Hambones BBQ and Chapman Drugs, Hapeville GA

This past Friday after work, I drove down to Hapeville, an inside-the-perimeter suburb best known for being that place in Atlanta where the airport is, and was very pleasantly surprised to find some genuinely amazing barbecue at Hambones, a restaurant that I hadn’t heard of before last month. Sadly, I don’t remember where I heard about it beyond “Facebook.” Nobody has (yet) stepped forward to let me know it was them, or one of their friends, who mentioned the place, so I don’t know whom I should thank, but man, somebody’s due a handshake.

Hambones has been open for several years on a side street off the main drag (Central Avenue) through town. In a really weird bit of real estate, it is within sight of another barbecue place called Pit Boss. I had considered just doing a sandwich and stew at each place, but it didn’t work out that way, because the amount of food that Hambones serves up is pretty ridiculously huge. I had the “Q and Stew” lunch special, which comes with a big sandwich, a bucket of stew, a shot glass of a second side and a Big Gulp-sized drink for under nine bucks, and so Pit Boss will have to wait for another visit.

On a side note, I have been totally lucking out lately in finding places with amazingly good Brunswick stew. It’s like the food gods are paying me back for that awful, wretched stew that I had at Georgia Pig down in Glynn County last month. In April, I’ve been knocked out by how good the stew has been at Speedi-Pig, Dave Poe’s and now at Hambones. The stew here is thick with chicken, pork, corn, tomatoes and lima beans and I really enjoyed it hugely.

Hambones nominally opens at 11, but in reality, the doors are unlocked a little early, because the lunch crowd this place gets is huge and in a hurry. The setup is a little unusual. They have a carry-out register at the bar, and a small register for dine-in orders. The register set-up, in any other business, would look like the place where you bring your check on the way out, rather than a “order first” window with a big menu board. The lunch line is long, and you pick up a menu on the way to the small register. The design of the place is no-frills, with mismatched chairs, large, dark interiors with a few scattered TVs tuned to ESPN, and a hideous overuse of the awful Comic Sans font on all the menus and labels. It is the polar opposite of a franchise chain, as it should be.

At any rate, when you order the lunch special, you get your choice of chopped pork, chicken or beef. They will serve it sliced or pulled for a fifty-cent fee. I also noticed that they charge fifty cents extra for fries, which is very unusual. Many places, including Dave Poe’s, will charge you an extra half dollar for the stew but call fries a regular side. I later learned that Hambones makes their fries in-house and they are very popular. Perhaps I should have tried those.

The pork is very tender and very smoky and doesn’t need sauce, but there are three on the table and they are all very good. The house sauce is a traditional red tomato-vinegar mix, and the house hot sauce is the same, only amped up with peppers. I liked this one best, but I was also quite taken with the rib sauce, a black mixture which tasted to me like there was less vinegar in it. In all, this was a quite good meal, with a lot of food served up with a lot of character for a very fair price.

I wasn’t quite done with Hapeville, because I heard about a soda fountain in town and so I went to go get some dessert. Central Avenue forms a main street through the small city. We’d driven through it some months back, during the short barbecue tour that the family took in January after the ice storm, to get from the I-75 corridor south of the city over to College Park. Driving through it, I could then feel the icy fingers of my past crawling along my spine. I think that this girl whom I inadvisedly dated for a few months way back when I was in high school lived around here.

There are just a few retail places along Central that are still open, with several restaurants keeping traffic coming through. Chapman Drugs is located next to the Freemason lodge, and there’s plenty of twenty minute street parking; just enough to grab something from the pharmacy and a milkshake or a limeade. I had two-scoop malt with peach and vanilla and it was just wonderful. Every milkshake should be that good.

Chapman Drugs is, inconveniently, not open on Saturdays. (Neither is Hambones, for that matter. I have to curl an eyebrow over barbecue joints where you can’t get a Saturday lunch.) This does raise the issue of when Marie will be able to come down here and enjoy a milkshake with me, but she’ll have a maternity leave in a month or so, and I think she will certainly be due an awesome milkshake. Maybe we can visit Pit Boss as well for lunch first and I can see which of the two barbecue places on Virginia Avenue I prefer.

Morelli’s Gourmet Ice Cream, Atlanta GA

Over the previous two chapters, I’ve related our wonderfully fun barbecue tour of some areas south of the city. We capped this off by getting some ice cream in East Atlanta. I read about Morelli’s on Urbanspoon and added it to my wishlist a couple of months ago. By a happy coincidence, our friends Victoria and James moved over to that neighborhood – just around the corner from it – a few months ago and have been raving about it. When we met them for lunch last month, we agreed that we needed to get together again and see whether all the fuss over this ice cream was warranted.

What happened here is that the owner, Donald Sargent, was looking for a new business opportunity, found a space that a Bruster’s was leaving, invested in all their equipment and started turning out some of the most decadent and wild flavors in the city. They go through 150 or more gallons of heavy cream each week making their ice cream. They have the expected chocolate and cookies and cream and other fun, traditional flavors, but they’ve also got some pretty wild ones. These include the very popular maple bacon and the possibly more popular salted caramel, and some that are way off in la-la land like olive oil, feta and sweet corn.

Two years ago, Bon Appetit named Morelli’s one of the five best ice cream parlors in the country, singling out their coconut jalapeño and ginger lavender. There’s been a line ever since.

Service here can be a little slow, in part because the terrific, friendly staff will let guests try one or two samples before making an order, but we got here between rushes around 3:30 and didn’t have a very long wait. My only quibble was that they didn’t assemble Marie’s chocolate sundae very well. It was delicious, but it was a challenge for Marie to eat it before it toppled over!

I had a cup of salted caramel, and, still stuffed from barbecue, could not finish it, but boy, I enjoyed what I had. Even more critical than the flavor was the texture of the ice cream. This just really tasted freshly mixed. It hadn’t been sitting in that freezer for very long at all. Oooh, and apparently, I have since learned, they’ll let you mix half-scoops in a single cup. I bet a half-vanilla half-caramel is just amazing.

Victoria’s just a couple of weeks from having her boy, and so she and Marie had a lot to talk about. We enjoyed kicking back on Morelli’s patio for probably a little longer than etiquette might have suggested, since there were plenty of people in line and looking for a table, but you know, we ate an awful lot last Saturday and I needed to sit down for a while. We’ll have to go visit our friends again very soon, once we have some babies to introduce to each other, and try another restaurant in the neighborhood… and then pop back for some dessert here.

The Chocolaterie, Cumming GA

Boy, howdy, is it ever a good thing we don’t live very close to this place. We don’t have an awful lot of money at the best of times and have a baby on the way. This place could very, very easily blow one heck of a hole in a fellow’s wallet. Hoo, boy.

So a couple of Sundays ago, Marie and I celebrated her birthday with an afternoon together. We had lunch at Sam’s and then drove north through Roswell and Crabapple and up Georgia-372, which is called Birmingham Highway for some reason. This is a very pretty drive, past million dollar homes and gorgeous trees and into Cherokee County. Eventually, this put us sort of east of Ball Ground, near a retirement community called Big Canoe, and that sent us into the southwest corner of Forsyth County and our destination, Poole’s Mill Bridge Park.

Marie and I both love covered bridges and waterfalls, and this has both. Well, it’s more of a cascade than a waterfall, I suppose. The bridge is no longer open to vehicles, but visitors can walk through it, and play in the shallow river as it hits the rapids. It’s a quiet and secluded spot, but popular enough to bring several couples, dog walkers and families. We stayed for quite some time, and left as a birthday party was arriving in the covered pavilion.

Around 2:30, we continued east, crossed Georgia-400 and wound our way behind an enormous, upscale development off exit 13. I’d been here three or four times when I worked in Alpharetta and we celebrated co-worker’s birthdays at either Ted’s Montana Grill or Red Robin. There’s a movie theatre and a Barnes & Noble here and, a few doors down from a Stride Rite shoe store, a place that sells some of the most decadent chocolates in the city.

The Chocolaterie’s specialty is truffles, and they don’t scrimp on these. Priced at between $1.75 and $2.50 apiece, guests are not going to gorge themselves here, but they are going to get incredibly high quality with every bite. We selected a half dozen from the forty or fifty available – one for me and five for Marie – and I’ve never tasted anything like them. I made my key lime truffle last for several very small nibbles, not willing for the experience to end. And I don’t have that much of a sweet tooth. I thought Marie was going to black out and fall over.

The shop is filled with other imported treats and snacks, and they also do fudge and other drool-worthy things. For guests looking for something a little cooler, there are little single-servings of Edy’s, Ben & Jerry’s and Itti-Bitz, priced right at just a dollar or a buck-fifty each.

Perhaps the most exciting thing in their case was one that I decided to save for later. They do a small number of really spicy truffles, too. I am incredibly curious about the ghost pepper one. It’s decorated to look like a little white-sheeted kiddie haunted house ghost. Or maybe I’ll work my way up the spicy truffles until I get to that one. Marie will definitely want to return more than once; I expect I’ll have many chances.

Other blog posts about the Chocolaterie:

Atlanta Food Critic (Feb. 28 2011)
Roots in Alpharetta (Sep. 16 2011)

Bubba Garcia’s Mexican Cantina and Zuzu’s, Saint Simons Island GA

I was just saying last month that the presence of Jack Davis artwork is a sure sign of a restaurant’s quality, and here, for the third time this year, is a place with his wonderful and distinctive art emblazoned for all the world to see. Never mind the Zagat sticker in the window, does a place get a thumbs up from one of Mad Magazine’s Usual Gang of Idiots, that’s what I’d like to know. Bubba Garcia’s, a small cantina owned by the same group on Saint Simons Island behind the popular Gnat’s Landing, goes one better than even the good places this year with caricatures of the owners – Old Brick Pit and Mayflower Restaurant – by having the business’s mascot be a signed Jack Davis creation. Continue reading “Bubba Garcia’s Mexican Cantina and Zuzu’s, Saint Simons Island GA” →

Yoder’s Deitsch Haus, Montezuma GA

So Thursday of last week, I went by one of the cafeterias on our to-do list of Roadfood.com-reviewed restaurants, and on Friday, the four of us visited another one. We took a trip down to visit Marie’s mother and father on Saint Simons Island, a trip that puts us within striking distance of six of the remaining restaurants on that list – five in middle Georgia and one in Savannah. I decided that we’d take the furthest one from the highway, Yoder’s Deitsch Haus. If the rumblings that I’ve been hearing about gas prices are true, I figured we should probably visit the one farthest away now, while gas is only about $3.50 a gallon. Yoder’s is about thirty miles south of Macon and then fifteen miles west of the interstate, and it’s probably worth the trip with gasoline at twice the price.

Boy, this is beautiful country down here. Much of the land in this chunk of middle Georgia around Montezuma and Americus is owned and farmed by Mennonites, as is the restaurant, bakery and country store that we visited. It’s the greenest grass you’ve ever seen, and unusually dense with black and white cows clustering around streams and milling around twisted and gnarled trees. The presence of the extended Yoder family is apparent as you drive west out State Route 26, with some of the roads that feed into the main highway sharing their name as well as the businesses. The cafeteria is set up in a large, unassuming building with a small sign out front, and staffed by servers wearing the faith’s traditional, modest dress. There’s plenty of parking, and space for buses from churches all over the state to bring in groups to eat here.

In the previous chapter, I noted that at Matthews, I had a pretty good meal. That’s not a complaint; dozens of inferior restaurants serve far worse within walking distance of that business. At Yoder’s Deitsch Haus, however, we had a genuinely terrific meal with even lower prices. I’m really glad that I didn’t do these two restaurants in reverse; I’m much more pleased to have my family share such good food with me here.

Like most cafeterias – well, apparently, I think that, prior to Matthews, it had been about six years since I’ve been in one – guests can select a salad first, and then a dessert. At Yoder’s, this could be a tremendously dangerous choice, because you could probably just sit down to four slices of pie and call it the best meal of your life. I’ll come back to that. Should you go, try and restrain yourself and select your meat and two. Marie and I each had pot roast, which was very, very good. My son had fried chicken, which was even better, and my daughter had sausages, which were evidently amazing, but she gobbled the darn things up so quickly that nobody else got to try a nibble.

But as good as the meats here are, the vegetables are even better. I was a little discouraged by the dull iceberg lettuce in the salad, but all the other veggies were quite excellent, especially the beets. I could have just had a bowl of those and the dressing. Marie says that we shouldn’t call it thousand island dressing so much as “inspired by” it, so I’ll take her lead. We each had creamed corn, which was excellent, and various other treats. My son was not as taken with his mashed potatoes, which he thought were lumpy, but my daughter loved her cheesy potatoes and Marie quite liked her green beans.

Oh, but then, these desserts. Marie had a slice of cherry pie, which she said was amazing. My daughter had chocolate, which she insisted was better. My son had peanut butter, which he not only insisted was better than either of theirs’, but even better than the peanut butter pie that he had at Zarzour’s in Chattanooga three weeks previously. True to form, he then got out his phone and updated his Facebook so that all his friends stuck in fifth period could see that, once again, my boy was out on a family trip lording his awesome desserts over them. But then I allowed my children each a single small nibble of my slice of shoofly pie, which is a crazy, thick and sticky melange of molasses and brown sugar and both children wept. This is the best pie on the entire planet. Gas could get up to seven bucks a gallon, and if you come by I-75 exit 127 in Georgia, you’re still going to want to pull over and drive the thirty mile round trip for a slice of this. Marie said that it was all right, but she likes fruit pies better. Marie is, occasionally and rarely, hopelessly mistaken on points like this.

After lunch, I thanked the staff and we wandered over to the country store. My daughter and I were distracted by a goat named Martha, whom you may feed for fifty cents. Martha probably won’t allow you to pet her unless you shell out for some food first, I noticed. In the country store, we considered buying some licorice or horehound for the road, but settled on a jar of locally-made blueberry jam. Marie’s hoping to make pancakes one morning this weekend so we can try that out. The girl at the register was very amused by the two-dollar bills that we used to pay for it.

We then enjoyed the nice ride back to the interstate, bought some gasoline while it’s still only $3.50, and made our way across the state to the coast. It’s a straight shot down Georgia 26 to Hawkinsville, where you can pick up US 341, the old Golden Isles Parkway, and take the two and a bit hour last leg to Brunswick. This is probably worth discussing a little more should we actually stop along the way and eat on this road, but I find this a much more pleasant ride than the interstate, with only one mind-numbing segment, the twenty-odd miles just east of Jesup. Then Marie drove around Brunswick down every fool road in town for half an hour before she got to the causeway. Well, she lived here for years; nostalgia can do this to a driver. And she drove right past Willie’s Wee-Nee Wagon, which is on our to-do list for a later visit, so we can’t hold it against her.

Dutch Dreams, Toronto ON

(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, I’ll tell you about them.)

So the second day of our road trip started out somewhere on the south side of Pittsburgh. I had hoped to actually make it into the city for the night, but we lingered too long down in Charleston and couldn’t quite stay awake long enough to get to our destination motel and so we stopped at a Super 8 somewhere south of town. For breakfast, we drove to an Eat n’ Park, possibly the one in the suburb of Bridgeville. This is a small chain based in the Ohio Valley with, according to Wikipedia, 75 stores in the area. While the restaurants started in 1949 as drive-ins with roller skating car hops, it is very similar to a Denny’s today.

The plan was to have lunch up the road in Buffalo with my friend Jennifer at the world-famous Anchor Bar, but we spent the whole day running earlier than planned and arrived in town about an hour and a half before they opened and opted against waiting. So we met up with Jennifer, whom I met a couple of years earlier when she lived in Savannah and would come up to Atlanta for concerts, instead at a coffee shop downtown and just had a small lunch with pastries. I briefly considered catching the Buffalo Bisons, who, as it turned out (I learned much later) were hosting my beloved Toledo Mud Hens, but instead we made our way over to Niagara Falls like six or seven million previous honeymooners. We spent a little while there and then drove over to Toronto to meet up with our good friends Dave and Shaindle. We did some shopping at some Toronto institutions like The Beguiling, Sonic Boom and the now sadly closed Pages, and had supper at Nataraj, an Indian place which has also since closed, and then made our way to the York neighborhood for dessert at Dutch Dreams.

Interestingly enough, throughout the trip, Marie and I ate at only one place where one of us had been previously. In Marie’s case, this would be a popular restaurant in her college town of Middlebury, and in mine, this completely wonderful ice cream parlor that Dave and Shaindle have taken me to visit on each of my three trips to Toronto. Dutch Dreams is a hugely popular place with a really long line almost all of the time, and that’s with only about half of its business wanting to stay and eat among the few, cramped tables in the back. The ice cream here is simply the definition of decadence. If I lived in York, I would weigh 400 pounds. They serve up giant scoops and somehow manage to put gigantic toppings in the cone with them, making it a challenge for anybody to chow one down before it melts all over the place.

Dutch Dreams is a family-owned business. Theo Aben’s father opened the place and put the young man to work serving customers at the age of 12. I don’t know whether Theo has been in the store on the occasions that I’ve visited, and so I did enjoy this interview with him over at Good Food Revolution. There, he describes his upbringing and the great difficulty in predicting what’s going to sell out before they place a reorder from the facility where they buy their ice cream. It’s also completely impossible to predict how the line for dessert is going to work. My personal take is that dozens of drivers who previously had no intention of stopping will pass through, occasionally see the line looking short, screech to a halt, desperately look around the side streets for someplace to park and rush in. The periodic absence of a long line artificially creates demand, but since they don’t close until one in the morning, there’s plenty of time to get your dessert.

I apologize for not having any photos of my own of Dutch Dreams, but it was dark when we went, and since we weren’t writing a food blog then anyway, it didn’t strike either of us as essential to try and shoot it. I also don’t feel right borrowing other folks’ photos for this blog. The store was probably much brighter when it was first cobbled together around 1980, and much of the paint is old and peeling now, but it is nevertheless a beautifully thrown-together collage of kitsch and color, with photos of Dutch royalty next to ancient statues of clowns. The shelves across from the ice cream counter are packed with imported candies and other foods, including homemade stroopwaffels, and there are cows on the ceiling. The whole thing is a feast for guests’ eyes, and you can see some examples of what it looks like with a quick Google search, or just visit Blog TO’s page on the place.

Toronto is really full of good restaurants. The next day, we had an early lunch at the George Street Diner, which was pretty good, before hitting the 401 and heading east. Some other places that I’ve enjoyed on previous visits are Shanghai Cowgirl, a rowdy and silly burger and sandwich place on Queen Street not too far from the Silver Snail comic shop, Fran’s, a classic-style diner right across the street from Massey Hall, and The Ben Wicks, a terrific pub in Cabbagetown opened by the late cartoonist. It’s a shame that baby expenses and other things will almost certainly keep us from Toronto this year, because we’d love to visit Shaindle and Dave again and enjoy all the good eating.

Blossom Deli, Charleston WV (CLOSED)

Well, here’s an interesting turn-up for our blog. This is the first time that I’ve written anything about a restaurant which has apparently changed dramatically since we actually visited it. In fact, when I decided back in October to do these honeymoon flashback chapters, I realized that I would unfortunately be writing a little obituary for Blossom Deli in Charleston, but that only lasted a couple of weeks before word got out that the place would be reopening under new ownership. In December, Blossom reopened to a lot of goodwill, best wishes and crossed fingers.

This is a restaurant with a very curious and fun history. Apparently, the original Blossom Dairy was started in the 1920s by one Samuel Sloman. He eventually branched out to old-fashioned lunch counters, and there were somewhere between six and ten of them in the region. It’s one of these stores, opened in 1938, that is still with us, although no longer in family hands and after several periods of closure and neglect. It’s in downtown Charleston on Quarrier Street, and the original version apparently stuck around for at least fifteen years – Mr. Sloman passed away in 1953 – but eventually shuttered and lay dormant for years. I’ve found conflicting reports as to exactly when the original Blossom Dairy closed, and for how long this period of closure lasted, so take what you hear with a grain of salt. I’ve even heard tell that at some point in the eighties, the building was an all-ages punk club.

I’ll tell you what’s really neat to think about. You know the Nero Wolfe adventure Too Many Cooks? Well, possibly not. Anyway, the action takes place at a fictionalized version of the exclusive West Virginia retreat Kanawha Spa. If we can imagine that Archie Goodwin would have been asked by the state’s attorney’s office to return to Charleston to give evidence in the capital murder case that would have followed the events of that story, then it stands to reason that Archie would have gone somewhere for a corned beef sandwich and two glasses of milk. I didn’t actually enjoy that particular novel, finding it dated and Wolfe’s views on race patronizing, but I liked it a lot more when I realized that, having never been to Manhattan, the Blossom Dairy is the first place I’ve visited that Archie Goodwin might have also been. And it looks much the same as it would have back then.

At any rate, after however long a period of closure, the Blossom reopened, now called Blossom Deli but retaining the original signage. Changing the sign would have been a crime against cuisine, fashion, design and history, anyway. Just look at that awesome art deco block lettering and all that red and the entryway’s beautiful curves. If that doesn’t make you want to put on a wartime-era suit and hat to go in for a milkshake, you probably need to put down the cell phone and quit texting teenagers, kid.

Under the more modern management, Blossom Deli turned into a restaurant so impressive that I described it as being what Marietta Diner wants to be when it grows up. It had evolved into what’s a said-to-be-awesome sandwich shop in the daytime, and then at night, they turn the lights down and pull out the tablecloths and have a very upscale supper menu in place. At all times, they serve fabulous desserts. Marie had a chocolate mousse that was so rich and amazing that even she couldn’t finish it, but she retired it with a big smile on her face. We stopped in about a half hour after finishing supper several blocks away at Bluegrass Kitchen. I don’t suppose there’s any tactful way to tell somebody that you’re going to pass on their dessert and go get a sweet treat someplace else, but when the goal is to visit several places in a community, that’s what you need to do.

Blossom is about a block-and-a-half from a really super independent bookstore called Taylor Books, which has been hanging on and serving its community during this tough recession and the general battering that indie sellers have taken over the last few years. We left town very impressed, and while our hearts would later be stolen by Asheville, we certainly saw downtown Charleston as a place where we could be very happy. When you add in the delightful conversation that we had at Bluegrass Kitchen, it looked like a really fantastic community, and that’s why I got genuinely upset, doing a little research into the restaurants that we visited, to find the team at Fork You writing, in September, about Blossom Deli’s impending demise.

Since then, I’ve been following the story as new links have emerged. Here are three news stories about Blossom – apparently, for legal reasons, no longer “Dairy” nor “Deli” – and its latest incarnation, which opened on December 2nd. (One, Two, and Three.) The new ownership team of Jay Cipoletti, Mark Hartling and James Nester, with chef Matthew Grover, have inherited a lot of goodwill and a lot of hope. They are presently open only for lunch, their upscale supper plans on hold until they find their feet a little better. We may be seven hours away and unlikely to return anytime soon, but I certainly wish them the best, and a long and successful career in that awesome building.