Two Brothers Barbecue, Ball Ground GA

I was out of town yesterday on business, hoping-to-earn-a-little-extra-money-business, with Randy, who, apart from an unfortunate willingness to eat at those gawdawful Chinese buffets, isn’t at all a bad egg. The road took us north through Ball Ground, a town, they say, which was mostly owned by a miser named Oscar Robinson who died in 2005 with an incredibly complicated estate. Robinson owned most of the buildings in the small town and filled them with rocks. He’d sell them, of course, but that’s what the buildings housed: rock stores. Apparently there are still millions of dollars left unaccounted for, and some of it’s probably holed up in one downtown building or another. The current owners are in no rush to tear down anything or let somebody clear it out, for fear that a big sack of money might be under a staircase or in a wall or something. On the one hand, Robinson didn’t seem to do very much for bringing economic development to Ball Ground, but on the other, he kept the Wal-Marts out of town. Frankly, we all owe that man a beer in heaven.

The road took us to Two Brothers, a place I left in a fit of completely unjustified pique about eight years previously. The interior of the place is done up like a whacking huge tool shed, full of rusty old farm equipment, those glass insulators for power lines that you always see in places like this, and old soda bottles lining the walls. Eight years ago, I had my eye on a bottle of Kickapoo Joy Juice from the late sixties. This was a Ski / Mountain Dew clone made to cash in on the Li’l Abner comic strip, and sold at the (now abandoned) Dogpatch USA theme park, along with shops throughout the region. These days, it’s bottled with a paper label and sold in specialty stores for nerds like me, some of whom like to pretend that they can tell the difference between it and Mountain Dew. Anyway, I like the original bottle, and they wouldn’t sell it to me, and so I walked off in a supposed huff and didn’t come back because they were so “mean.” Plus, they’re in Ball Ground.

Well, I’m willing to let bygones be bygones after eight years, especially when I’m the one who lost out by not eating this great food.

Lunch and supper are served here Thursday through Sunday. You go through cafeteria-style and usually have seven or eight sides to choose, with pickles, onions and chow-chow available by the register. The stew – I’m not picky about stew, I just want to see it available as a side – is a thick one you can eat with a fork, similar to the hash you get in Athens and the Carolinas. They have a mild and a hot tomato-based sauce and they’re pretty conservative with it.

This is a good little place, ready to fill you up for about ten bucks. Admittedly, every time I look at the paper-labeled bottle of Kickapoo on my mantle, it sticks in my craw a little, but I think I can justify stopping by more often than once every eight years. You never know; I might need some rocks.

Other blog posts about Two Brothers:

Buster’s Blogs (July 24 2009)