In today’s chapter, Marie writes about rain and about flat tires, but more importantly, she writes about this European bakery and deli just outside the Birmingham city limits, where they’ve been serving up a dessert so rich and decadent that the state of Alabama insists that you must eat it before you die. Continue reading »
This is the first of two entries this week in which I will mention a restaurant that I can tell you less about than I would like. In fact, I can’t tell you the most important thing about it: where we heard about it. Well, I suppose “Is it any good?” might truly be the … Continue reading »
Over the course of the next several days, we’ll be telling you about the fun trip that we took to Starkville, Mississippi, to visit Marie’s brother and sister. Karl moved there after serving a few tours in the army, and Anne, as readers who were with us last year, lives in Memphis. We had a … Continue reading »
I must admit that within a couple of minutes of entering Kool Korner Sandwiches, I was completely baffled. I had read up on the place, which is in a Publix strip mall in the Vestavia Hills suburb of Birmingham, and followed the reviews and looked over their web site, all of which promised the best … Continue reading »
So I was sketching out this trip and my daughter requested a hot dog while we were in Birmingham. That suited me just fine; I’m mercenary enough to want to add more chapters to this blog, and we had bypassed Pete’s Famous Hot Dogs, arguably the best-known restaurant in the city, in favor of one … Continue reading »
This is Marie, contributing a very small chapter about some very small cakes. As any reader of this blog knows, desserts are well-nigh irresistible attractions for me. Generally, therefore, I don’t work very hard to locate places that serve chocolates, sweets, cakes and pies because they tend to creep up on me and drag me … Continue reading »
One of the current faves among the restaurant-reviewin’ crowd in Birmingham is Saw’s, a barbecue joint that has moved into the space formerly occupied by the much-loved Broadway Barbecue. It’s in a really nice little strip of shops and restaurants on Oxmoor Road in the Homewood community just south of the city center and Vulcan … Continue reading »
Well, here’s the situation with our recent road trip to Memphis: we didn’t get to stop in Alabama for some white barbecue sauce. I had a place picked out and we were looking forward to it, but mercifully, I had the sense to double-check on the restaurant, located in the northwestern town of Hamilton, and … Continue reading »
That last time that I went to Birmingham, years and years ago, on a night that Bob Dylan was coming to town to play, I had no idea whatsoever where I was going, apart from a general recommendation that I should ask around and find Reed’s Books. This was before Google Maps, and since I’ve … Continue reading »
I enjoy a great nostalgia for that feeling I had at age seventeen, going off to college and ready to both make whatever mark on the world I was going to make, and also desiring to brag to my parents about what wild, weird, wonderful things that I uncovered and experienced. So the presence of … Continue reading »
A few chapters previously, I mentioned how the discovery of mayonnaise-based white barbecue sauce in Clarkesville, Georgia had changed everything. “Oh, yes,” some people say, “that’s what they have in northern Alabama,” but that isn’t true. White sauce is still extremely obscure and not at all common. One of my co-workers was born and raised … Continue reading »
