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.
So here’s what happened. The Thursday before Christmas was a short morning shift for me at work. I took the kids with me – at this point, my son had not yet decided to stay in Georgia with us – and was thinking that this would be just a simple hop-skip-jump trip to give my son something fun for his Christmas vacation before we took the longer trip down to the coast the following day. We had a fabulous early lunch – slash – late breakfast at Mama’s Boy, joining the many happy diners who love the very popular place, shopped for comics, visited our friend Devlin, had a snack on our way out of town at Ike & Jane’s, got the photos off the camera, uploaded them to Picasa, and went over to my parents’ house for our family Christmas. There, my brother told me that the in-home hospice nurse had told him that she believed that my father was down to his last two weeks. Turned out she was overestimating by about four days.
So, I’m sorry, Mama’s Boy, but I’ve had to ask my children what the heck we had to eat here. I remember that I liked it, but this month has been so horrible that, between the trip to the coast, my dad’s last days and the ice storm that socked the dickens out of Atlanta, I don’t remember Mama’s Boy very much at all. At some point, I will plan a return trip and give this place one of my “take two” second observations. That’s another one of my silly notions about how I’d like to do things in this blog. So I’ll swing back by in the spring and experience this place’s “southern fun dining” and let far less gunk cloud my mind before I sit down to write about it. With that in mind, I’m turning this chapter over to my kids’ recollections.
My daughter, who turned twelve just a week before our visit, remembers: It was a big blue building with a painting of a bike on it, and there was a metal bike out front. Inside, there was a stick chandelier, over the fancy dining room, but the other side, from the seating station over to the back bathroom, was kind of yucky. There was an alcohol sign that made Dad feel old. (It stated that you must have been born prior to 1989 to order a beer. 1989 was the year that I moved to Athens.) My brother had this amazingly, amazingly, amazing fried chicken. The water didn’t taste that good, though. And like, the chocolate cake for breakfast didn’t taste just like chocolate, because there was espresso in it, too and it was great. There was a really round piece of cake with chocolate drizzled all over it and powdered sugar. But they didn’t want you to get fully fat off your breakfast with cake, so they added a serving of fruit, which was grapes, strawberries, pineapples and oranges. But if you dipped them in the leftover chocolate sauce, it was really good. That’s all I can remember!
My son, who will turn fourteen in April, remembers: First of all, the food is amazing. I remember that my sister had the chocolate cake for breakfast, but they tried to make it healthy by adding fruit. I had the peach French toast and some fried chicken, and the toast was good, but the best thing on the table was the fried chicken. The breading was amazing. It had so much flavor, and if we go there again, that’s what I’m going to get is the fried chicken.
It certainly gets their seal of approval, anyway…
Marie, Let's Eat! 