Frankie & Johnny’s, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

Here’s an incredibly interesting restaurant. It’s not worth knocking over anybody to have breakfast here – in fact, if you go looking for good grits, it’s not worth visiting at all – but I swear, this place fell through a crack in time. It looks and feels like a place with no relationship whatsoever to the modern world. Social media? Twitter updates? Not this place. Nobody talks about it, least of all on that “internet” thing. Don’t believe me? Google it. You’ll see an Urbanspoon listing with votes from eight people, and me over at Roadfood.com asking whether anybody knew anything about it, and a bunch of Yellow Pages and Yelp listings with no user reviews at all.

The parking lot does to your car’s alignment only slightly less damage than falling off a cliff. The sign – a beautiful, rusted anachronism – has fallen apart and is no more. This weird, vintage thing is what caught my eye the first time that I drove past it. A little more than a year ago, I stopped by and photographed the sign just for my own sake. Had I known then that the silly picture of the nice young couple in the roadster was going to fall out and crash into the potholes beneath it, I would have taken more care not to capture part of a Taco Bell billboard behind it. Well, I never claimed to be a good photographer.

Inside, it is as quiet as the grave. It is a classic roadfood stop for truckers and utility company drivers. It’s where you can go to get a cheap, enormous breakfast. I had bacon – fantastic bacon – eggs, grits and toast for four bucks. Well, the grits weren’t worth eating. That bacon was amazing.

From 10:30 until 2, they serve lunch in a buffet line. Looks like they offer lasagna, meat loaf and the like, with all the trimmings. Then at two, this place shuts down and returns to the other side of 1967, to decay and rust and rot away further. It’s the most authentic – if that word means anything right now – breakfast experience I’ve had lately. I can imagine my late father eating here four times a week for years and never mentioning it to anybody, because it wouldn’t occur to him to do so. It is what it is, and does not aspire to more. But this isn’t destination food. The young crowd that “rediscovered” Pabst Blue Ribbon has not found this yet. This is for local workers, men who do not mind destroying the alignments of their company’s trucks.

I asked about it. I learned nothing. The owner, an older Asian man, said that he’d been open for seven years. I said that the business must be much older. He agreed. I suggested that the building must have been there a long time. He said that it had. I asked him what happened to his sign. He said the sign was still there. I laughed and said that once, there had been a picture in the middle, where there is only a hole now. Not laughing, he agreed that yes, once, there had been. And then he went to work setting up the lunch buffet.

I left, and time didn’t march on. It froze.

(Update, 7/25/12: Eleven months later, it was gone. Without a word or a peep or a notice anywhere, the building and the parking lot were completely gone. Logic tells us this happened after a bulldozer and a wrecking crew came in. I prefer to think it was because time folded over like a tesseract, and, just like that, the building left through a crack in time, back to where it came from, as though it had never met our troubled days.)

Gigi’s Cupcakes

When Grant was planning the itinerary for an afternoon together, he included Gigi’s because of my taste for sweets and our daughter’s more specific adoration of cupcakes. Sadly, neither of us showed much enthusiasm. The girlchild was under the weather and wanted to sit out this food trek, asking only for a comfort snack of Krystal to be borne home to her after we were done. In my case the problem was the memory of another dedicated cupcake store in Nashville. When I reminded him of that visit, Grant diplomatically replied that he understood I had been “underwhelmed” by that place. So I figured I would hold my enthusiasm until we went to his selection. More on that later. Continue reading “Gigi’s Cupcakes” →

Smokejack Blues & Barbecue, Alpharetta GA

I have a little goal here to visit and report upon one hundred barbecue restaurants before the end of 2011. I’m not sure whether we will make it – we’re almost three-quarters there – but any opportunity to grab one for the blog is one that we’ll try to take. Two Saturdays ago, I looked over the map and decided that we hadn’t trucked up GA-400 in a while, and I was curious what new restaurant developments could be seen on Windward Parkway. Alpharetta is the home of Smokejack Blues & Barbecue, a business seven years old which has expanded to a second location a little further north in the town of Cumming. Smokejack’s not getting quite all the press and attention among barbecue restaurants in that area right now – there’s a place called ‘Cue that everybody’s talking about – but I remembered having a pretty good, albeit pricy, meal there a few years ago.

When I worked in Alpharetta, there was one perk that certainly beat any that I have at my current job. To celebrate birthdays, our department would take all the staff out to eat once a month. She wasn’t with the company for really long, but I did have the pleasure of working with a girl named Kristi who was a completely fun trip, just overflowing with silliness, light, Southern slang and malapropisms. She chose Smokejack for her birthday and I remembered enjoying it greatly, even if the restaurant’s prices kept it out of my regular rotation of places to visit. Marie and I had lunch here for just under $30. That’s a heck of a lot to pay for barbecue for two, but in their defense, the restaurant tells guests up front that theirs is less a traditional BBQ place and more an upscale eatery that focuses on smoked meat.

Marie and I hoped to have our daughter and our good friend Samantha join us for lunch, but each of them asked for rain checks in the end, not feeling well. So Marie and I made it a quasi-date day, with the baby bundled in the back seat and spent a few hours enjoying each other’s company and eating pretty well.

Smokejack, located in Alpharetta’s small, but very cute, downtown, offers the usual assortment of pulled pork or chicken dishes. Most of them apparently are sauced just before they send them out of the kitchen, but they’ll serve them dry if you ask. I noted that they have a chicken sandwich with white, north Alabama-style sauce, and while normally I might be expected to give that a try, I was really in the mood for another order of burnt edges.

I had these for the first time a couple of weeks previously at Woodstock’s Bub-Ba-Q and was curious to try another restaurant’s take. I had the sauce, a delicious black, sticky-sweet Kansas City-styled goo, on the side. The beef was so good that no sauce was necessary, and I strongly advise anybody curious to order this dry. I had the burnt edges with baked beans, which were pretty ordinary, and a very tasty corn pudding that Marie and I shared. She ordered chicken thighs from the appetizer menu. These came with an orange habanero glaze and were served on a bed of pretty good slaw. She also had a side of wood-roasted vegetables that she mostly enjoyed. Brunswick stew is available, but, sadly, with a small additional charge as it is not technically a “side,” but rather a “soup.”

A little driving around town didn’t convince me that I was missing very much, foodwise, by leaving my job in Alpharetta. We got back on GA-400 and made one more stop in the area, though. Two days previously, I had visited one of the wonderful Taco Stands in Athens. They had opened a store in Alpharetta several months earlier. I had stopped in and was pretty disappointed, but chalked it up to opening week catastrophe. I was curious, now that they’ve hopefully got their act together, how they compare to one of the originals.

The honest answer is that they compare poorly, but are still pretty good. It’s a very different sort of restaurant to the Taco Stands of Athens, or even to the since-closed Buckhead watering hole. It tries to be a lot – upscale and family-friendly, even offering X-Box games for children – but it’s all so unnecessary. The prices are disagreeably higher than the originals. Seriously, a taco, $1.39 at Barnett Shoals, runs you $1.99 here. If I’m wanting Taco Stand, I don’t need an airlock and hostess station, I don’t need my tacos served in a little IKEA basket, and I don’t want to tip a server. I want my name called and I want my tacos on a tray.

That said…

There are certain realities of eating that trump fancy-shmancy considerations. Admittedly, the prime ingredient in the Taco Stand is nostalgia, but you can’t deny the awesomeness of the chicken enchilada and its wonderful dark sauce. On the other hand, while the tacos are good, they are nevertheless different, and in fact, inferior, to the tacos in Athens. They’re served on grilled flour shells rather than hard corn, and the beef is markedly different. The sauce tasted the same to me.

As much as I like the food, I really just don’t feel like the Taco Stand transfers well to this type of environment. I’ll forgive a lot for a good chicken enchilada like this, but in much the same way that a Burger King Whopper doesn’t gain anything from being served on a nice white plate, remaining, at it’s core, fast food, this “upscale” store doesn’t make the scruffy, tasty, wonderful food any better. It just makes it more expensive.

Harry’s Pig Shop (CLOSED) and The Taco Stand, Athens GA

Well, it took me a little while to get over to Harry’s Pig Shop. I had been wanting to visit for quite a while now, but I don’t just go to Athens every day, and when I do, I’d like to occasionally try something other than barbecue. There are quite a few good restaurants around that town, you know. Nevertheless, I moved it up my to-do list a couple of months ago after I read the good writeup at Buster’s BBQ Blog. Continue reading “Harry’s Pig Shop (CLOSED) and The Taco Stand, Athens GA” →

Little Hut Sandwich Shop, Philadelphia PA

(Honeymoon flashback: In July 2009, Marie and I took a road trip up to Montreal and back, enjoying some really terrific meals over our ten-day expedition. I’ve selected some of those great restaurants, and, once per month, we’ll tell you about them.)

Our friend Chris in Jacksonville has lived all over the place, and he’s got relations and aunts (he pronounces it “onts,” magically) and kinfolk all over, so he’s a pretty reliable source for getting ideas about where a fellow should visit. When Marie and I let our friends know about the honeymoon road trip, Chris was among the first people to make a suggestion. Since we were going to be visiting Philadelphia to see Marie’s aunt and uncle, we needed to swing by the Little Hut Sandwich Shop in Ridley Park, which is not far from where they live. Apparently, Chris is under strict orders to always bring his grandmother a big cheesesteak from this little takeaway counter whenever he visits.

Boy, you want to see people fight? City of Brotherly Love my eye, you just watch what happens when a newbie wanting to visit Philadelphia asks where he should go to get an “authentic” Philly cheesesteak. I think fans of one shop literally drive across town and beat people up for what was said on the internet about somebody else’s. I once defended Roy’s Cheesesteaks here in the ‘burbs of Atlanta as being as authentic as what you can get in Philadelphia, as Roy is actually from Cherry Hill. One guy told me “he isn’t there any more, is he?” and another said that Cherry Hill’s not Philadelphia. I took a lesson from internet fights that I once spent far too long fighting, and withdrew after the first round.

Oh, we just had a ball getting to this place. See, I printed maps of each little area that we would visit and, naively, assumed that you could just take I-95 down from New York into Philly. The Jersey Turnpike isn’t really I-95, even though it’s the same road. To continue on I-95, you actually have to detour onto one of a number of perimeter highways. Thankfully, Marie had to foresight to buy an atlas just in case, and pointed out that if we continued south on the Turnpike without exiting, then we would end up in Wilmington without seeing Philly at all. This remarkably confusing problem is detailed at Wikipedia across several pages; in short, this is one of the only interstates in the country that has two separate legs, and requires drivers to use other highways to get from one to the other.

Detouring via, I think, I-195 and I-295 around Trenton just to stay on the road we wanted was actually the second weird disappointment of the day. After our wonderful trip to Boston, we drove as far as someplace in Connecticut called Cromwell for the night. We had slept pretty decently at a Super 8 and looked around for some breakfast. I can’t remember where we ended up and I’m hesitant to name it for fear of shaming the wrong place, but it was a diner and Marie wanted pie for breakfast and they served her a piece with mold on it. Seriously.

The morning was spent driving through northeastern sprawl. The highway skirted around New Haven for the most part, and then through the disagreeably ugly Bridgeport. In time, I-95 carried us through the Bronx and Queens (cue the customary verse of “Dose Were Da Days”) and across the George Washington Bridge, eventually putting us onto the Jersey Turnpike. If you remember July 2009, you might recall that the feds came down on a half-dozen or more elected officials in New Jersey for corruption. I had a little frisson of excitement hearing about this on the news as we continued, but happily, we made it out of the state before the FBI closed the borders or anything to stop any of these crooks from leaving town.

We got to Philly a little after one. The northeastern neighborhoods are ugly as sin, but the downtown is breathtaking, the bridges are gorgeous and I love how all the ballparks and arenas are in one area. We got a glimpse of the Spectrum, which was demolished about a month later. We made our way to Ridley Park and found Little Hut very easily. The teeny place only does carry-out orders, though they do have a picnic table outside.

After enjoying some great conversation with the couple who were working the counter and learning about their shop, Marie and I split a giant mushroom cheesesteak and it was just amazingly yummy. The bread was soft and chewy, and the meat was seasoned just right. Neither of us had a cheesesteak that good before, and, other than Roy’s, haven’t had one that good since, although Woody’s comes pretty close. We had a bag of Herr’s brand chips and washed it down with a Hank’s orange cream soda. Amazingly, Marie’s aunt and uncle live only about two miles from Little Hut but haven’t got around to trying them. We made sure to let ’em know where to go next time they get a hankerin’ for a steak sandwich like this.