Donut King, Snellville GA

One of my favorite foodie blogs is the “increasingly-inaccurately named” (as Douglas Adams might have termed it) Food Near Snellville. I noticed his work several months ago – he and Jennifer Zyman’s Blissful Glutton have been in a war of attrition for the top spot on Urbanspoon for the Atlanta region – and even though he’s based in one of this region’s many traffic-clogged, sprawling messes, he gets out to plenty of good restaurants and writes with a sense of infectious fun. To celebrate his finally claiming the number one spot from Blissful Glutton, we headed over to his turf.

Okay, that’s a complete lie. To be perfectly honest, Snellville, nothing more to me than that oft-gridlocked, badly traffic-managed corridor between Stone Mountain and Loganville, just happened to be on the road back from Walnut Grove, which we visited a week ago for our roadfood tour. Well, since we’re never in that neck of the woods, I wondered whether there might be anything we could grab for a snack after lunch at Kelly’s, just to try something a little different. And as for finding a new thing to try, I did this little trick: I zoomed in really close on US 78 in Google Maps until the names of restaurants started showing up. Donut King stood out, so I figured we’d each grab a treat there.

Yeah, sometimes here, you get lovingly-told stories of our life spent eating well and the wonderful histories that we have with favorite restaurants, and sometimes you get this. Anyway, there’s some really good doughnuts in Snellville.

Honestly, other than food, I’m hard-pressed to come up with a single reason to visit Snellville. Well, fair’s fair, food is, you know, second to friends as the best reason to visit anywhere, but the town is seriously lacking in bookshops and record stores. Several years ago, the kids and I were coming back from Athens this way just to have something different to see and we stopped into this utter craphole of a CD store where my son bought a VHS copy of the awful film Space Jam and the idiot behind the register wouldn’t let my daughter use the restroom. Even that place is gone now.

Food-wise, Snellville looks to be a chain paradise, with only a few standouts. Sri Thai sounds very promising, and FNS gave that place a good review. Actually, doing a little research, the most interesting thing that I’ve learned is that the national chain Dickey’s Barbecue Pit has one of its three Georgia locations in Snellville*, only it’s not listed on the corporate website, while four forthcoming restaurants are shown as “coming soon.” That’s just lovely, I say sarcastically. There’s no such thing as a good nationwide chain of barbecue restaurants. (*note: a commenter has informed me that this store has already closed.)

As for Donut King itself, I’m glad we made it an early start for the day, because this place closes at the unfortunate hour of 1 in the afternoon. It’s in a strip mall with a Provino’s and a Philly Connection and sixty thousand cars. It’s not particularly easy to get into, and a downright pain in the neck to get out of. But the dougnuts, well, they’re wonderful. Marie puts on airs of not actually liking doughnuts very much, but she found her chocolate frosted to be incredibly yummy, and the girlchild in the back seat was making happy “mmmmm” sounds as she wolfed down her eclair.

Despite their early closing time being a little inconvenient for curious eaters, the business clearly does a good job anticipating demand and bakes and fries accordingly. As you see in the photograph above, I had Marie hold her doughnut out for me to shoot. The last few times we’ve gone into a dessert place, I’ve had good results from shooting the display case showing off all the treats. Here, we arrived so late that most of their food was gone, and while my food composition skills are still admittedly meager, there’s no way any photographer could bring that decimated display to life. Thus said, the community must clearly love this place to have cleaned it out so thoroughly by 12.30 that only slim pickings were left for us. They were really good slim pickings, but it left me curious what Donut King looks like at five in the morning.

Great American Donut Shop, Bowling Green KY

Marie and I enjoyed a nice weekend visiting friends after dropping the girlchild off for a week with her mother. It was a five and a half hour haul from our place in Marietta to Owensboro, where we had lunch, and then we made our way back down the William Natcher Parkway. This is an amazing seventy-mile stretch of absolutely nothing, through farmland and… well, nothing. There are exactly two exits on the whole road with gas stations, and they’re one right after the other, 25-odd miles northwest of Bowling Green. Make sure both you and your car are ready for this drive before you get on the parkway! Continue reading “Great American Donut Shop, Bowling Green KY” →

Cook Out, Asheville NC

We’ve mentioned in the previous chapters that Marie very graciously selected the restaurants that we visited on our most recent trip to Asheville, and, even more graciously, paid for them. However, I wasn’t entirely ready to leave town without one last stop. About two hours after lunch, time spent shopping, letting my daughter have the run of things, and the uncompromisable trip to The Chocolate Fetish on Haywood for Marie to load up on dark chocolate sea salt caramels, we drove to the east side of town to show my daughter Tunnel Road, one of Asheville’s more commercial strips, full of chain restaurants and hotels. Well, there’s more than that. There is a very, very good comic shop out here called Comic Envy, a reasonably good barbecue place called Fiddlin’ Pig that I’m sure we’ll revisit, an independently-owned toy store, and a Mexican restaurant called Papas & Beer that has a heck of a lot of fans, but mostly Tunnel Road is clogged with chains. Continue reading “Cook Out, Asheville NC” →

Double D’s Coffee and Desserts, Asheville NC

This latest trip to Asheville saw us really getting some exercise. After we enjoyed a terrific lunch at Luella’s, we drove through the city and then west a few miles on I-40 and US 23, and then south down NC-151 to the Blue Ridge Parkway for a couple of hours stretching our legs at Graveyard Fields. In the late afternoon, we made it to our hotel, checked in and relaxed for a while before going downtown for supper. We ate at Early Girl Eatery, about which I wrote back in June, and had a very good meal, although perhaps not a match for the truly great breakfast that we’d earlier enjoyed. We passed on dessert, as we had other plans. Continue reading “Double D’s Coffee and Desserts, Asheville NC” →

Steak ‘n Shake, Kennesaw GA

A few years ago, the Steak ‘n Shake chain, which has 500 stores in 22 states in the southeast and midwest and is, by my definition, large enough to be called national, decided to introduce a terrific promotion which my daughter and I used to enjoy greatly. They have a “happy hour” with half-price milkshakes from 2 to 4 every weekday afternoon, and again from 2 to 4 am overnight. When I took a job that left me with a couple of weekday afternoons free, and my daughter was in elementary school, this meant that I could take her by the Steak ‘n Shake nearest us on Barrett Parkway – said to be the busiest and most profitable in the whole chain – and join the mob for a daddy-daughter milkshake treat.

Those days are actually gone for us, since she started middle school and no longer gets home until close enough to suppertime to make a milkshake “ruin yer dinner” impractical. I slightly resent the loss of quality time, but then again, that’s just one of the many downsides to having your kids grow up.

The milkshakes here are terrific – my particular poison is a mix of their banana and orange cream – but the food is only slightly on the preferable side of average. The beef is okay, albeit pressed into sadly small and weedy patties, and the fries are thin enough to make you wonder whether there’s any potato in there, but the chain does offer a dish which is actually worth a second look. It’s not the same as what you can find in Cincinnati’s chili parlors, but Steak ‘n Shake does offer their version of a 5-way.

I’ve only been through northeastern Kentucky four times, but on each of those occasions, I’ve made it a point to stop at either a Skyline Chili or a Gold Star. I imagine that people more familiar with Cincinnati would be pleased to tell me about a better, more humble, non-chain restaurant to get chili made in that city’s style, and perhaps the next time I’m in that region, I’ll give that a try. In these restaurants, you get the area’s particular chili recipe – very finely chopped ground beef served in a light stew containing (as Wikipedia terms it) “unusual ingredients such as cinnamon, cloves, allspice or chocolate,” but without the traditional chili peppers or chili powder like you would expect from other regions.

This chili is intended to be eaten over noodles or on a hot dog, and not in a bowl on its own. Over time, some traditions developed about how to order this dish in area restaurants. A two-way is simply the chili poured over spaghetti noodles, and a three-way adds a giant mound of shredded cheese. A four-way adds either beans or diced onions, and a five-way contains the lot.

Steak ‘n Shake’s version can’t be characterized as a proper Cincinnati 5-way, because the beef is not spiced the same way, nor is it chopped as finely as what you would see in a Skyline. It’s just average canned chili beef in a “special” sauce of ketchup and Worcestershire. At any rate, I got to thinking about it after reading an amusing thread about the chain’s chili over at Roadfood.com, and it made me peckish enough to want to get back over there. In a bit of nice timing, my daughter had early release last week for parent-teacher conferences and so we had an early supper together. With milkshakes, of course. It wasn’t bad at all. It was no Gold Star, but it will do until the next time I can get to Cincinnati, anyway.

Jiffy Freeze, Canton GA

One of my favorite little traveling roadfood resources is Chopped Onion, a splendid little website that specializes in detailing, not just the usual barbecue and meat-and-three joints that we look out for when making our road trips, but also hot dog and ice cream places. The site’s owner has a particular interest in old, “vintage” Dairy Queen restaurants that have not updated and upgraded their appearance. I certainly understand the fascination; long before that company nailed down its franchise look and feel and started aggressively enforcing its trademark, there were dozens of “dairy queen” restaurants all across the country that were only loosely connected with the parent corporation via use of their soft serve goo machine, just as there were once many dozens of “tastee-freez” stores and many dozens of “zesto” stores, and most of these, by far, are lost to history and memory.

This country’s move towards corporate standardization and homogenization left behind many hundreds of buildings that were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s to sell “dairy freeze zesto”-styled menus, with fast food burgers and hot dogs with a variety of slaws and soft serve goo. Eventually the hammers of trademark lawyers came down and these businesses were told to get a proper franchise agreement going or make it on their own. Most of them must have closed long ago and the stores, eventually, were bulldozed. Some, a small handful, decided to use the existing building and community goodwill to effect a name change and try making it on their own.

Jiffy Freeze looks to be one of these. While I’m not certain what it was originally, the building reminds me of an older Dairy Queen Brazier construction with neither indoor seating nor a drive-through, but they’ve been calling themselves Jiffy Freeze with no hoopla or much in the way of advertising since the mid-1970s. I was very much reminded of Mrs. Story’s Dairy Bar in Opelika, which we visited last month, although this place has a considerably larger menu. I’m not entirely sure that you’re going to get the best Philly cheesesteak in the area here, but it looks like they will try and make one for you.

This past Saturday, we were meant to have made a road trip out I-20 to Madison and Augusta, but finances were unexpectedly low, discouraging us from spending the money on gas. This left us free to attend a “couples shower” for Randy and Kimberly at her parents’ house north of Canton, for which we’d earlier sent regrets. People should really know better than to invite us for anything on a Saturday without at least ninety days’ notice. Especially during the football season. The really surprising thing is that this genuinely is not a pretentious affectation of mine; the calendar is quite honestly penciled in through mid-January. At any rate, dropping a visit to Augusta, for now, meant that we could spend an evening with our friends, and visit a little more with Kimberly’s incredibly neat and interesting father, a pastor and musician with fantastic stories to share.

I don’t know anything about the town of Canton, but a little research pulled up this Jiffy Freeze place. I thought that would be an ideal after-shower destination, but I phoned and learned that the darn place closes at the absurdly early hour of 8 on Saturday. Grudgingly, we’d have to stop in on our way to the party. Then, we ended up leaving almost a half hour late to pick up Todd and Samantha for our trip up I-575. Just as well that was a very tasty slaw dog!

Since we’d be eating in just a little while, we just split a footlong with slaw and Marie had a very, very tasty fried peach pie. The pie was a little smaller than many places make them, but it was nevertheless very good. The slaw was very creamy with mayo and made for a simply fine snack. The one disappointment, and it was a mild one, was learning that the “Mississippi Mud” that my daughter ordered was just a prepackaged chocolate ice cream sandwich from, I think, Blue Bunny. She thought it was really good, and I’m always curious to see these sorts of products when they’re unknown to me, but I was kind of hoping she’d actually get to try that actual chocolate pie for the first time.

I can’t swear that Jiffy Freeze is worth a really long drive, but it’s certainly a nice little curiosity for anyone passing through Cherokee County on I-575, and if you like good, creamy slaw, it’s worth a try. I’m very glad that little roadfood places like this are still around and drawing a crowd.

Sublime Doughnuts, Atlanta GA

About six months ago, a regular guest where I work brought in a big box of Sublime Doughnuts as a thank-you for the front desk. The treats were duly sliced into bite-sized samples for all the staff to try. Allegedly, a couple more boxes have come this way for Wednesday afternoon birthday celebrations, but, criminally, I don’t work on Wednesdays. I recall thinking that my sample was just wonderful and resolved that I needed to get back to have a lovely little breakfast from them as soon as it was feasible.

Six months went by and I finally thought to stop in for an afternoon snack. I need to try harder, don’t I?

The business was founded by a local fellow, Kamal Grant, a couple of years ago. He picked a career that’s for morning people: he’s there, in a shop on 10th Street once occupied by some other doughnut baker who chose to misspell the word the way that those dunkin’ people do, every morning at 4 am getting his doughnuts and pastries ready for a hungry audience. I really like the way that many of his creations don’t look like hockey pucks. Some, like his red velvet cake, do, but his version of a Boston creme, for example, is called the A-Town Cream and is shaped like a letter A. Elsewhere on the racks, you’ll see little hearts, stars, twists and ribbons, all of them decadently delicious.

Earlier this summer, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution named Sublime as their favorite guilty food pleasure in the city, singling out their A-Town Creams and their Reese’s peanut butter doughnuts. It looks like my peers in the food-talkin’-bloggin’ community are similarly sold on the place.

We – Marie, my daughter and my parents – stopped by on Saturday after our lunch a few miles south at Harold’s. After a quick detour to look at the federal pen and the requisite teasing of my daughter that this is where she’ll end up if she doesn’t straighten up, we drove north up Pryor and Central, up avenues where my dad, navigating and reminiscing, used to work, while we listened to the Dogs beat up on Vandy. Left on Marietta and right on Spring / West Peachtree as Vandy caught a break and had a field ruling of a fumble overturned as an incomplete pass, we started passing $10 and $20 lots for Tech fans coming into midtown to tailgate. Tenth Street, which borders one side of the Tech campus, was full of yellow and navy and black and gold. Apparently there’s now a Petro’s Chili and Chips outpost actually inside Bobby Dodd Stadium. It’s a little aggravating to be within walking distance of a Petro’s and know that the most convenient one is still three hours’ drive north.

My dad was talked out and tired and didn’t want to get out of the car when we arrived, but the fellow behind the counter at Sublime had an awful lot to say. He showed off and described all the treats on display. I got a different pastry for Marie, Ivy and my mother, and while they all came with different flavors, they all shared a wonderfully light and fluffy touch. Grant’s trick in the kitchen, reported by John Kessler in the AJC, is to fry the doughnuts at a very high temperature for a shorter period; that apparently gives them the most puff.

These are absolutely wonderful pastries, and although with prices this low and a profit margin so slim, it will certainly take a long time for Grant to grow this business, he’s got an awful lot of goodwill backing him up. I hope that Sublime thrives and becomes a destination for everybody in the city. Even all those Tech students lining up 10th need something to eat.

Follow Marie Let’s Eat! on Twitter!