Zucca, Smyrna GA

Every year, our friend Neal turns his birthday into a week-long celebration called The Festival of Neal. We asked him, a couple of weeks in advance, before he got completely booked, whether we could schedule some time to take him to supper somewhere. He selected a place near him in Smyrna called Zucca. This was one of those places that I’d been figuring that I’d get around to for many, many years.

Zucca opened its first of four Atlanta locations in 2003. There’s the one in Smyrna, which we visited, one near us in Kennesaw, one a little further up the road in Woodstock on Towne Lake Parkway, and one in Decatur. I’m of the opinion that Atlanta is completely packed with amazing pizza restaurants. Does Zucca have a chance at breaking into my personal top five of Vingenzo’s, Varasano’s, Fritti, Everybody’s and Labella’s?

Marie wasn’t able to join us Wednesday night. She needed more sleep than I do back before the pregnancy, and even more today. This past week has been lousy with allergies and pollen and it’s hit me worse than any spring of the past six years and I’ve been an absolute nightmare to sleep with, since I can barely breathe. A couple of nights previously, I banished myself to the couch for fear of waking her with nose-clogged snoring. I proceeded to wake everybody in the house, even the boy who sleeps in the basement. I mention this because the plan was for me to pick up the children and drive down to Smyrna and meet Marie at the restaurant, and instead we nearly collided at the foot of the driveway. She came home, completely exhausted and spent and full of stress and frustration and asked me to deliver apologies, but she needed to sleep. And did she ever. It was fitful and interrupted, but she got to lay down for about twelve hours, and she deserved every second of it.

Like a complete lout, the pizza slices that I brought home were covered in bacon, which she doesn’t like. Well, that’s another one in the failure column for me!

Well, the children and I stopped in to visit my mother for a few minutes, and got to the restaurant just before seven. It’s a family-friendly sports bar, with a big sign in the airlock advertising franchise opportunities. At various points during the week they have trivia and games, and on the weekends, they have loud music and DJs who evidently can’t spell their own names. Or maybe she’s called Sue Spence. Who knows? It was, unusually, a time to discuss spelling and pronounciation. Like many middle schoolers, my daughter is incapable of speaking for more than four minutes without announcing that something has been “pwned.” This is evidently pronounced “powned” in twelve year-old-ese. Our friend Todd was able to join us, and he saw the reunited British band OMD earlier in the week at The Loft. In twelve year-old-ese, that’s pronounced “owmed.”

I started with a bowl of minestrone to sooth my allergy-ravaged throat, and it was excellent. I might have saved a penny or two by ordering just a small pizza and a second bowl of that wonderful soup. The pizza that the kids and I got was my son’s choice. He wanted to try the Buffalo pizza, which skips tomato sauce in favor of blue cheese and ranch, topped with chicken, bacon and tomatoes with wing sauce and blue cheese crumbles. It was very good and there was a heck of a lot of it. A large pie here will easily feed three.

The birthday boy ordered Zucca’s Victory pie, which, they boast, earned them the 2008 prize in an International Expo of some renown. It’s a ramped up Margherita – mozzerella, basil, olive oil and parmesan – adding sausage and mushrooms. Neal substituted onions for the mushrooms. Todd also ordered a large pie – more than enough to take several slices back home to Samantha, who also could not join us – with sausage and peppers. I had a slice of this and thought it was pretty good, but certainly elevated by the quality of the sausage, which was just excellent. Sometimes, better ingredients make an enormous, palpable difference.

David was also able to meet us after bowing out of work a little early. Pizza’s not really part of his diet, but he did enjoy a bowl of the terrific minestrone, and a large Greek salad. Well, to the naked eye it was a Greek salad; according to the menu it was a Tuscany salad. I’m really not certain what the difference would be!

Overall, it was a good meal. They do good work here, and the service was fantastic. The pies are probably not as good as Antico, but the service was leagues better than what you find there, so I’d put the two on about equal footing as far as the overall experience. Just like Antico wasn’t qute able to knock its way into my personal top five, nor was this place. Not at all bad, but not quite transcendent, either.

Seriously! You have to try this soup!

This won’t be a very long entry. I just felt it important to remind my readers in the Atlanta and Jacksonville areas – we haven’t visited any other towns with a Sweet Tomatoes – that, for the next two weeks, you can try one of the very best soups that any restaurant, anywhere, serves up. It’s the creamy tomato soup at Sweet Tomatoes, known as Souplantation on the west coast, and for many years, they have, criminally and haughtily, only offered this wonderful treat in the month of March and for one week in October. They serve the most mediocre chili every day of the year here, but only offer the tomato soup for just one month.

We hadn’t actually been back to a Sweet Tomatoes since we celebrated Neal’s and Marie’s birthdays a year ago. I said, then, that I’ve found the overall experience agreeable if unexciting, except where the soups are concerned. They have a few very notable ones apart from the creamy tomato, such as a shrimp bisque and a chicken lime thing, but our desire to visit many different restaurants rather than just stick with favorites over the last several months has meant that Sweet Tomatoes has been off our radar, and I never even checked to see what soups they might have offered anytime lately. But at the beginning of the month, the writer Mark Evanier, who brought this wonderful soup to the world’s notice, rang the dinner bell to tell his bajillions of readers, “Soup’s on!” So it was back to Sweet Tomatoes we went.

This past Saturday, Marie and I met up at the Dunwoody Sweet Tomatoes with our friends Victoria and James, who just moved to a new place in the East Atlanta neighborhood. Victoria suggested that we meet up for a meal again sometime, and I told her that it was creamy tomato soup month again, but she’d never heard of it, meaning that this restaurant still needs to work on getting the word out. Marie and Victoria are each in the later stages of their first pregnancies, and have a lot to share and talk about, although not necessarily soup.

Meals here are very reasonable. For nine bucks – seven if you join the “Club Veg” club for email coupons – you get all you can eat salads, pastas, freshly-baked breads and about nine different soups from which to choose. I typically have a medium-sized salad and three bowls of soup. This time, I had two bowls of the amazingly delicious creamy tomato and one of the almost as amazingly delicious shrimp bisque.

Creamy tomato is on the menu for just two more weeks. If you’re in a town with a Sweet Tomatoes, you should definitely make plans to get over to one as soon as possible. In Atlanta, there are four stores, all on the north side, outside the perimeter. With pollen ravaging the area and our sinuses, wouldn’t a nice bowl of delicious soup do you good?

Taco Cabana, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

You can’t miss this restaurant at the intersection of Piedmont and Monroe. It’s the place that looks like the two fellows from Miami Vice are about to beat up on the guy bringing in all the cocaine in his DeLorean. Taco Cabana has always been this garish, and that’s part of why they spent about six years in court defending their look.

In the late eighties and early nineties, this spot was occupied by a nearly-identical restaurant called Two Pesos. This was the only Atlanta location of a chain that had started in Houston in 1985. I ate here several times when I was in high school and when I came home during my first year of college. In fact, my very first car – and here’s an odd memory – died for good one night after a meal here. It was a wonderful, gigantic 1979 Oldsmobile Delta 88 and that great beauty would have driven me to Europe and back, had I asked. I was having car trouble all day, and fretted with two friends at Two Pesos what I would do if it couldn’t be repaired. Well, it couldn’t. It cranked twice more, once when I left the restaurant after a horrible, grinding shriek of metal, and once, for the final time, after it conked out again at a traffic light down the road. So Two Pesos was my last meal with that Oldsmobile.

What I didn’t know then was that Two Pesos was already years into a losing battle defending their business. Two Pesos had been started by some businessmen, allied with a former manager of one of San Antonio’s Taco Cabana stores, in 1985. Within a couple of years, Two Pesos had blanketed Texas with locations, and the much slower-growing Taco Cabana found themselves facing competition from a lookalike copycat which had established themselves in cities like Houston and Dallas, flinging locations as far afield as Colorado and Georgia to establish themselves ahead of where Taco Cabana could go.

So Taco Cabana sued Two Pesos for ripping off their look, feel, design, store layout and menu to such a degree that customers were left confused as to which came first. The Supreme Court eventually weighed in Taco Cabana’s favor. Left with a lower court order to completely reconstruct every one of their existing stores, Two Pesos elected instead to sell out to Taco Cabana. The Atlanta store was remade and remodeled into a Taco Cabana over the course of about an afternoon.

I’m not sure why I never popped back by the business, whatever its name, after that fateful evening when my car cranked for the last time. I remember they always had decent food at great prices, but the road just never took me by again. Well, not when I was ready for a meal there, anyway. Years and years passed and I read about the slugfest that the two restaurants had in court and figured that I should stop by again. It might make a readable story, if nothing else. Or something weird might happen.

Now, one thing that I didn’t like about my trip to Taco Cabana is that they don’t have chips, although they offer them. For ninety-nine cents, you get a pair of flour tortillas that you can rip into small pieces and eat with their tasty salsas. Somebody should tell that guy behind the register that those aren’t chips. So I had two tortillas along with a platter of two chicken tacos, rice and beans. I asked for one hard shell and one soft in order to sample some different flavors, and thought that chicken was very good for this sort of food. There was nothing very unusual or weird in my meal, but it was a step or two up from what you’d get at a similar place, and priced right. I liked the layout and the big patio space, which is probably quite fun and relaxing in warmer weather.

So then I went to my car and it would not start. I turned the key and nothing happened. The whole electrical system was not responding.

I know this must be impossible to believe, but twenty-one years after my Oldsmobile sputtered and died after I had a meal in this building, I came here for the first time and the hotdamned restaurant killed my Camry. You want to tell me the odds of that?

Turned out I had one of those very rare car problems that I can actually solve. One of the battery terminals had a loose connection. I avoided a freakout, shook my head in disbelief, popped the hood, jiggled it, bit my lip, tried again, thanked God and drove, nerves wracked, to my brother, who spent a few minutes replacing bits and tightening things and making sure I was roadworthy again.

I figure Taco Cabana is surely the safest restaurant in the city now. My car’s had problems there twice. It’s like Garp buying that house in John Irving’s novel after an airplane crashes into it. There’s just no way in the universe I could possibly have car problems there three times, right?

Matthews Cafeteria, Tucker GA

Marie and I made it our rule to not give a negative review to any restaurant that either of us visit. It goes against the grain of this being the story of a good life spent eating well. If we have a bad experience at a restaurant, it just doesn’t make it to these pages. That doesn’t mean, however, that I can’t express a little disappointment when an otherwise good meal just plain lets me down.

I first heard of Matthews Cafeteria when the second volume of the Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives tie-in books was released. I was really looking forward to the second book, because I feel that Georgia was badly underrepresented in the first one, with only the Marietta Diner making its pages. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a pretty good restaurant, but it’s still a little overrated. I wasn’t sure, then, which Georgia restaurants had made it onto the show. You can check out the full list yourself, thanks to the excellent Flavortown USA fan site.

So the book was released – this has been a year and a half – and Georgia got two more restaurants in the print archives of Triple-D. Neither of which I’d ever heard of. It felt like Fieri got together with the ghost of Douglas Adams to upgrade Georgia from “harmless” to “mostly harmless.”

Well, Matthews stayed off my radar until it got added to the list of restaurants reviewed at Roadfood.com late last year. When we started Marie, Let’s Eat!, we agreed to visit and feature all of the 29 restaurants there, barring two for reasons I’ll mention when we finish the goal. Last year, two more were added – Barbecue Kitchen in College Park, and Matthews Cafeteria, meaning there was no getting around it, I was going to have to go to Tucker and try this mostly harmless restaurant. (One of the Roadfood.com restaurants, Melears in Fayetteville, has since closed, leaving a total of 30 on the site. At the time of writing, we are ten away from the goal of 28. Two of those ten will be appearing in this blog over the next week.) So I grumbled and complained and looked around and actually read Fieri’s team’s writeup in the book, and watched the segment on YouTube. I also asked around a couple of months ago to see whether any of my friends knew anything about the Roadfood.com restaurants on our agenda. My friend Laura, whom I have known since high school, when I listened to too much Smiths and she listened to too much Duran Duran, said that theirs is the “most awesome home cooking ever” and that she used to brunch there every week.

And then there are the reports of their Brunswick stew. Now, if you look up the Triple-D segment on YouTube, you’ll get the very curious sight of Fieri acting like he’s never heard of Brunswick stew at all, which is really weird and not especially believable, but you’ll also see this amazing concoction of chicken, creamed corn, potatoes, Worcestershire sauce and a whole mess of other stuff that looks like the most fantastic stew ever. Suffice it to say that when Thursday rolled around, I was licking my chops in anticipation of getting to Matthews as soon as they turned the metaphorical “lunch” sign on to get ahold of that stew.

Would you believe they didn’t have any? Or that the girl at the register said that they only have it on Wednesdays?!

Stymied and not a little crushed, I enjoyed what was nevertheless a pretty good meal. I went for a traditional meat and three, with a pork chop, mashed potatoes, green beans and dirty rice. Everything was quite tasty, especially the dirty rice, which was seasoned just perfectly. I think that if I actually lived in this section of Dekalb, I’d be ready to eat here most of the time. It’s a proper southern meat and three, every bit as good as, say, Vittles or Folks Southern Kitchen. In fact, there’s a Folks just a hop, skip and a jump away, down Lavista near I-285, and you can get food of the same or better quality, for better prices, at a locally-owned place here at Matthews, so there’s no reason to frequent that particular outpost of that chain. No, the vegetables are not of the same quality as the region’s highest points – Mary Mac’s and Doug’s Place – but they’re just fine for a meat and three.

I was, nevertheless, a little disappointed, not merely in the lack of Brunswick stew, but in the lack of attention from the wait staff. They seemed to employ an army of ladies in white with red aprons, but the only ones who spoke with me at all were the lady working the line serving my food and the one at the register, who told me the bad news about Brunswick stew only being served on a day I’m working downtown. I was there for the better part of forty minutes and helped myself to a couple of top-off refills of the very good sweet tea, and not one person asked after me. It’s probably just as well; I might have asked an impertinent question about why the heck there was a microwave oven against the far wall next to the bottles of A-1 and Red Rooster. Don’t know that I’ve seen that in a dining room before.

The meal, as I keep saying, was pretty good, but whatever disappointment I had with the service was more than made up for with the strawberry shortcake. This was amazingly decadent and wonderful, and almost as good as the lovely pound cake treat that Marie made a few days before. I’m sorry that my better, sweeter half wasn’t around to try it. Hers is better, but she appreciates other people’s excellent desserts even more than I do.

But while I’m registering disappointments along with the good food, let me raise one other. The previous Saturday, Marie had to work some overtime hours. I picked her up afterward and we had a little cheap date night, just the two of us, at the wonderful America’s Top Dog. The previous visit proved to be really good, but this second trip saw me trying one of their half-smokes with chili and man, oh, man, was that ever amazing. It wasn’t until I was back on 285 after lunching at Matthews that I realized what I should have done once I realized I wasn’t going to get to try this Brunswick stew was just had two veggies and a dessert, and then stopped by America’s Top Dog one exit north for another half-smoke. I had a perfectly good meal, but I was completely stuffed, and what I should have done was thought it through a little more. For somebody who looks forward to regularly visiting a fast food joint two years in the future, I sure do let my impulsive side mess me up when it comes to getting something to eat, don’t I?

StaQs BBQ, Smyrna GA (CLOSED)

Every so often, I run into a restaurant that really isn’t that amazing, but there’s something about it which deserves a little bit of praise and attention just because the people behind it have come up with something just a little extra. It’s when I find a place that does something that nobody else does that I get a real sense of pleasure. Even when there is room for improvement elsewhere, a restaurant should be hailed for at least offering something unique. So it is with the ridiculously-named StaQs.

My daughter seems to have been mostly absent from the pages of this blog lately; she missed out on her brother’s trip to Tennessee with me, but that’s not to say she’s been completely idle. She has been going through a difficult period, getting used to the awful social rules of middle school, and, sadly, acting like going well out of the way for something to eat is a monstrous burden upon her texting and iPod time. She is, after all, twelve. Well, last week, she and I had a little time after a doctor’s appointment for a quick snack, and even though I probably should not have spent any additional money that day, I realized that we’d be going by StaQs, which is on South Cobb Drive a couple of doors down from Vittles Restaurant.

This particular stretch of road has been pretty brutal to barbecue restaurants. I mentioned many months ago that the venerable Old South BBQ was just a stone’s throw from some others, intending then to come back and try StaQs, but it slipped down the wishlist. Just north of Windy Hill, you can see the building that once housed Champs, a pretty good place that was notorious for blaring Country Music Television at maximum volume in every room of their big facility. The restaurant has sat untouched, the old signage still there, for more than three years. Across the street was once another barbecue joint, the name of which escapes me, but they too kept their signage long after the business closed. Old South still seems to thrive and has seen off at least two challengers around this intersection, but economically, this isn’t the most upscale region of Cobb County. Rents are probably a little cheap here, suggesting that StaQs might have been right to start small in this building, which I believe was formerly a Waffle House.

Speaking of that, I did mention that something on the menu here was notable, even if, perhaps, the overall quality of the food is something that still needs a touch of work. StaQs offers a remarkable little dish called, appropriately, The Mess.

The Mess is, simply, a small serving of chopped pork and cole slaw atop a waffle with maple syrup. I don’t know who came up with such a thing, but they deserve a medal.

For people already in Smyrna, it’s certainly worth stopping in, but as for whether it’s worth a very long crosstown drive to try, I’d have to say probably not. I really didn’t enjoy the pork as much as I hoped, and neither sauce – a sweet and a hot, each tomato-based – were really that amazing. Nor was there enough pork to really sample much of the sauce, as the maple syrup had already made the meat very sweet. It’s a remarkably good idea, but I suggest the pork could use a lot more smoke flavor for this meal to be a real showstopper.

On the other hand, the stew here really is quite good, and worth a try. It’s made with chicken, corn and potatoes in the traditional tomato base, and you get a really big helping of it for your money. My daughter will often just order a bowl of stew when we go out, and this was considerably more than either of us were expecting, or that she could finish. She had the rest of it for lunch a few days later.

Speaking of lunch, thanks to this place, I’m now wondering what a plate of a drier, smokier meat might taste like with maple syrup. Maybe I should run up to Ellijay and get some of Oscar Poole’s pork and try some of that done this way. Hmmm.

My Cousin Vinny’s, Kennesaw GA (CLOSED)

This is Marie, contributing an uncharacteristically dessert-free chapter. One of the local places we don’t visit often enough because of our roaming tendencies is a pleasant little pizza joint with a brick oven. I usually forget the actual name of the place, in fact, but luckily Grant knows that when I suggest eating at the Brick Oven pizza place I mean this restaurant. However, given our tendency towards variety combined with the tendency of that area to have an infestation of mall traffic, we don’t eat there very often. That is a shame, because besides good regular food, every so often they have fried green beans as a special and I am rather fond of those. Actually, the last time we’d tried to go we had to pass because there was a line out the door and we were too hungry to wait that long for dinner.

There are a lot of pizza joints in the area, and that’s one of the reasons we tend to change out. There’s another Italian place I’m particularly fond of, in fact, but we go even less often because of budgetary constraints. They happen not to have fried green beans, but that’s irrelevant.

On this particular occasion we had a good excuse to go to a familiar place. My aunt Lori and her husband let us know that they would be coming down through Atlanta on their way to Florida and wanted to visit over dinner, and that was the first thing that came to mind that would be easy for an out-of-town guest driving down I-75 to find. Their visit was scheduled for a Thursday (traditionally my most stressful and longest day at work) so having something to look forward to for the evening was definitely a positive addition to my day. As good hosts, though, it was important to give them a place that would be easy to find and which I could get to independently if (as it almost turned out) I would need to drive there on my own because of the effects of Thursdays on my schedule. Then, as a surprise, after dinner we got to open a late wedding gift. I am always partial to late gifts as it is a good excuse to keep the original celebration going.

One of the peculiar aspects to this particular visit is that for the first time I visited the online reviews of the place. We’d just stopped by the first time and liked it, so we hadn’t ever checked what the internet was saying about the place. Now, when I looked at the web in order to send directions and maybe send a copy of the menu for them to look at, I saw a clutter of negative reviews scattered around several lists (in between quite a few much more positive ones). The puzzling thing about them is that these particular reviews didn’t seem to be about the same place we’d visited. All our experiences have been at the least tasty and at the best very good.

This particular evening went quite well. Most of the other business for the place that night was people stopping by for take-out so we had the dining room nearly to ourselves. I hope it’s not because of the reviews, but the server did say that they do a lot of their business on the weekend. The last time we’d tried to go we had to pass because there was a line out the door and we were too hungry to wait that long for dinner!

The food there is not overly complicated, just tasty. Sadly, the fried green beans were not available that day. Our order started with a huge plate of rolls covered in melted garlic butter, hot and rather addictive themselves. My uncle commented that he could eat just those for dinner and that got us another plateful so he almost did! Generally, if I can have only one topping on a pizza I’ll go for sausage but that’s not an option these days. After the baby I am going to have a salami sandwich followed by a sausage pizza, then when I get home I’ll probably make one of my family’s Dutch recipes that involve more sausage, even though that’s winter food down here in Georgia!

We had ordered two pizzas to share except for our daughter, who had to be different and get ravioli. She got a salad out of the deal, and although not a fan of green stuff ate most of it, only passing on the onions. Grant and I chose a pizza that was new to us for the evening, the chicken pesto with spinach and tomatoes. It’s a really good combination that I would definitely take again. So all in all, I would have to say that if they ever deserved those poor reviews they’ve definitely outgrown that phase.

After dinner we got to open a late wedding gift. I am always partial to late gifts as it is a good excuse to keep the original celebration going.

(Update 7/11/12: Sadly, we have learned that My Cousin Vinny’s shuttered in late June. We were speaking to Malika of Atlanta Restaurant Blog last night, and she remembered that when this place was on US-41 some years ago, it was always packed. We only ever saw it busy just one time after we discovered it in its Busbee Parkway home, and thought of it as just a quiet getaway. That, of course, probably isn’t what restaurants need to keep the lights on. Our best wishes to the owners and staff.)

Vingenzo’s, Woodstock GA

Well, here’s a surprise. This pizza restaurant in Woodstock completely blindsided me. A couple of years ago, when everybody was going nuts – and rightly so – about the mighty and wonderful Varasano’s, this place calmly opened and casually revealed a product every bit as good, only with a wider menu and a much more laid-back and relaxed atmosphere, with no pretension or artifice. Seriously, I’ve had several truly great pies at Varasano’s, and one visit which was a little disappointing, but Vingenzo’s is every bit as wonderful as Varasano’s at their best and, honestly, surpasses them in an area or two. I think that I might have found a new favorite pizza place in the Atlanta area.

Neopolitan pies are the order of the day here. Just about everything is handmade, down to the cheeses, and served up on eleven-inch pies. I think that two of these should feed three people.

On Wednesday, the four of us came up here, meeting our friends Neal, Donna and Eric for supper. My daughter was under orders not to protest or make any hints; she was on my list for overindulging at breakfast. My son, getting over a cold, had lost his voice, and so he, literally, pointed out several interesting pies from their menu that he’d like to try. I recommend that everybody try this out themselves one day soon. It’s so much nicer and more pleasant selecting pizza when one child cannot protest and the other has been strongly warned not to.

We had an awesome server who went over everything and made some suggestions, encouraging us to try their mozzarella pairings. These appetizers, priced between $7-10 each, give you a good portion of cheese along with something else to complement the taste. I tried the very soft mozzarella di bufala with a little pepper, served with a few leaves of mixed greens and two white anchovies. It was completely delicious. Neal had a different, creamier cheese, Stracciatella di Burrata, that came with greens, cherry tomatoes and capers. If you’re sharing, then for $18 you can get the “Grand Tasting,” which gives you each of Vingenzo’s three cheeses along with the small salad, peppers, capers and two types of olives. You don’t get the delicious anchovies this way, but I expect that many of my readers probably don’t care for those anyway.

Marie was not feeling especially hungry, so she enjoyed a bowl of pasta e fagioli soup for dinner along with a good bit of bread. You’ll definitely want to try this; it’s a pizza crust, basically, with olive oil and a little parmesan. The children and I, meanwhile, split two pizzas and I think that we chose well. The Regina comes with sausage and wild mushrooms and that was pretty knockdown good on its own, but the other pie, Bianca con Prosciutto e Fontina, was the master stroke. It came with prosciutto and a heap of arugula atop more of this amazing cheese. It is very similar to the excellent Nucci pizza at Varasano’s, but heaven help me, I liked this even better. I don’t know where the notion of mixing arugula and salty meats together originated, but I sure am glad that somebody figured it out.

Vingenzo’s also makes fresh pasta – Neal said that his was wonderful and Donna and Eric also enjoyed their linguine – with a variety of sauces and toppings that all sound amazing. With an introductory meal this good and a menu this dense, this is absolutely a place that needs revisiting, and without delay. Heck, one of these days, I’d like to start working on the wine list here, too. I am really glad that we found this place, and look forward to another visit soon.