Papi’s Cuban and Caribbean Grill, Kennesaw GA

A few Fridays back, Marie and I found ourselves with just the baby. Our daughter had found a jawdropping sale on clothes at Plato’s Closet and I had made her an offer that she couldn’t refuse. If I forwarded her the next month’s clothing allowance so she could fill a bag and save something ridiculous like – no joke – 75%, then she could fend for herself for supper and Marie and I could enjoy some grownup time. The baby just sleeps at restaurants – long may that continue – so we could mostly get a break from kids.

Marie was in the mood for a sandwich, so I suggested that we give Papi’s a try. I had only been to this location once, right when it opened, and figured it was due a second glance. I did not know it at the time, but this is actually a small group of four restaurants, with one in midtown and three in the suburbs. They have daily specials and interesting entrees, but where they are said to excel the most is in their sandwiches.

We got to Papi’s just as the dinner rush was about to get heavy, and this apparently coincides with their closing a few tables to make space for a band in the second dining room. We did not have to wait, but quite a few other people arriving after us did. This is a very popular place on Friday evenings!

My readers who enjoy unusual sodas should certainly swing by one of Papi’s locations and check out the drinks on offer. They had quite a few cans of things that you very rarely see, including my beloved Ironbeer. A Cuban soft drink goes extremely well with a good Cuban sandwich.

In my mind, a Cuban sandwich is defined by its very good, slightly sweet bread, meats, lots of mayo and pickles. Marie had the medianoche sandwich with smoked pork and ham, and I had jerk chicken, and we both really enjoyed them. We were a little let down by the fries, which tasted rather too much like institutional mass-produced fries, and fried in the same grease used for the fish. Next time, we’ll have a different side. There certainly will be a next time. While perhaps not quite as tasty as the relocated-to-Birmingham Kool Korner, the sandwiches are still very good, and the atmosphere is fun and upbeat. I’d like to go again one day and enjoy the live music, and an Ironbeer.

Fat Matt’s Rib Shack, Atlanta GA

Fat Matt’s is one of those places that is so small and so popular that I have never been a regular. I really don’t enjoy the challenge of parking at a place where it is such a chore to either get in or get out, and there have been more occasions in the past where I had planned to eat there, been discouraged and left than there have actual instances of me sitting down to some food and, most evenings, live blues. This is a pretty good place to eat, though. Sometimes, that discouragement that I’ve felt has bubbled into serious aggravation that the fates were against me.

For many years, they operated a second business in the building next door. Fat Matt’s Chicken Shack is now closed, but for a good while there, you could enjoy some of the best fried chicken in Atlanta. The only plus side to it shuttering is that there are one or two extra parking spaces available now.

Well, lines out the door are usually not a green flag for me to come eat, and indeed it had been many years since we’d stopped by for some food. Early last month, however, Roadfood.com added a couple more places to their small library of Georgia restaurants. So Marie and I buckled up the baby, promised my daughter a bowl of stew, and asked David to come along and eat with us. We arrived at 11.30 on a Saturday, right as they opened. There was one space available to park – behind the old Chicken Shack – and a line out the door. There’s always a line out the door.

The review at Roadfood.com suggests that the building once housed a Krispy Kreme. It is certainly an old one, and it doesn’t seat very many, even with a patio. When there’s a band playing, it is packed and loud and sweaty and all kinds of wonderful, if you enjoy a slab of very good ribs in the company of lots of strangers guzzling beer.

How Fat Matt’s manages to make such tasty barbecue is a genuine mystery, as they roast over charcoal rather than wood. The meat is moist – perhaps overly so, as it comes presauced with their tangy red tomato-based mixture – and flavorful, but that unmistakable smoked wood taste that informs the best barbecue is not present here. For many years, fans have been marveling at how this place can break whatever rules that people hold dearest about barbecue so casually and still turn out such tasty food.

For my part, while the chopped pork is very good despite not being what I’m usually looking for in barbecue, I really wish they would not presauce it. I’d love to try it dry one day. The Brunswick stew is pretty good, but not among any of our favorites. The rum baked beans are just terrific, though. There’s just enough of a hint of rum to be noticeable, and they make an excellent accompaniment to the meat. I really love these! Honestly, the only thing this place does that I cannot get behind is serving up boring old Lay’s potato chips. If they must offer chips from a bag, I wish that they were Golden Flake brand.

After lunch, we drove the hop and skip – it’s not even an “and jump” away – over to Grindhouse Killer Burgers for dessert. David wanted to try one of these burgers that everybody’s talking about and pronounced it pretty good, while the rest of us enjoyed some malts. Marie had already made the bold claim that the chocolate malt here is one of the very best in the city. I had a vanilla and, honestly, it was pretty darn good, but not even close to being as good as the amazing malts at Chapman Drugs.

There’s a heck of a lot of good eating within walking distance on this leg of Piedmont and Cheshire Bridge. I’m curious to try Sheik Burritos some day soon. I’ll probably have to follow that up with a malt from Grindhouse as well.

Baby Tommy’s Taste of New York, Marietta GA

At the end of May, Fox News personality Sarah Palin took her family to New York City, where she met with NBC personality Donald Trump before the watchful eyes of sixty-eleven news photographers who wanted to watch the conservative duo chow down at a New York pizza place. Attempting to adhere to the philosophy of there being no such thing as bad publicity, and failing terribly, Trump took the opportunity to show a visiting celebrity one of his town’s legendary pie places. To folk like me, who’ve never visited Manhattan, it looked like he might have done all right. I was quickly informed, by the invaluable Jon Stewart, that Trump did it horribly, godawfully, wrong.

In what must rank as one of the funniest television moments of the year, Stewart, in a vulgarity-spewing tirade, absolutely lost his lemon with just how badly Trump represented his city. If you have not seen these brilliant ten minutes, please look it up and watch Stewart try to be respectful, and fail, as Trump’s list of crimes against pizza grows and grows. Don’t spoil the fun by reading about these crimes before you press play.

I sent that link to Marie a couple of weeks back and she quickly wrote me back, noting that it really had been a while since we enjoyed a proper New York-style pizza. Almost immediately, she had read and asked around and suggested that a little place on Cobb Parkway, south of the Big Chicken and next door to that army-navy store, might be one of the closest things we have to a real, authentic, Manhattan pizzeria experience. I’ve been driving past this place for years and not noticing it, which is not surprising when you consider all the sprawl that buries businesses on this ugly stretch of road. She was right; we were long overdue for a visit.

Doctor Who once taught me a lesson in recursive logic. I was reminded of it when I asked the fellow at the register what made this place the most authentic New York pizza place in the area. He answered, “All our customers tell us we are.”

I think that I got a little bit more information from the owner a little later on. Apparently, what you want to see in a New York pizza place is a big counter with pies being sold by the slice. The smell needs to hit you as you walk in the door. You want an even spread of cheese and sauce, a certain curl to the crust, and a conservative but noticeable char on the underside.

Marie and I shared a Primavera-style pizza (mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers, black olives and onions) and I also had a knish, served with two packets of Gulden’s brand mustard. I thought it was pretty good, although I wasn’t mad about the cheese on the pizza.

I particularly liked the really generous pile of toppings that we were given, but Marie found it a little overpowering. Since by now you have all watched that clip from Jon Stewart’s show, I’m not spoiling anything by saying that my eyebrows raised as Marie got up and fetched a knife and fork to tackle her slice. Having been instructed by Varasano’s some years ago how to correctly hold and eat a slice, I wasn’t surprised when Stewart really blew his top about Trump eating pizza in New York with a fork, and told Marie, with a smile and a tut-tut, that Stewart would surely not approve of how she was eating.

“There are too many toppings on the pizza,” said Marie, “and Jon Stewart can bite me.”

Personally, I thought that a bit harsh. We wouldn’t have even been enjoying this particular pizza without him!

West Cobb Diner, Marietta GA

This is Marie, contributing a chapter on the West Cobb Diner. This was a place chosen by my mother-in-law, who wanted to have an opportunity to show off her newest grandchild to her friends, so of course that makes this a place that is friendly to large groups straggling in at odd times. Much better than the places that like to keep a big group in waiting area purgatory until Mr./Ms. Always-late arrives!

The West Cobb Diner was actually on our list of places to check out before this invitation, but when we tried to go, the wait time was much too long and we had to go to plan B that day. We learned then that this restaurant is really difficult to find. It is hidden in a very nice strip mall and completely invisible from the road. I was very pleased to get the invitation, not least because I certainly don’t mind showing off the kid even though there was a competing and newer baby at the same lunch! There will always be younger babies than mine, but he is still new enough it’s hard to wrap my mind around the idea that someone might want to look at some other child.

Anyway, we made it there after about half the table had been served, but with a few diners still to come. It was a friendly crowd and the only disadvantage I could tell was that the table and noise level made it a bit difficult to carry on a conversation with anyone not actually next to or across from you. The server did a great job keeping track of all of us and keeping our glasses full. She wasn’t going to let the guaranteed large-table tip limit her.

The food has a Southern-style slant, with fried green tomatoes in the starters, pimento cheese on the burgers, bacon in the beans and white gravy for the biscuits – but you can also get a steak if you want it, or thai noodle salad, or any of a number of other things not strictly Southern but which don’t appear to clash at all. One of the benefits of going with a huge crowd is seeing what everyone else gets and making a note for the future of anything interesting on their plates. My next order is probably going to be the meat loaf or the pork chops.

I got the vegetable plate, sadly passing on the non-vegetarian beans and peas, and wasn’t able to finish it all. The food is very good, well-made and stayed hot while I wandered around the table to bring the baby to various fans calling for his presence. Since I tend to eat too fast because I don’t like food that has gone cold, that’s saying something. The food is simply well-made. For a place with a fairly large menu, that is pretty good. Make sure to check out the menu board to see what is available for vegetables. As a transplanted Yankee, it does always strike me as odd that things like mac-n-cheese are counted as vegetables, but all the sides I got and those ordered by others looked great.

And of course a review by me wouldn’t be complete without a comment on the desserts. The diner has a glass case with a selection of cakes, pudding and pies that is comprehensive without being overwhelming. The servings are generous, especially the chocolate layer cake.

Delia’s Chicken Sausage Stand, Atlanta GA

When Marie and our friend Victoria were each in the later stages of their respective pregnancies, we met up near their new apartment in the East Atlanta neighborhood for ice cream at Morelli’s, and resolved to get together again after our babies were born. Victoria and James were raving then about Delia’s Chicken Sausage Stand, a collaboration between Delia Champion, who started our city’s much-loved Flying Biscuit Cafe, and Molly Gunn, who I understand co-owns The Porter. Weeks went by, babies were born and I started getting impatient about when the heck we were going to get together so’s I could try one of these dogs. Or slingers, as the restaurant would like to term them.

Make no mistake, though. These may be called slingers or chicken sausages, but they are definitely from the same mold as hot dogs. This is a good thing, as Marie and I certainly love good hot dogs. The new take on them here is incredibly neat and fun and very tasty. Champion and Gunn are using buns baked by the popular Holeman & Finch and locally-sourced, organically-grown chickens for their meat. The results are just a little different from even the best hot dog places in town – America’s Top Dog, Barker’s, Brandi’s – and make for a very interesting and unique taste. Plus, they’re open absurdly late. Like four in the morning late. If I lived in that neighborhood, they’d be seeing me pretty frequently in the middle of the night!

The one thing about Delia’s that does not please me is the lack of seating. There’s only a small indoor area with air conditioning to place orders, and six picnic tables outside to eat. As Atlanta enters its utterly miserable summer, this is going to keep us from paying them another visit for a few months. This is a real shame, because the food is quite wonderful.

Acting like I had not eaten anything in a month, I ordered both a Naked Slinger – far from naked, it was the sausage with their “comeback” sauce and a little of the firey five-pepper mustard – and their signature Hot Mess, a slinger buried under melted cheese, chili and jalapenos. This really is too messy a thing to eat in polite company, but somehow I avoided spilling any of it on Victoria and James’s couch.

Honestly, though, the sausage is so good that it doesn’t need all the crazy toppings. I really preferred the Naked Slinger, and thought that the meat’s flavor was really brought out by the mustard. Meanwhile, my daughter enjoyed eating the chicken as traditional sliders, and Marie had the Italian Stallion, which has the slinger served with onions, peppers, mozzarella and marinara sauce. Everything was really quite excellent.

I just amused myself, wondering whether the slinger could turn into an iconic Atlanta variety of dog, just like half-smokes are in Washington. I wish I had a TARDIS so I could pop forward a few decades and check that out.

The Varsity, Kennesaw GA

Over the last eight chapters in the blog, I have written about the four-day trip that we took to visit Marie’s brother and sister in Mississippi. These were posted here slightly out of sequence, as I was anxious to share some stories about places outside our regular stomping grounds around Atlanta. Not that anybody other than me is keeping track of these, but the next four entries (plus the next Honeymoon Flashback, later this week) are about some places that we visited before this road trip.

First up is a place that we visit with something approaching frequency, the Kennesaw location of The Varsity. I’m sure this is not a place that needs much introduction. It is as iconic as American restaurants get, and the downtown location, which I’m sure I’ll revisit and write about one day, is a major tourist attraction for the city.

The Varsity has done more things right than wrong over the years – moving their beloved Varsity Jr. location from Cheshire Bridge out to Dawsonville, because serving a long-established neighborhood is not as profitable as snagging outlet mall shoppers, must surely count as a “wrong” – and one of their neater ideas has been building satellite locations along each of the northern arteries that feed into the city. Whether you’ve followed the sprawl into the suburbs up Interstate 75 or 85 or GA-400, there’s a Varsity for you, and each of these stores do a darn good job capturing the feel of the original.

Usually, if we are in the mood for a burger, and don’t feel like making a production or a caravan or a road trip out of it, we just hop over to Cheeseburger Bobby’s, which makes one of the best burgers in Cobb County. The Varsity, let’s be fair and honest, is a fairly weak competitor in those stakes, but their fries are better than Bobby’s, and so are their onion rings, and so is their chocolate milk – you just won’t believe how well chocolate milk over ice goes with a burger until you try it – and they also add one thing that I sure do wish that Cheeseburger Bobby’s would consider for their own patties: pimento cheese.

I mentioned a few chapters back that I greatly admire the writing of John T. Edge. About a week before our trip, I read his delightful Hamburgers and Fries, one of a short series of books, very Calvin Trillin in feel and flavor, in which Edge flies around the country trying regional takes on the most classically American of foods. He has slug burgers in Mississippi and steamed burgers in Connecticut and, most drool-worthy of them all, pimento cheeseburgers in South Carolina.

I know virtually nothing about South Carolina. It’s always been a state that I have driven through; I have never stayed overnight in the state. I recognize this as a deficiency that needs correcting, and longer visits and more detailed investigations of South Carolina are on the long-term agenda. From what I understand, though – and, admittedly, a good chunk of what I understand is what I have read in Edge’s books – many of the older hamburger joints throughout the Palmetto State have long offered pimento cheeseburgers. It is apparently one of that region’s specialties.

I’m reminded of the similarity between the Varsity’s hot dogs and chili and the ones that you can get at Macon’s Nu-Way. When the Varsity’s founder, Frank Gordy, was first driving around the south nailing down ideas for what he wanted his restaurant, then called The Yellow Jacket, to serve, it’s suggested that he decided to replicate the Nu-Way experience. That was somewhat lost when the Varsity expanded and grew to its current enormous size, but you can still absolutely see Nu-Way’s influence. I wonder whether in 1928, pimento cheeseburgers were common in Atlanta, or did Gordy find a place or two in South Carolina that inspired him to do them here?

Every so often, I find myself craving pimento cheese on a burger, served all hot, gooey and greasy. Marie doesn’t often remind me that she’s a damn Yankee, but when she quickly corrects my order of pimento cheeseburgers and asks for her own with a slice of cheddar, I remember all right. Ah, but it’s those differences that keep us interesting, right?

Melody Lane Mediterranean, Marietta GA

Here’s a most peculiar story about a restaurant that I had somehow visited twice before, when it was chocolate and when it was peanut butter, but never when it was a Reese’s treat. Melody Lane is the new incarnation of two prior ventures, one of which excited me, but I thought, wrongly, that it had vanished.

When I first moved to Marietta in 2003, I drove north on Canton Road and spotted Melody Lane Deli on my right. I stopped in for a sandwich and found it really unimpressive. It was mainly a breakfast place; making lunch sandwiches seemed like an afterthought. I didn’t give it any more consideration; life’s too short for unimpressive food.

Years passed, and David took the kids and me to this little Mediterranean grocery, located just a hair north of Melody Lane, but on the left, where they were serving up gyros and falafels to guests at a teeny little counter with four bar stools. They told us then that they would soon be moving, probably to the strip mall across the street. I said that I’d look out for them, particularly as they sold cans of Vimto, one of many soft drinks that I like but rarely find. In time, though, the grocery store closed and nothing new opened in that strip mall.

More years passed – I really have lived here too long – and I followed a recommendation from a new food blogger in the area, A Girl and Her Words…, to give Melody Lane a try. She raved about the excellent Mediterranean food available here. “Wait a minute,” I thought. “Is that really that crummy breakfast place?” By this time, I’d forgotten all about that grocery store, and didn’t realize what had happened until I spoke with our server after Marie and I had a childfree supper to celebrate our anniversary a little early. The grocery store had moved across the street by buying the restaurant!

The evening was memorable for one thing even above the food: this was the first time that we left the baby with his two older siblings for a couple of hours. Marie and I were probably just a little distracted, and waiting nervously for one of our cell phones to ring with a crisis.

We started with an order of baba ghanoush, a dish that I like at some places a lot more than others. This was one of the good ones. It was really creamy and lip-smackingly tasty. I followed that with a tabouli salad for myself. This, sadly, wasn’t the best I’d ever had. I liked the tabouli at a place a little south that has since closed a lot more.

Marie had the chicken shawarma and just loved it. The meat is broiled and seasoned with tahini sauce, parsley and garlic. By comparison, my kafta – ground beef and onions with parsley – didn’t come close. It was very good, but the chicken was just so wonderful that I got menu envy again.

This was an inexpensive and simple way to celebrate our anniversary, but we were kind of keeping things as simple as possible over the course of May as we got used to having the baby around. Now that we know about Melody Lane, I hope we’ll revisit it soon. I want an order of that shawarma chicken to myself, to be honest.

We’re taking a longer-than-normal break, but we’ll be back on Monday. Have a great weekend!