I don’t know whether we’ll ever manage it, but I had it in mind, a month or so ago, that Marie and I might could visit all of the SEC schools and feature at least one restaurant from each in this blog. On the one hand, we’re in Athens, Knoxville and Nashville kind of regularly anyway, but on the other, that would mean a trip to the benighted Gainesville, Florida. Auburn, however, seemed like a decent test of the waters, since it’s only about an hour west of Columbus. Plus, I have a very reliable guide to the town in the form of my friend Cheryl. Continue reading “Mrs. Story’s Dairy Bar, Opelika AL”
Category: alabama
Milo’s Hamburgers, Birmingham AL
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 learned that they’re not actually open for lunch on Saturdays. Insanity. Who ever heard of a barbecue joint that wasn’t open for lunch on a Saturday? Well, I say that, but they’re out there. The wonderful Hot Thomas in Watkinsville, near Athens, started a schedule some years back that’s basically the least convenient set of hours anybody ever tried to open, and never, madly, on Saturday. Continue reading “Milo’s Hamburgers, Birmingham AL”
Gus’s Hot Dogs, Birmingham AL
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 never cottoned to buying an atlas or anything like that, traveling anywhere back then meant pointing my car in the general direction and seeing what turned up. In Birmingham’s case, it meant driving back and forth down the mostly deserted downtown streets marveling at what appeared to be a heck of a lot of hot dog restaurants. The impression that I got was during the working week, the city has a thriving financial base which supports nine or ten hot dog businesses. I don’t know whether that’s true – I’ve never sat down with anybody from Birmingham and really talked about the town – but that’s the impression that I got. Continue reading “Gus’s Hot Dogs, Birmingham AL”
Buffalo Rock
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 Steverino’s was a complete revelation. Not only did they serve up the biggest sandwiches I’d ever seen, they delivered them. This changed everything. Continue reading “Buffalo Rock”
Miss Myra’s Pit Bar-B-Q, Birmingham AL
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 in Tuscaloosa and he’d never heard of it until I asked him about it. Heck, the girl we spoke with at a fair trade importer right in the heart of downtown Birmingham had only a vague idea what we were talking about. I don’t know that it’s as accurate to call it a regional delicacy as it is some weird thing that only a scattered few oddballs know about. Continue reading “Miss Myra’s Pit Bar-B-Q, Birmingham AL”
Marie, Let's Eat! 