Fuzzy's Taco Shop and ADD Drug, Athens GA

I got stymied for the umpteenth time with this one place that I wanted to eat in Athens. Let's not go into it now. Maybe the time after next.

Anyway, on one of my previous trips to town, I noticed that a big sports bar was going in the space near the Morton that had previously been home to that tapas place. Actually, I don't think that it registered then as a sports bar; I just saw that it was a taco place. I've always got time for a taco place, but I somehow wonder whether Athens is large enough to have room for a new one. In college towns, you occasionally see a little friction between established restaurants with a lot of history, the fun and trendy new places, and the out-of-town interlopers who come in and suck business away, particularly downtown. Fuzzy's is definitely in the latter category. It's a chain from Texas with, at the time of writing, forty-eight locations in ten states, all of which have cropped up since 2005. The Athens store is their first in the southeast; a second, in Charlotte, is due to open in the spring.





These are California-style tacos, available with nine different meats. I ordered a two taco plate, which comes with a guest's choice of two sides, and settled on tempura shrimp and grilled chicken. The shrimp was sadly quite bland while the chicken was much more agreeable and interesting, but neither of them possessed a flavor that stayed with me for very long. I did like the texture of the chicken, and I really enjoyed the salsa. I was asked "hot or cold," and figured that to be some kind of euphemism, or fun Fuzzy's slang, but no, this place will serve you steaming oven-hot salsa for your chips, which was certainly unusual.

I've got nothing against newcomers. College is where you're meant to ground your memories and let nostalgia bring you back. To that end, I'll always be loyal to the much-loved Taco Stand. Sampling this revealed some interesting new things, and the staff really demonstrated that they're out to have a good time, but this place will be making memories along with today's undergraduates, and not occasional visitors back to town like me. For folk in my age bracket, the downtown Taco Stand is still there, and I spent the next hour or so with a curled lip, wondering why on earth I'd let my "try new things!" desire lead me away from a place that I would have enjoyed more.

Sometimes, though, even the old reliables will let you down a little. A visit to America's finest comic shop, Bizarro Wuxtry, most certainly did not let me down at all, happily. I'd been pinching some of my disposable income pennies and bought some books that I'd been wanting, including Dark Horse's really great new hardcover collection of Milk & Cheese by Evan Dorkin. I enjoyed catching up with my friend Devlin, and then I made my way over to ADD Drugs in Five Points to get a milkshake at their lunch counter. I love how they call it a snack bar. What I don't like is that I ordered a pimento cheeseburger with lettuce and tomato, and then struggled to find any meat in the darn thing.





The sad reality is that over the sixty-some years that ADD has been with us, the amount of meat in their burgers has thinned away to practically nothing. They still mix up a fantastically good milkshake, and I think it's one of my favorite places in town to just sit and people-watch and have fun small talk with the servers. But the burgers that were pretty good once upon a time, when the large neighboring space that has been home to the Earth Fare for so long was home to a different grocery store, perhaps Bell's if my memory serves, have fallen upon very hard times.

I drove home thinking that if I wanted tacos and a burger, then I should have gone to the Stand and White Tiger. Ah, well. We'll get some barbecue when Marie and I go to town next, and in the meantime, I had some fine new books to read, and at least I got a terrific milkshake out of the deal.

Bay Breeze, Marietta GA

This is Marie, contributing an article about Bay Breeze, a locally-owned restaurant with two branches. We went to the one in Marietta on a lunch date with some of our neighbors. There were quite a few tween and teen girls in the party plus the baby, so as you can imagine the party was a bit on the loud side, but the restaurant has their floor space divided up into a few sections so hopefully there was at least a bit of a sound barrier. Regular readers may remember that I prefer to write about desserts, and have no fear, there was a rather magnificent dessert involved in this trip – but more on that later.

Bay Breeze is a seafood restaurant that is in head-to-head competition with another locally-owned small chain restaurant, the Marietta Fish Market. They are within a mile of each other, and there is a billboard advertising the other restaurant looming over the parking lot of Bay Breeze! Also, if you look at the reviews you will see a rather interesting number of positive and negative reviews that just happen to mention the other restaurant. I don’t know the whole story, but there is definitely some history between these two places. I have it on rumor that their owners used to be friends, and that a squabble over who would be planting a seafood restaurant on Canton Road caused the present impasse.




That billboard's been there since the restaurant opened.

Bay Breeze is a family style restaurant with a great big fish tank and lots of floor space. There is a good deal of ticky-tacky nautical style decoration, including a fountain coming out of a boat, but the set up is comfortable otherwise. The portions are generous but not big enough to choke a horse, and the prices are reasonable. While this is not really the place to go if you want health food, the meals I’ve had here so far have been tasty.

This time I was in the mood for something to clog my arteries and got the fried shrimp. It came out hot, crispy, and just hit the spot. The fries and cole slaw sides were OK. However, the more impressive lunch was on the girlchild’s plate – due to some exceptional behavior the previous day, she was allowed a slice of chocolate cake for lunch. It came with ice cream drizzled in chocolate sauce, and was far too much for her to handle, although quite delicious. We wound up taking more than half of it home.

Overall this is a good place to take families, with reasonable prices and convenient parking and tables. It’s also generally got good coupons floating around, doubtless because of the rivalry keeping competition going.

Bowen's Dairy Bar, Henagar AL

Real life had interfered with our plans in a calamitously disagreeable way back in December and January, and while we kept on trucking and did not let it inconvenience us too much, it did mean the cancellation of two out-of-town trips that we had planned. One of these was going to incorporate a visit to what is possibly the last surviving Kay's Kastles, a once-thriving ice cream chain that now only seems to exist in the town of Soddy-Daisy, a little north of Chattanooga. Perhaps we'll make it back sometime. I mentioned this to my mother, who never, ever objected to stopping for a treat at a Kay's Kastles in, say, Rome or Fort Payne, and she said that she had half a mind to take a side trip to this Kay's the next time the road takes her to Chattanooga. She says that she really loved Kay's grape milkshakes.

This was on my mind when we found ourselves in the town of Henagar, atop Sand Mountain, hoping that a dairy bar called Bowen's was still in business. We left Scottsboro after our curious detour to the Unclaimed Baggage Depot, and made our way to AL-35, crossing the Tennessee River via the simply amazing and spectacular B.B. Comer Bridge. This wonderful old steel truss bridge (seen in a YouTube video here) has been rated structurally deficient and is in the process of being replaced. Northbound traffic from Sand Mountain toward US-72 and Scottsboro goes across a newer bridge, lessening the load that this beauty must carry. It will apparently be demolished later in the year, so readers only have a few months left to see it.



It was only a couple of miles' detour to find Bowen's, which opened in the early 1960s. The business is closed from Sundays through Wednesdays, and I guess that I only phoned to ask whether they were still in business on one of those days. The top of Sand Mountain may be home to the possibly unfair stereotype of an out-of-control problem of methamphetamine use, but it's certainly not the home of a thriving social media scene. I figured that if I could indulge the ladies in a lengthy detour to that big thrift store, then they could indulge me in a fifteen-minute jaunt to see whether an old dairy bar was still in business.

Happily, it was. That said, there's nothing to it. If you, dear reader, have a passion or a curiosity for timelost little places like this or its similarly timelost cousin restaurants around the southeast - see the "dairy bars" label for other examples - then it is certainly worth the detour up AL-75 to visit Bowen's. If the countryside terrifies you, then you'd best stay inside the perimeter. In the days before interstate fast food, little roadside places like this were simply where the locals came for a hamburger or a milkshake. Those that survive, unheralded and unchampioned, still perform a fine service, giving the people of the community a place to come together on a surprisingly hot Saturday afternoon, taking a break from farm work. I'm not aware of any other restaurant around for miles and miles. It's simply where the locals go. Well, locals and oddballs like us who go a long way out of our way for the same sort of soft-serve cone that interstate chains serve. Nevertheless, as we got our cones and incredibly tasty cherry milkshakes, I told the nice lady who ran the place how grateful I was to see that Bowen's was still in business as time marches on.

An SUV pulled up while we stretched our legs, kicking up a cloud of dust. More ice cream was obtained, and the dust had not settled before the family was on their way.

When we returned to town, I told my mother that I couldn't help but notice that they sell grape milkshakes here. Henagar is just a half-hour, if that, from Fort Payne. She says that the next time she goes to visit her cousin Judy on Lookout Mountain, she'll phone me for directions.

Circumnavigating Alabama - Postscript

After finishing our quick visit to Huntsville, I had hoped to visit a couple more barbecue places in northeast Alabama, and so I used Google Maps to chart our way home. Then, unlike our "whatever happens" drive to Nashville the previous afternoon, I looked around Urbanspoon and hammered down two more places to try. This served as a "postscript," if you like, for my "circumnavigation" of that state two weeks prior, hitting a few more places that I couldn't have found at that time.

The first of these was a nice reminder of why I enjoy barbecue restaurants so very much. It is more than just the taste or the people, or the very real sense that, unlike just about any other food in America, no two places are anywhere even close to being the same, thanks to radically different recipes and preparation styles. If you'll allow me to ramble, in many barbecue joints, there is a real sense of history, that businesses can and often do last long beyond the fickle finger of fashion. There is a trend that we all notice if we live in a cosmopolitan, world-class city like Atlanta - don't you laugh; we've had two NHL teams - and keep an ear open for restaurant news and trends. Chefs get restless and bored and thrive on press and attention.

I think that it's part of the semicelebrity culture, but the impression that I often get is that a chef - slash - owner's attention lasts only as long as the rush of the crowd, or 27 months, tops. Oh, sure, there are exceptions - Hugh Acheson, for starters - but seriously, how many articles at the restaurant or real estate news blogs do you see in an average week that mention somebody notable opening up some new place, which also mention things like "Chef So-and-so, whose previous ventures include..." and then name some place that you always intended to go visit, but never did, and now it's closed. It's why, when, two months ago, three reputable blogs that I enjoy reported each others' rumors that a presently-trendy eatery on Edgewood was soon to close - it hasn't - I thought that would be a great shame, but I also wasn't very surprised, either. That's just how this business operates.

If barbecue places worked the same way, then this hobby would be radically different, and no fun at all. Take Atlanta's Old Brick Pit, for instance. Once upon a time - the mid-seventies and into the early eighties - that place was nationally known. As restaurant critics and writers in cities like Chicago and New York finally stopped eating at places on the fortieth floors of downtown skyscrapers and ventured, blinking, into rural America to see what this "barbecue" that Calvin Trillin had spoken of was, Old Brick Pit and Harold's were the places that the nationally-syndicated travel and culture writers visited when they came this way to learn about that peanut farmer who was running for president, and maybe see a game played by this town's first NHL team. This wasn't a flash in the pan; the newspaper-driven world sent thousands of travelers, tourists and locals to its door, in a way that small-audience bloggers and hobbyists like us can only dream about. An as-long-as-Blogger-still-exists Google link ain't got nothing on a dozen mentions in The New York Times over five or six years.

In time, the Old Brick Pit's reputation and fame faded. They still serve up some pretty good barbecue, albeit most probably not as good as it once was, but that business continues long after its time in the spotlight has faded. And that's what I was reminded of as I enjoyed a terrific sandwich at a little shack called Mary's Pit Bar-B-Que, somewhere between Gurley and Maysville, east of Huntsville out US-72. Once upon a time, this place was amazingly well known. A writer named Mike Kaylor befriended the Toney family in the early 1980s. Writing for the since-shuttered Atlanta Weekly, Kaylor wrote several articles about barbecue culture and road-tripping, in much the same way that we do today, and found many opportunities over the course of several years to single out Mary's Pit Bar-B-Que for his audience. Looking about, I see traces of that still around. A blog whose writer should seriously be using Urbanspoon called The Great North Alabama BBQ Quest visited Mary's late last year. This blog, incidentally, despite its quite limited scope, is one that I highly recommend. If it doesn't make you want to spend a week around Huntsville just eating beyond your capacity, then there is something very, very badly wrong with you.





Mary Toney opened her restaurant in 1957. She and her then-husband felt that they needed a little help getting their preparation just right, so they called in the services of a man named Walter Jordan who was known, quite seriously, as the "Master of the Hickory Pit." Mrs. Toney is still living, although the business is now managed by her younger son, Jeff. I happily thanked Jeff for a fine meal, because this was even better than the really good food that we had enjoyed a couple of hours earlier at Little Paul's.

We ate at a picnic table outside. The shack has just a few bar stools and a counter inside, and a window in the back, as it's principally, and unsurprisingly, a take-out joint. This was in sharp contrast to the meal we'd enjoyed about 24 hours previously at CBQ in Smyrna, where we were next to a smoker, between a car dealer and a traffic-packed highway. Here, we relaxed on a rural country lane, with a creek behind us and green, green grass all around. We let the baby put his feet in the grass and watched as he tried desperately to stand on Marie's shoes instead. We also ate a little. The ladies were happy with their desserts, while I was taken with the crunchy and tangy vinegar slaw and the thin, hot sauce. This was an absolutely terrific little getaway that reminded me, in the best possible way, of all those fantastic little middle-of-nowhere joints around Athens, Georgia. If you seriously think that there's a better way to spend a really nice, warm Saturday than with your family, eating barbecue outdoors, you are mistaken.

After our break, we returned to US-72 and continued east to Scottsboro. I had entirely forgotten, until we saw a billboard, that this is the home of the Unclaimed Baggage Depot, an enormous thrift store run by a company that buys freight after the airlines that have lost luggage have paid claims on it. Personally, I found it highly-priced and not even close to being like the weird and eccentric black hole that Roz Chast depicted in a fantastic comic strip that she did for The New Yorker - it's reprinted in her collection Theories of Everything, which every library should own - but Marie and our daughter loved it and would have happily spent another four hours there, given the time. We've penciled in a return trip for them, in fact, which will give us an opportunity to try some of the other barbecue shacks in the community beyond the one that we visited, Tate's.





Tate's was my fourth barbecue meal of the day - the ladies had now retired and waited impatiently for me to finish so that they could get their shopping going - and it was definitely the spiciest. In a moment of slapstick comedy, I spilled the tiny cup of thin vinegar-tomato sauce on the picnic table. The wood instantly soaked the vinegar right up, leaving the red peppery residue behind. It is also a take-out only place, the whole cinder block building being taken up by a kitchen. I was pleased that they offer Brunswick stew, and don't make any silly claims about that Gibson fellow brewing it up.

I'm afraid that Mary's was so darn good that Tate's, not quite as smoky or as moist, could not help but compare unfavorably, but it was still a perfectly fine recipe, and the ladies who were working that day were incredibly friendly and nice. They pointed me in the direction of the Unclaimed Baggage Depot, and were sweet enough to give me more sauce after I acted like one of the Three Stooges on their picnic table.

The present plan is to return to Scottsboro in three weeks' time and give Marie and our daughter many, many hours of shopping. We'll see if I can't come back with visits to another couple of barbecue places and dairy bars to share with all you trendy, cosmopolitan types.





The interactive map at the bottom of each of our pages displays every restaurant featured on this blog. A separate map of just the barbecue joints can be viewed here. Have fun with it!

The Barbecue Dynasty of Huntsville AL

Ever since we started this blog, I have wanted to go back to the great city of Huntsville and pay a visit. I had only been here once before - like millions of kids around the southeast, I took an overnight middle school field trip to the Space and Rocket Center - and did not really remember anything about the city. What we found was a very charming and busy region, with a run of sprawl south of the downtown area along US-231 that's pretty ugly but also decently managed, with a limited access highway running in tandem with the light-controlled avenues beneath it. We visited on a day with gorgeous blue skies contrasting the ring of the southern Appalachians that border the urban area, and it just felt peaceful and relaxed and, honestly, didn't show us a bad side. Huntsville is the home of a couple of minor, minor league sports teams and a hospital with a monorail, and it's where some of Big Bob Gibson's kinfolk have carried on his tradition with some interesting barbecue joints.

To be honest, this is an area that (again) needs more investigation and involvement than we were able to give it on a family trip, even one where we made five stops in Alabama before coming home. After a long breakfast in Nashville, we took I-65 south of that city for about an hour, and got off at exit 1. This took us through the twin towns of Ardmore, Tennessee and Ardmore, Alabama. It is pretty country up here, and I'm glad that we took these two-lane blacktops through these nice communities rather than staying on the interstate. Had we done so, we would have easily made our way to the original Big Bob Gibson's in Decatur, and perhaps undertaken a more thorough sampling, but we entered Huntsville from the north instead, and tried some of the places that his nephews and great-grandchildren started instead.

I did learn one remarkable claim. It's well documented that Gibson claimed the origination of white barbecue sauce for smoked chicken. I've not heard a particularly strong challenge to that story. But would you believe that he also seems to want to be the fellow who came up with Brunswick stew?





Let me skip forward a bit and explain that one of Bob Gibson's daughters started a chain of Gibson's barbecue restaurants in Huntsville, not stepping on his uncle's toes in Decatur, where Big Bob Gibson's restaurants rule the roost. It would appear that these are not as common as they once were, and I only spotted two of them - there were, at one time, four - on our visit. One of the former Gibson's locations is now home to Little Paul's. Interestingly, the building, right across from a large hospital, was constructed as a pharmacy several decades ago before Gibson's moved in. There's a little plaque by the door commemorating its history. Paul Sanford, the great-grandson of Bob Gibson, and his family painted over the front when they moved in back in 2002, but a close look still shows the "labelscar" left behind by the old Gibson's lettering.

Little Paul's has a reputation as one of the most popular barbecue joints in town, attracting the attention of many bloggers, both locals and travelers, including Davwud's Food Court, among others. Our visit found some darn solid food, prepared with lots of love and attention for a really busy Saturday crowd. I ordered the chopped chicken, hoping to sample the Gibson's-pedigree sauce over the meat for which it was originally prepared, and was very pleased with it. The chicken was moist and juicy and the sauce was quite wonderful. I had it with some vinegar slaw that was out of this world. Interestingly, they prepare both vinegar slaw and more traditional creamy, mayo-based versions.

The most peculiar side available, however, is Brunswick stew. As I've commented before, very few barbecue places in Alabama offer this dish, and some of those that do, such as Real Pit in Greenville and Hog Rock in Wetumpka, call it "camp stew." But my initial, pleasant surprise at seeing this on Little Paul's menu was tempered by the suggestion that it is made from Big Bob Gibson's original recipe. I asked the fellow at the register, and he "confirmed" that, yes, Gibson is the man who first concocted Brunswick stew. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but that simply isn't true.

I passed on Paul's stew - like three or four disagreeable places in the Atlanta suburbs, it is not a "side," but a separate, premium item - but when we made our way down to the second stop a little while later, they offered a lunch special of a sandwich, Brunswick stew and a drink. This was one of the two Gibson's restaurants that are still in town. I picked it as it was the further of the two away from Little Paul's.





Actually, while there appear to be two "Gibson's" in town, there are also two outposts of "Big Bob Gibson's" and one store called "David Gibson's," plus Little Paul's place. When we came through town, we passed by the Space and Rocket Center, awakening an interest that Marie had in visiting that she did not know that she possessed. Maybe one day, we can do that, and when we do, we should see whether we can tackle the town's non-Gibson barbecue!

The Gibson's that we visited was the one that other bloggers have not really written about. Huntsville's two local writers - Dining Dragon and Huntsville Plate - have told us about the Gibson's that we drove past. We went to the one on Whitesburg and, honestly, I didn't enjoy it very much.

I did, on the other hand, appreciate just how interested the staff here was in telling me about the Gibson dynasty, and how they smoke their pork for twenty hours over hickory. The nice woman at the register was quick to debunk Little Paul's claim that his great granddad invented Brunswick stew, which was nice. The white sauce was not bad and the stew, quite thin and packed full of meat and potatoes, tasted good, but the meat, sadly, tasted limp and tasted old. I'll assume that this was just a bad day, but this was no way to carry on the legacy of such a big name in the region's eating. Little Paul's had the atmosphere and vibrancy of a new and exciting restaurant, and Gibson's felt every one of its fifty-two years.

We were not entirely done with north Alabama. There was a little more barbecue to be had, and some interesting discoveries to be made as we made our way out of town on US-72, but more about that in the next chapter.





The interactive map at the bottom of each of our pages displays every restaurant featured on this blog. A separate map of just the barbecue joints can be viewed here. Have fun with it!

Return Visits to Two Favorites in Nashville TN

It worked out that on our trip to Nashville, I had an appetizer at one restaurant, a main course at a second, and a dessert at a third. I think that I'd do that every evening if only I could.

We drove up on a Friday for two reasons. Mainly, we wanted to try the fish tacos at the popular Mas Tacos Por Favor, which we visited on our previous trip to Nashville and which are only available on Friday nights. A secondary consideration was dining on our way home the next day; more than half of the places that we ended up stopping that Saturday afternoon are closed on Sunday. We always have to bear that in mind when we are traveling.

Sadly, our friend Brooke, who wanted us to try these fish tacos, was called into work Friday evening and wasn't able to indulge with us. They were every bit as good as Brooke suggested they'd be, and even better than the very good ones available down by us at Kennesaw's Buckhead Burrito Company. They're fried tilapia, underneath the restaurant's usual mix of veggies, and served with a wonderfully tasty smear of spicy remoulade. Tory and I each had one, while my daughter had chicken and Marie had a side order of plantains. I also had the evening special of a cactus and chorizo taco, and darned if that wasn't even better than the fish taco. Those two were a terrific way to start the evening.



Marie and I have said before that the very best restaurants are the ones where the staff looks like they are having a terrific time, like there is not one thing that they would rather be doing than making food and serving guests. I'm hard pressed to think of any restaurant, in any town, where the crew is having as much of a blast as Mas Tacos' employees and owner seem to be having. If some disgruntled employee wants to tell me I'm wrong, then I'll tell that joe that they need to be in pictures, because they sure fooled us. The crew was backed up, having just finished a ridiculous carry-out order of a hundred tacos, and the short line in which we waited rapidly filled up behind us. To help out, guests in the line started passing orders from the window to people who had already grabbed tables. The place was a complete madhouse, and everybody there was having a ball.

As our seats were needed, we vacated our space just as soon as the last crumb was finished and made our way to Pepperfire, as recounted in the previous chapter. I had my "main course" here, while Tory, Marie and our daughter waited until the third location on our agenda for theirs. This would be the wonderful Pied Piper Eatery. Granted, I have not been to this Pharmacy that everybody in Music City is raving about, but until I am proved wrong, I think this is the home of the best burger in Nashville. But burgers were not on the agenda this evening; in celebration of the ongoing Festival of Dairy, Marie wanted the restaurant's unbelievable grilled cheese sandwich.



This indulgent little gem is still called the Clay Aiken, even after the Pied Piper has revamped their menu and I'm even less sure who the heck Clay Aiken was, other than "cheesy." Seriously, when our grandchildren look to their version of Wikipedia, Mr. Aiken's principal contribution will surely be "inspired the name of the best grilled cheese sandwich you ever had." This place also has the best fried pickles in Tennessee, so I don't know what the heck Marie was doing ordering broccoli with her meal.

Now, about their menu revamp: it is amazing. The menu is a "used LP" in a protective sleeve. Seriously, you get a 12-inch "record" with the food selections on both the A- and B-sides, an inner and an outer sleeve and a beat-up clear cover to keep the dust off your precious used vinyl. The designer of this menu deserves a medal. Even though I just had a simple milkshake, I read every letter of that package like I was looking for a special thanks credit for Steve Cropper.

We love the music theme at this restaurant, and sat at the Janis Joplin table. We told my teenage daughter that the last time we were at Pied Piper, so disagreeably long ago, we sat at the Culture Club table. She said that she didn't know who that was, and so Tory, Marie and I all sang "Karma Chameleon" to her, very loudly. We've embarrassed that child before, and will surely do so again, but I don't believe we'll ever top the peak of mortification scaled with this effort. She curled her lips so tightly that she kissed the back of her throat before beating a hasty exit, not returning until her face returned to a healthy red glow.

Pepperfire Spiced Chicken, Nashville TN

Nashville is the world's home of hot fried chicken, and, as we learned from our visit last time to the legendary Prince's, the city is not kidding at all when they say "hot." No, sir. However the spice mix is made and however it's applied to the bird, places like Prince's or Bolton's are fully prepared to knock the swagger out of anybody's walk. But these wouldn't be worthwhile if all you were getting was a mouth full of lava; there has to be some amazing chicken underneath it.

I believe that Pepperfire Spiced Chicken - they're "spiced" and not "hot" like the others, stating up front that they're considerably less lethal - opened in late 2010. We were staying overnight in Nashville with our good friend Tory, and she heard about the place late last year. With more reasonable waits of only fifteen or twenty minutes compared to Prince's couple of hours on weekends, Pepperfire is a terrific place to swing through and bring some crazy hot lava chicken home.

No, it's not lethal like Prince's, but it's still crazy hot lava chicken. I loved it.





Once we made it to Tory's, kicked back and let the baby play and shout for a while, we started thinking about supper plans. Tory and Marie had an idea for their dinner that I was sure would bring me a great dessert, and I had an even better idea for an appetizer, about which more in the next entry. Naturally, I had no objection to having my three courses at three different restaurants.

So the ladies waited patiently while I dug into my tenders, which I ordered medium, with fries and baked beans. Even at medium, these still packed an impressive burn, much hotter, I was cautioned, than the typical "hot" of hot wings. The meat was so very juicy, too. I really enjoyed the heck out of this chicken, and I also made certain not to discount the white bread upon which the chicken was served. Having soaked up chicken juice and crazy hot lava, this was the best white bread ever.

This was a really terrific stop. I left with my mouth burning and very happy. While Prince's is a must-visit just for the experience, I honestly enjoyed the food here even more. It made me hope to come back someday and sample the other, hotter flavors available. If nothing else, the wait's a lot shorter.

Speaking of waits, the following morning saw us stopping by a restaurant called Sky Blue on our way out of town for some breakfast. We were seated immediately, but the agonizing, hour-plus kitchen backup, followed by only sending out two of our three plates, really cost them our goodwill, but it would be churlish to not note that the resulting pancakes really were quite amazing. Best not to linger over the aggravation; guests with time to spare, which we were most emphatically not, are probably assured a fine breakfast. And on that, we'll close for now and tell you good people tomorrow about the Nashville favorites that we were able to revisit on the Friday evening, bookending Pepperfire.

CBQ, Smyrna TN

Our trip to Nashville did not go as planned.

Returning to US-41 in the town of Jasper, my idea was to drive at a leisurely pace and stop wherever the roadside lured us. In one instance, this worked out splendidly. We found the gorgeous Foster Falls near the town of Sequatchie, and a better distraction from a drive I can't describe. We really enjoyed stretching our legs and spending a few minutes walking around there.

Early March isn't the best time to see the countryside at its best, but this corner of Tennessee, below Monteagle, really is beautiful year-round. The climb down from Monteagle, I'm happy to say, is a very special treat. Rather than that gentle and straight tractor-trailer-friendly interstate descent north into the meadows , US-41 is about six miles of twists and turns and fun. I highly recommend it.

But what we didn't find anywhere was barbecue. I admitted that I was having a problem with my addiction to using Urbanspoon to over-plan our trips, and so, for the drive north, I was just going to turn off the computer and not plan for anything. After leaving South Pittsburg, we'd just stop if we saw those three glorious letters, BBQ, and not be tied to a schedule like we so frequently are. Sadly, it was nearly a hundred miles before we saw those letters, and even then, the first of the three was different. We made it all the way to Smyrna, one of Nashville's southern suburbs and one absolutely choked with used car lots and scrapyards, before we spotted CBQ on the left and turned around to try them.





For many years, 1344 South Lowry Street, as US-41 is labeled in this part of the world, was home to Smokin' Ed's. There is very little useful information online about this place, although those brain-hurting aggregator sites like "Merchantcircle" still have records of it. From what I understand, Ed had locations in Smyrna and in Pigeon Forge before selling the business to somebody who consolidated under that name in Seiverville. I am also aware of quite a few rumors about Ed moving from town to town and starting businesses that don't seem to last very long, but, wishing to avoid repeating potentially libelous comment, we'll go that far and no farther.

Cary Wofford moved into Ed's Smyrna location in 2007, trading under the name CBQ. It is primarily a take-out business, with two old picnic tables out front. The divided highway isn't very traveler-friendly, particularly as the Nashville suburbs begin their Friday rush hour, but they seem to do some good business with carry-out orders and catering.

Marie and I each had pulled pork and thought it was really good. The pork is smoked over hickory for about twenty hours outside. Picnickers will be dining right next to the smoker, which is probably the best place in the world for it, as the aroma from the smoker is enough to overpower any exhaust odors coming from the cars speeding towards Murfreesboro.

The pork is very smoky, moist and tasty, but what really made this a great stop was the sauce. It's available in mild, medium and hot varieties of a tomato-vinegar mix and even the mild has some lingering burn behind its sweetness. The writer Troy Downing, who visited last year, must have got the mild to find it not very spicy, but then again, he also got a shot of whiskey out of the deal. The medium sauce was too spicy for Marie and the hot just about did me in. I loved it completely.

It was such a nice little stop, and such a nice visit with Cary, that I didn't really mind that I missed out on some barbecue that I'd hoped to find along the way. We saw a little more of interest as we got out of Smyrna and entered LaVergne, including the restaurants Lazy Pig and Smokers, but by this point, rush hour traffic and those great big buses and six thousand traffic lights had slowed our progress so badly that we couldn't realistically stop at either and still get to the bookstore in Madison that we wanted to see before getting back to Inglewood at our appointed time. So we left LaVergne for another day, and looked forward to some supper.

It was, literally, an eight hour drive from Atlanta to Nashville. Just think: when musicians made this trip along US-41 before the interstates were built, it was like this all the time.



The interactive map at the bottom of each of our pages displays every restaurant featured on this blog. A separate map of just the barbecue joints can be viewed here. Have fun with it!

Dixie Freeze, South Pittsburg TN

For many, many years, I have told myself that one of these days, I was going to go visit Nashville and take US-41 to get there. Last weekend, Marie and I finally did this, taking the baby and the teenage girlchild along for a very, very long trek up to Nashville that let us see some amazing scenery and lovely places. I had it in mind to stop at every single barbecue joint along the way, expecting to find a few. In the end, we only saw three, all in the Nashville suburbs, thereby putting a crimp in my plan to scale the Urbanspoon Tennessee rankings. More about that in tomorrow's chapter.

We planned to just stay one night in Nashville and then rush out of town for a trip to Huntsville and give my recent circumnavigation of Alabama a postscript as we moseyed home along US-72. Just about the whole trip was perfect, even if the main objective along US-41 was denied me.

Anybody who has traveled between Chattanooga and Nashville has seen the beautiful reservoir of Nickajack Lake. The view south of the interstate is breathtaking and unspoiled, but the view north shows off a fabulous old steel span bridge. I've always wanted to drive across that, but getting to Nashville as quickly as possible has always been the goal. That wasn't the case this time. I was pleased to see that US-41 is the road that takes that bridge. So the plan was to take I-75 to Chattanooga, and I-24 to the other side of town, exit 174, and then follow 41 alongside the Tennessee River, cross that bridge and go to Jasper. From there, it's a six mile hop down US-72 to the town of South Pittsburg. A roadfooding acquaintance of mine who writes the blog Davwud's Food Court had written lovingly about a classic restaurant called Dixie Freeze before, and that looked like a great destination.

So we followed US-41, loving the view along the river, but then when we reached that beautiful bridge, we found the road closed for bridge repairs! We had no choice but to detour onto I-24. While I grumbled and Marie offered appropriate "there, there" encouragements, we just took the interstate to South Pittsburg and found the darn restaurant the unpretty way.





Marie and I have visited a handful of quite old restaurants that really fascinate me. Common to each are soft serve ice cream and hot dogs. They all date from the time before interstate fast food chains, the days before Dairy Queen started consolidating the many and varied old restaurants that bought their equipment but operated independently. Two of these places, Mrs. Story's in Opelika and Bowen's in Henegar, about which more next week, are called "dairy bars," so this will be this blog's formal name for the jiffy-dairy-spot-freeze places in question going forward, even though the only two places we've personally seen that specify this term in the restaurant's name are in eastern Alabama. Google suggests that restaurants known as dairy bars are scattered throughout Connecticut, Virginia and the upper midwest as well. There's a new label on the sidebar which guests may use to learn more about our experiences with them.

Dixie Freeze opened in 1948 as a walk-up window dairy bar, but it has evolved over time to become a very interesting mutant version of the concept. It does shakes, malts, sundaes and very good burgers, but where it really excels is with fresh home cooking. Certainly, guests can get a pretty good fast food-style hamburger here, but it's the meat-and-three specials that elevate this into a gem.

Marie had the catfish along with some Brussels sprouts and was very pleased with them. I thought that I did well, or at least paid a little attention to the temptation of overindulging, only having about half a burger, a few onion rings and one of the best vanilla malts anybody has ever made, but Marie's meal was certainly the best at the table. The catfish was just excellent, easily as good as, if not better, than restaurants that charge a lot more and build their reputation on it.

South Pittsburg is one of those many unfortunate communities that have seen their commercial center move out to the interstate, following and clustering around the Wal-Mart. Travelers on I-24 certainly are spoiled for choice among the national chains here, but just five minutes' detour south gets drivers to this really fun old place, full of history and community, where a much, much better meal is assured. And if that isn't enough reason to stop, you can spot the top of a gigantic and beautiful steel arch bridge spanning the river across TN-156. There's always something new to see.



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Jalisco, Atlanta GA

In January, I wrote about the popular Nuevo Laredo Cantina, and noted then that every three or four months, I get a little peckish for El-This-Los-That Atlanta-styled "Mexican" food. The story goes that the red sauce-and-cheese style of Mexican food - the sort of place where, in the late 1980s, we all gorged on cheese dip - was brought to Atlanta by the founder of the local chain of Monterrey restaurants around 1974. One of Monterrey's longest-lasting competitors is Jalisco, which has been serving up chips-n-salsa and goopy, melted white cheese in the Peachtree Battle shopping center since 1978. This was, once, one of my favorite places to eat. Any opportunity from, say, 1989 to 1993 to get some dinner here and do some shopping at the dearly missed Oxford Books was one that I always took.





Well, sure as shooting, it had been about three months since I last filled my arteries with all this tomfoolery, and, one day last week as I was idly flipping around on Urbanspoon wondering what I might get for lunch, Jalisco popped up. I thought that it really had been a long, long time - at least ten years if not more - since I visited this place, and that I was overdue.

I got to Peachtree Battle a little early - all the better to look at the very silly tchotchkes at Richards Variety Store and wonder how in the world this place sells enough to pay its ground rent - and tried to remember how their table salsa tasted. I had completely forgotten. You eat at enough of these places, you start to figure that some of this table salsa is coming off the back of a truck somewhere, because it all tastes the same. Jalisco's is different; it is made fresh daily and somehow never quite comes out the same way twice. I must have come on one of their best days, because I finished two bowls of the stuff.

I ordered the lunch special #1, which is not the least healthy choice on the menu. It has a taco and a chile relleno with refried beans along with a big glop of guacamole over some shredded lettuce. Nothing here is traditional and nothing here needs to be. It is simple Tex-Mex comfort food in an old-fashioned strip mall restaurant that successfully shuts out the world of Peachtree and Buckhead and gives you attentive service and a reliably decent meal. This isn't anything to thrill about, but it's a great place for either a slow and quiet lunchtime read or a crazy and loud night out with several friends in the evening. It's been here for 34 years and I hope it's with us for at least the next 34.



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The Festival of Dairy

This is Marie, contributing an article about a day of excessive indulgence we have called The Festival Of Dairy. As regular readers of the blog may have noticed, I have been avoiding dairy since we noticed that our son was sensitive to cow's milk proteins. Well, he's sensitive to a bunch of other stuff too, although we have never been totally sure what, but at least that one thing we could prove and replicate. As a result, I have been avoiding some of the foods I love most, such as good cheese, cheesecake, ice cream, most chocolates, and more.

On top of that was everything I was avoiding on suspicion, either permanently or in sequence, so I wound up weighing 8 pounds less than Before Baby. So on the one hand, I was pretty proud of making it so far, but on the other it was just getting to be time to make a transition. So after some hemming and hawing (and a bit of foot-dragging on my part), we determined that on the day the baby tuned 10 months would be when I would break free of dietary restraints and let the kid eat formula. Don't worry, folks - we'd done some transition work with him so he wouldn't be in complete shock at the change.

The first place we went to was Woody's for a cheesesteak. As a fair warning, it is equipped with one of the worst parking lots in the city, so make sure to go when you won't be tempted to drive somewhere else just because you can't get a convenient parking spot - the food is definitely worth a bit of searching around for somewhere to stash your car.





It might also be useful to have two people go for take-out, so that if you need to drive around a bit the passenger can go in to place the order. In our case, we were pleased to see that the last parking space left was right in front of the door. You walk into a tiny dining room with cute wooden booths and past the grill. It is separated from the order desk by just a window, so you can watch your Philly being cooked while you wait, if you are so moved. We of course ordered our sandwich with extra cheese, and I would recommend that, especially if any toppings like mushrooms are added. The chopped beef just soaks up cheese.

Don't be fooled by the apparent overabundance in the photo; the sandwich was not gooey, it was just right. The meat was tasty and the mushrooms complemented it very well. Our daughter, who is not as fond of hot sandwiches and would make a project of getting as many desserts as possible over the course of the day, had a milkshake. She declared it better than Steak & Shake, which is a better compliment than it sounds. She loves those shakes. Our sandwich was gone way too fast - if we hadn't had a day of decadence ahead of us I would have felt ready to take on the large sandwich by myself rather than just sharing it with Grant, but we had places to go and treats to enjoy!

The next stop was Zesto, which has been the subject of a previous entry. It's been a favorite treat for several years, and I planned to have my usual comfort flavor of malt, chocolate banana, rather than exploring one of the many other options. It's just a fun retro place to go. it was a little odd to travel though the pretty wooded Poncy neighborhoods and come out on the ugly blight that is Ponce de Leon Boulevard, turn into this place that looks like it has been there since the dawn of milkshakes and then get such a good quality experience.



The staff behind the counter have without exception been friendly, upbeat, and pleased to see us no matter how busy it's been, and I don't recall that we've ever had a problem with our order. Also, probably by chance, we got some really good pictures of both kids. The first sip of milkshake in months was just so good. In the past I had been done with milkshakes before the cup was more than half to 2/3 finished, and generally passed the remainder to the back seat for a child to finish. Not this time. I slurped the bottom of that cup with the straw in regret that it was done already. We actually had another slightly odd parking experience this time, which would be a bit of a theme for the day. Has anyone ever made a left turn onto Ponce from Zesto without having to pause? Well, we did. Mind you, we paid our Karma tax beforehand by having had to wait a good five minutes waiting for a gap big enough to get into the place to begin with.

After Zesto we stopped in at Savage Pizza in Little Five Points to have lunch with our friends James, Victoria, and their baby, who is two weeks older than ours. They were kind enough to join part of the Festival, and their baby was so much fun to watch. At one point, he chugged down his lunch in under four minutes, then gave us such a beautiful look of dismay and disbelief at seeing us feed our little guy without sharing!





Savage Pizza is a place with a sense of humor. There are toys hanging from the ceiling, giant recreations of Jim Steranko illustrations, and comic book covers papering the interior walls. Regrettably, there is such limited free parking that the staff must be vigilant beyond reason to make sure that guests are not taking advantage of their spots, so a sense of humor is a truly valuable thing. At this point in our trek hunger wasn't really an issue any more, it was more the enjoyment of the experience. We shared a small pizza with extra cheese, sausage and pineapple, and some ridiculously tasty buttery garlic knots. The girlchild had apparently made a personal commitment to eat only desserts (aside from a few chips and fries, which hardly count) and was eager to get to our last stop.

We ended our trek at the tremendously cute Frosty Caboose, which we first read about last summer when The Food and Me gave it a short mention. It is a stranded train car on some disused track in the gentrifying industrial area of Chamblee, sadly without much in the way of seating except some planters that can serve as benches.





If you want a leisurely session with a great bowl of ice cream, bring a camp chair. But do go ahead and eat at the location, because if you don't you'll miss out. We saw a dad come with two really little kids, one barely older than a toddler, who brought his own bowl. The kid was clutching the yellow plastic like a blankie. Another pack of a half dozen or so kids came swarming up onto the back of the caboose and rang the bell and shouted ridiculous things like "warning bell!" in feverish joy. We also saw a couple of new parents come to enjoy the weather with a scoop or two. It's a friendly place, and the only improvement I could see would be the addition of a covered area with a picnic bench or two. The ice cream itself is excellent - we shared a banana split with strawberry and two kinds of chocolate - and I can see coming there again even though it's a bit out of the way.

Technically, although the Frosty Caboose was the end of the family tour of restaurants, the consumption of Stuff Formerly Off-Limits did not end. I went over to the Whole Foods cheese counter and lingered, dawdled, and looked at samples, and wound up with a mild Gouda (Roomkaas, a really buttery rich kind), a medium-sharp cheddar, and a crumbly sharp cheddar from Ireland called Kilaree. Sadly, I was to eager to dig into the cheese that I did not take good note of the milder cheddar, which is a shame.

Grilled cheese sandwiches were the very first thing that my mother trusted me to make for myself that involved a hot cooking surface, and they turned into my go-to comfort food for quite a while. As I get older, however, I wind up making them less and less often, and when I do make them it's likelier than not that they will be made with cheese costing $15 a pound or upwards. The best one I ever made is a cheese that I can only get from mail order, and that was almost included in the Festival, but since shipping for cheese is as much as another whole block, I opted for the option that included more cheese. However, if you ever want a truly magnificent Dutch cheese, order from Zingermans. That's the real stuff.

We ended the day at Sweet Tomatoes, for the March special which is creamy tomato soup. It was a great end to the day, since a great big salad was definitely what my system needed after all that dairy, and a couple of bowls of soup to warm me up at the end was just the thing. We mainly go to Sweet Tomatoes in March because that is really their best soup. If they had it more often we'd go more, but then I would have been missing it along with everything else!











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