Bloggers Invade the Buckhead Diner

A couple of weeks ago, Marie and I finally got to put some faces to some names and meet a few of our fellow hobbyists. We were invited to join a little gang called the Atlanta Food Bloggers Society - you've probably seen the little "plate" icon on the sidebar to your right by now - and the launch party for the group was held at the venerable Buckhead Diner, in conjunction with some new menu items that they have rolled out. Well, there is one face that we knew ahead of time; we've known Rebecca Mendelsohn of Atlanta Foodies, who organized this group, for a few months in our "civilian" identities before we realized that we were each bloggers. Also present that afternoon: Amy on Food, Atlanta Restaurant Blog, The Blissful Glutton, Fiddlehead Foraging and The Food and Me. All we needed was for me to pretend to be dead and everybody else could have played an awesome game of How To Host a Murder.

We met at the Diner, which I recall opening with great hoopla in 1987, because its owners, the Buckhead Life Group, wanted a chance to show off some of its new menu offerings from the new executive chef, Charles Schwab. I confess that I felt a moment's pause about offering a "review" of the goodies that we tried, as just about every chapter that we've written here has been written from the perspective of us, anonymously, enjoying, and paying for, a good meal at someplace that we would like to share with our readers. I trust that our readers will understand that on this occasion, we were invited under the purview of a small social media event to greet the chef and representatives of Buckhead Life Group for a complementary presentation of the new concoctions on their menu, specifically to get the word out to our readers. I can't, therefore, "review" the restaurant, whose sterling reputation has been speaking for itself since I was in high school anyway, as the experience was not at all like what regular diners will experience.

With that in mind, they started us off with some white truffle deviled eggs before giving us some pimento cheese-filled hush puppies that they termed "fritters." I really lucked out here, as Marie's nursing-mandated avoidance of dairy meant that I got her fritters. They then brought out "day boats" of ceviche, made from rotating recipes, served with plantain and sweet potato chips. The ceviche that we enjoyed included shrimp, calamari and small scallops. It was followed by a plate of spicy tempura shrimp, and that was followed by a pizza, made with a very thin crust and pesto sauce, then a Cobb salad, pecan-encrusted Maine cod, an entree of turkey jardiniere, and finally a renowned and decadent - I am definitely using that word far too frequently to describe desserts, but I mean it here - white chocolate banana cream pie.


The tempura rock shrimp was my personal favorite of the selections.


The Cobb salad, however, was possibly the consensus favorite of the group.


The turkey jardiniere is served underneath a salad of its own, with tomatoes, arugula, radishes and potatoes, with a lemon vinaigrette drizzle.

I'll tell you honestly, there was not one thing that I disliked. They have put together a splendid menu - it is a pricey one, mind - of some incredibly tasty things, and if they did so knowing that any misstep could be magnified and communicated to readers who might (in my experience) blow things further out of proportion, then so be it. They didn't make any missteps. Possibly the least interesting thing among the treats they provided was the pizza, but it was still exponentially superior to plenty of other pizzas in town.

I enjoyed the tempura shrimp best, followed by the turkey dish, and then probably the pimento cheese fritters. They really balanced the spice of the shrimp quite perfectly. It had a kick without lingering, but was the most pleasant possible kick. The turkey was utterly unlike the dry meat that I typically dislike. It was moist and juicy and exciting, and served with a splendid complement of veggies that I would never have guessed would go so well with it. These little paper-thin radishes, of all things, just went perfectly with it.

The Cobb salad seemed to be the overall favorite of the table, and I wouldn't say that anybody was wrong for loving it. This has to have been one of the freshest salads that I've ever had; every vegetable tasted like it was picked that morning, with the avocado in particular just electrifyingly vibrant. The blue cheese - apparently Point Reyes blue rather than the Diner's popular and famous Maytag blue - was probably my favorite thing in it, though. I could have had a heaping spoonful of that cheese.

We thanked our hosts at the Diner for showing off their treats and enjoyed sharing a little shop talk with each other. The Blissful Glutton, whose blog has sadly been a little dormant while she has been working as the editor of Eater Atlanta, has probably been doing this longer than anybody else in town, but she still has a lot of passion for good meals. That's reassuring; we have all seen some good food blogs dry up and blow away as their writers lose interest. This was a very positive afternoon. We all have blogs that we enjoy reading, and restaurants that we love to visit, and everybody wanted to talk about engaging writers and good places to eat, without dwelling on the bad. I suppose, when a hobby remains as, sensibly, unorganized as ours, there's really no opportunity for drama unless you just want to be a diva and call other people out for daring to disagree with you about a restaurant. Life's just better, though, when you're pleasant.

We touched on the curious alchemy of Urbanspoon rankings, a subject near and dear to my heart, what with so many restaurants that I've visited proving so colossally unpopular, unhip and uncool that I'd have to post about two thousand trips to Frankie & Johnny's to have the same statistical impact as a single visit to Fogo de Chao. On that note, I have tried, without much success, to invite some other writers whose blogs that I enjoy to join Urbanspoon and start enjoying the benefits of the spoonback linking. It brings a good deal more traffic to our blog, and I enjoy seeing how my chief peers and I move up and down the rankings. Of course, many of these sites that I enjoy most - Buster's BBQ Blog, Chopped Onion, Where's the Best BBQ? - detail older roadfood and rural places, and not on the more intown trendy joints - like Buckhead Diner - that get you higher up the big city rankings, but it sure would be easier to follow good blogs like them were they in my Urbanspoon news feed.

Leslie, of The Food and Me, hoped that the rest of us might offer suggestions about prompting more comments from her readers. Short of going negative, we were all stumped, noting that pretty much the only time that any of us can reliably expect comments of any sort is when we tick off a restaurant's owner. Or his sockpuppets. I think that we would all like more interaction with our readers, though. Sometimes, I wonder how Marie and I managed to pick up so darn many of you. Drop us a line once in a while; let us know how we're doing. All of us!

Red Queen Tarts

This is Marie, contributing a tiny little article about a tiny little treat - pop tarts. Sort of, anyway. You know that my articles are mainly about dessert, right?

Well, despite my unfortunate weakness for artificial grape flavoring and seasonal sugar bombs like candy corn, I'm not really a big fan of toaster pastries that come in cardboard with silver wrappers around them. They smell like chemicals to me. I have been known to buy them for the fans in my household, and then flee with my nose pinched shut when the odor of toasted pop tart wafts through the kitchen.

So, what am I doing writing about them? Well, this article is more about pop tarts as they would be if we lived in a world where there actually were little elves who did baking for the sheer pleasure of feeding people, so you could get stuff from the grocery store that had as much love in the making as the treats you swiped off of Grandma's cooling racks on visits to her kitchen. I mean, look at these. If you opened cardboard box and took out a silver foil package and found this inside, you'd just have to believe in elves, right?

These cute little treats are a labor of love by Candice Reynolds, a.k.a. The Red Queen. She shares my opinion that the truly decadent treat should involve real care and attention to detail, and takes it just a little farther. Heirloom flour, aluminum-free baking powder, fillings made from seasonal (never-frozen) ingredients, and nearly all of what she uses is organic - some serious thought and care went into the selection of her ingredients. And after all that, as you can see she uses personal care and attention as each tart is very clearly fork-crimped. I do hope she's using ergonomic work practices, as she apparently has quite a respectable output each week.



The crust is almost like a cookie with those lovely sugar crystals on top, but the fillings are not overly sweet, so there is no need to risk a toothache on biting into them. In fact, some, like the Meyer Lemon, make the word tart an adjective as well as a noun - and that is as it should be. Flavors vary by season and availability. So far I've tried mainly the fruit flavors but have heard that some like the chocolate hazelnut should not be missed.

One of the neat things that the cafeteria my my workplace does is occasionally check out local vendors and test their products on the happy guinea pigs (excuse me, customers) who come through the line. Sadly, these were a little on the pricey side to make the cut as a regular offering, but every so often a group of us will get together and pitch in for a minimum order to get these delivered to the office for a late afternoon snack. She generally can be tracked down at farmer's markets (often found at Peachtree Road Farmers Market and East Point Farmers Market based on her Facebook page), and for catered events. It may take a little searching to lay hands on some, but they're worth it.

Also, thanks to Adventurous Tastes for an enticing write-up that got me interested in further exploration (if I remember correctly, I ran across this piece while looking for inspiration on writing up an article about cupcakes), and also includes some much better pictures of these treats than the one I took!

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Hey! We've moved! Come visit our blog at its new home!

The Georgia Rib Company, Marietta GA

The Georgia Rib Company is, without question, the strangest looking barbecue restaurant that I have ever visited. There are many businesses where guests might question the layout or the decor, but this was the first time that I have ever entered a business and thought that somebody stole the sign from the actual restaurant and moved it somewhere else as a practical joke.

I had never heard of this place until I started cleaning up Urbanspoon's barbecue listings several weeks ago. I was working through the G-named restaurants in the Atlanta section and found this place in Marietta. Reasonably certain that I would have heard somebody mention it if it was still in business, I phoned them fully expecting the number to have been disconnected. But no, they've just been quietly doing business in a huge building that once housed a skating rink, keeping to themselves for many months in the shadow of the celebrated and popular Sam's BBQ-1. Seriously, you can see this building from Sam's, and would have no idea that it was a barbecue joint unless you went inside to check it out for yourself.

So basically, you've got a huge barn of a skating rink building, but the interior has been retrofitted to look like the most dated, early-eighties wall-carpeted event space that you've ever seen. The corridor has meaningless little angles in it, and there are at least three dining rooms. We entered and found nobody in the airlock or the hostess station. Ahead on the left, there was a private room that seats close to a hundred, lights out. Further along this new wave corridor, on the right, Marie and I could hear light R&B, and we found a bar that was a little smaller than the event room. It was only slightly more alive than the closed private room; there was one couple in a booth waiting for their meal to arrive. Further down the corridor is a gigantic room, also darkened, that, in the evening, hosts live music in a barn for about four hundred.

We figured that the middle room was where we were meant to be, so we returned. The room looks like a sports bar, with plenty of college football banners and several flat-screen TVs tuned to either games or some Angelina Jolie movie, but all of the TVs were muted so that we could listen to the smooth sounds of people who, like Kenny G, could play rhythm but had no idea what the blues were. There were no staff around in this enormous complex, just that one older couple, patiently and happily enjoying each other's company, while important games played silently with a soundtrack of a meaningless, quiet pulse of love songs for the soulless.

This was, in point of fact, the weirdest and most out-of-place that I have ever felt since a co-worker in Athens once invited me to visit her at this bar where she worked, which I'd never heard of, in the old Ramada Inn on Broad Street that's now a Holiday Inn Express, and the bar turned out to be a pick-up joint for the Centrum Silver crowd who wanted to dance to a bad cover band playing "Smooth Operator."

In time, some hungover teenage girl emerged to show us to a booth. She had no idea that the restaurant's web site offered a $4.95 lunch special of a sandwich and a side. This food would have to be something else to make up for this utterly bizarre atmosphere. Fortunately, it was pretty good, and struck a pleasant chord in my memory.





Marie and I each had chopped pork sandwiches. Getting the problem out of the way, the sides were pretty disappointing. Marie had the collard greens and did not finish them, and I had the Brunswick stew, and while it was pleasant, it didn't bowl me over.

But the chopped pork here really is something else. It is really smoky, dark, pink and dry. It's so distinctive and so dry that, more than most in Atlanta, it genuinely needs some sauce to mix right. It's probably not accurate to say that it is "crying" for sauce, but it is definitely coughing and clearing its throat for some. This was a real treat, finding something so wholly, utterly unlike the usual suburban standard of moist-to-greasy pulled pork that I have seen lately. There is only one sauce here, a sweet, brown, Memphis style. It goes excellently with the pork.

Much as I enjoyed the meat, I quickly found myself wishing that I had gone against convention and tried the ribs. Even though ribs are in this restaurant's name, it just didn't occur to me to order them, as I prefer chopped pork. However, this place must certainly know what it is doing, as the young server informed us that the owner, many years before, had once run Jilly's, The Place For Ribs. I didn't even half-remember that place when I saw Georgia Rib Company's boastful slogan, "The Only Place for Ribs" and thought that a bit bold of them.

But when the girl mentioned Jilly's, a lot came flooding back. This was a small chain in Georgia many years ago. When I was a kid, my family would occasionally visit the one on Cobb Parkway in Smyrna. Not yet interested in barbecue, I'd always just get a burger - of course - but I recall that they had amazing, messy, greasy onion rings. There were also stores, locally, in Roswell and near the East Lake shopping center in Marietta, and stores in Macon and Columbus. I enjoyed the nice rush of pleasant nostalgia for long-gone restaurants, as I often do, and affirmed that this gentleman has probably been smoking and grilling almost as long as I've been alive.

I don't know the circumstances that led him to resume serving barbecue in this really weird space, of all places, but I'm glad that he's back. Now that I'm older and know what the heck good ribs are supposed to taste like, I might need to return and try what stubbornness had kept me from trying as a child. While there's only limited information about Jilly's online, I've asked around and a few friends have since told me that they enjoyed the old Place for Ribs. If you're among their number, swing by this oddball restaurant and see whether your own nostalgia might be tickled a little.

A Friday Night's Eating, Atlanta GA

The situation was grim. Marie had requested that we spend the second weekend of October relaxing. After several out-of-town trips in September and the madness of the convention over the first weekend of the month, she wanted a Saturday where we didn't do anything. That meant that if I wanted some new things to talk about, then on Friday night, I needed to please everybody with a couple of small meals and a couple of great desserts.

There was, first, the problem of my daughter. I had decided that I wanted to go back to Everybody's, the terrific pizza joint by Emory's main campus, but I was not keen on being so far away from my daughter while she was at a football game in the suburbs. She didn't want to come eat pizza. "You'll just put anchovies on it," she said, not unreasonably. A bribe was necessary.

"What if we get ice cream afterward?" I asked. She declined.

"What if we get Jake's ice cream, then?" Oh. That changed things. She'd drop the lead singer of My Chemical Romance on his butt for a scoop of Jake's.

Then Marie piped in. She can't eat ice cream, as I should remember. The dairy gets in her breast milk and gives the baby stomach aches. We would have to get desserts from two different places, at least once I figured out where you can get any Jake's these days. She also wasn't keen on pizza for the same reason. Maybe we could get a hamburger somewhere instead.

Imagine. There are some people in this world who would handle this problem with a single trip to a Picadilly Cafeteria. I hope we never turn into those people. In point of fact, I wouldn't mind if this baby one day piped up to demand we insert stops for seafood and chicken mull into the menu. While we live in a city as large as Atlanta, there's not one blessed thing stopping us from having the best of all possible worlds in one evening. Well, apart from the chicken mull. We'd have to drive to Athens for that, but we could come back here for the ice cream and cake.

The children and I picked up Marie at work, allowing her fellow employees to admire the baby for a few minutes - well, and the tween girl as well, I suppose - and giving Marie a chance to feed him. We then made our slow, agonizing way from Dunwoody through Friday "rush" hour traffic to Decatur.

Everybody's has been serving the community for forty years now and, while fad and fashion have thrown other pizza places in the limelight, I still believe that Everybody's serves one of the best pies in the region. Vingenzo's might have knocked it out of my Atlanta top five, but it's still a great pizza and worth a visit. This was actually the slowest I've ever seen it, but we arrived before the Friday dinner rush really got going.





With Marie planning for a burger in a few minutes' time and the threat of anchovies infuriating my daughter, they simply shared a salad and some amazing breadsticks. My individual pie was, unwittingly, a carnivore's delight, with anchovies, chicken, and Italian sausage. I promise that I intended to have them with tomatoes and peppers, but something went stupid in my brain once I sat down. I have no legitimate excuse, but good grief, was it ever good.

Afterward, we walked down to the end of this strip mall to Wonderful World. I should note that we took the risk of leaving our car in Everybody's lot and leaving the premises. I have heard, before and since, that this is never a good idea. We didn't get towed or booted, but I don't advise doing this.

Wonderful World has very quietly been grilling up some of the very best hamburgers in the city, without attention or hype, sliding their sliders right under everyone's radar during the last three years of the city's hamburger madness. I'm certain I never heard of this place at all before I looked up Everybody's on Urbanspoon the day before we went down and was amused to see the name of this place listed as "nearby." The name tickled me, because I frequently get one of two different songs named "Wonderful World" stuck in my head.





Anyway, Wonderful World is a very small side venture by Stephen Chan, who has opened a small chain of cafes called Tin Drum around the city. It has received virtually no attention from my fellow hobbyists, although The Toothfish gave it a good review when it opened two years ago. Two years! This is one of the best hamburgers in the city, for pete's sake. Folk need to get over here and try one.

They're quite small and very nicely priced. Most are under $3 and are made from fresh, local beef, never frozen. The fries are also fresh and just incredibly yummy. We've had some good burgers lately. In fact, we've had a lot of 'em. This knocks just about all of them to the side, easily ranking among the juiciest and tastiest our town can offer. I had the WonderfulBurger, which comes with cheese, lettuce, pickles and a house sauce. It was just perfect.

I really like the interior decor a lot, too. Slotted wood paneling covers the lights behind them, resulting in a very comfortable and laid-back vibe. It only seats a couple of dozen at long, communal tables, but I think that once people get their food here, they'll be in no rush to leave. It's a complete delight, but we did have to make our way. I had promised the girlchild some Jake's.

(Before we leave, however, a follow-up note. One of those songs that I enjoyed replaying in my head was "Wonderful World," a track from one of David Sylvian's countless odd projects, Nine Horses. As Tin Drum was also the title of Japan's last studio album, I amused myself concluding that Chan must also be a Sylvian fan. This was confirmed a couple of weeks later, when I was walking down Broad Street downtown, passed one of the Tin Drum locations, and did a double-take when I saw, through the window, a giant blow-up of the front cover of that Japan LP. Chan makes terrific burgers and he appreciates one of my favorite musicians. I'd have said favorite, period, before he released that awful Manafon. Yeeesh.)

Now, not long ago, there were a few more Jake's locations than there are now. Most magical was the great one in Decatur, at the end of the strip mall where Wuxtry has long resided. We could kick back and indulge in ice cream there for hours. It would appear that only a single Jake's location is left, although they supply a few other coffee shops and places with their amazing product.

Inman Perk Coffee is one that Marie and I had visited once before. It's a splendid little place where locals on laptops are always kicking back. Honestly, it's next to impossible to make much comment on a coffee shop's product, as I don't drink coffee, but I figure, as long as the ice cream is good, it's worth a visit. A relaxed and comfortable environment like this is just a bonus.



Unfortunately, Marie was deprived of this most excellent ice cream. She departed to change and feed the baby, possibly so her heart would not be broken that we were indulging in front of her. Mine was a cherry and vanilla double-scoop - their reliable "brown sugah vanillah" has been either replaced by or supplanted with a "thrillah vanillah" that I found myself enjoying even more.

Marie's treat was a few miles up the road at OK Cafe. This venerable meat and three buffet diner has been around since the mid-eighties. Their long line of customers waiting for a table is so legendary that they installed a big digital sign out front informing anybody driving past how long the current expected wait is.



While the OK Cafe prides itself on its classic American diner food, with their chicken and fried trout particular favorites of everybody, we were just there for dessert. Marie got a big slice of chocolate cake. It was not a ridiculous, oversized chunk of a thousand calories, but something sensibly-portioned and tasty. They do fantastic work here, and getting to-go orders is incredibly simple.

This was a fine evening out. We discovered someplace new and fantastic and each of us came home satisfied. I'd call it a success all around. There remained, however, the problem of Marie decreeing the next day to be one of relaxation and late sleeping. That was fine, because I knew that we'd need to have lunch sometime, and I had a plan for that.









(Update, 3/24/12: Sadly, the Wonderful World shuttered this week to make way for another Tin Drum. Right across the street from a Doc Chey's...? Wow.)

Rise-n-Dine, Atlanta GA

This is Marie, contributing an article about breakfast. My relationship with breakfast has been a little out of the ordinary because I am one of about four people in the world who dislike bacon (on its own merits, that is - not for religious, moral, or health reasons). When I was a teen, I learned how to make pancakes so I could tie up the griddle and get something to eat, then escape before my dad and uncle could fill the kitchen with the smell of frying meat. It was also fun to make smiley face pancakes and such for the littler kids.

My personal favorite breakfast is a bowl of fresh fruit with good yogurt, a bowl of cereal if it is warm, an egg or oatmeal in cold weather, some toast with a top-quality jam, and some hot black tea. A nice creamy Dutch cheese also goes well with the toast. Obviously, it's easier to have this breakfast at home. Except on workdays, of course, when peanut butter on half a bagel is more typical!

However, every so often I am called to go out for breakfast. In this particular case, it was a friend's visit. Our friend Chris, from Jacksonville, was back in town on the last leg of a road trip up to New Jersey and back on family business. When someone is visiting from out of town you let them have a good bit of leeway in picking out a place to meet, and he was the one to pick Rise-n-Dine, based primarily on the fact that it was the highest-rated breakfast place near his hotel. I made the trek to Decatur with the kids to meet up with Chris, knowing the wait time would be pretty daunting, so a bottle came along for the baby. It's fairly popular place and if you either like people-watching or are meeting more for the opportunity for conversation than a quick meal, the wait isn't bothersome. The wait was a little hard for a 12-year-old to take, but she managed with a little window shopping and the help of her phone. Twosomes will get in faster than larger groups. There don't seem to be many larger tables.

Once actually inside, we were served quickly and had a cheerful server. He was a little bewildered by the request for a mug of hot water to heat the bottle, but complied promptly, and barely in time - the baby just barely began to fuss before his milk was done. The baby passed out in time for the food to arrive, nice timing on his part, and generous of him considering the fairly high noise level inside. The server had pretty decent hearing. I have been avoiding dairy due to the apparent allergy of a certain little person who shares my meals, and I have been unpleasantly surprised before to get rye toast (with butter on it) instead of dry toast; despite the noise, that server got it right.



Ivy saw grilled cheese on the menu and asked if she could have that. Generally the answer is no, because we feel it is not right to pay 5 bucks for something that costs about 11 cents to make at home. However, in certain circumstances, such as when the restaurant uses multiple kinds of cheese on bread that isn't unnaturally square, we make exceptions. She also ordered the orange juice. When her drink arrived and I saw how brilliantly orange and dense it was, I had to have some for myself. That, I think, was the best part of the meal, and it was surely better than the hot tea that would have been my alternate choice.

Unfortunately we didn't order anything terribly photogenic. The table voted the herbed fried potatoes the best item after the orange juice. Next time I will make a point of getting the sweet potato pancakes.

Breakfast isn't a hard meal to get right, as long as service is reasonably fast. However, Rise-n-Dine manages to take a step past the ordinary. I'd go again.

West Egg Cafe, Atlanta GA

A few Fridays back, I had not decided where I was going for lunch, and then I got peckish early and set out to find some breakfast instead. I actually work with two former employees of West Egg Cafe on Howell Mill, and they speak fondly of their time there. So I looked over the menu and was very interested by some of the things that they assemble there.

West Egg Cafe was once a Jake's Ice Cream store. I'm not certain for how long, but the franchise owner elected to get out of ice cream and strike out on her own with coffees, breakfasts and sandwiches. They do offer a few desserts in the form of pastries and cupcakes. I took home one of their celebrated Coca-Cola cupcakes to share with Marie and, frankly, was not impressed, but that's okay. The omelet that I had in the restaurant was so darn good that it didn't matter.





I've never had pimento cheese in an omelet before! I was torn between this and the Georgia Benedict, which is turkey sausage, eggs and gravy over a biscuit. That sounds wonderful, but the omelet was just fine. It came with a delicious biscuit and potatoes grilled in a skillet.

This place can get really busy, so breakfast guests should expect a wait. Fortunately, the deck behind the restaurant appears to be free, so there's plenty of space to park. The service was downright excellent, with a small army of servers stopping by to check on everybody. I don't go out for breakfast all that often, but it's always nice to add to my options with a place as fun as this.

Buckhead Barbecue Company, Smyrna GA

In recent months, I've visited some of the barbecue restaurants in and around Atlanta that can trace their lineage back to Sam's BBQ-1 and the old - well, recent, but old in restaurant terms - alliance between Sam Huff and Dave Poe. Those two once employed several cooks and staff who have gone out and started their own restaurants, with results that, in my book, range from pretty good to what I would have called disappointing but I've since downgraded to "downright awful," thanks to the online sockpuppeting antics of its supporter(s) ticking me off.

However, we have clearly saved the best - for now - for last. Despite the name, which I find pretty silly considering this place isn't even in Vinings, much less Buckhead, the Buckhead Barbecue Company has surpassed the quite good work found at both Sam's and Dave's restaurants. Their chef, Kevin Fullerton, used to work with those fellas. This restaurant is serving up an exceptional product at a terrific price from a little strip mall shop in Smyrna, just a few doors down from the excellent Roy's Cheesesteaks.

They've taken the bold move of opening in the shadow of an unaccountably popular location of Jim 'n Nick's, a mediocre chain whose local store has already claimed one barbecue fatality in a store called Atlanta Ribs. I certainly hope that Buckhead Barbecue Company can draw enough attention to their little shop one mile outside the perimeter to thrive. Hopefully, the praise and love that Roy's has found here will keep bringing the curious into the 'burbs to try this place out. This place deserves some attention, friends.





We had supper here a few Wednesdays ago, in the company of our good friends Dave and Amy, who live in Virginia and had come to town for Anime Weekend Atlanta and stayed to visit family. We commandeered a table on their patio for more than two hours, catching up and talking about barbecue. Actually, when Amy had requested that we meet somewhere for barbecue and told me that they were staying in Smyrna, my little "what can I blog about" senses started tingling and I knew just where I wanted to try.

All of the meats here are very good, with pulled pork smoked just perfectly and just moist enough to not need any sauce. That said, if you like drowning your meat and you like to try several different things, then Buckhead probably offers more sauces than any place that I know this side of Asheville's Ed Boudreaux's: a whopping nine varieties, and every one of them is lip-smacking tasty. If any one was the house sauce at a single-bottle joint, it would be a winner, which makes it a much better experience than Ed's, where the phrase "jack of all trades, master of none" was never more true.

I was most impressed and intrigued by the different "Eastern NC Vinegar" and "Lexington NC Vinegar" varieties. I had heard that the distinctive sauce around Lexington was a vinegar-tomato blend, but, not really able to go up there and try it for myself, yet, I was left wondering what the difference is between that and the sauce common at so many restaurants around Atlanta and the I-20 corridor, which I would describe as red, and thick with a mild, vinegary kick. If what Buckhead Barbecue Company mixes is accurate, then Lexington sauce is much thinner - online recipes that I've since consulted suggest four parts water to one part each vinegar and ketchup, with sugar and lots of pepper - and has a different sort of kick, very much unlike what I have been finding and questioning. There is, it turns out, at least one other example of Lexington sauce in the area; Swallow at the Hollow's vinegar sauce surprised me by splashing red all over the pink meat. Now I know why.

Apart from these, there is a very good mustard sauce, two examples of a traditional brown sweet sauce - a spicier "Kansas City" and a sweeter "Memphis" - and an Alabama white sauce, and every one of them is just wonderful. My daughter was so taken with the Kansas City sauce that, after she finished her meal, which included a fun little combo dish of Brunswick stew poured over very good mac-n-cheese, she started squeezing herself spoonfuls of sauce. Give her some saltines and she'll look just like a starving undergraduate.

Dave had trouble deciding between two sandwiches. They offer one rather gloriously ridiculous Elvis tribute sandwich, with crunchy peanut butter, bananas and bacon, fried, and he was tempted, but he went with the Big Pig, which is a sliced pork loin beast topped with pulled pork, bacon, melted cheese and horseradish sauce. Dave was one of my groomsmen and I love the guy, so I seriously hope he had steamed vegetables for lunch the next day. On the other hand, with the bread puddings he and Amy took along with them, I'm not so sure eating healthy was on the agenda. Well, they were on vacation.

Goodbye to El Pollo Loco

I will always associate El Pollo Loco with death.

That's hardly fair, of course, but that's how these things happen. One of my earliest memories is the death of an uncle named Ruford, who married my father's oldest sister before Dad was born. This is, in part, why I am convinced that there must have been some old family contract that made it illegal for anybody to marry into my family unless they had a name as silly as any of ours. My grandfather had a sensible name like Joseph, gave all five of his kids oddball names, and the oldest of them married somebody with a name like Ruford.

Anyway, Ruford died when I was five or so, and somebody, probably his daughter, my cousin Sandie, told all of us small ones who were at the hospital that somebody had brought some Mississippi mud cake for us and it was back at the house. Ever since then, Mississippi mud cake has been off my menu. Seeing its name in print reminds me of the first time that I ever encountered death, and my kindergarten-aged self shudders inside.

I was really pleased to hear that El Pollo Loco was entering the Atlanta market in 2007, because, of course, I am interested in smaller chains. One of the first of what would be perhaps nine - down from a planned and announced fifty - opened on Holcomb Bridge Road in Roswell. I would drive right past it on my way home from work. Now, at that job, on the last business day of each month, everybody had to stay late until everybody else had finished and the books were balanced, possibly because my boss was Bill Lumbergh. So on the last business day of the month, my mother would pick up the children from school for me, since heaven knew when I would leave, and I would get supper somewhere in Roswell and enjoy a good book.

So, I settled on trying out the new El Pollo Loco that November, left sometime after the sun went down and somebody's financing was finally approved and a contract written, got in the car and my phone rang. It was the children's mother, calling to say that her mother was in the hospital. This was a Friday; I asked whether she wanted me to bring the children to Knoxville the next day to see her, and she said, firmly, not to, to give it a week. She then took a sharp turn for the worse and died on Wednesday morning.

Not that I had any kind of love left for anybody in that family, but, for my children, I should have told her that I was coming anyway, and just gone home and packed. Instead, I spent Friday night wowing the avocado sauce on El Pollo Loco's salsa bar. I ate at three of the city's El Pollo Loco locations quite a few times in 2008 and 2009, before I cut fast food from the diet, and always enjoyed the meals here. But with every one of them, I heard that voice in the back of my head saying "You should have taken your kids to see their grandmother one last time."

Which is a pretty unfair thing to do to myself; hell, earlier in 2007, I deliberately curtailed a plan to drive straight from Toronto home to Atlanta in one go, just to give these rotten kids a few hours with her. You'd think that'd give me a little pass on the guilt, but guilt's a stupid, senseless thing, and that's why El Pollo Loco never meant "the crazy chicken" to me. It meant death.



Tomorrow's News Today, a good site about Atlanta retail that locals should certainly be reading, wrapped up the restaurant's four-and-a-half-year run in the region with an obituary and recap and noted that three of the nine stores indeed formally changed their name to The Crazy Chicken, an act which surely must have been borne of desperation.

While they were with us, though, El Pollo Loco served up some pretty good meals for what it was. I always thought of it as a cross between a Mrs. Winners and a Del Taco. Sure, you could find better if you wanted to pay a little more, but when it was convenient for us to stop by the Smyrna, Marietta or Roswell stores for a cheap, reliable meal and load up on chicken burritos and chips and salsa, this was a little better than the average.

I'd been telling myself for months to stop back by the Smyrna store, because the sluggish halt to the franchise group's expansion plans sounded like it would make a good story. I put it off too long; even after the Marietta "Crazy Chicken" had shuttered and become an IHOP, I just kept saying that I'd get around to Smyrna eventually, and never did. We'll just have to see them on the west coast, if we ever make it out that way.

In the meantime, I continue to wait impatiently for that long-promised Del Taco to finally open in Snellville. The obituary linked above suggests that this location might finally open in February 2012. I'm starting to get impatient.

Jack's New Yorker Deli, Vinings GA

Here is a restaurant that is just plain mixed up in my memory. I had this place completely backwards. I could have sworn that, as long as I could remember, there was a deli called "The New Yorker" in Vinings. Seriously, like, from the late 1970s, I remember a place in one of those white buildings across from the fountain on Paces Ferry. I am so accustomed to the memory that I did not think twice about whether or not it was ever there, or still there, or gone. It was just part of Vinings, like the New York Pizza Exchange and the Vinings Inn and the church where Howard McDowell used to preach, which has been a La Paz upstairs and a Mellow Mushroom downstairs for at least fifteen years, but it's still the church where, as an elementary schooler, I would regularly be sent to Vacation Bible School in the summer and await visits from the old Atlanta Braves Bleacher Creature.

So a few weeks ago, we were thinking about having some supper with Neal, and were looking around for a place in Vinings that was open Sunday and where we had not been in a while. I thumped the table with excitement about stopping by this place for the first time in ages. So we made a beeline for Vinings and Neal wondered where on earth we were going; the New Yorker is on the other side of Vinings, on Atlanta Road near Log Cabin. Sure enough, the buildings that I swore housed this place were occupied by a Starbucks and by a Jimmy John's.

I thought for a couple of days that one of the girls at the restaurant cleared up the confusion. She told me that the present space was actually the second store; the original was indeed in "proper" Vinings on Paces Ferry, but it had moved near the square in Marietta. Another couple of locations have since popped up in the area. That seemed to clear everything up until I visited the restaurant's web site and read that the business opened in 2002, far too late for it to be part of my childhood memories. So what the heck was that sandwich shop in Vinings that I'm thinking of, I wonder?





I feel pretty strongly about where Vinings actually is. Despite what some real estate agents and some clusters of apartment homes in Mableton would have you believe, Vinings is a very small place, and it is entirely inside the perimeter. Its boundaries are a pair of Kroger grocery stores. There is one on 41 and Paces Mill Road, and there is one on the south end of the neighborhood between Log Cabin and Atlanta Road. Its eastern border is the Chattahoochee River, and the western border is actually not I-285, but Cumberland Parkway. That's not complicated. If you live OTP, then you're in Smyrna and a wannabe.

They claim here, in actual-Vinings, to not be an imitation New York deli, but to provide a neat southern twist on things. I don't know how accurate any of this is, but it is certainly really tasty! Neal had a fried bologna sandwich and really liked it, but I'm sure my sandwich was better. It's called a Ryan's Wise Guy and comes with with prosciutto, cappicola, pepperoni, lettuce, tomato, black olives, banana peppers, fresh mozzarella and balsamic vinaigrette. Just a terrific, big little sandwich at a reasonable price.

Anyway, Jack's New Yorker Deli is open until 9 on Sundays, which is probably a little later than it needs to stay open. We wrapped up our meals by 8 and spent time gossiping and catching up and the place was hardly hopping. It is a terrific spot to go and gab. It's a little hidden from the road, and easy to drive right past, but certainly worth a visit.



(Edit...) In December, I stopped by the Marietta Square store for an Ellis Island sandwich and fries. It was delicious. I like the "Deli Dust," a little mix of salt, pepper, garlic and onion powder, sprinkled over the fries.

Eating Good Food Badly During Anime Weekend Atlanta

One thing is inescapably true: it's incredibly difficult to eat well during any kind of convention. I must have hit a new low during Anime Weekend Atlanta at the beginning of the month. Oh, I had some pretty good meals, to be sure, but I didn't temper them with, you know, vegetables or exercise or anything esoteric like that. It was like Fried Food Fest or something. Anyway, here's a report on what I did to my arteries during the con, and why I spent the next few days eating a little more sensibly.

Friday's lunch was a trip to Big Chow Grill, a regular Anime Weekend destination, in the company of my baby and two other very small guests. I met up with my friends Laura, Elizabeth and Jessica, none of whom I ever see enough of, and Jessica's two small children, one aged two and the other just three weeks. It was observed that, if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes four people to have lunch and take care of three younguns. Things got so chaotic with loud little ones that I phoned my daughter for backup and had her wheel my baby into the mall to calm him down for a little bit. Big Chow was as good as ever - I had one medium-sized bowl of spicy stir-fried chicken over rice and a second medium-sized bowl of spicier stir-fried chicken over egg noodles - and our service was exemplary.

Marie was able to get to the show a little after six, and while my daughter continued being wild and twelve, Marie and I took the baby out for supper. We made it over to Smyrna's US Cafe, a favorite of some of our family that I've been putting off revisiting for far too long.





We've never eaten at US Cafe as much as I would like, because, unaccountably, my daughter does not like the place. Neither does my brother, and whenever we would be visiting my mom and dad, he would always veto going there, even though it was so close by. It's a very family-friendly sports bar, full of screaming kids, pool tables and big games on the TVs. For some, I'm sure it must be hell on earth, but the burgers and wings are very good and, of all things, the salsa they serve with the chips is just heavenly.

I've always liked this place a good deal, and my dad was friendly with the owners. He liked coming here a lot, and really liked the milkshakes. I had been putting off a visit, knowing I'd get sad thinking about my father, particularly with him not around to talk about football this season. But I was in the mood for a burger, and I don't know whether there's one better in the Smyrna area, so I bit my lip and we had a good meal.

Saturday morning, I probably should have had a small bowl of melons and blueberries for breakfast, but, as recounted in the previous chapter, we went to Mountain Biscuits and I had one with country ham and one with lots of syrup. Then for lunch, I met up with Matt at another sports bar, the Galleria's Jocks and Jills, to watch the Georgia game.





There used to be several more Jocks and Jills locations in town, but according to their website, there's just the one left, in the Cobb Galleria, where, presumably, the ground rent is a little manageable. There's also one in Macon and another in Charlotte. It's a sprawling sports bar with several rooms, including a space upstairs that is occupied during game time by Atlanta's Rutgers Club. I tend not to pay much attention to what goes on in conferences other than the SEC (and now I have one and maybe two more teams to follow, so thanks a million, Slive), but while we were there, it looked like Rutgers was having a rough time of it at the hands of Syracuse.

When I watch a game out, I typically have an appetizer over the course of the first half, and then order an entree towards the end of halftime, and then tip quite generously for hogging a table for so long. This time I had some nachos - in a rare concession to health this weekend, I asked them to go very, very light on the cheese - and, later, some hamburger sliders with homemade chips. The food was acceptable and the service fantastic, but I wouldn't go here unless I wanted to watch a game.

I only got a little bit of con time on Saturday before going to my mother's house, which is closer than my own to the con, to change. I went to go see Bryan Ferry with David and a couple of his friends from "back in the day," Tom and Patt, with whom he was haunting clubs thirty years before. Bry was playing the same venue, Chastain Park, where I first saw him in 1988. Heck of a good show, if perhaps not his best, and enlivened by guitarist Chris Spedding ripping the absolute hell out of Neil Young's "Like a Hurricane."

Afterwards, David said that he was in the mood for greasy burgers. I found myself not really feeling like arguing. So we ended up at a Steak 'n Shake, where I ate the new Fritos Chili Cheeseburger, which is the absolute last thing anybody on the planet needs to eat at midnight. It's two patties, a slice of pepperjack, shredded cheese, chili and jalapeno peppers. Evidently, I didn't really feel like avoiding a heart attack, either, eating such a thing at midnight. There were several other late-evening revelers from the convention, all costumed up, all similarly damaging their arteries. It sure was good, though.

I ate better on Sunday. Promise.

Mountain Biscuits, Marietta GA

Here is a first for our blog. We've never considered a restaurant for inclusion, dined, declined and then gave them another chance before. Mountain Biscuits, a very busy place on Old 41 between the Church Street Extension and Barrett Parkway, got back on our better side after a less-than-thrilling introduction suggested just enough promise to make me want to give them another try, and while the results still were not quite perfect, the second trip was certainly warranted.

A few Thursdays back, I was looking around for something new to eat or revisit, when Mountain Biscuits came up as a "nearby suggestion" to some place on the Marietta Square that I was considering. They allegedly made a very good chicken sandwich, and so I drove over there to try it. The drive wasn't at all bad, and the lovely old building, very photogenic, was inspiring. It is no fault of the restaurant, but the illusion of a middle-of-nowhere roadside shack is sadly spoiled by the presence of some condos across the street.

While the service was impeccable and very friendly, I found this chicken sandwich to be completely overrated and overpriced. It wasn't bad, and I was not offended, but it was incredibly ordinary. It just tasted like an interstate fast food chicken sandwich, and I couldn't understand why on earth I was paying $5.75(!) for something that tasted like it came from a Wendy's or something. The bun, in particular, set off the trucked-in alarm. I crossed this place off my "to-blog" list.





But I noticed something curious as I had my lunch. From 11 to 3, six days a week, they offer lunch, with the promise of burgers and barbecue and an overindulgent plate of loaded fries that I might have ordered had the awesome, super-friendly woman at the register not told me that they were frozen fries. While they were not completely packed while I was there, they were nevertheless busy, and despite the lunch hour, every single person who came in seemed to be ordering biscuits instead of typical lunch fare. Were these biscuits really so good that they made for better 1 pm lunches than this ordinary sandwich?

My return was assured when the woman at the register started passing around little sample cups of their potato salad. While I almost never order this anymore for diet reasons, I do certainly love it, and this stuff was incredibly curious and interesting. If you will, it's baked potato salad, and it tastes a whole lot like a loaded baked potato, with bacon and sour cream. In point of fact, while I have had better, I have never had anything like this, and I believe in celebrating unique dining-out experiences. I also felt that I should be judging a restaurant based on what they make in-house, rather than what some truck brings. If the potato salad was any indication, they really can make some great stuff here.

So two mornings later, while my daughter embarked on a lengthy and detailed makeup job for her Anime Weekend Atlanta costume, Marie and the baby and I paid them a second visit for breakfast. We joined a very long line and were rewarded with some excellent biscuits. They are not, perhaps, quite in the same league as Stilesboro Biscuits a few miles up the road, who set the gold standard, but they're nevertheless really good. The line's length is testimony that they are doing something very right.

I think these treats are a little firmer than Stilesboro's, and Mountain makes them memorable by putting this wonderful concoction called Farmer's Biscuit Syrup on the tables. It's sort of a thin molasses and it goes incredibly well with a hot, buttered biscuit of this consistency. Frankly, should we return for breakfast one day, I won't even bother with any meat filling. As good as the country ham was, and it was quite good, I think drowning a plain biscuit in this delicious goo and eating it with a fork would really be something. Doesn't that sound insanely indulgent? I'll do that on a day when I'm planning to eat two ounces of steamed cauliflower for lunch.

I do, however, operate with a pretty strict three-strikes rule where Fox News is concerned. If I do go back for a third visit and the single TV there is still tuned to that propagandist garbage, it will be the last time. Maybe I'll wait a good while, and see whether they're giving their lunches the same homemade attention as their breakfast, and told that guy in the Flowers Bakery truck that he no longer needs to bring them those awful buns. The baked potato salad is clearly a step in the right direction and shows what they want to be doing. Hopefully, over time, they'll refine their lunch recipes further and turn out a chicken sandwich that's every bit as unique, and warrants the price. If they've turned that divisive dirt off the TV, it'll show that they really mean business.

Falls View Restaurant, Forsyth GA

It's a pretty bold claim to say that yours are the "best catfish this side of the Mississippi." That's an awful lot of land, you know. Fortunately, Marie and I visited a restaurant just a short hop from I-75 that might can honestly make that claim. Falls View Restaurant, which is near Forsyth and Jackson, and across from the gorgeous High Falls State Park, is one of the last places on our list of Roadfood.com-reviewed Georgia businesses to try. It's an incredibly convenient place for interstate travelers to pull over and stretch their legs for a little while before enjoying a quite good fish supper. Incidentally, the restaurant itself claims to be in Forsyth, while both Urbanspoon and Roadfood.com call it Jackson. I'm not familiar enough with the area to judge, so I tossed a coin.

We came to the park from the east, having spent the afternoon eating and shopping around middle Georgia and just enjoying ourselves tremendously. We stopped at the park first, and spent more than an hour walking around. There's a large pond dammed up by the parking area, but most people make their way across the state highway and onto one of the trails to go play in the waterfall.

Since I'm stating this boldly, in public, I should point out that, legally, you are not meant to swim here. There are signs all over the place telling you not to. Swimming is prohibited. But people were doing it anyway, by the dozens. There were between twenty and thirty people splashing around and cooling off in the wonderful swimming hole at the foot of the falls. Brave teen boys were on the falls themselves, sliding down into the deep water beneath them. It looked mighty dangerous, but I'd have done the same at their age. Marie and I were not dressed to get completely drenched, but we waded in up to our knees and had a terrific time.





After too-short a time in the swimming hole, we knew we had to make our way to the restaurant and get back on the road. My mother was watching the children and we did promise that we'd be home at a certain time. We found out that the climb back up to the parking area was a lot steeper than I had thought, and were pretty spent by the time we got back to the car. Turns out the restaurant was close enough that we could have just walked there instead.

Falls View was opened by John H. Wilson the week before Christmas in 1969. He sold the business to his son Tommy in 1988, and he, after a sixteen year run, sold it to the present owner, whose name is Almond, in 2004. She made some minor modifications, but otherwise has kept the place's rustic charm and front porch rocking chairs. There's a touch of gentle whimsy to the place; one table up front is given over to a great big catfish, "reading" a menu in some shock over its content. I told her that we found out about her restaurant from Roadfood.com, and she didn't know what that was. I encouraged her to stop by.

This is a place that welcomes visitors of all ages, but their clientele is in the older brackets. I was reminded of Jim Stalvey's in Covington; it is a restaurant that appealed to my parent's generation and has never taken the time to reach out to a younger crowd. I don't suggest that they should change anything, but, heck, that Ms. Almond had never Googled her place to see that the review at Roadfood.com was the top result suggests that they're comfortable with their aging base. It all adds up, as it did at Stalvey's, to a wonderfully timelost experience. They just don't make restaurants like this anymore, where a server asks, when she takes your order, whether you want onions and pickles, and, indeed, brings you a small plate of white onions and dill and sweet pickles as an appetizer.

The catfish was indeed really good. Apparently, most of the time, they have an all you can eat special with them, but a sign on the door sadly reported that on this Saturday evening, they could not offer it, as their sources did not catch enough. But we made one of the best decisions that we made all day when Marie ordered the red snapper so that we could try a couple of different fish. It was completely wonderful, and totally outshined the celebrated catfish. Definitely try this yourselves, dear readers.

If you are traveling between Atlanta and Macon in the evening on a Wednesday through Saturday, then this is absolutely a place to consider. I'm aware that I have pointed our readers at some pretty out-of-the-way joints, but this isn't even five minutes off the highway, and it will give you a wonderful experience celebrating a style of restaurant that is slowly fading to time, and enjoying some really terrific seafood and steak fries while you do. I'm very glad we were able to visit this place.

Fresh Air Bar-B-Que, Jackson, Macon and Athens GA

I've been looking forward to sharing a few words with you good readers about Fresh Air for quite some time. If you're interested in Georgia barbecue, then this is one of the state's best-known and most beloved old shacks. It's a very old one, in fact, having opened in 1929 in a small store between Flovilla and Jackson. The original building was almost all pit, a gigantic brick smoker with a curious L-shape that has been intriguing guests and sparking conversations for many years. The faithful have been making pilgrimages to this lovely stretch of road for decades to hear about their history and smell the smoke from this pit. The building has been remodeled and expanded many times over the years. The upstairs dining room now seats about twenty, with another large room just down a short ramp. On Saturday afternoons, this place is packed.

Their food has never been among my top-something, absolute favorite, but it is still a very wonderful place, and absolutely deserving of its iconic status. If I were asked for a list of eight or nine essential barbecue stops in our state for a traveler to try, I would absolutely include Fresh Air. I would have said that even before finally making a long, long overdue visit to the original location in late September.

I first experienced Fresh Air when they opened two satellite locations around Athens in the mid-1990s. I liked them both equally, and I liked them a lot, even with so many other good places within that legendary thirty-miles-around-Athens ring of great joints to visit. One is slightly north of the city, just past Athens Tech on the way to Danielsville and off to the right a short ways up Old Hull Road. The other, in Bogart, was the one that I visited a little more often. When I first moved to Athens in 1989, that building on the old Atlanta Highway - the one immortalized in "Love Shack" that's now called, by many, the Winder Highway - was the home of the notoriously-named Peanuts Redneck BBQ. That place closed in 1991 and it was something else for three or four years - was it a Korean restaurant? - before Fresh Air moved in. Man alive, did I ever eat here a lot.

A fourth location is in Macon, and we've only stopped here once. Shortly before expunging interstate fast food fuel from our diet, and before planning our road trip dinners in advance, we once stopped for supper in Macon on the way back from Saint Simons on a Sunday. The only places that we knew about were, typically, closed on Sunday, and so we settled for Arby's. I know that we can all offer terrible Arby's stories, because I don't think that any restaurant chain in America has fallen so hard and so painfully as that once-edible place has, but this was just about the worst ever. I remember somebody ordered egg rolls, and I remember thinking that ordering egg rolls at an Arby's was just about the living definition of setting yourself up for disappointment, but I remember the end result being even worse than predicted. So we went back to Fresh Air, which some selfish person in our party had vetoed for some fool reason, a much, much more satisfying meal was obtained, and a lesson was learned for all of us.





While the original Fresh Air was indeed opened in 1929, it has been in the hands of the Caston family since the mid-1940s. For most of that time, Toots Caston - that wasn't his name, but when a fellow said that he was going to stand by a name like Toots, you respected him enough to use it - ran the place. According to a history of the restaurant, posted in one of the dining rooms and on the web site, when Toots died, aged 89, in 1996, "he was the oldest actively employed person in Butts County." Toots's grandsons, David and George Barber, now own the business. Neither were in when we stopped in on this Saturday. The fellow running the register and keeping the line moving told me that he had actually retired from some other business a few years earlier, but asked George whether he could come work for him so as not to get too bored.

Unlike Fresh Air's bitter rival, Old Clinton, this is a restaurant that keeps things simple. Now, I don't mean to disrespect Fresh Air when I say that I found myself bowled over by that upstart, as I think that everybody would agree that both certainly offer some excellent food, and, besides, Old Clinton clearly and without question ripped off more than a few things about their look and shape from the veteran, especially the sawdust-floor front porch. Here, however, you can only order three things: chopped pork, stew and slaw. Well, they have a rack of candy, and some Tom's brand potato chips, but all that they make in this giant prep room is pork, stew and slaw, and they do it very well.

The pork, like a lot that you find inside the Columbus-Atlanta-Macon triangle, is quite dry and wanting some sauce. It's a vinegar-tomato-pepper mix, and it brings the meat roaring to life. The slaw is very light on the mayo and very green, and I don't think you can eat it with your eyes open. The stew is thick and wonderful, owing more to the Virginia style than the Glynn County style. It's great, every bit of it.

Butts County is a little too far from Athens for people to take food along for tailgating, but the Bulldog faithful congregate here all the same. While the Dawgs were in Oxford beating up on Ole Miss, better than half the people here were decked out in their gameday red and black, with the game being called on car radios. We were in the third quarter, and most of the business was takeout. People had been getting together with friends and family and run out of food and needed to come back for more pounds and pints and quarts, because there was more football to enjoy when we got finished. I could have people-watched all day in this lovely old restaurant full of happy guests. If you have never made a pilgrimage here, then you are overdue.



The Macon location:


In Athens, the Hull Road store was the one that I only visited once or twice...


...only because the Bogart store was a little closer to me.


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