and charges more for it. This atop the already steep price. Can we cut this nonsense out right now, Atlanta? There are five hundred barbecue joints in this state and somehow, the only ones who think that stew - stew! - is a premium anything are in the northern Atlanta 'burbs.

Having said that, some of the food is pretty good. I've frequently bit off more than I can really chew with collards, and lose interest quickly, but these were better than most. The stew was indeed very notable, and rich with flavor. The sauces, in squeeze bottles on the table, were also good. The North Carolina vinegar was nice, but I really liked the dark brown Kansas City sauce a lot.

Unfortunately, the pulled pork wasn't very smoky and it was also quite greasy, so I'd have to dock quite a few points for that. I don't know what on earth they did to make it so greasy as to remove or overwhelm any taste of smoke from this pork, but it had the consistency and character of crock pot roast beef. It was limp and forgettable, until the Kansas City sauce brought it to life. I hate to sound like a Woody Allen character, but the food wasn't very good, and the portions were so small!





That is the least amount of food that I have ever paid for as a "plate" in a barbecue restaurant, and very nearly the most money that I have spent. Say what you might about inconsistency in the kitchen, an off-day, or different palates and different tastes, but honestly, there's an understood rule about judging barbecue places that, while rarely spoken, trumps all other considerations. Simply put, if I'm going to pay $12.46 for a plate of barbecue with two sides, I better not be leaving hungry. I left hungry.

Fortunately, I had business in north Cobb about an hour later, so it wasn't much of a detour to pop into Cherokee County and swing by Hot Dog Heaven in downtown Woodstock and get something to eat.





I have read much about Hot Dog Heaven over the years, and I'm very sorry that I visited on a day when Miss Becky was not working. There are many great stories about this superhuman example of effervescent Southern hospitality dishing out Chicago-styled Vienna Beef brand dogs at low prices, and I regret that I didn't get to recount one to you dear readers.

What I can tell you is that here, you get a great big treat for not a lot of money. I did just have lunch, and didn't want to overindulge or load down on calories, so I just parked out front by the Betty Boop and had only a "Maxwell Street"-styled Polish sausage with grilled onions, sport peppers, and brown mustard, and chewed that delicious thing down while the Travel Channel had one of their peculiar programs about food that only very weird foreigners eat. I don't know who the market for octopus or beef tongue ice cream is, but I guarantee you that the hot dog that I was enjoying was superior.

Woodstock might just be a little bit of a drive for a Vienna Beef dog, Chicago-style, but the wonderful, laid-back and silly atmosphere is a great little place to kick back and get away from things. I'd like to stop by again the next time I'm in the area, and try a few of the other things on their menu.

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Osteria del Figo Pasta, Atlanta GA

Our Nashville-based friends Brooke and Tory came to town for Dragon*Con, and we had our usual Sunday night get-together with them during all that madness. I have to thank the convention for never scheduling anything unmissable on Sunday evenings, although this year, a special screening of an episode of Torchwood, with commentary by one of the actors, did mean we got together slightly later than I would have hoped.

I picked them up at the hotel while Marie and the children went ahead to Osteria del Figo on Howell Mill. I figured that we'd ask our guests what sort of food they were in the mood for and have a nearby restaurant already selected to breeze them there. I'm pretty sure I had every reasonable possibility other than pasta covered. If it wasn't just down the street from our own house, twenty miles north of downtown, we'd probably have gone to Frankie's, but I was momentarily stumped about a good, inexpensive Italian place near the convention hotels. A quick little look over Urbanspoon suggested this would be a good choice, and it really was.



The restaurant is easy to find; it is on the corner of Howell Mill and Huff, and it appears to have ample parking, which is kind of a rarity in this neighborhood. There's a too-small airlock area, where guests line up to place their orders with a cashier. This part is a little slow, owing to a dense menu utterly full of possibilities. There are a good number of house specials, but also similar "build your own pasta" creations like you see at some of the larger national chains, with 18 sauces over 25 noodle selections. Speaking of which, there are currently seven Figo locations in Atlanta, but they don't appear to have expanded to other cities. Most of the combinations here start at $8, and you can add meats for various prices. Figo prides itself on its meatballs, offered in a variety of recipes, for $1.50 each. This is a good place to get quite a lot of food for a reasonable price.

It looks like you can make some really fun meals up here. I went with spinach ravioli with amatriciana sauce, which is a red sauce with pancetta, tomatoes, peppers and olive oil. It was terrific. Marie had primavera over linguine and our daughter had pesto sauce over penne noodles. I am keen to visit again for lunch one day and give the artichoke ravioli with four cheese sauce a try. First Bite had that when she visited a couple of years ago and it looks very tasty.

As we waited for our food, we talked about visiting Nashville in a couple of months. This has been pretty much the longest I have gone without a trip to Nashville in a decade, and frankly, I miss the place, but this has been something of a ridiculous and crazy and busy year. So I tossed out a skeleton of a plan of what I'd like to do when we get there, and one or two places that I'd like to visit or revisit. Naming all these wonderful restaurants and wonderful meals had me quite hungry for my ravioli!

Well, after we had talked about Prince's and Rotier's and Ellington Place and Mas Tacos and Pied Piper and other such yummy places, and let the baby get lots of love and cuddling and attention, we enjoyed a really good meal. The food here is simply splendid, and we all enjoyed sampling each others' dishes. Pasta really was a fine idea of Brooke's, honestly. I'm very glad that we tried this place.

After we ate, the baby let us know that he really was in the mood to go home and be nursed and go to bed, so my daughter and I drove the ladies back to their hotel, but not before stopping at Flip Burger Boutique for a milkshake. I was sorry that Marie missed out, but Flip, incredibly noisy and ridiculous, isn't baby-friendly at all. Unfortunately, they were out of the requested Cap'n Crunch shakes, but we enjoyed the Peach Melba and Krispy Kreme and Strawberry Shortcake and the remarkably curious Burnt Marshmellow with Nutella. ("It tastes like camping," Tory exclaimed.) Everybody visiting Atlanta should try one of these.

There was a really odd loop of music videos going on the bar here, including Radiohead and, of all things, "Primary" by the Cure, which still strikes me as very odd to see anywhere other than the old Staring at the Sea VHS. My daughter is currently totally in love with the lead singer of My Chemical Romance. I pointed out the Cure, told her, truly, that MCR pilfered every idea it's ever had from the Cure and, back before he ate all the pies, 1981-model Robert Smith was an awfully good-looking fellow. She disagreed with emphasis. Then I pointed out the bassist, Simon Gallup, and told my daughter that the girl I took to the prom was more totally in love with him in 1988 than she is with Gerard Way, today. She had to pause on that point. I never got much in the way of follow-up.



(Update, 11/12/11): As I promised myself weeks ago, I tried that artichoke ravioli with four cheese sauce. Marie and I went with our daughter and Neal to the Figo in Vinings and gave it a try.





It was every bit as tasty as I had hoped. My daughter had the paprika penne with arriabiatta sauce and was also very pleased with it.

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Sabor do Brazil, Marietta GA

So how many Brazilian restaurants do you imagine you'd find within eyesight of the Micro Center on Powers Ferry in Cobb County? At least three. "Four," said my daughter. "Oh, wait, never mind, that says 'Brazilian Wax'." Naturally, we went to the wrong one first. The wrong restaurant, not the wax place.

Back on Labor Day weekend, Marie was down at Dragon*Con, gaming with her brother and sister, while I stayed home to watch the children. David suggested that we meet for supper at the Brazilian restaurant across from Micro Center, and I thought he meant Botemkin, the popular bistro on Terrell Mill that opened in late July to some praise and hype. This has never happened before, and I darn well hope it will never happen again, but the three of us twiddled our thumbs and drank water waiting for him - I've mentioned before that David's manners are impeccable, and he's not the sort to be late without phoning - until I got impatient and called him. Well, my daughter and I twiddled our thumbs; the baby just cooed and gurgled. No, of course, David was waiting for us over on Delk Road at Sabor do Brazil, a much less expensive buffet place. Sheepishly, we apologized to the servers and withdrew.

Sabor do Brazil is a tiny little restaurant with a small dinner buffet, nicely priced at $8.99 on weekends. Honestly, the food was not at all bad, but pretty uninspiring. I had a large salad earlier that day for lunch, so I just started with a small plate with some tomatoes, black beans and rice, a little skirt steak in gravy, some fried bananas and baked flan. It was okay. Much more interesting was what I had to drink. They make their own cashew juice here, and that was very tasty.



But honestly, I go to restaurants sometimes and just have an okay meal, and figure that there's really no reason to write a blog post about it. Even as I planned to go back for a small helping of tilapia in a tomato sauce, I figured we are really behind enough between "meal" and "blog" that I can occasionally skip a writeup.

Then a young fellow came by the table and let us know that the barbecue was ready, if we wanted to come get some. Everything changed.

Now, it is a rare day when I must flat out contradict what any of my peers in this hobby state on their blog, but I'm afraid that Malika Harricharan of Atlanta Restaurant Blog is quite mistaken to claim that this place doesn't serve the skewers of meat roasting in an oven that you typically find at Brazilian steakhouses. Perhaps they don't offer this at lunch, when she stopped by, but they certainly do at dinner. By my definition, this clearly is not barbecue, as the young server described it, but holy anna, is it ever terrific.





Well, most of it is. They have a number of meats roasting here, and I was not really taken with the pork ribs, which were too fatty. The beef with bacon was tremendously good, and the sausage was remarkable. Best of all was the picanha, which is top sirloin. They set the skewer upright on a plate and slice it downwards, with guests using tongs to help pull the meat away. It was tremendously good food, and I overindulged with great pleasure. David and my daughter each called it a day long before me, although in David's defense, not knowing about this "barbecue" option - it's just an extra dollar for the meat, a remarkable steal of a deal - he had loaded his plate with the buffet and didn't have much room to dig in to the picanha.

Other than the young fellow who invited us to try the "barbecue," we were served by the teenage daughter of the owner. I asked how long the restaurant had been here, and she said just about ten years. Not knowing who she was, I asked, as I do, how long she had worked here. "Oh, since it opened," she replied. When I raised an eyebrow and asked, "Really?", she got adorably flustered and told me, "I'm the daughter's owner, I mean, I'm the owner of the daughter, I mean, I'm the owner's daughter," and that she was busing tables when she was seven.

She told me about the cashew juice, which is called simply caju in Brazil. I had no idea that the nuts that we eat are just a kernel of a much larger fruit that, in South America anyway, is used in its entirety. The fruit is eaten as a dessert or used in cooking, or the caju is extracted for a beverage. According to Wikipedia, in India, this juice, fermented, is used as the basis of an alcoholic drink called, depending on the process, either feni or gongo. Learning new things about food, and not just the stories behind restaurants, is one of the best things about writing this blog and talking to businesses. Now, I wonder where I can get a glass of feni, and how hard it'll kick me onto my backside.

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Six Feet Under, Atlanta GA

Six Feet Under has a pretty shaky reputation among food lovers, I'm sad to say. I've always enjoyed the meals I've had here, ever since my daughter came home about seven years ago after a weekend with her mother, breathlessly exclaiming how they went to a cemetery and had crab legs. That took a little work, getting to the bottom of that story.

At the time, her mother lived in town, and would have liked to have made this a regular destination for the kids, but it was always a special treat, owing to her low finances. On one occasion, among many, she had grumbled that she hadn't any money to do anything nice with the kids on one of her weekends. I succumbed to generosity and packed up my children with $40 and a note that the girlchild, aged maybe six, haltingly penciled from my letter-by-letter dictation, explaining that she and her brother wanted fresh fish and had robbed a convenience store to get the enclosed money, and to please take them to the graveyard for fresh fish. We know that nostalgia is a prime ingredient in the very best restaurants, but how can you not absolutely love a place that inspires stories so darn cute?

Looking around, however, I do see many mixed reviews, and discouraging grumbling from quarters who find their prices too high and their portions too small. Sadly, they might be right in that one regard. I visited for lunch a few Fridays ago, and the prices on their web site are no longer accurate. They have gone up, and I paid $14.50 for what turned out to be a fistful of shrimp and scallops baked in parchment.

Oh, but they were such good shrimp and scallops...





Six Feet Under, in one of the most deliciously appropriate names in the business, is indeed across the street from Atlanta's gigantic Oakland Cemetery, with a high deck overlooking the beautiful view. Actually, I enjoy the view of the restaurant's second location, on 11th Street, even more. That's just about the best view of the city's skyline. I have eaten at each location twice now. On one of my evening trips to the 11th Street store, when Marie and I were eating downstairs, there was a power cut that knocked out the electricity for about five blocks. Fortunately, we pay with cash and weren't held up when we wanted to leave. Driving around all those blocks of Northside and Howell Mill without any lights was eerie and wonderful; I'd have hated to have missed that while waiting for a credit card machine to come back online.

The original location is the real destination for travelers, and I would certainly rank it among Atlanta's best seafood places, though I think that I enjoy Tin Can in Sandy Springs a little more. It's a fabulous, ramshackle building in the lovely Grant Park neighborhood, and very popular with a big crowd. There is a small lot behind the building, but I ended up joining many others in parking on the streets behind the restaurant, about two blocks away.

I sat at the bar and really enjoyed that pricey order of shrimp and scallops. They're baked in parchment with butter and lemon and are just wonderful. I had them with a spinach salad, homemade chips and hush puppies. Everything was completely delicious, and the ladies and gentlemen working the bar did a great job paying attention to all their guests.

Six Feet Under prides themselves on being a green business, with a composting program and, at their 11th Street store, a windmill. It's definitely a place to show off to out-of-town guests, and, every once in a while, a nice treat for us. Don't even have to rob a convenience store to eat here. Well, one more price hike and you might have to, but until then, it is good eating.



This is 6FU's second location, where we once ate in the dark after a power failure:

Community Q BBQ, Decatur GA

So Community Q opened better than two years ago, and it's taken me this long to check it out. The praise has not quite been unanimous - among others, Foodie Buddha was underwhelmed by it in December of '09 - but enough of my fellow hobbyists have been clear in their praise that I figured it warranted a try, especially since my most recent barbecue trip had been pretty unsatisfying.

Enthusiasts who write blogs probably already know the restaurant's story. Owner David Roberts had worked at the old Sam & Dave's in Cobb County. When that duo split up and Sam went one way and Dave Poe went the other, Roberts found himself some new partners and an intown location just a short walk from Wuxtry Records in Decatur. They're smoking up some very, very good pulled pork here, but the sides might be the star attraction.





The restaurant's been on my wishlist for a little while, but I guess it took a disappointment to get me kickstarted. I had a short morning at work a couple of Thursdays back, so I took the Dorothy L. Sayers that I was finishing over for an early lunch. I arrived just as they opened and enjoyed a very good meal.

I ordered the pulled pork plate with Brunswick stew and fries. Reading what others have said, and looking at the wonderful pictures online, it looked, after that first visit, like I really missed out by not trying the mac and cheese or the slaw, both of which appeared completely wonderful to me. Happily, the stew was really good. It was meaty, rich and, truly, the best I'd enjoyed in several weeks. The fries were fresh cut and liberally dusted with rib rub. Killer. These are every bit as good as the fries we had a couple of weeks previously at Southern Soul Barbeque on Saint Simons, and those were terrific. All they needed was a nice mustard sauce for a dip.

Speaking of sauces, they have two on the table. Neither completely thrilled me, but they were both perfectly good. I felt the vinegar sauce was just a bit milder than I prefer, but the sweet brown sauce was very nicely balanced and complemented the meat very well. This was very good pulled pork, nicely smoked and moist. Yet I read that the brisket is even better. Obviously, another trip was needed. So a week later, I returned.



The second visit was not quite as good as the first, sad to say, although that really is some terrific beef brisket. I think that I just prefer the pork a little bit more, although either would be a fine choice. The slaw is a real surprise for this region, as it is considerably more vinegary than most in the city. The mac and cheese, on the other hand, I did not like at all. It was really heavy and oily and not at all pleasant. I'd have done better to stick with the fries!

My service at both visits was very attentive and friendly. This is clearly a place where the staff is enjoying their job and passing their enthusiasm around the store. Plus, there's one other thing that I liked about this place a lot: the prices on the menu board include tax. Why the heck doesn't everybody do this?

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Swallow at the Hollow, Roswell GA

I feel that we need to ramp up the barbecue reviews here over the next few weeks if we're going to hit my goal of one hundred barbecue restaurants before the end of the year. We're about twenty shy with three months to go, and I think it's doable. Of course, we also have to get back on a reasonable schedule without these increasingly ridiculous month-long lags between eating and posting a blog chapter.

I also feel that, doing that, we're going to run into some more restaurants where I'm going to leave unsatisfied. Now, negative reviews run counter to this blog's theme, I think, and we have certainly scrapped several planned chapters to our story when a restaurant failed to meet our expectations, but every once in a while, we run into a place that does some things quite well, but the overall experience is really lacking, to the point that I find it more frustrating than disappointing. So both this week, and next, I feel that I should share a story of why a restaurant let me down.

With that in mind, it was indeed a month ago that Samantha joined us for a drive over to Roswell to revisit Swallow at the Hollow, a place I have not been in a really long time. I recall thinking that it was not bad, but this was a long time back. I was reminded of it when a new blogger, The Georgia Barbecue Hunt, stopped by Swallow at the Hollow at the beginning of August. A couple of days later, the indefatigable Food Near Snellville, whom you all really should be reading, left a cautionary note on his own blog that the Swallow's many fans have a tendency to defend their favorite restaurant with some vigor, especially when the subject of that restaurant's ribs, and whether they are smoked or broiled, comes up.

Just as well none of our group had any ribs, then. I sure would hate to say anything controversial. On a related note, this restaurant serves the single worst barbecue sauce of any I have ever tried, anywhere, in thirteen years of yammering about barbecue restaurants on the internet.





I'll get the good stuff out of the way, because some facets of our meal were really quite good. The sides were all completely delicious. Best of all were the collard greens, which might well put anybody else's in the city to shame, but the baked three beans were really tasty, and I was quite taken with the Brunswick stew, which was thick and orange and tasted equally of corn and tomato. I've been told that some of their specials are cooked up in conjunction with Greenwood's, the restaurant across the street, or that perhaps they share some recipes? They boast that almost everything here is fresh and homemade, the exception being the fries, which are frozen. I've taken to asking about that before I order these days. I figure that I've had enough Sysco fries - I said the S word! - in my life; I love fries, but I'd rather try what the restaurant can make themselves. Here, the fried green tomatoes are better than most, if perhaps a little thicker and softer than I've usually had them. As far as vegetables and stew, this place is a winner.

The first disappointment, and it was a medium-sized one, came with the music. Most evenings, this place features live sets from up-and-coming country music stars, apparently in collaboration with Nashville's popular Bluebird Cafe. It's a terrific venue for them; the building is a lovably unphotogenic big shack with a tin roof and wooden walls lined with autographed glossies. As we came for lunch, I knew that we'd miss the live music, but I was still expecting country to be played above us, and not "threefer" sets by disagreeable dinosaurs like Journey and Aerosmith from some Sirius classic rawk radio station. On the other hand, we learned that my daughter, thanks to Glee, knows all of these songs despite never actually listening to classic rawk radio.

The chopped pork was, at best, decent. I have had worse. It was not at all smoky, but it was moist and not offensive. The problem, if I may be bold, is that when pork lacks a good, smoky punch, then a good sauce that complements it well can bring it back to life and make an average meal memorable. I don't know that I would enjoy the chopped pork at Speedi-Pig in Fayetteville dry at all; it's the addition of that good brown sauce that gives it life.

All of the sauces at the Swallow disappointed me. There are three, and the vinegar, which splashes red all over the pink meat, was the best of them, but please don't consider that a compliment. The mustard might not have been bad on other meat, but it didn't go well with this. The thick brown sweet sauce would go well over ice cream. It is criminally unsuited for this, or indeed any meat. The best thing that I can say about it is that it seems to have permanently cured my daughter of her infernal habit of drowning her Brunswick stew with sauce. Like the bull-in-a-China-shop twelve year-old she is, she just stampeded into squeezing about an ounce into her bowl without sampling either, not realizing that this stuff has more business in a milkshake than in stew, and retched and choked down her bowl in order to get some dessert.



Whatever their failings with the meat and sauce, the Swallow is notable for their sides, and also their desserts. My daughter and Samantha each had this decadent chocolate banana pudding, and Marie enjoyed a slice of blackberry pie. I tasted each and can confirm that they were amazing.

This brings us to the final disappointment: the check. The pie was more expensive than the slices we had the previous night at Buckhead's Pie Shop. A chopped pork plate here costs a shocking $13.50 before tax and tip, an amazingly high price for such mediocre meat. I understand that Roswell might be thought a little pricier of a place to eat than Summerville, but that is, literally, more than twice the price for the same amount of better food at a superior barbecue restaurant, Armstrong's, in that city. A few weeks later, I also had a massively superior plate of barbecue at Big Al's BBQ Pit in Statham for, again, less than half the cost of this. Put another way, even factoring in the Buckhead pay lot, we spent less money ITP the previous night going to both Smashburger and Pie Shop than we did with a single lunchtime trip to Roswell, where less food was ordered.

I was genuinely pleased with the sides and the dessert. Collards this good should be tracked down, and we could be here all day listing places with poorer fried green tomatoes. As a destination for southern vegetables, meals at the Swallow at the Hollow should be encouraged. I could happily return and try a three-veggie plate here one evening listening to live country if the opportunity arises.

But this barbecue, I certainly won't order again. Marie took a good portion of hers home to reheat for lunch. She intended to try it with some of the Dreamland sauce that we keep in the fridge for just such an occasion. It was still mediocre and overpriced, as Samantha judged it, but Dreamland sauce at least made it tolerable.



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Smashburger and Pie Shop, Atlanta GA

A few Fridays back, I took Marie and the children out for supper. Naturally, I'd heard talk about Denver's Smashburger chain and their decision to invade our turf. I feel pretty confident in the quality of Atlanta's home-grown burger joints; Smashburger must be pretty confident in their ability to show us up at our own game.

Other burger joints have tried; their store in the Lindbergh neighborhood has actually gone into the space that Fatburger vacated. So, is Smashburger good enough to play with the big boys?





The answer is emphatically yes. This is a much better meal than what Fatburger offered. It's considerably better than Grindhouse, and it's better than Cheeseburger Bobby's, which is really good, but most of Atlanta's never-cross-the-perimeter crowd still don't know about. It's a lot better than Five Guys. Your mileage may vary, but I enjoyed the heck out of this.

On our first visit, I had the Atlanta Burger. One of this chain's really fun quirks is to tailor one menu item to go with each city where they open. So our town's signature burger comes with pimento cheese, peach barbecue sauce, grilled jalapenos and cole slaw. It was terrific; I enjoyed it with a side of fried pickles and was ready for a second. Actually, I think that they're missing one cute trick here. You know how everybody who writes about food on the internet talks with a wink about In-N-Out Burger and their "secret" menu? Smashburger should definitely have ingredients and recipes for all these signature burgers in the system, so that, even not on the menu, a guest in Atlanta can ask for a Denver burger, or whatever. Sadly, on a follow-up visit, where I had the "Ultimate Cheese" - excellent, but really more defined by the pile of fried onions than the cheese - the manager said that you'd have to order the signatures "manually," using the "create your own" ingredients, and hope the local store has what you need.

On that first visit, Marie had a classic burger and really liked it, and did a "create your own" the next time out. On the first visit, she had the fries tossed in a little herb mixture of olive oil and rosemary, and sweet potato fries the next time. We agree that these are better burgers than most places in the city, and certainly in the top ten.

Now, while many of this city's bloggers have been covering the burgers quite well (Amy on Food, as always, has some terrific photos in her short report), I don't see where anybody has mentioned the salads. My daughter, who loves good burgers, decided to get a salad this evening, and none of us were prepared for its size. While the basic burger, available in three sizes, is quite sensibly proportioned, the salad comes in a bucket only slightly smaller than your head. Don't order one of these unless you'd like to share. In all, it is really good food and quite nicely priced. The three of us ate well for under $20.

Electing to continue visiting places that are all the rage this summer, after we finished, we passed on a Smashburger milkshake - made from Häagen-Dazs ice cream - and drove over to Pie Shop in Buckhead to see what they had to offer. I think that I broke Marie. Sometimes, food makes her so happy that strange things happen. We went back to my mother's house to pick up her car and she fell asleep on the couch, dreaming of blueberries.





Now, one thing that I really didn't like about Pie Shop was having to pay to park, but that's the suburbanite in me talking. I've got old-fashioned ideas about parking in strip malls. This place is located around the back of an old strip center, above and behind a nail place, on Roswell Road, between the Shane's Rib Shack and the Roxy, and parking costs five bucks*. If you were going to just hop in to buy a pie to go - they run between $30 and $40, or $4.60 a slice - you could probably get away with it, but if you're going to stay for your dessert and a glass of milk, you'd probably better cough up the money.

Okay, the other thing that I really didn't like was that I read The Food Abides' glowing review of the place earlier that afternoon and was roaring ready to try their ganache pie. They didn't have any. I had to make do with chocolate cream, which is just about my favorite kind of pie anyway, other than shoofly. It was amazing. I had a scoop of whipped cream along with it. You've never had whipped cream so good. I washed it down with a glass of milk. It took quite a long time to finish. If I hadn't paid my five bucks, they could've towed my car twice over. It was just so rich and wonderful that I had to eat it very slowly.

The pie that ended up knocking Marie out was the blueberry. After some debate, my daughter went for the key lime, which was fresh out of the oven. It's fun to watch her at work. My daughter does not often praise business owners or thank them for meals, unless she's so bowled over that a fuss must be made. She ended up telling one of the girls that work there that she loved the food, and, in answer to their sign, as a pie lover, she should work there and asked would they hire her. Never mind that she's twelve.

There isn't really enough room at Pie Shop to linger. Most of the interior is given over to the baking area, with cooking tables and ovens, with just two tables for guests to sit. I thought the place was completely charming and the food was just remarkable, but we might do better to pick up some slices to take back to my mother's place next time. For one, we won't have to pay to park (but see below), and for another, we can more safely enjoy a food coma with a sofa upon which to collapse.





*Update: An unfortunate mistake here; Pie Shop's owner, Mims, wrote to let us know that the parking is enforced only during the later evening, when the clubs are open! Nothing is stopping you. Go!

Update: In early December, Smashburger moved into our neighborhood with a store on Barrett Parkway in front of Town Center. It's very nice to have such a quality meal available so close to us, especially with the yummy pimento cheeseburger as an option.

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Australian Bakery Cafe, Marietta GA

So Melissa, my former boss who urban-evacuated herself to the side of some mountain up near Ball Ground, and I were walking around the Marietta Square with the baby, figuring that one of the many restaurants there would tempt us. I had mentioned that there was an alleged Australian bakery there, and no sooner did her eyebrows raise did I realize that I had no idea what the heck that meant, either. Was this a place we could go to try one of those vegemite sandwiches that Men at Work sang about, or just a place that sells cookies shaped like koala bears?

It turns out it's really more of the former, but while I didn't see any koalas in the display case, you can get cookies shaped like the continent of Australia. Well, of course.

This isn't entirely a silly affectation. The bakery is run by Mark Allen and Neville Steel, two childhood friends from the town of Boort, who met again in the late seventies studying at William Angliss Food College in Melbourne. Various explorations in the food business followed, with Allen moving to the US in 1991. Here (apparently on the west coast), he introduced Americans to the Australian meat pie, a sensibly-portioned single serving of various meats and fillings baked in a wonderful crust. Allen and Steel reunited in Marietta in 2001 to bring these meat pies to the east coast, and provide a stopping point for homesick ex-pats. It's their contention that many Australians and New Zealanders swing by on visits through Georgia for a taste of home, and to pick up some Australian groceries, including, of course, jars of vegemite.





Melissa and I stopped by on a Thursday and there was a pretty good lunch crowd. The shop is decorated with as much over-the-top Australian memorabilia as is possible, including flags of each of that country's states hanging from the ceiling. The staff is incredibly friendly and nice, and did an appropriate job admiring my baby.

I had the lamb curry pie with a side salad and thought it was just splendid. It really wasn't at all spicy, which my tongue was craving, but it was seasoned just right and satisfied me all the same. The crust was just super flaky and it tasted so fresh. It left me very curious what their dessert pies are like. I washed this down with a terrific Bundeberg brand sarsaparilla, which Melissa grabbed by mistake when reaching for the ginger beer. It was lighter than I expected, but I bet it goes great over ice cream.

I probably should have taken some home. A glance over the grocery shelves turns up all sorts of unusual goodies, from sodas to the yeast spreads to fun-looking candies with silly names (Tim Tams?). I may have to stop in again sometime and do a little shopping.

Joe's Walk Hard BBQ, Leesburg AL

Longtime readers know that Marie and I - well, admittedly, it is mainly just I - get a kick out of stopping in other states for regionally-available sodas that we cannot get in Atlanta. When we were in Fort Payne, we pulled into a grocery store called Sav-a-Lot, where I hoped - actually, where I expected - to get twelve-packs of Buffalo Rock and Grapico, but they didn't carry them. They did, however, have strawberry flavored Moon Pies. I gobbled those babies up within four days.

After lunch at Fort Payne's Bar-B-Q Place, we drove south on US-11 in the direction of Centre and Gadsden, intending to stop in the next grocery store that we found and try again. We finally came to a Piggly Wiggly in Collinsville, and I made some very curious discoveries. They were sold out of Buffalo Rock, though they still had it in Diet, but I got the Grapico that we required, along with that distributor's Crush - slash - Sunkist clone, Sunfresh, which comes in blue raspberry flavor. In June, I had found blue raspberry Crush on Saint Simons Island. It's delicious. They were out of it when we returned in August, and that Winn-Dixie's Pepsi distributor said they didn't have it in any of his Brunswick area stores. The local Publix here in Atlanta can't seem to get it in, either. Fine, I'll buy a clone of it in Collinsville, Alabama. As long as I get my blue raspberry, nobody gets hurt.

But the real stunner was finding two-liter bottles of Double Cola a good seventy miles south of its home base of Chattanooga, outside of which, this product is just criminally difficult to find. I very rarely buy two-liter bottles - they go flat quicker than I can drink them, as I have just one soda a day - but I figured that I could share with my daughter and we'd finish it before it turns to syrup. I once read on a message board of Double Cola being spotted in Cusseta, which is on the Georgia side of Opelika, but this was the first time I have personally ever seen it outside its regular habitat.

Well, anyway, we've been talking about barbecue, so I should probably wrap that up. The original plan had been to finish up our little tour with a visit to the town of Centre, to try a place called Starr's Real Pit, which 3rd Degree Berns had written about in 2009. Fortunately, I learned a lesson from our trip back through middle Georgia last, as I recounted a couple of weeks ago in the chapter about our trip to Smokin Pig near Savannah, and decided to phone each of the restaurants on our itinerary and confirmed that they were all going to be open. Starr's is now called Lanie's, and they are not open on Saturdays. That left me fumbling a bit, as Urbanspoon was not able to find another barbecue place between Fort Payne and Rome. That's because, as mentioned in that chapter, the site is called Urbanspoon and not Barbecuerestaurantsinthemiddleofnowherespoon. Google was able to find a restaurant in the area that nobody had submitted to Urbanspoon yet. I phoned Joe's Walk Hard in Leesburg, a small town between Collinsville and Centre, and confirmed that they're open for business.





Sadly, I'm unable to write from the usual broad overview of the food and dishes here, because the rest of our group had thrown in the towel and didn't want to order anything more after our other meals. Well, maybe we should have spent more time at Desoto Falls working off the first two stops.

I had the chopped pork plate and thought it was completely delicious. It was a close second to the meat that we had enjoyed at Big Jim's in Hammondville. It was chopped quite fine but with a good bit of bark, juicy and smoked just right, and the not-overly-sweet brown sauce worked just perfectly with it. The baked beans were nothing out of the ordinary, but the slaw was just fantastic. Very tangy with a vinegar kick, this packed more punch than most any other mayo-based slaw that I can recall.

I did treat my daughter to an order of banana pudding, as she had been disappointed by the dessert at the last place that we tried. She was ecstatic about it, calling it the best dessert that she had all day. Since she ate nothing but desserts, I suppose she was qualified to judge.

Joe's is built into the space next to a gas station and convenience store, and about half of the menu is devoted to their various breakfast options. I had hoped to speak with Joe, a younger fellow who looks like he could vault right over whatever defensive back you think you could throw at him, a little bit as we left, but he was deep in conversation with some old-timer. So I just offered my thanks, and the old-timer turned on me with an eye-popping aura of talking-all-day-long power and asked whether he knew me or ever worked with me someplace or other, because I sure did look familiar. I asked whether he ever lived in Athens, Georgia, as I'm absolutely certain I'd never seen this guy at any of the corporate, desk job businesses where I have worked in Atlanta. He said he had not, but wanted to know where I worked in that town. Then he wanted to talk at length about my twin. I got the feeling that Joe wasn't going to get very much barbecue cooked with this fellow talking everybody's ear off.

But this was north Alabama, after all. Being able to talk everybody's ear off is something you learn hereabouts around the age of four.



(Note: We kind of spent August and September being very, very busy. In a desperate attempt to catch up, this should be the first of nine consecutive days' worth of entries.)