About Our Blog

We're Grant and Marie. I've lived in Georgia all my life - twelve years in Athens and the rest in the northern Atlanta 'burbs - and Marie has called many more places home: Minnesota, Kentucky, Vermont, St. Maartens, some place in Canada that didn't get any TV and kept her from enjoying Sid & Marty Krofft Saturday morning shows at just the right time in her life, and Saint Simons Island, among others. We met in Athens in 1995, finally started dating eleven years later, and got married in '09.

Regular fellow diners include my tweenage daughter and our baby, who had his first drop of Brunswick stew in May of '11. There's also an older teenage boy who sometimes lives here and sometimes doesn't, and a large recurring cast of friends and family in cities all around the southeast, from Memphis to Jacksonville, and we'd love to meet new friends in cities where we don't know anybody yet.

Marie and I love traveling and finding new places to eat, and enjoy talking with the owners of small, out-of-the-way restaurants when time affords it. We like taking alternate routes away from the interstate, and taking a different way home than the one that we took to get to wherever it was that we went. We dumped national chains from our diet around the time we got married, except for Krystal. I love Krystal. Don't you judge me. We were enjoying using Roadfood.com for eating ideas for some time before getting started with this project. If it wasn't painfully apparent enough, I was totally thrilled with and inspired by Calvin Trillin's writing when I discovered it in early 2010. I'm trying not to rip him off too much.

One of our goals for this blog is to visit and report on every restaurant in Georgia that has been reviewed at Roadfood.com. Another is to have a meal in every SEC city. We have already been baffled enough how to manage to justify and pay for visits to Fayetteville and Baton Rouge; the pending addition of Texas A&M to the conference has me quite grouchy on this front.

The principal goal, however, is to inspire our readers to dump the chains, eat a little better, get out and enjoy this wonderful region, get some good exercise at a state park or someplace in between meals, and generally just enjoy life a little more. Despite the general chapter headings being based around a restaurant each post, this really isn't a restaurant review blog, it's the story of our very happy life, and, hopefully, how good eating will intersect with a good worldview. To this end, "restaurant reviews" in this blog will frequently be interrupted by discussions about any- and everything else that inspires us.

We love getting recommendations for places to try, and challenges from barbecue cooks that the place we have not visited is better than any we've tried. We don't accept complementary meals in return for reviews and never announce ourselves, though, especially with the baby in tow, I figure it's not very hard to figure out who we are. We're the ones enjoying our meal more than anybody else!