Classic Que in Griffin and Fayetteville GA

I remember our first trip to Southern Pit very well. It was May 28, 2009, and while we weren’t blogging yet, I was nevertheless using Roadfood.com to find new and fun places to eat on our way on our trips down to Saint Simons Island and back. On that trip, Marie and the kids and I stopped in for lunch on our way to go get married, which is why it’s fairly easy to remember the date. I’m good about remembering the day we got hitched (the 30th); Marie’s birthday, slightly less so, on account of her decision to never enter that date anyplace like Facebook where I get a ~~cheat~~ friendly reminder. We had a huge lunch that day, and Marie capped things off with some delicious blackberry cobbler. I later waxed hyperbolic about how awesome this place was, and returned a few months later with Matt and our friend Kevin, shortly before he flew back out to California to resume work in academia.

As we’re entering the last few weeks of pregnancy, I struck a compromise between our twin desires to get out and drive and yet not stray too far from home. I’ve worked up a pair of short afternoon barbecue tours for Marie and I to enjoy small road trips without exhausting her. The first one is what I termed the “West Central Georgia Tour,” and was originally intended to bring us to two of the remaining stops on our goal of all the Roadfood.com-reviewed sites in the state: Southern Pit and Melear’s Barbecue in Fayetteville. Unfortunately, or not, considering its low reputation of late, Melear’s closed in January. So the revised plan saw us driving down I-75 to Griffin, then going north and west to Fayetteville for Speedi-Pig, and then further west to Sprayberry’s in Newnan before returning north on I-85. By chance, and not design, all three of the places we visited are reviewed on the wonderfully fun Chopped Onion, one of my favorite sites for finding barbecue joints and hot dog stands.

Should any of my Atlanta-based readers be interested in retracing our (planned) steps and doing their own simple tour as a day trip, I’d like to point out that you can also sample a McDonough barbecue restaurant called O.B.’s very easily on this path; it’s on the same exit (218) off I-75 that you take to go to Griffin. The same plan we took, with minor detours, should also take you near Uncle Frank’s in Fayetteville, Cafe Pig in Peachtree City, and Westside in Newnan. We haven’t visited any of these places yet, but you might could make a really full day of it if you’d like. Let me know how it goes for you!

By chance, the road that we ended up taking sped us past yet another place that I’d like to try one day: Dean’s Barbecue in Jonesboro. See, we had planned to drive down to exit 218 and shoot across 20 to Southern Pit, but after having dealt with insane construction traffic in north Atlanta on I-75, we were in no mood to sit and wait for all the spring break congestion that started building at exit 230. We could have sat bumper-to-bumper crawling for twelve miles, but I trusted our navigation instincts and we got off at 228 and found US 41 that way, which took us right past Dean’s. Some other day, perhaps.

We finally got to Southern Pit about forty minutes behind schedule. The place is not really easy to find; it isn’t signed very well, but if you are driving south, keep looking to your left and you should see it through the trees, its small sign dwarfed by the ones for Georgia Lawn Equipment and Toro brand mowers. Then make a U-turn across the divided highway when you get a chance.

The chopped pork here is not very dry and not especially smoky, but it is nice and pink and packed with flavor. Readers who have been following my recent series of memory issues will be pleased to hear that I ordered my sandwiches without any sauce at each business we visited, so that I could get a better taste for the meat before smothering it. They have a single sauce at Southern Pit: it’s a nice, brown tomato and vinegar mix, and is very sour and tangy.

I thought the Brunswick stew was pretty good, but was extremely pleased with the cracklin’ cornbread. I had been a little disappointed last year when I went to Harold’s and could hardly find a crackle anywhere in the bread, but this was just popping with them and it complemented the stew very well.

Sadly, I have to take a little issue with the desserts on offer. We were surprised to see blackberry cobbler available this early in the season. Marie asked about it and our server – points for truth – confirmed that they get the blackberries from Sysco. (“He said the S Word,” I whispered later.) The strawberry cream pie, he assured us, was made fresh in house, and this turned out to be quite good. Marie had a slice of that in lieu of a side for her chopped pork sandwich, and we were happy and pleased as we got on the road for stop number two.

The second visit was in Fayetteville, a town that neither of us had ever visited before. If it wasn’t painfully obvious from earlier chapters, when I’ve lived in the Atlanta area (which would be all but twelve years of my life) I’ve always been a resident of the northern ‘burbs: Smyrna, Alpharetta and Marietta. I just never got down this way very much.

A manager at Southern Pit had given us better directions to get over to Georgia-92 – just take Birdie Road west and cut off a huge corner, enjoying some very pretty land and houses along the way – but he could not have prepared us for an unexpected detour. An accident or fire shut down this highway completely, and a Fayette County sheriff sent us on a left turn. We shrugged and hoped for the best and eventually joined Georgia 85, which, happily, not only hooks up with 92 just outside the Fayetteville city limits, it is the very road – Glynn Street – that we were looking for. Unfortunately, it is marked amazingly poorly, and we did not know that it was Glynn Street until we drove right past Speedi-Pig and had to turn around.

My buddy Rex had told me that his girlfriend swears by Speedi-Pig’s Brunswick stew. It is similarly singled out by both Chopped Onion and another of my favorite barbecue blogs, the frustratingly-on-hiatus 3rd Degree Berns. None of these good people come close to telling you the real truth: this stew is amazing, easily just about the best in Georgia. It’s a toss-up between this and Harold’s, flatly. You will definitely want a large order of this stuff.

The chopped pork is diced pretty finely and, while it has a nice smoky taste to it, I did not like it nearly as much as I did Southern Pit’s meat. On the other hand, the price is just amazing. For 99 cents, you get a really good portion of meat on a “piglet” sandwich. I ordered two, but really only needed one. They have two sauces on the table, mild and hot varieties of a vinegar-tomato-pepper mix, and apparently they keep a much more potent hot sauce behind the counter, but I did not think to try it. The hot sauce wasn’t that much different from the mild, honestly. The barbecue is not at all bad here, and neither is the slaw – mayo-based and easy on the dressing – but the stew is the selling point. Run, don’t walk, to Fayetteville, friends.

I noticed that a party of four was asking one of the servers what had become of Melear’s. I expect that’s going to be a question the staff will be answering for months to come. It’s always a shame to see a much-loved, very old restaurant close its doors, even if its reviews had been pretty awful lately, and especially before I was able to try it.

We didn’t linger at either restaurant, but were still a little behind schedule as we got back on the road and headed west. More about that in the next chapter.

Willie Rae’s, Marietta GA (CLOSED)

Here’s another long overdue visit to a very popular destination in Marietta, this one right on the square. I added Willie Rae’s, which is about to celebrate its eleventh anniversary, to my to-do list many months ago after seeing a good writeup of it somewhere. This is a place that tries, with some success, to mix up a menu of southwestern, southern, and Creole-styled dishes in an upscale environment surrounded by lovely, folksy artwork on the walls.

They don’t always pull it off. One black hole on the menu is the inclusion of Lay’s potato chips as a side to some of their dishes. Try as I might, I just don’t see the point of lavishing attention on a burger in the kitchen and then serving it with plain Lay’s. But when they get it right, the results are magnificent.

Location is everything in the world of restaurants, deciding what is hip and cool. If Willie Rae’s was inside the perimeter, people would have been raving about it for ages. Sitting quietly on the Marietta Square, it’s easily ignored by the ITP crowd. Interestingly, walking around the square, you can see quite a few very good restaurants, none of which attract much commentary or blogging. Hollie Guacamole! and Tommy’s Sandwich Shop are both pretty good, as are Johnnie McCracken’s and the Marietta Pizza Company. There are four or more very nice, upscale restaurants, at least three places to get desserts, including a cupcake place – one of the latest trends – and Traveling Fare, which sells wonderful pot pies at the weekly farmer’s market, but despite ample free parking, nobody wants to venture up here except office workers and people with court business.

Well, if you do feel like braving the mean streets of Cobb County, you’re certain to get a pretty good meal at Willie Rae’s. I arrived early and looked around in a cute toy store two doors down while waiting for them to open. Within twenty minutes, there was a pretty good crowd in the place, proving that just because us weirdos with blogs aren’t yammering about it, business is still pretty good.

I was a little disappointed that I would have to pay a bit more than I wanted for some chips and salsa – apparently you can only get some by paying six bucks for a really big appetizer with cheese dip and an avocado sauce as well – so I had a small cup of very good jambalaya instead. It was served piping hot in a coffee mug on a little saucer and they didn’t scrimp on any of the meats. This was really tasty, although I don’t know that I’d like a full-sized serving of it with so many other interesting things on the menu.

I had the chicken burrito, served with a very good Caesar salad. The burrito was absolutely packed with really tasty chicken and just a few peppers. I was so pleased to pay a good price for a meal here and really get my money’s worth in very good, seasoned meat, not a big pile of rice or other fillers. The burrito was covered in a wonderful cheese sauce. I think I might have asked for a very small cup of salsa for the chicken, but it was just fine without it. It’s really a good feeling when a place meets your expectations so fully, you know?

I’d love to see some of my peers with larger audiences come up to the square and give these places a try. If Willie Rae’s was on Howell Mill, or in Asheville, people would be raving about the food and the atmosphere. The food certainly warrants it, and you’re guaranteed to get a kick out of all the fun artwork. Well, people are raving, just not people with blogs.

Stilesboro Biscuits, Kennesaw GA

Ooooh. Our otherwise impeccable timing was off a couple of Saturdays ago and we missed some live bluegrass!

Marie had been looking around for breakfast places in our area and found rave reviews for Stilesboro Biscuits, a tiny little place on Stilesboro Road. This is a long suburban corridor that runs parallel to US-41 north of Barrett Parkway and is mostly residential. How on earth they squeeze a bluegrass band in here when there’s barely room for a dozen guests, I have no idea. We did luck out in having a table open up just after we entered and got in line, otherwise we’d have been eating in the car. I love the ramshackle feel of this place, with all the mismatched furniture and constant, busy energy of people bustling around in such a small place.

Anyway, it was a very lazy, drizzly Saturday and I graciously allowed the children to come with us for some really excellent biscuits. The four of us each had a different filling – chicken, steak, bacon and country ham – but you know, these biscuits don’t need any meat. They’re just amazing. You’ve probably guessed that I’m given to occasional fits of hyperbole, but even Marie, the level-headed one, was saying that these were the best biscuits she’s had in ages.

This place is possibly just a bit out of the way for just going out for breakfast and then coming home, but it is certainly on our radar for any times that we’re heading in that direction. Grabbing a bag of biscuits and a bowl of grits to enjoy before hiking Kennesaw Mountain sounds like a really nice morning. We might need to do that some Saturday soon. Well, maybe a couple of months after the baby’s born, anyway. I wish they weren’t so far out of the way; I would love to swing by on my way to work. Heaven knows you don’t get biscuits this good from anybody’s drive-thru window.

Bocado, Atlanta GA

So I finally took the plunge! Bocado is one of Atlanta’s best-known newer restaurants, and if I’m not mistaken, every blogger in the region has already visited the place. It’s been on my to-do list for ages, but other things and other meals kept coming up. They have a really convenient location on Howell Mill right where it meets Marietta Street, and I’ve been known, occasionally, to drive right past it in the early evenings, when Williams Street is really blocked up and I need an alternate way over to the interstate. I’ve just never had the opportunity to stop in before.
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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)

Sam’s BBQ1, Marietta GA

I’ve been telling myself for at least five years that I needed to get over to Lower Roswell Road and check this place out. Friends, if you live in Cobb County, don’t make the mistake that I did and put this off any longer. Sam Huff has been cooking up some amazing pulled pork that you seriously need to try. He apparently lives out in West Cobb, in that Lost Mountain community that I had driven through just two days previously, and was a regular on the competition circuit for years, winning all kinds of awards for his pulled pork, ribs and brisket. Six or seven years ago, he partnered up with Dave Poe and they opened what would become two restaurants in Marietta. They’ve since gone their separate ways, and Poe got the other place on Whitlock. I drove past it two days previously as well. That was an odd weekend.

Two Sundays ago, Marie and I were going to do something to celebrate her birthday. She just wanted a day together, away from kids, with a few general ideas about what she’d like to do. As I assembled a battle plan and a road trip that would take us via back roads up through Roswell and Alpharetta, I looked for lunch in the area and realized we could get some barbecue at Sam’s place. Even better, Sam’s wasn’t one of those irritating closed-on-Sunday joints that have been complicating my life. We drove right past a place that I wanted to try, Amos’s, which is near Ball Ground, on our trip. Closed.

Sam’s occupies two storefronts in a beat-up old strip mall near Johnson Ferry Road. One of these is the takeout store and the other is the restaurant. Sam’s has been answering the same questions about their food for so long that it’s led to some playfully exasperated T-shirts and signs explaining how many people can be fed with a pound of pork, that their meat is pulled and never chopped, that take-out orders are two doors down, and other rules. This has led to playful teasing from the regulars about supposedly misunderstanding the policies. During our visit, I saw two groups come in to enjoy lunch who ribbed the kid at the register that they wanted carry out. Poor kid.

The pulled pork here really isn’t very smoky, but it’s very moist and flavor-packed. It’s served dry, and guests can help themselves to three sauces at a pump station next to the drinks. The most popular, unsurprisingly, is a sweet Kansas City-styled tomato-based sauce, but, while good, I found this the least of the three. The vinegar and the mustard sauces were both outstanding. I don’t know which I prefer; both really complemented the meat really well and I haven’t enjoyed the combination of great pork and great sauce so much in weeks.

The sides were very good, too. I ordered the lunch special with a sandwich, baked beans and a glass of sweet tea, and Marie enjoyed a plate of pulled pork with green beans and potato salad.

I definitely plan to go back soon for another meal. This is absolutely among the better barbecue joints in the Atlanta area.

Briar Patch Restaurant, Hiram GA

Next week sometime, I’ll get around to telling you about why I ended up here, instead of at Bocado like I intended on this past Friday. Briefly, I found myself suddenly desiring a nice, comforting plate of chopped barbecue pork instead of the sandwich that I had been thinking about all week. There are a pile of barbecue joints around Atlanta on my to-do list, but the one that spoke to me the most was this old place way out Georgia 120, long past the point the road changes its name from Whitlock to Dallas Highway. From the Marietta Square, it’s about twenty minutes’ drive. I had only been to Briar Patch once before; when I had the Geocities barbecue page up, a reader in the area recommended that I come out this way and give the place a try.

It had been a really long time since I drove out this way at all – long enough to miss an unfortunate change. The El Pollo Loco where we used to eat is now an IHOP. That California-based chain made a big production out of moving into the Atlanta market about five years ago, but it kind of did a half-assed job, if you ask me. Not bad burritos, mind. They’ve a few stores left, I believe.

Anyway, the road takes you past Cheatam Hill Cemetery, where my father was laid to rest in his amazing, see-it-to-believe-it plain pine box, past the IHOP, past the gigantic, upscale Avenue at West Cobb, sister development to the nice shopping center between Marietta and Roswell on the same road, through a charming community called Lost Mountain, and to the Paulding County town of Hiram. Weirdly, I realized too late that I was out in this general direction just four days previously. My son’s middle school had a band competition at McEachern High and this place is only seven miles from that school. Let’s do a better job watching that odometer with gas prices like these, okay?

Not visible in the above photo: Seven hundred trillion ragweed pollen particles. Per hundred. It was a rough day.

This place is a big and definitely popular destination in the area. I got there at twenty past eleven and parking was already at a premium. Briar Patch employs a huge staff to keep things moving efficiently. The service line gets you to a couple of registers underneath three big video screens that show off the menu. It’s a big, full service restaurant with burgers and steaks as well as hickory-smoked pork, beef and chicken. I went with a “little” pork sandwich basket, which comes with fries and slaw, and asked for an extra cup of stew.

Weirdly, and I’m not sure what to make of this, they offer bottled water for free, but charge ninety-five cents for a cup of ice. I’m pretty sure that I’ve never run into this before.

I made the mistake (again!) of not asking for my sauce on the side. The sandwich, nicely priced at $6 with slaw and fries, comes drowned in their red tomato-based sauce. The chopped pork was very tasty, but I think that the amount of sauce really overwhelmed the meat. I was able to fork out a couple of nibbles that tasted much better on their own, or dipped in a really good spicy hot mustard sauce. I got a little cup of this for my fries. My doctor had, just an hour earlier, told me to lay off the spicy food for a week while my allergy-devastated throat heals, but the mustard sauce is just so good that I couldn’t resist a few contraband bites.

The slaw was really nice and creamy. I recall, from my first visit many years ago, not really enjoying it, but it was a pleasant surprise this time out. The stew was very mild, thick and chewy, and quite honestly the highlight of the meal. It tastes terrific, and it felt so good going down my gullet. I will say that the portions are really reasonable, but will probably feel small to people used to overeating with a plate of barbecue like I used to do. Since I’m trying to whittle down my portion sizes, I was pleased, but I can imagine some eaters might want to pay the extra dollar for a large sandwich.

I brought some Gregory McDonald to read, but was distracted a little by the decor. Apart from the mounted deer and game heads throughout the store, the top tier of the walls show off some painted artwork depicting Confederate soldiers fighting in Paulding County. (A drive from Marietta will take guests through a tiny sliver of Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park.) On the wall above the exit door, there’s a big depiction of a not-entirely Disney-styled Br’er Fox threatening Br’er Rabbit with a trip to the briar patch.

I’ve lived in Georgia all my life and consider Joel Chandler Harris a whimsical part of our common folklore, but was surprised to learn that neither of my kids has any idea who the heck Uncle Remus was. I know the tale in this painting from my third grade teacher reading it to us. I suppose that you can’t do that in school any longer.