CamiCakes, Vinings GA and Sugar Shack, Atlanta GA

Sweet stuff! Normally, Marie tackles the little chapters about snacks and desserts, but in today's post, I wanted to share about a couple of treats that we enjoyed a couple of Saturdays back.

Cupcake boutiques have been growing in popularity a lot lately, probably led by the success of the Gigi's chain. It's led to a few other locally-owned places that we have visited once or twice, and a few other small chains. One of these is CamiCakes, which has two stores in Florida and two in the Atlanta area. The second of these opened up in Vinings, and a part of me swears that they moved into a space that, until recently, housed another cupcake place. Then again, I'm so old that I remember when the ground that this strip mall occupies was home to a Majik Market.

Marie and I took the children over to my mom's house, and she watched the baby while the three of us and Neal, whom we had not seen in a few weeks, had lunch at Vinings' Figo Pasta. We then walked over to get some desserts here. This was not very easy, as Vinings is really, really pedestrian unfriendly.





I think that these probably do the job better than anyplace else in town. They are just terrific, and so rich that a single cake is perfectly satisfying. I had a "black and white" of chocolate cake with vanilla frosting, Marie had the chocolate raspberry almond cream - yes, you read that correctly - and Ivy had mint chocolate. We brought one back for my mom as thanks for watching the baby while we ate, because we're even sweeter than cupcakes, we are.

So, some hours and one heck of a great football game later, we came back down I-75. This time, we were without my daughter, who went over to a friend's house to stay up all night and drink lots of soda, as tween girls do. We had supper with friends, as you'll see in the next chapter, and as we were leaving, I started thinking about some place we could get a late-night treat. I recalled that we passed a place called Sugar Shack in the strip malls across the street from the Brookhaven MARTA station, and hoped that it might be open.





This appears to be the only Sugar Shack around at this time, but it is looks to be corporate-designed by an ownership group, Metrotainment Cafes, for easy exporting into other locations should the demand arise. I have to say, though, that when we stopped by, things were pretty slow and there wasn't a lot of demand for their cakes and treats.

Marie had a slice of one of their extremely good chocolate cakes, but my eye was taken by a great big round red thing. It was a red velvet Whoopie Pie. I had never heard of these treats before, although, in a really weird coincidence, my friend Natalia, who's from upstate New York, mentioned literally three days later that she had just tried to bake one for a friend and failed. Whoopie Pies are two big "cookies" of cake surrounding an icing. The layers are softer than cookies yet firmer and less crumbly than cake and, in the case of the red velvet variety, the icing is cream cheese. It's apparently more traditional to see them as chocolate cakes surrounding vanilla frosting.

I looked up Whoopie Pies on Wikipedia and was amused to see that Pennsylvanians and Mainers are in a long-running war of attrition as to which state can claim the delicacy. Each side has my sympathies; as a Georgian, I'm not about to cede the origin of Brunswick stew to anybody who thinks it came from some county in Virginia. The idea!





The other Camicakes store in town, on Peachtree, was where I snuck off to find myself a banana cream cupcake, and it was wonderful. I'm conspiring to stop by one or the other location again really soon for another.

Fred's Bar-B-Que House, Lithia Springs GA

Every so often, I get a reminder that, for every new restaurant that stays on top of social media and Google alerts about their place, there are many more that have no real interest in doing that sort of thing. Take, for example, Fred's Bar-B-Que House in Lithia Springs. Despite logging several hundred guests a day, and a welcome and thanks to every one of you, this very blog had some disagreeable misinformation posted on it a little more than five months ago, and in all that time, nobody, not the business owner nor any of his legion of patrons, mentioned it to me.

Probably back in 2001, I visited a restaurant one Saturday evening not far from McCollum Air Field called the Kennesaw Bar-B-Que House, and logged it on my old Geocities barbecue page. Some time later, it closed, and I mentioned its passing in a June chapter here that listed all those older restaurants that had closed since I first wrote about them.

A couple of months went by, and I started cleaning up Urbanspoon's listings of barbecue places in Georgia and Alabama. As I've mentioned in some earlier chapters, this wonderful, useful site does have many errors, ranging from businesses that were closed before there ever was an Urbanspoon, to miscategorized places, like wing joints erroneously tagged as serving barbecue. So I was looking through the Atlanta "B" heading and found a place called simply Bar-B-Que House in Lithia Springs, and, like the one in Kennesaw, it was said to serve something called Yellow Jacket Hot Dogs. I guessed that either that business moved or this was another location. Either way, their web site was expired, but I added it to my to-do list, and, a couple of Fridays ago, drove out to enjoy some of the best chopped pork anywhere around Atlanta, in an unassuming little place that nobody online talks about. I can't help but find this curious, as it's more evidence that, the further you get from the city center, the less important the internet is to your business's success. There was a huge mob of customers and guests that any trendy urban place would kill for, but not one person in this crowd apparently had any incentive to let Urbanspoon know that the name of the restaurant should be Fred's Bar-B-Que House.





So I was quite mistaken in simply listing the Kennesaw location as closed and having no follow-up. I got only the briefest few words with Fred, who was managing the front register and window amid an increasing tidal wave of hungry customers, but he confirmed that place had been their second location, and it closed in April of 2004. The store in Lithia Springs has been doing roaring business for twenty-five years now, with hardly a mention online. This is one of those restaurants that I'd like to see turn around on that front. It really is quite interesting and very tasty. Well, the hot dog wasn't.

Even the only sour note of my meal was nevertheless fun in a historical sense, however. The Yellow Jacket Dog - a mediocre boiled dog served with ketchup, mustard, onions and dry chili on a toasted bun - is a holdover from the dogs served from the 1950s through the 1970s at the long-closed Yellow Jacket Drive-In, which had been at the intersection of North and Hemphill two generations of Georgia Tech students ago. We'll set aside partisan college loyalties in favor of good taste, noting that Athens has seen more than its share of below-average restaurants with the word "bulldog" stuck the name somewhere, and just say that infinitely superior dogs are available from many, many other places in town. I suppose, though, that plenty of older Tech alumni can be excused for their nostalgia in wanting to experience these old favorites again, and I am glad that the beloved old recipe has a home on Thornton Road for them. Businesses with a sense of history are always a good thing.

But honestly, I have to wonder who has time for more than just two or three bites of these unhappy dogs to confirm their awfulness when this excellent pork is available. This is genuinely terrific stuff, tender and moist and smoky and not needing any sauce to impress. The house sauce is a light brown, mildly sweet tomato-vinegar blend and it is also really good. This interstate exit is home to two really fantastic restaurants. South of I-20, you've got Turner's - slash - Beaver Creek, with its pulled pork and glistening orange mustard sauce, and north of it, you have this place, with chopped pork and sweet brown tomato sauce. What the two have in common is an amazing success among the locals. Fred's was nearly packed by 11.45, with a short wait at the window and limited chances to chat about things in the "lobby" while you wait for your number to be called. After twelve, the line snakes into the dining areas, and the big parking lot is darn near full.

I was reminded how, a couple of weeks previously, David and I enjoyed an almost solitary lunch at downtown's One Eared Stag, nobody there but ourselves despite every blogger in the city yammering at full volume about it (and with good reason; it is amazing), and here's this place, the only reason the line isn't out the door is because for some weird reason it threads through the dining room. You get outside the perimeter, the definition of success is a little different. Might be, it's a little more honest.

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Hudson's Hickory House, Douglasville GA

A few Fridays ago, I found myself heading west out I-20 after a short morning at work, bound for Lithia Springs to try a barbecue place. I had all the time in the world, and I needed to stop at a Publix to use an ATM. I remembered that there was one in Douglasville, so I went along a little further, just enjoying some music and a very pleasant morning's drive. It wasn't until I was on the exit ramp that I remembered that I'd been meaning to stop by Hudson's Hickory House and that it was supposed to be around here somewhere. I recalled reading on a blog called Courthouse Bites that it was somehow near the Douglas County Courthouse, and I was certain that I could find that. It turns out that the restaurant really isn't anywhere near the courthouse, but it is next door to the sheriff's department.

This might perhaps be the last entry in which I wonder aloud about the origins of a particular regional style of barbecue, detailed in these earlier chapters: Wallace in Austell, Briar Patch in Hiram, Johnny's in Powder Springs and the deliberate homage at Davis in Jasper, although I have learned that there might be another in the area that has a similar style. Apparently, the proprietors of a place that might be called Hog Wild somewhere south of Douglasville* got permission from Buford Hudson to use his style of hickory-smoked pork and thin, red-to-black vinegar sauce. It was my server's contention that Hudson is the man who came up with this recipe forty years ago. I wish that he had been available to speak with me; I think that I would have enjoyed a chat with him.





Well, my server did not know about Briar Patch, but she did confirm that both Wallace and Johnny's are welcome to use Hudson's recipe, and, in return, Hudson's uses Wallace's recipe for stew. As with the others that use this style, the meat is, unless you ask ahead of time, served completely drowned in the thin, red-black vinegar-based sauce, and there's a bottle of truly hot mustard-pepper sauce if you order the meat dry and would like to try both. Interestingly, the mustard sauce at these five places is not quite like the mustard sauces of South Carolina, or in the Auburn-Eufaula-Columbus triangle. Those are thinner and yellower and less potent. This sauce is more of an orange-yellow and it's quite firey. After a few bites of the dry, quite moist pork with this tough customer, I conceded and just drowned the meat with the red-black vinegar sauce, as its creator intended.

Georgia often gets a very short shrift from barbecue writers, as we allegedly have no traditions of our own to compete with the better-known styles of Texas, Kansas City, Memphis, Owensboro or the Carolinas. I would humbly suggest that, while its influence is small and its home region mostly confined to Atlanta's western suburbs, this is something that we can genuinely hold up as a Georgia original. I certainly haven't found it anywhere else. It may not be to everybody's taste, but it is unique, and it is ours.



*I found reference to a place in Carrollton with that name, and I suppose that it might be the one that my server mentioned.

The Purple Daisy and The Hickory Pit, Chattanooga TN

Earlier this month, David and I took our every-other-month trek up to Chattanooga and McKay. We'd hoped to have David's old friend Stephen join us, but he ended up having to work. It was a disagreeably long trip. When we go, we're on a bit of a time budget to get back in time to pick up my son from day care before he hits the "you've been here too many hours!" alarm. Between missing the exit for our first meal destination, necessitating a lengthy detour, the unhurried service at that place, and the agonizing wait for McKay to price the gigantic stack of CDs that David brought to sell - two hours!! - we found little time to relax at the two restaurants where we visited, and no real chance to talk with staff or owners to learn much about them. This, sadly, was a case of eating and running.

Part of the problem is that Google Maps is still hopelessly confused about how to navigate exit 178 on I-24. Seriously, if you think that you might need either US-27 or TN-58 in Chattanooga, at this point, I'd recommend using some other service to get better directions, because if it turns out that you do need that exit and miss it, it's a real pain in the neck to turn around. That said, travelers from Atlanta or parts east will use this exit, like they're going to the Incline Railway, if they want to sample the food at The Purple Daisy Picnic Cafe. It's owned by Lisa and Tony Davis and opened in 2005. They have the rumblings of a good reputation for the quality of their pulled barbecue pork, but since David and I would be visiting a barbecue joint in just a couple of hours' time before leaving town, we each tried one of their other signature items, an incredibly neat triple-decker sandwich called a Rainbow.





The Rainbow is a really neat little sandwich, and I think it would be fair to call it a little frou-frou. Between three slices of bread, crusts removed, it includes pimento cheese, cucumber spread and chicken salad. The result is just a fantastic little mix of very different flavors. David and I each enjoyed it a great deal, and it suggests that even better things might be found on the menu.

I have to say that I was not mad about the chili, which was quite thin and didn't have any feel of personal oomph to it. The hashbrown casserole, which went with the sandwiches even better than the heaping handful of yummy kettle chips, was a much more successful creation. This is quite a good little restaurant, and one that I would like to visit again to try the barbecue.

(Incidentally, the Purple Daisy is across the street and catty-cornered from a pizza place called Mr. T's. I pity the fool who does not recognize the giant ice cream cone sign out front that marks this location as a former Kay's Kastles ice cream parlor. More about this at some point down the road.)

Speaking of barbecue, we dashed in and out of a little place on Ringold Road that I had spotted a few months previously and had a very good snack on our way home. It's called The Hickory Pit and it's in a really neat log-framed building that might be older than the business. The teenaged girl working the register said that she thought the restaurant might have opened "a long, long time ago. Wow, it's always been here. Since the eighties." It's always humbling to listen to teenagers and their incredibly different perspective on what constitutes a long, long time ago.





David ordered a chopped pork sandwich and I had chopped chicken for a change, with beans and slaw. The meat was smoked well and pretty dry; it really wanted some of the sweet brown sauce to make it a little more to my taste. The slaw was really terrific.

I was a little discouraged by the inclusion of - dear heaven - "freedom" fries on the menu, but this was otherwise a thoroughly decent detour in a nicely-designed restaurant with plenty of neat things on the wall to look at, ranging from a local newspaper report of President Roosevelt's death in Warm Springs, Georgia to a collection of old soda bottles. In this case, I chose to get mock-hurt by one of the bottles and bemoan the late hour and how we really would not have time to stop by a Bi-Lo for more Double Cola before flooring it out of town. I got some excellent sweet tea to go and we made tracks for home, wishing that McKay had not taken quite so long to process all those cast-offs of David's. At least Hickory Pit was on the way home so that we could stop there at all, and I did not pick a place in Ooltewah or Cleveland! Hopefully, the next trip to Chattanooga, the restaurants that we pick will be places where we have a few more minutes to linger.

Martin's Bar-B-Que Joint, Nolensville TN

I don't believe that I got quite as much out of our trip to Martin's as I could have. It's one of those very rare cases where I did a little research - if you can call it that - after the fact and found that there was so much more here than I knew, and that, had I been better informed going in, I would have gone from a very pleasant and tasty experience to a potentially even better one.

I first heard of the place when John T. Edge included it in his celebrated November 2008 article for Garden & Gun, "100 Southern Foods You Absolutely, Positively Must Try Before You Die." Edge singled out Martin's redneck taco, a pile of pulled pork and slaw on a cornbread "tortilla," and I agreed that I needed to try that. However, I declined in the end, as the "taco" turned out to be a burrito-sized monster, and I would rather just sample the restaurant's standard plate to get a feel for how they do their meat here. I figured that I'd order a brisket taco instead - much smaller, and about $2.50 compared to the huge redneck taco's $8 - and get my fill that way. And, because I am a numbskull, in the sixty seconds that it took to move from the menu board to the window register, I somehow conspired to forget to order the brisket.





Martin's is an extremely busy place. We arrived just after the church rush began and it was completely packed by the time we finished, proving, once again, that those barbecue places that choose to close on Sundays are just killing themselves missing business. I suspect that most of the guests were looking forward to watching a little football at noon central time, but this was the one Sunday of the season where CBS didn't have a double-header, leaving all their affiliate stations scrambling for something else to fill three hours of airtime. The Nashville CBS station dusted off an ancient episode of Law & Order from way back when Richard Brooks was in the cast, and when Chris Noth was a baby. Not often you see that season on TV anymore, is it?

It's a lovely drive down here. When I sent a wishlist to Brooke to put together an itinerary of sorts for where we might go eat on the Saturday, I had included Martin's as a possibility, but when I looked at the map and saw that Nolensville is located a good twenty miles south of the city, in between interstates 65 and 24, I told her to never mind, that we'd make our way there on the way home. Of course, I'd never been out this way before, and it was just a gorgeous and relaxed little drive after we left the southern edge of the Nashville sprawl and found nothing but farmland and orange-colored leaves for miles and miles.

I had a pulled pork plate with slaw and fries, and thought everything was very good. They cook the whole hog here, as they do in the eastern Carolinas, and the pit really is a sight to see. I was a little disappointed that more sauce was not available, because the small cup that I had was really terrific and I couldn't flag anybody down to get more. Would you believe that the red and yellow squeeze bottles on the table really were ketchup and mustard? I've become so used to barbecue restaurants using those for additional sauces that I was quite surprised to find them used as they were intended. Apparently, the sauce that came with my order was the "Sweet Dixie" style, which is a completely wonderful mix of sinus-clearing peppery zest and sweet zing, not quite thin enough to drink. I could have used a lot more of that, but it wasn't until I watched the clip of the restaurant's appearance on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives that I was even aware that there were more sauces beyond the Sweet Dixie available.

(Strangely, I had no idea that Martin's was ever on Triple D and wouldn't have looked for it but for a curiosity from the evening before. When we were at Prince's Hot Chicken Shack, I saw the autographed poster of Guy Fieri that appears regularly at establishments featured on his show. Once we returned to Atlanta, I looked for it at the Triple D fan site, Flavor Town USA. Prince's was not listed, suggesting that if an installment has been taped there, it has not yet aired, but I saw Martin's on the list instead. What a pleasant surprise!)

The interior design is really cluttered; beyond the fun and silly country & western music decor, which includes a framed ad for the short-lived JR Ewing Beer, there is so much signage for the food and the slogans and the T-shirts that it's a little overwhelming. It's a rare case of a restaurant offering too much for guests to take in. With the line out the door with after-church guests and loud Nashville standards being played at maximum volume - sadly, no, we weren't quite able to make it out of middle Tennessee without hearing "A Country Boy Can Survive" - it's pretty easy to hit sensory overload here. Stepping outside into the calm, blue, November sky was very pleasant after all that chaos.

We had quite a long trip home from there, thanks to the baby being very fussy. We continued south to TN-840, what I would call a "trucker's loop" that currently connects Interstates 40, 24 and 65 southeast of Nashville and allows travelers to get from one to the other without hitting all the knots and tangles of those highways in the urban center. Along the way from Nolensville back to Murfreesboro on this road, you can briefly see the most remarkable home in the hills above and on your left. It looks like a huge, white castle and it is completely gorgeous. It was used as the location for Taylor Swift's "Love Story" video and it's called Castle Gwynn. Sadly, no, we weren't quite able to make it out of middle Tennessee without a reference to Taylor Swift, either.

Three further stops on the way home were necessary to satisfy this hungry and cranky baby, and Marie and I learned the hard way that, when they are awake, babies don't take well at all to the ear-popping atmospheric changes of high points like Monteagle. We had a terrific time in Nashville, and love our friends and love the food, but we've never, ever been so glad to get home!

Noshville, Nashville TN

This is Marie with an article that contains no desserts at all, though it does have something that is nearly as yummy - salami. I didn't like salami nearly as much before I got pregnant and swore off the stuff for a very long time. This article is about a place that is, as a result, nearly synonymous with salami for me. On our first visit, sometime while we were still dating, we stopped by this place mainly because it was across the street from a comic and music store that was dear to my husband's heart, but now it is a destination to itself. Which is good, because the comic and music store moved to a soulless strip mall that probably has better rent prices and definitely has more floor space.

The motto of Noshville, a New York-styled deli, is "An eating experience, not just a place to eat," and they do a good job living up to that. The deli area is at the front, where you could theoretically just order a pound of this and a half pound of that if you insist on not sitting down. Mostly, of course, it services the restaurant and catering customers. Although the place is really quite large (and needs to be, with the lines as long as they can be) the floor space is neatly divided up into separate eating areas by a bar and a couple of semiprivate rooms.





The menu is large and varied enough that I have very little trouble putting together my ideal breakfast as described in an earlier entry. However, the more usual breakfast selections are clearly very popular, and I passed a couple on our way to the table who were eating omelets that looked almost good enough to steal and run away with. But then we wouldn't get to come back, and that would be bad.

Noshville has four locations in Nashville, though we have only gone to the Midtown one. That seems to have the best reviews, though, among them the delightful Dining With Monkeys, which comments on the pickle bar as one of their features. For that, I wish we'd brought our daughter, who is somewhat fond of pickles. As it was breakfast time, though, I passed it by without a glance. Those are really the best choice of green stuff of the options available, though who goes to a deli to have salad?

We have eaten there a good half-dozen times by now and never had an unsatisfactory meal, though I was considerably less taken with the celebrated hash than my husband was. One of these days we will have to visit on a day when we aren't going to another place just before or after, so I can get some of the desserts without feeling bloated. We will probably continue making a point of stopping by to load up on salami on our way out of town, though. I've also had the roast beef and tuna melt, and maybe next time will try the liverwurst. Grant once had what appeared to be an orgasmic experience with a Monte Cristo. Definitely recommended.

Prince's Hot Chicken Shack and Pied Piper Creamery, Nashville TN

I was told two things before going to Prince's: that the wait would be long and that the chicken would be unbelievably hot. You know that Daffy Duck cartoon where the genie warns him very sternly that he's going to suffer dearly for his insolence, and Daffy just dismisses him with a "Consequences, shmonsequences" and learns the genie was not kidding? I felt a bit like that.

So, as related in the previous chapters, our friends in Nashville led us around - the number of people required two cars - to visit some good eating. To avoid the line, Prince's was actually our first stop, at noon. They don't open until two in the afternoon, evidently because, on weekends, they stay open until four in the morning. So we came back later on, right in the middle of their supper rush. This is a really sketchy little strip mall in an ugly side of town at noon. After the sun goes down, and people start wandering in to ask diners whether they'd like to buy a brand new two-pack of mens' shirts, you start to wonder how the heck good this chicken must be.



We ordered. We were given number 88. We looked around and noticed that there really were a hell of a lot of people twiddling their thumbs. The security guard - yes, security guard, and packing - had turned on the LSU-Alabama game, five minutes into the first quarter. It didn't appear that there was a line when we entered. It only registered afterwards that all these people had already placed their orders. Ms. Jeffries - Prince is her middle name, and she is the grand-niece of the Prince family that started this joint in a different location decades back - seems to have an extended family and lots of young nephews watching TV in the back. We enjoyed brief bits of casual conversation with the folk around us. A lady called out "number 53! Your order's ready!"

Time passed. Brooke suggested that she take advantage of the delay to go gas up and return. Our three friends decamped as two seats along the wall opened up, so Marie and I took the baby and sat down. A fellow came to wipe down the table next to us. "Wow," I said to him, "is it always this busy?" He talked, at length. Almost the entirety of the twenty minutes that Tory, Brooke and Matt were gone, I listened to this man talk and found his mumbling impenetrable. I caught perhaps every eighth word at first, nodding sagely. He just talked like a character in a Cure B-side. After a quarter of an hour, he held up a finger and said "something something something cake something something back," and returned with a flyer for Irene's Old Fashioned Homemade Cakes. I think that he recommended me to phone in an order.

After he made his way to wipe down another tablecloth, Marie and I watched some guy with a seat at the table in the window react with some visible intensity to the powerful chicken that he was eating. He was wearing a lime green ball cap. His face was the color of a brick. He was just far enough away that we couldn't quite hear what he was saying over the sound of the other diners, and the two children bouncing a basketball back and forth, but he was wiping sweat from his forehead and it sounded like he was saying "howwwwwkkk, awwwwwkkkk, Gawwwwwd, arrrrgh."

Our friends returned. They called out number 65. It was nearly 8 pm, and our dessert destination, Pied Piper Creamery, would be closing in an hour. We decided that Marie, Brooke and Matt would go get ice cream and return to Tory's house. Tory and the baby and I would wait for the chicken. And so we waited and chatted. The security guard took a break when the game reached halftime, LSU and Alabama tied at 3. You should see this security guard. He might not climb a chain link fence to run after you, but I'd sooner punch myself in the face than this guy.





As Tory and I waited and, mercifully, the baby slept, everybody else made their way south to the awesome Pied Piper. We wrote about their sister restaurant, the Eatery, last year. It is one of our favorite places in the city, and we knew that the ice cream would be good. Everybody got wonderful treats. Marie selected a Cheerwine sorbet for herself and a vanilla for me, and all the ice cream waited in the freezer until we got the chicken back.

We returned at five to nine and unwrapped the chicken. Whether dining in or taking home, the chicken comes in wax paper in a brown bag. Unwrapping it, you find deep dark orange that we now know to be the color of pain.



I don't care how many ghost peppers you think that you can gargle. Do not, do not order this chicken hot the first time you go to Prince's. Sure as you're living, do not order it extra-hot. Start with mild and work your way up. I'm serious. I've finished vindaloos enough to think I'm ready to tackle a phaal one of these days. That Man Vs. Food guy would get knocked down unconscious by Prince's Extra Hot.

Tory had one small bite of the hot and was done, instantly. And see, the first three or four bites, it's not too lethal. What happens after those three or four bites shouldn't happen to anybody. Marie worked her way past the skin, where the hot paste is concentrated, and dug out the meat and still couldn't finish half a leg. I did slightly better, but this was not the same sort of life-affirming, every-corner-of-your-mouth-is-alive glorious air-punch of hot awesomeness, this was insanely firey and very painful. The chicken was good, oh it was so good, but it hurt too damn much. My lips felt like they were puckered up like the beast in the kissing booth at Six Flags' Monster Mansion and, abruptly, I retired. I went back to the restroom to wash any lingering Scovilles from my face. Speaking of Cure B-sides, as I did above, my mouth was the color of Robert Smith's, but I was not wearing lipstick. I rubbed Chap Stick on them and it felt like chalk. The next morning, Marie's mouth and mine were still chapped.

Unhappy and in unwelcome discomfort, I returned to the den, where my vanilla ice cream was waiting. This was, in point of fact, the best ice cream that I ever had. Maybe it was the exceptional circumstances, or maybe Pied Piper is just that good, but the next time that I get a hair up my butt to eat crazy lava chicken, I'll have the Piper on speed dial.

Then things got bad. Tory had pulled up a silly video on YouTube to show us. It was incredibly funny. I laughed so much that I teared up. My eyes and face started burning. I don't know how I got hot chicken death sauce near my eyes, but I did.

One of the funniest things ever seen in a movie is in the 1985 comedy Clue, in which Madeline Kahn, as Mrs. White, starts talking about how she once got so angry that there were "flames, flames" on the sides of her face. Up 'til that first Saturday in November, I didn't really know just how bad that might be for anybody.

It hurt, but it was good. I would not have missed this experience for the world. But heed the warnings. Us folk on the internet? We know what we are talking about. It is hotter than you think it is. Have ice cream handy.

Rotier's Restaurant and Hog Heaven, Nashville TN

In the previous chapter, I wrote about two reasonably new restaurants in Nashville that we had not tried before this visit. This time around, a pair of considerably older restaurants that I have enjoyed before. I was visiting Music City long before Marie and I started blogging, after all. Plenty of favorites have come up in the mix.

Marie and I first visited Rotier's just after we got hitched and made our way to town, and again a few months later when we were passing through on our way to Kentucky and met up with Tory for a bite. I found the place thanks to its listing at Roadfood.com, and it certainly didn't disappoint. Design-wise, it reminds me of Coletta's in Memphis. It's dark inside and, before Tennessee banned indoor smoking in restaurants, you probably couldn't breathe very easily.

Rotier's opened in the mid-1940s and is still in family hands, grilling up some incredibly good burgers with a lovely feeling that they are doing it their own way. It's the best kind of hole in the wall, the one that locals have probably driven past dozens of times without ever noticing. With its back to the busy West End thoroughfare, it's simply invisible unless you happen to be on this side street and looking the right way.







I don't know that I'll ever order anything here except the hamburger. I like mine on French bread, but they'll give it to you on a bun or on toast if you ask. A couple of trips back, though, someone in our group had the roast beef and that has sold Marie, and she, in turn, recommended it to the rest of our group. While the baby slept, Tory, Brooke and Matt joined us for this early supper. Brooke and I each had burgers and everybody else dug in to the roast beef, which comes in a really thick gravy, and enjoyed a pile of sides. Everybody had either the fried zucchini, which is completely amazing, or the fried okra. Marie also ordered some broccoli, for some weird reason, when she could have had the fried pickle spears, which sounds much more sensible to me.

With more meals forthcoming, a little exercise was called for. We actually parked just a couple of minutes' walk away in Centennial Park, and went back to the cars to unpack the baby's stroller and then took a nice jaunt around the gorgeous park, where the Parthenon was all dolled up for some big event. The side of the gorgeous building was lit up in blue, with bubbles and fish projected onto it! It looked like the sort of shindig that always gets interrupted in Gotham City by supervillains and their gangs.

We also had a really disagreeable experience with a really talkative homeless guy trying to make friends with us. But, you know, cities. We outwalked him.

On the other side of the park, we came to a restaurant that I had visited ten years previously. It's a little barbecue place called Hog Heaven that mainly does takeaway, but also has a few wooden picnic tables for guests to eat there. The restaurant opened in 1986 and is staffed by a really goofy, fun-loving crew. At some point in the eighties, one of the young staffers, using that awful old computer paper that you might remember having little holes along each side to feed through, wrote up a hilarious sign asking for tips so that their band could go into the studio and record a cassette. The sign is still there, and occasionally baffles customers who think that it's meant to be taken seriously. "Nobody really makes cassettes any more, do they," people will ask, before giving advice about mp3s.





I had a pulled pork sandwich and a side of baked beans and while I was not blown away, this was a perfectly satisfying snack. The pork does not taste very smoky, but it is quite moist and full of flavor, with a really satisfying, chewy bark. I asked for the meat dry and had two teeny cups of sauce on the side to try them out. The regular hot sauce is a brown, spicy and sweet concoction typical of the Memphis style, and it complemented the pork very well. The white sauce looked a little pink under the harsh lighting, and had a bit more of a kick to it than any other white sauce that I have tried, but I really preferred the brown, and, after getting a good taste for both, ended up pouring the rest of the brown over my meat.

Everybody else overindulged and ordered a good bit more food than I did at Rotier's and passed on this meal. We'll call it their loss; Nashville is said to have many barbecue restaurants that can compete with the quality of this, but I enjoy it and hope that I don't wait a decade to stop by again.

Mas Tacos Por Favor and The Wild Cow, Nashville TN

When we first told our friends that we were going to make a blog out of our hobby of traveling and eating at fun local places, our good buddy Brooke piped up with a suggestion in Nashville. She told us that we needed to try Mas Tacos, a food truck that has, in the nearly two years since she told us about it, found a brick-and-mortar base and has been serving up some ridiculously good Tennessee-styled takes on traditional Mexican dishes. We visited Nashville twice in 2010, but neither visit really coincided with a good time to go meet up with Mas Tacos, either the truck or the shop, during their limited hours.

Quite traveler-unfriendly, they are usually a weekday concern, and on weekends, they are only open for brunch on Saturday. Brooke is emphatic that we simply must come on a Friday evening, when they're open late selling fish tacos. The really great things that we enjoyed on the first Saturday of the month sold me; we have penciled in a Friday night visit for March so that we can try the tilapia.

We had a group of six plus the baby when we visited. Our daughter stayed home with my mother for the trip, but it still took two cars to transport Marie and me along with Brooke and Tory and their boyfriends Matt and Andrew. Our first planned stop, after we arrived in Nashville around 11.30 local time, was the legendary Prince's Hot Chicken Shack, but they open later on Saturdays than I thought. We set that aside and came back that way later in the evening; look for a chapter about that remarkable visit on Wednesday. Mas Tacos Por Favor is about four miles south of Prince's, through the dense commercial sprawl of what the locals term "East Nashville." It's really more sort of north, I'd say, but neighborhood traditions are weird things.





Teresa Mason's delightful old Winnebago is parked out front of the store, and I understand that one reason it's hard to track her down on the weekends is that she's usually booked for events and things and doesn't want to try being in two places at once quite yet. Since we knew that we had a very busy day of eating ahead of us, we all took it fairly easy here, just munching on one or two tacos each and enjoying a cup of tasty horchata.

The menu, written in colored chalk on blackboards mounted around the window inside, changes all the time here, based on whim and what ingredients are available. I picked two tacos, fried avocado and spicy carne molida, and Marie had pulled pork. Most of the tacos are topped with red cabbage, cilantro and onions, and a light drizzle of a creamy dill yogurt. It's a terrific, eclectic little mix of flavors, and served in a cozy, low-lighted, get-to-know-yer-neighbors space. I like the design and love the food. Brooke pointed out Ms. Mason to us as she rushed through; I was sorry that we didn't get the chance to speak. I certainly hope that we can make it back in March.





The second stop on our trip was just a hop, skip and a jump away on Eastland, and it was, similarly, packed and busy with a lunch crowd. It was also very, very smoky inside thanks to an awful lot of stuff being grilled in the back. About two years ago, a hip new multi-use development was constructed in front of a closed and deteriorating old retirement home, bringing some new life to this side of the neighborhood. Among the brand new restaurants to move in is The Wild Cow, a vegan place that has been winning all sorts of city awards along with a large and devoted clientele.

Marie and I still ate kind of small here. I ordered the first thing on the menu, the small green chile root salad, which confused me when I looked it up online after I didn't remember the name of it, and found a slightly different worded version of the same dish on their website's menu. It was very tasty, and had fresh lettuce, jicama, a heaping handful of crisp, roasted beets and pumpkin seeds tossed in a green chile "caesar"-styled dressing. Marie was interested in the side dishes and had the pineapple cole slaw, which she did not enjoy quite so much, and the excellent lentil stew.

Most of the others, still pacing themselves, just shared a large appetizer order of the restaurant's cashew dip, which is served with tortilla chips and fresh veggies. Andrew would be leaving the group after this meal to go to work, however, and so he dug in to a French Quarter Dip, which substitutes seitan and mushrooms for roast beef on a hoagie roll with creole-style seasonings, and had a side of spicy kale. He said that he enjoyed it, but the kale was the real standout. Andrew regretted having to work and missing out on the restaurant's excellent beer selections. They offer several high-gravity ales and stouts from good breweries, including the local boys at Yazoo.

Perhaps almost as interesting as the food was the soda that Marie ordered. I've not seen Bruce Cost's ginger ales before; they are unfiltered and require a little very gentle shaking to mix the ginger better before opening. I don't think the result is quite as appealing as my beloved Buffalo Rock, but it's still an extremely good ginger ale.

After this, we returned to Tory's house for a short break before going shopping at the local McKay Books, which is always a pleasure, and then resuming our little eating tour. These first two restaurants that we visited are quite new, but the next one on the agenda was a much older one, and one that Marie and I have loved for a few years already. More about that in tomorrow's chapter.

Outback Steakhouse, Atlanta GA

Marie and I were invited to join some other local media to sample Outback Steakhouse's new menu items, including a line of steaks and chops grilled over wood that complement their successful "Seasoned and Seared" blend. It was nice to visit with our friends from Atlanta Foodies and meet some other area bloggers, including Exclusive Eats, Insatiable and Talking With Tami, who posts more frequently than most adults breathe. Poor Marie, sadly, had to contend with worse than usual traffic coming from Dunwoody, and missed the first couple of courses. Some good steak and desserts cheered her up a bit.

Our regular readers know that we rarely patron national chains of any type, preferring to learn the stories of small restaurants. I was reminded, however, that beyond the quality of the food, which, at Outback, is reasonably solid, there are still stories to tell. I was really fascinated to learn that the whole roll-out process of the "Wood-Fire Grilled" menu - just imagine a little TM there, as we are dealing with the corporate world in today's entry - has taken two years of testing, training and installing the new grills in close to a thousand stores across the continent. At the same time, Outback has embarked on a massive redesign of all of their stores, apparently the first face lift that many of these places have seen in twenty years. In a hobby where locals scrutinize, for example, the four months between the start-up and the crash landing of LeRoy's Fried Chicken, being taken through the two years it takes to roll out a new product line is actually quite intriguing.

We met with Dave Ellis, who came up from Tampa for the event and who has been with the company since its beginnings. He told us a little potted history of the chain and shared a few fun anecdotes. I enjoyed hearing about the development of the popular Bloomin' Onion appetizer, which required the help of a professor at Texas A&M to get a specific, spherical one-pound Spanish onion to grow under set conditions which could be duplicated at farms throughout the western states. Even with big, multi-national chains, there are funny stories to be told.

So they fed us. They fed us extremely well. They gave us small samples of both the classic "Seasoned & Seared" and the new "Wood-Fire Grilled" sirloins so that we could compare the taste. The original is made with a blend of seventeen spices, while the new has only six, and is cooked over oak wood. They were each quite good, although I did prefer the original, with its fuller flavor. The newer sirloin is just fine, but there's a fire in the classic's belly that the oak wood version, with its lighter spice, doesn't match.

That said, the light spice and wood grilling does go extremely well on some of the other menu items. One of the highlights was the pork chop, which was unbelievably tasty. It's served with a little cup of midly spicy orange marmalade and I could certainly see myself having that again down the road. We also sampled their California chicken salad, baby back ribs, an incredibly curious mahi-mahi dish topped with artichoke heats, sun-dried tomatoes and a lemon sauce, along with prime rib and the menu's highest point, a really good ribeye that uses a slightly different spice blend that mixes a little better with this cut.




I made an exception in our rule against professional publicity photographs, in part because my own photo of the mahi-mahi was horrible, and in part because this pic does a great job conveying just how downright peculiar this dish is. Works, though.



They finished us off with a pile of desserts, including a very rich and moist carrot cake, a cheesecake with raspberry sauce, and a really unusual chocolate waffle, served with a thick, house-made chocolate sauce and a big scoop of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream. I'm sure our long-term readers will appreciate that, now that I have identified the problem, I've broken my bad habit of using the word "decadent" to describe whatever fool dessert gets put in front of me, although the waffle came pretty close to warranting it. Outback's setup allows them to change out their dessert waffle specialties according to the season. Should I return when strawberry waffles are on the menu, I will have to try those.

Having said that, of course, Marie and I rarely ever visit national chains. Outback did a splendid job putting a human face on a corporate world, and showing off some very good food. I appreciated the chance to get to know them better. I'm not about to start calling the Hall of Fame Bowl anything other than the Hall of Fame Bowl no matter who sponsors it, but if you're on the road and desiring a good ribeye, Outback, in a very pleasant surprise, has shown itself to be a good option.



Outback invited us to enjoy an additional meal on them, so a few days later, we stopped by the store nearest us, on Barrett Parkway, in the company of our daughter to try them out. I ordered that celebrated Bloomin' Onion appetizer without thinking to ask whether either of the ladies wanted to share it. Never do this; that is far too much onion for one person to attempt on their own. Other than being forced, disagreeably, to waste about half of a perfectly good onion, we enjoyed ourselves. Marie and I split their largest ribeye, with the "Wood-Fire Grilled" seasoning and prep, with a small order of shrimp, and it was quite delicious, while the girlchild just had some soup and sides. Marie expressed a desire to come back once she is eating dairy again, so that she can enjoy one of those waffle desserts with ice cream. Reckon we'll do that. Probably not on a weekend night, though; this place gets ridiculously busy!

Country's Barbecue and more, Columbus, GA

Cheryl had mentioned to us when Marie and I were in Columbus in September that she would be busy on the last weekend of October, and to try not to schedule a trip down that weekend. Indeed, we had originally planned to make our visit to Providence Canyon on the 22nd, but circumstances conspired against us and we ended up buying a car that day and coming down on the 29th, when, it turned out none of our other friends in the area were free, either. Fortunately, I've made just about enough trips to Columbus over the years not to get completely bewildered like I used to. That's just as well, because the directions that I had printed for this road trip only went as far as the two Alabama stops in the previous chapter.

I had promised Marie a trip to Country's after we set it aside last time, but we made a couple of other stops first. To begin with, we pulled into a Publix to pick up some twelve-packs of Buffalo Rock and Grapico, which we still can't get in Atlanta. Nor can we get any answers why the Publix stores down there can't ship 'em to the Publix stores up here. Truth be told, it's a little aggravating. Don't get me started on the lack of Blue Raspberry Crush up here.

After that, we did something pretty unusual for us. We visited a restaurant to get food for the next day. I'd read that Cafe le Rue offered some of the best gumbo in the state, among other treats. Since barbecue was on the evening agenda, I decided to just get an order for lunch the next day. The restaurant is small and cozy, a perfect place for date night, and they have a decently deep wine list. The gumbo reheated well, and it was terrific, really rich and mildly spicy. They even threw in a slice of French bread. I bet it's really something else served fresh. We'll have to try it again sometime.



So, onto Country's. For those of you who missed out, the timeline goes like this: my friend Matt introduced me to this incredibly popular local chain about ten years ago. Except for those times that I just went through on the way to Mobile, I think that I've eaten at one store or another on just about every visit since. I heard that Ronald Reagan had died while eating at the original location. I finally got down here with Marie last year, and she gave me a sweet earful about how much she loved it, and how she couldn't believe that I took so long to bring her to Columbus to try it. We were poised to visit again in September, but Ric and Maggi persuaded us to go to Black Cow instead, where Marie was not really thrilled with her meal. So, Country's was emphatically on the agenda when we returned last month. And Marie, love of my life, for whom we made this trip to Country's, decided that three barbecue sandwiches in a day had been plenty, and she wanted a veggie plate. Women!

So anyway, the Country's that we visited on this trip is the newest of the three in Columbus, where I'd only eaten once before. The building was erected in the late 1930s as a Greyhound station with a large interior diner. There's a lovely, curving art deco style to it that fans of this architecture need to see. In the 1950s, Greyhound apparently moved to a smaller location as part of the downsizing that left the wartime diners and cafeterias behind. The rival company Trailways moved into this facility, but I'm not sure whether they used the restaurant much. It was eventually shuttered and left in disrepair for a short time before Country's took it over in 1988. In one of the neatest feats of restaurant design around, the building actually incorporates an old bus which has been gutted and turned into a small secondary dining room. Kids love it. Speaking of kids, there were a heck of a lot of 'em around that evening, in costume. We were not long from being hugely inconvenienced by them.

But before we get to that, it's always worth praising Country's for their really excellent food and service. There's no room in the bus depot Country's for a bluegrass band like the one off exit 6, but there was a TV, so I could see Georgia squeak out that lovely and wonderful win over Florida. I suppose Marie's veggies were all right. I ordered the Saturday night special of a chopped chicken sandwich and a side of salad for $6.39 - I really, really like the fries here, but I figured that I needed some lettuce after everything else we'd eaten today - and, because I did not read the menu closely, was sad to see that the sandwich came drowned in a sweet brown sauce when I was looking forward to Country's mustard sauce instead. The server, who was awesome and sweet, replaced it. She actually told me that she'd "work some of our Country's magic for you." Country's was started, and is still co-owned, by a fellow named Jim Morpeth. Jim needs to identify that server and give her a bonus for coming up with that line.

Actually, following up the discussion in the previous chapter, the next time the road takes me to Columbus, I'd love to sit down with Jim and talk about his experience with chipped meat and mustard sauce. He may not have the older family connections that Chuck's in Opelika and The Smokey Pig here in Columbus share, but anybody who's built a popular colossus like this probably knows a thing or two. The trouble would be finding a time when Jim's actually not working his tail off and Country's isn't packed beyond capacity. I've eaten at these stores more than a dozen times, and I have never seen it such.





For dessert, I resolved that we would go to the other place that we put off visiting on our last trip down, Fountain City Coffee. When Ric lived in a small apartment nearby, he would often come here, and I recalled that they had a good selection of pastries and cookies. We left without stopping last time as the baby decided he wanted to get back in the car and sleep. This time, he let us know that he was really hungry, and I thought this would be a good place for Marie to nurse.

Even though we were within walking distance, we were in Country's lot, so, having tempted parking karma at least twice in October, I decided it best to burn the gas and move the car a little closer. However, we couldn't get as close as I'd hoped; Broadway was blocked off. I've seen this happen before, when the street is closed for a car show or something. So we detoured around it while the baby whimpered, and as we looped around past the Springer on 10th, we both felt that uptown parking was not going to happen, and we'd have to pull into a side street or that big hotel where Patrick Troughton died in '87 to nurse the baby. I was actually shocked when we found a spot on 10th in front of the CSU dorms, right around the corner from Fountain City.



Unfortunately, Fountain City really didn't come completely through for us. They were already sold out of desserts, except for gelato, and my memory of this place being as full of comfy couches and seating is flawed. There are indeed several chairs and tables, but the handful of larger, cushiony chairs for a nursing mom is smaller than I thought. Marie did find a place to nurse and enjoy a cup of tea, but we both joked that if only we knew a Columbus State undergraduate to let us into that dorm, the couches in the lobby looked really comfortable.

In its defense, I'm sure Fountain City is all kinds of awesome earlier in the day, before they sell out of pastries. They sell panini sandwiches here, and staff-mixed blends of coffee concoctions, and were probably the first place in town to offer wi-fi connections for their guests. They still sponsor an open mic night that has been getting a great turnout for years. The tea that Marie had and the Mexican Coca-Cola that I sipped could have come from anywhere, but Fountain City's wonderful service from such a great young staff made the visit as pleasant as could be.

Then we left, and the parking karma that we exhausted earlier in the month, sneaking away from Everybody's Pizza, and later from Hd1, caught up with us. All those costumed children that we saw earlier were participating in a fun run through the uptown streets. Broadway had been closed earlier, and, after we parked, the police shut down 10th.

We sat in the back seat and sang lullabies to the baby while pumpkins and Disney princesses jogged behind us. I'm restless and impatient by nature. Half an hour of that and I was apologizing to restaurants a hundred miles away for misusing their parking spaces. Remember, friends: car-karma can get you.