Marie, let's eat!

We’re Grant and Marie. Welcome to our food blog, where we write about restaurants and dining experiences. We are based in Atlanta, and that’s where the bulk of these stories take place, although we try and get out to other cities and towns in the southeast for restaurant visits as much as possible.

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 teenage 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 Del Taco. I love Del Taco. 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 had already been baffled enough how to manage to justify and pay for visits to Fayetteville and Baton Rouge; the addition of Texas A&M and Missouri 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, and stories about what else we might be doing on a road trip, such as visiting bookstores, parks, old bridges, or children’s museums. We do not allow negativity in the comments; polite disagreements are welcome, even about politics, but the only person allowed to be a jerk in these pages is the author.

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 guaranteed-positive reviews, and we never announce ourselves… although, 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!

If you would like to drop us a line, for comment, recommendation, invitation or media event, then please e-mail us at gmslegion@gmail.com . We look forward to hearing from you!

A note on copyright: Please note that all photos, text and other materials used on this site are copyrighted by me, unless otherwise indicated. If you would like to use any photos or content from marieletseat.com on your website, blog or other medium, please just contact me for permission. I’m usually pretty cool with granting that. Friendly advice: Please do not make the mistake of thinking that my decision to allow free publication via WordPress entitles you to use content without my approval. This will prove to be an expensive error. I have been writing professionally for more than twenty years, and my attorney knows these rules better than yours does.

A note to subscribers: WordPress just does not play well with RSS feeds, including Google Reader. We are in the habit of revising old chapters to update information, note closings, and remove dead links. Doing so “republishes” the post as though it was brand new. There is a workaround that sometimes functions (making the post “private,” then making the change, then removing the “private” stamp) and sometimes does not. Our very valuable readers have, with perfectly good reason, complained about this infernal problem of old posts showing up in their feed. We apologize for the error and wish we could stop it 100% of the time, but this inconvenience to subscribers is beyond our absolute control. We would rather have accurate chapters than not. Thank you for understanding, and, if you are aware of a foolproof fix, please e-mail us.