Flip Burger Boutique, Atlanta GA

Here’s a place that, surprisingly, I had not been for more than a year. Flip opened its first store in Atlanta on Howell Mill Road in late 2008, to instant acclaim, incredibly long lines, and mixed reviews from a hipster crowd that can’t decide whether it wishes to embrace the hype or react against it. I ate there a couple of times in ’09 and really enjoyed it. They offer really good, fancy-schmancy hamburgers and incredibly decadent milkshakes. Richard Blais and his team, including a chef named Mark Nanna, then opened a second store in Birmingham which the good people of north Alabama are even crazier about. Last fall, when Marie and I took our daughter out for a second eating trip to that city, we spoke with a girl at Penzeys Spices who told us that we absolutely had to go to Flip. A third store opened here in the Buckhead community a few months ago.

So Flip is certainly a local success story, and one which shows every sign of being able to grow and expand more over the next few years. I could definitely see Chattanooga’s north shore district supporting a Flip.

A couple of Fridays ago, Marie and I took a break from the kids – mercifully, they’re old enough to be left on their own for a few hours – and got out for some grown-up time. We met my co-worker Victoria and her fiance James for an hour or so and enjoyed some of those really good burgers and shakes.

The best advice I can give anybody who’s been thinking about trying Flip is to arrive early and arrive curious. The menu contains all sorts of incredibly odd and fascinating sandwiches. My favorite is the simple, classic southern burger, served with homemade pimento cheese and a wonderful green ketchup, but they also serve patties made from turkey, crab, veal and other unexpected meats. On this trip, I had a chorizo sausage burger, which was served with cheese, hash browns and a fried egg, and while I did not enjoy it as much as the southern burger, it was still quite wonderful.

Victoria kept it simple with a bacon cheeseburger, and James had the crab, each also having one of those unaccountably trendy iceberg wedge salads, but Marie surprised me by passing on a burger this evening and just having some of the fries and rings that I ordered – memo to self, your wife is owed an order of fried zucchini next time – and having a big orange creamsicle shake, which is the most amazing thing ever.

The line got long behind us. Absurdly so. I think that the only thing that I dislike about Flip is that their space is small enough that diners can’t help but be aware of all of the people waiting for a table. Is this some restaurant psychology trick? If so, it works. I would have gladly spent a good deal longer visiting and talking, but I felt downright guilty hogging a table with another two dozen people lined up and waiting. So I got a Krispy Kreme milkshake to go – it’s every bit as wonderful as it sounds – and we called it a night. We should definitely go back, though. There are still a mess of burgers here that we have not tried.

Barbecue Kitchen, College Park GA

We finished up what I termed as our barbecue road trip two Saturdays ago at a little place in College Park hidden just off the interstate. It’s a very old little joint called Barbecue Kitchen, and I had never heard of it until the good folk at Roadfood.com added it to their small list of reviewed restaurants here in Georgia. It’s very easy to find, just off I-85 going south after the Downtown Connector has split, and I am surprised, now that I have been here, that I never heard of it before. In all the many conversations and lists about barbecue in the Atlanta area, this place has remained one of the city’s best-kept secrets.

It must be said that, however, that my kids didn’t enjoy it at all, and rather wished that it had remained a secret. On the other hand, happily, I had a simple, good meal here and quite enjoyed the experience. Several months ago, I wrote a chapter about The Old Hickory House in Dunwoody, reflecting how this fading restaurant is not at all what it used to be. Barbecue Kitchen is exactly how the Old Hickory House used to be. It was like stepping back in time thirty years to when that place was packed, loud and vibrant.

While my meal was indeed very good, I really was not able to finish it. We tried sharing plates and small portions at our earlier destinations, but Barbecue Kitchen absolutely leveled us with the amount of food that they pile in front of guests. I coined the phrase “insane metric buttload of food” to describe how much was put in front of me. Even if I was not already satisfied by our small meals in middle Georgia, this would have been too much for me to finish. This place gives you free refills on your vegetables, probably with the understanding that nobody’s going to be hungry enough after a first course to still be wanting more.

So this time out, we decided that I would order a barbecue plate, and Marie would get three veggies, and the kids would each get a single side and a dessert. Now, maybe I was stymied by pork-goggles or something, but that looks like a really gigantic pile of food that our server, a delightful lady who, saucily, would not divulge how long she’d been with the restaurant, but conceded that her husband would often bring her to supper here when they were dating, laid down in front of me. I wouldn’t really call any of it exceptional, but very good comfort food. I enjoyed the stew best of all. The sauce, very thick and amazingly sweet, got Marie’s seal of approval. She also enjoyed her green beans and creamed corn.

For their desserts, the kids each had a slice of cake. My son had coconut and my daughter had red velvet. They had been very good on this road trip and deserved them, I thought. Normally, the cliche is that you can get dessert only if you clean your plate. On this trip, nobody cleaned their plates. We were all completely stuffed. The lesson learned, perhaps, is that the next time we do a little eating tour, we need to space the restaurants out a little bit more. Two small meals and one gigantic one in such a short afternoon simply does not work!

The Oink Joint, Zebulon GA

In the previous chapter, I explained that the four of us went off on a middle Georgia jaunt to get away from the snow and ice in Atlanta. The road to Thomaston’s Piggie Park, our destination, took us right through Zebulon, a sleepy little community about sixteen miles north of where we were going. We had been through Zebulon once before, last summer. When we went down to Warm Springs back in July to eat at the Bulloch House, we came back this way to visit A Novel Experience, a shop which I had seen listed on Huffington Post as one of America’s best bookstores. I don’t remember whether I actually noticed the Oink Joint at that time or if I heard about it shortly afterward and recalled it as another reason to go back to Zebulon, but it’s in an ideal location just a stone’s throw from the book shop.

While I understand that some of my readers might not be particularly interested in bookstores, I’ve always thought that they are terrific places to spend your time, especially while on eating tours and waiting for a meal to settle. It helps when the store in question is one as simply wonderful as A Novel Experience, which, flatly, is a superior store to any in Atlanta. Certainly, we have a couple of pretty darn good ones – A Capella Books in Little Five Points is probably the best – but the atmosphere of peace and simplicity, backed up by a fantastic selection of very well-chosen new titles and a surprising number of used books that I actually wanted to get around to reading anyway, makes A Novel Experience an absolutely wonderful destination for book lovers. To be fair, you probably won’t find the sort of wild, unexpected treasures of a really old store, packed densely with antiquarian weirdness, but for a good break from the world in the company of a really well-thought and sensibly planned bookstore with an awesome, friendly staff, the quiet little town of Zebulon is definitely worth a drive.

Plus, there’s a pretty darn good barbecue joint just a block or so away, and Zebulon is still so sleepy that they don’t charge for parking. Good for them; it gives you plenty of time to enjoy a good bookstore and then have a fine meal. Or vice versa, whatever you need.

The Oink Joint is one of the newer barbecue restaurants in the state, only opening early in 2010, but its owners, Craig and Deeanna Cardell, have been cooking on the festival circuit for a few years. Their space is pretty tiny, but decorated with several trophies and medals from their outings at several southeastern barbecue cookoffs like the Lake Oconee Barbecue & Blues Festival, where the Cardells took grand champion in 2009. I believe that, prior to opening the store, they competed under the name Right Stuff BBQ.

They have a small space, and it fills quickly. We arrived just as the lunch rush was ending and there was a small logjam at the door as people tried to fill out past my impatient and manner-free children. Everybody else’s kids do that, right? It’s not just mine? Please say yes. Anyway, once we wrestled them back and let everybody inside exit, my daughter decided that she wanted some ice cream instead of another meal, and my son passed on barbecue and had a big grilled cheese sandwich. So Marie and I each got a pulled pork sandwich. She got Brunswick stew as a side and I ordered baked beans, The pork here is pulled and extremely moist. They have two sauces, both of which were very tasty.

Now, even trying to share food and think in terms of sensible portions, we still had enjoyed a fair amount of barbecue between our two stops in Pike and Upson Counties. Nevertheless, I was – somehow – still a little bit peckish after my sandwich, and very curious to try something unusual on the menu. Oink Joint offers smaller portions of their pork, chicken and beef brisket in taco form, and one of these really struck my eye. A kogi taco mixes pulled pork with diced “fire and ice” cucumbers and a Korean barbecue sauce. This was so unusual and tasty that I found myself wishing I had just had one of these instead of the sandwich, which was pretty good on its own. The next time we feel like coming to Zebulon, I think two tacos and a side of stew would be exactly what’s needed.

Of course, the down side to trying the taco was that now I really was full, and we had one more stop on the road, back inside the Atlanta perimeter in College Park. Could this family stuff any more food before popping? Stay tuned.

Piggie Park, Thomaston GA

Two Saturdays ago, I was about as sick of snow as it is possible to be. I’m sure I was not the only one. The winter storm that walloped Atlanta earlier this month was the biggest in eighteen years. We spent three days trapped in our house, and I didn’t get back to work at all until the Friday, and then I had to climb over a danged fence just to get to where I needed to be, because the employee parking lot was inaccessible. Long story. Anyway, if you’re a local, you have your own tale of woe and boredom and board games, and if you’re not, here’s the confirmation that Atlantans just don’t handle snow well at all.

So by Saturday, I was screaming to be outdoors somewhere without any white stuff anywhere, so I charted out a day trip down to middle Georgia, where Marie and the kids and I could stretch our legs and enjoy some sun. So naturally, then, because we’re contrary, the first place we went didn’t require us to get out of the car and actually do any leg-stretching, as it was a drive-in. I planned this day trip to hit two more of the Georgia restaurants featured at Roadfood.com, and the first of these was down in what some of the sillier locals and billboards call “T-Town,” a little place called Thomaston.

Thomaston’s a bit of a drive from Cobb County. We took I-75 through the city and exited on Tara Boulevard, just a few exits beyond the southside perimeter, and continued down US 19 for about fifty miles. With the exception of a single bookstore which I’ll mention in the next chapter and the impressive edifice of Atlanta Motor Speedway near Griffin, there’s not a heck of a lot of anything other than food on this road these days, but not a lot of traffic or backup, either. (There is, incidentally, a magnificent barbecue shack called Southern Pit which we really love, and will revisit for this blog on a visit later this year.) It was a very nice day for a drive in the country, especially after being cooped up indoors for so long, although I sort of wish it was a degree or three warmer so we could have had the windows down.

Piggie Park first opened about sixty years ago, and while they serve burgers and milkshakes, this place is, with good reason, best known for its sliced barbecue pork. This was absolutely exceptional, and the best of the three barbecue joints that we visited that afternoon. The pork was so moist, yet not at all greasy, and with a lovely smoky taste. The sauce was the traditionally dark ketchup and vinegar combo of middle Georgia.

Since we would be visiting three restaurants in a (barely) four-hour block, we broke up the orders so that we could all sample the goodies at each place without, in theory, getting completely stuffed. At Piggie Park, the four of us split a barbecue plate with fries and slaw, one sandwich with a side of fries and two bowls of Brunswick stew. Everything was extremely good, and we all loved the fries, which, unlike the pork, really were delightfully greasy and full of flavor.

I think the restaurant is definitely worth an hour and a bit’s drive; I just wish there was some more to do there. I’m not sure what else there is to do in Upson County. Maybe sometime when the weather is nicer, we can justify a trip out this way to a nice state park or something and do a little hiking. Since a trip to this drive-in won’t even give us the exercise of going from the car to the building’s front door, we’ll need to do something else.

Our next stop was a few miles back up the road, at a place we drove past on our way to Piggie Park. More about that in the next chapter…

Mary Mac’s Tea Room, Atlanta GA

I had been wanting to go to Mary Mac’s for a really long time. It’s the last surviving example of a brief late ’40s trend of restaurants opened by war widows looking to both stay afloat and remain a little classy, so they called their establishments “tea rooms” in the hopes of attracting a better sort of clientele than the lowlifes who went to juke joints and meat-and-threes. This fad did not last, but this one place on Ponce, started by Mary MacKenzie, survived. It is no longer in family hands – MacKenzie sold it to Margaret Lupo in 1962, who in turn sold the business to John Ferrell in the mid-nineties – but it certainly thrives. It’s one of Atlanta’s best-known destination restaurants, a place that turns a traditional meat and three into a very classy experience, and one of the very best examples of southern cooking in north Georgia, with some really amazing food.

The Saturday after my dad passed, I took Neal up on his offer to get out and relax a little. He had the goal of trying to track down a bizarre little promotional tie-in to the TV series Fringe, a short-pressed LP hiding out in various record stores, so we went by a couple of the few places in Atlanta left that still sell the darn things with no luck, and stopped at Mary Mac’s for lunch. There is a small parking lot behind the restaurant, but it fills up almost instantly. Diners will have better luck parking along Myrtle Street and enjoying a short walk.

The staff at Mary Mac’s enjoys welcoming new guests with a small, complementary bowl of pot likker. This is the slightly salty liquid left behind after boiling greens, and it starts meals here off just right. Everything here is incredibly tasty and fresh. I had a small house salad with thousand island dressing, and it looked and tasted like those vegetables were still in the ground the night before, and Neal and I shared an appetizer of fried green tomatoes. These were truly wonderful, easily the equal of the fabulous ones prepared at Blue Willow Inn and The Fickle Pickle, and served with a very light and tasty remoulade.

My meal was very good, or, at least, the sides were. I was indecisive about what to get, briefly considered the meat loaf, and finally settled on some chicken tenders. These were perfectly decent, but honestly, I should have just ordered a veggie plate. I keep telling myself that and never listen. I had pickled beets and the mac and cheese, both of which were just amazing, and Brunswick stew, which was also very good. Neal, on the other hand, really scored with his chicken livers, which he says were every bit as good as the exceptional ones at Doug’s Place in Emerson. Like me, he ordered one side too many, but enjoyed what he could finish.

We were finishing off our meal and basking in satisfaction when a woman who looked to be a little ways older than us but still bouncing with a spring in her step came up behind Neal and put her hand on his shoulder before asking how we were doing and how our food was. This unexpected burst of familiarity probably wouldn’t pass muster up north. Neal said later that he thought it was some relation of his coming to say hey.

She explained that she liked to come around and make sure everything was okay, and that while she wasn’t the one who cooked our food – I had asked whether we had her to thank – she did sample everything in the kitchen. While I joked around about how that explained why each of my beets had a bite taken already – a joke from a color Popeye cartoon that I doubt anybody else remembers – she went right to work rubbing Neal’s shoulders with such vigor that his eyes about popped out of his head.

She left her card and went onto another table. The back of her T-shirt read “I got my belly filled and my back rubbed at Mary Mac’s.” Free pot likker and shoulder rubs. They must want repeat business or something.

Bar-B-Que Shack, Athens GA

Here’s a restaurant that’s never really received a fair shake from me. The Bar-B-Que Shack, which opened in 1993, has been around long enough to reasonably qualify as the oldest surviving joint of its kind in Athens. There are older – much older – places in nearby Danielsville, Watkinsville and Lexington, but unless I’m forgetting about one, all of its peers – Carrithers, Spring House, J.R.’s, Peanut’s Redneck – have long since gone. The two Fresh Air outlets might claim to have been around since the 1920s, but that’s when the original store down in Jackson opened. The ones in Athens didn’t open until 1996 or so. The one on the west side of town, between the Pepsi plant and Bogart was the site of Peanut’s Redneck – and yes, that really was its name, Peanut’s Redneck Bar-B-Q – when I moved to town in ’89. J.R.’s opened sometime in the mid-90s, in the building that once housed Walter’s. That was a mid-eighties favorite of R.E.M., who recorded a “theme” to the restaurant that appears on their odds-n-sods 1986 LP Dead Letter Office. That building is now home to Hollis’s Ribs. The turnover in barbecue places in Athens has always seemed just a little brutal. Continue reading “Bar-B-Que Shack, Athens GA” →

Mama’s Boy, Athens GA

I’m afraid that I have done Mama’s Boy a terrible disservice in waiting so long to tell you about our trip here before Christmas. You see, and you’ll forgive me having my silly notions about how I schedule chapters in our blog, I had the bright idea to hold back an entry about Athens for a few weeks, until I visited the town again. That way, for some fool reason, I could have two chapters about Athens back-to-back instead of a single Athens story each month. Continue reading “Mama’s Boy, Athens GA” →