Canyons Burger Company, Woodstock GA

(Grant here to start this one off. For a tragically short few months, the town of Woodstock was home to a really superb burger joint that I don’t think anybody else but us ever visited. It was called Bob-O’s Burgers and Chili and it was in that same little strip mall as the Play & Trade and the ’50s-style diner and the Summit Tavern, and it was amazing. They served up Vortex-quality hamburgers made from all sorts of meat, including a cajun burger made from beef mixed with andouille sausage quite unlike anything else in the area, and chili so good you’d slap your mother for another bowl. We then tried Canyons, found it quite good but nowhere close to the greatness of Bob-O’s, and didn’t return until our hearts were broken by the better joint’s closure. That’s not to take away from all that’s good and tasty about the justifiably popular Canyons, but it is evidence that once in a while, the foodie network in Atlanta really does get hold of the wrong stick. In a fair and just world, both restaurants would thrive.)

This is Marie, contributing an entry entirely devoid of desserts, for once. This time I am talking about Canyons, one of the places we occasionally visit instead of a quick trip to Cheeseburger Bobby’s. Canyons, which has two locations, one in Woodstock and one in Atlanta’s Brookhaven neighborhood, apparently used to be independent but was acquired by Baja Fresh something like a year ago. They’ve just started the franchising process and have opened a third Canyons, co-branded with the burrito place, out in Montana.

As you can tell, we’re rather fond of sandwich and burger joints. A place has to have a little something extra in order to bring us back on a regular basis, though, and what brings me back is the sweet potato fries. The burgers are definitely tasty, but this is one of the few places where I actually finish my portion of fries and wistfully think about ordering another. That is, if we are doing the very sensible 50/50 order, which is half regular and half sweet potato. This is the only place I’ve seen to offer that option and I wish more places would offer it because really, who needs a bucket of fries the size of your head as a single portion? These are clearly intended to be shared. They shamelessly put “great” next to the sweet potato fries on their online menu, and I can’t blame them a bit.

There is regrettably no photo of the burgers from this visit, but honestly there’s nothing to pick them out of a crowd visually. It’s all in the taste. The owners talk a good game about quality Angus beef and never freezing their meat and so forth, and we’ve heard those tales from other places that weren’t exactly thrilling, but so far Canyons has come through on every meal we’ve eaten there. They offer the usual toppings plus a few extra oddities like chipotle mayonnaise. Ivy got their chicken once and although it’s a tad pricier than usual, that seems to be because they have good quality meat there too. She really enjoyed dipping the strips into the house BBQ sauce.

The decor of the place is very much reminiscent of a sports bar, although they always seem to keep the volume muted. The place has a number of flat screens usually tuned to various sporting events, though there’s generally at least one screen devoted to some popular show or other. Occasionally they remember to put the captions on. Aside from that, the pictures on the wall are all good-quality poster-size photos of people doing active things like mountain climbing. (Grant adds: That seems to be an odd shtick, but they’re consistent with it. Canyons tries to sell itself as the treat you can enjoy after a hard day climbing up and down the Adirondacks or something. Suffice it to say that a fellow could get a little self-conscious looking at giant pictures of fit, smiling runners while trying to enjoy a juicy burger.)

We would probably eat here a little more often if it were more convenient to get to, and if the bar next door, Pure Taquiera, had a slightly better taste in music. The live band last Saturday night was particularly awful! Strangely, although they offer milkshakes we haven’t actually tried one. Probably on our next visit.

The Grill, Athens GA

This is Marie, talking about The Grill in Athens, GA. Technically this visit involved desserts because I had a shake for dinner, you see.

This place has been around long enough that some of their “decor” is actually just old stuff they never took out, like the juke box attachments for the booths along the walls. The place has a lot of character. Of course it has the kitschy old style signs for beverages that no longer exist or were sold for a nickel. However, they also have a divider down the middle of the room that has glass display cases full of strange antique toys, comics and collectibles. There’s no way to take a picture of the stuff that would turn out, and I wouldn’t want to spoil the amusement factor of seeing the old toys and silly things in those displays. I wouldn’t recommend using their rest room either if you can avoid it, unless you are into the really old-fashioned kind, or you collect really bizarre bathroom graffiti. Continue reading “The Grill, Athens GA” →

The Varsity Jr., Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

I knew that at some point, Marie and I would have to use the blog to spread the unfortunate word about a much-loved restaurant closing, and write up an obituary tribute. I certainly never expected that I would be doing this about The Varsity Jr. on Lindbergh Drive and I’m still amazed that we’re saying goodbye to it before we had the chance to take the camera down to the main location on North Avenue for a proper entry on this Atlanta landmark.

According to the restaurant, it’s a stupid problem with city politics that have doomed the landmark after forty-five years. In a letter to their customers (available as well on the restaurant’s website), the owners explain that the time was long past for an overhaul of the old building, but their architects could not come to an agreement with the city planners. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that one sticking point was the number of driveways, of all things.

This has almost coincided with the groundbreaking of a new Varsity up north in Dawsonville. Apart from the two inside the perimeter and one in Athens, there have long been suburban Varsities northward up all three arteries out of the city, in Norcross, Alpharetta and within walking distance of us in Kennerietta. There is also, incidentally, a really small mini-Varsity in Waleska on the campus of Reinhardt College. I thought that was top secret city lore, but somebody blabbed it onto Wikipedia. Anyway, so the Varsity Jr. is effectively moving to Dawsonville, leaving behind a lot of history and memories.

Almost exactly twenty years ago, Atlanta was suffering a heat wave that would make the current one seem like an autumn breeze. I was driving around my circuit of record stores that August in my second car, a giant, two-door Oldsmobile Delta 88 without air conditioning. I felt like I was about to pass out from the heat, and I stopped into the Varsity Jr. to cool off.

I haven’t thought about this in years, and my present-day self is a little sheepishly embarrassed by how silly I was acting at age eighteen, but I remember that I ordered two small Varsity Oranges – not the better known “F.O.” Frosted Orange, but their tasty not-very-carbonated drink – and a large cup of ice water. I sat in the dining room and slowly drank one of the orange sodas and then took the other drinks outside into the hundred-and-seven degree heat. I took a deep breath, lifted the water cup above my head and slowly poured that out over me. I’m sure that it felt very good at the time. I was an ostentatious kid.

I have lots of silly memories about the place. Many of them seem to have a little sadness around the edges. When my son was just a few weeks old, he decided to go live at Scottish Rite for a month with supraventricular tachycardia. His mother and I subsided on hospital food for several days before I ventured out to get something tasty. I brought back two boxes from Varsity Jr. and stood in an elevator with about six other sad-eyed parents and visitors and grease running up both my sleeves. “Boy, that smells good,” one of them said. By the time we reached the intensive care floor, I was lucky to escape with all my food.

I also remember something really unhappy. The Varsity Jr.’s location was absolutely perfect for a quick walk before or after a movie at the Tara Theater across the street. About five years ago, I took a young lady to see Howl’s Moving Castle. We were on our way to the restaurant for a late dinner afterwards and she started spinning a yarn about an ex-boyfriend that she claimed was stalking her. The subsequent conversation, after we got our food, about the constant danger she felt turned out to be both a gigantic warning sign and a great big old lie that still actively aggravates me. There’s not been a meal here since that I didn’t feel the desire to stand in front of that booth, reach backwards in time and punch myself in the jaw.

On Saturday, Marie and the kids and I had an early lunch here to say goodbye. Between us, we had three burgers with pimento cheese and four dogs, two with slaw, one with chili and one naked. We had two orders of fries, one order of rings, two FOs and one small Coke. Only a mild case of indigestion and artery-clogging followed.

We’ll have to get to the main location again before too much longer and write that up. Heaven knows I direct enough tourists that direction every week; I’m rather overdue. But Cheshire Bridge and Lindbergh without a Varsity is just crazy talk. Where are we supposed to eat after seeing a movie at the Tara now?

Zesto, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

I think that one of the most interesting little facets to following the world of restaurants is finding little fast food chains that only exist in a city or two. Last month, I mentioned Milo’s in Birmingham, a chain better known for its amazing sweet tea, and how it co-exists in north Alabama with another chain called Jack’s. Each of them manage to survive on the same interstate exits as the better-known national chains like McDonald’s and Burger King. I’m not saying you’ll get really great hamburgers at places like this, but I firmly believe that they’re important, that they give regions their own, special identity, and that anybody – traveler or resident – who’d stop at a national chain over a small regional one when they just want a quick $3.99 value meal has got a seven-inch screw loose somewhere.

There are probably a lot more of these types of restaurants than anybody really knows about. Locals will often overlook them, mistakenly figuring that national success is a measure of quality, and treat these restaurants as oddball minor league wannabes. On the other hand, because the foodie subculture emphasizes (a) independently-owned single locations and (b) really great meals, regional chains only rarely come up in the conversations. They just don’t fit the topic, you might say. I noticed that in Asheville, there is at least one outlet of the Greensboro-based Cook Out, a chain 75 units strong that has not left the state of North Carolina. I’m very curious to try that one day, but honestly, can anybody count just how many superior meals we’d be skipping if we stopped into Cook Out over all the other really great places in Asheville?

Similarly, Atlanta has at least two chains that nobody ever talks about. Neither will serve up spectacular meals, but they’ll do them quickly and cheaply and, hopefully, with a lot of local character. One of these days, I need to tell you about Martin’s, a chain of fifteen stores that’s only open for breakfast and lunch. Twelve of their stores are all northeast of the metro area and only one is as far south as Clayton County, and it tastes a lot like Hardee’s did before Carl’s Jr. bought them out. Martin’s basically illustrates my definition outside Atlanta’s I-285 perimeter, and Zesto is what I’m talking about inside the perimeter.

To be strictly accurate, while Zesto, today, is a regional chain with six stores, back in the 1940s its ancestor corporation was about as large as a national chain could get in those days. According to the fascinating history on its web site, there were Zestos selling soft-serve ice cream in 46 states. I imagine that it and Tasti-Freez were the two biggest competitors to Dairy Queen.

By 1955, the corporation and its franchises dissolved their agreements, leaving the stores to make it on their own. Almost all of the old Zestos were probably gone within a few years. There are still pockets of otherwise unrelated restaurants here and there throughout the country that use the old name but don’t offer the same menu or ingredients, including three around Columbia, South Carolina that appear to be uniquely owned, but the Zesto restaurants in Atlanta have thrived and grown a little.

There are five Zestos in the city, plus with a more recent arrival in the teeny town of Tyrone, which is somewhere between Atlanta and Peachtree City, and each of them plays up the “1950s diner” experience. In the case of the store on Ponce de Leon, it really basks in the glow of nostalgic chrome and neon. The food is not at all bad, although nobody ever dropped their Chubby Decker back onto the wax paper in impressed shock at how amazing it was. There’s an amusing story about how the better-known Big Boy threatened to sue Zesto in 1961 over their imitation burger, named, then, a Fat Boy. I’ve always found Zesto’s burgers to be a little dry; adding a little slaw to a Chubby Decker really brings a refreshing flavor to it.

Zesto flirted, for a time, with the “fresh-mex” concept when it became popular in the late ’90s. The restaurant did the unthinkable then and converted their location on Piedmont Road into a sister restaurant called Burrito Brothers. In time, this was scaled back, and now three of the six stores are discreetly “co-branded” this way, offering tacos and nachos on the menu along with the burgers and chicken. I have never got around to trying these, actually. I guess Zesto is just first in my mind as a burger place.

In Marie’s mind, however, Zesto is a milkshake place first and foremost, with burgers just an appetizer to the real thing. So a couple of weeks ago, my daughter had complained that we had not enjoyed a Zesto milkshake lately, and I said we’d get around to it. (Children, as ever, think parents are made of money.) On Saturday, Marie was due to return to Atlanta from her family business in the Netherlands around 7. I figured, rightly, that she was due some pampering after all those sky miles and would appreciate a chocolate banana malt, so the kids and I picked her up and stopped at the Zesto on Ponce for supper.

I had a chili burger that dreamed of being a Varsity chili burger when it grew up and split an order of quite good chicken fingers with my daughter, and my son had a Chubby Decker and slaw. We all shared fries and heard about Marie’s trip and then we indulged in some quite good shakes. I usually either get the caramel or butterscotch, have trouble deciding between even these two simple choices, and have already forgotten which it was. My son had the blueberry, which was awesome. And Marie should have had a chocolate banana malt, only I forgot to ask them to add malt powder and I don’t think that she liked it as much, only she was too polite to mention it.

It’s good to have her home. I mean, we have to go back to Asheville in two days for a festival and more eating, and her being in the Netherlands would make that kind of difficult.

The Vortex, Atlanta GA

You know that saying about how I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend your right to say it? And how sometimes, people say and do things obnoxious enough to give you a little bit of pause and make you wonder whether you really mean it? I’m not necessarily talking about politics, though heaven knows certain BP apologists in Texas really make a man wish that “gag orders” actually entailed the use of ballgags.

The Vortex is an example of what happens when you stick by that rule. It’s democracy in action. You can praise a restaurant for having the greatest, most lovable, take-no-prisoners attitude about stupid customers in the city, if not anywhere. You can cheer when a business stands up and says that, actually, the customer is not always right, and lets you know that in their house, you will follow their rules or get lost. You can shout from the rooftops that finally, there’s a place that gets it, that won’t compromise principles and will not allow idiots to waste their time when they have a business to run. When their business involves selling the best hamburgers that I’ve found in Atlanta, it’s even easier to say “Damn right, the Vortex is exactly the place for me.”

Then you get to stop cheering with your fists in the air when they enforce a rule that you don’t like at all. Hey, mac, you’re the one who demanded that freedom in the first place.

Some years back, the state of Georgia enacted one of the few laws that our legislature has ever come up with that was worth a damn when they restricted smoking in restaurants. Basically, they told restaurants that if they insisted on allowing idiots to smoke, then they couldn’t allow anybody under 18 in their place. The Vortex was one of those places which figured they’d handle the loss of family customers by becoming a haven for smokers, and really didn’t appreciate the government telling them how to conduct their business.

It annoys me that of all the weird predictions that the Judge Dredd comic has made about our society that have come true, we’re stuck with riot foam and constantly expanding waistlines and artificial food, while the best future invention of all has yet to appear. In Dredd’s Mega-City One, smoking is only allowed in buildings called smokatoriums, and nowhere else. They don’t sell the best hamburgers in the city in a smokatorium and they don’t have the best bartender in the city there, either. Her name is Carla and on those very rare occasions I visit the Vortex, it’s an absolute pleasure to sit at the bar and be served by somebody so damn perfect at her job as she is.

It’s not just that I object to smelling cigarette smoke. Heck, I dated a smoker for a few months in 2004, but, as I’ve mentioned a few times previously, that was something of a mistake-filled year. No, it’s not just my own objection to smoking, though I remain convinced that the best burger I’ve found in the city would be even better without that stench in the air, but that I can’t take my family. Marie gave it a try one early evening a couple of years back before the haze got thick, concluded that their burgers are indeed amazing and left in a flash, blinking in the sunlight and breathing with her head between her knees. The kids? They’re not welcome. The signs in the front lobby restating that no, seriously, they really will not seat you if you’re under 18, and that if you have a problem, take it up with your congressmen are hilariously worded, but they’re also a little saddening.

One day last week, I sat at the bar and enjoyed the living daylights out of a Spanish Fly, which is an amazing hamburger served with ground chorizo and Monterrey jack cheese. On this occasion, I had some fries as a side. I only visit maybe once a year, and usually I can’t help myself and order some tater tots. I think the Vortex is principally responsible for the citywide trend of offering the darn things. I don’t know why I ordered them for so many years. It’s not like you’re getting anything from tots other than the nostalgia factor of saying “Hey! I had these in public school,” so heaven knows what the appeal might be. I need to quit that and try the potato salad or something next time.

The Vortex offers a huge list of burgers, and gleefully emphasizes the ones that just aren’t good for anybody. Bacon, fried bananas, eggs, habanero relish, peanut butter… it really is a remarkable menu full of delicious, dangerous things. I’ll really enjoy taking my son in about five years’ time.

I’ve thought about placing a carry-out order for burgers and having a picnic with my family over in Freedom Park. That way, everybody gets to experience how good the food is, but we miss out on the thrill of being in the place. The interior is a trip, a wild, loud, dark, bric-a-brac filled mess that’s somewhere between a dive bar and a very weird diner. So by mixing such a fun design with incredible service, excellent food and their uncompromising attitude, this should be the best restaurant in town.

If only if it wasn’t for that “allowing smoking” business…

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” →

White Tiger Gourmet, Athens GA

I forget where I first heard of this wonderful little place that opened in Athens last year, but it was almost certainly either from Hillary at Flagpole, or that delightful Foodieville WordPress blog which doesn’t get updated very frequently. Either way, somebody whose opinions I trust told me that there were some really good burgers waiting for me at the intersection of Boulevard and Hiawassee. My daughter and I stopped in one day in the spring to try it out and were very satisfied. Continue reading “White Tiger Gourmet, Athens GA” →