Old South Bar-B-Q, Smyrna GA

The last time I wrote, I was talking about Alpharetta’s oldest surviving restaurant. This time, it’s Old South Bar-B-Q, which, since the closure of Fat Boy a couple of years back, has become the longest-lasting place in Smyrna to get something to eat. It’s managed this through three generations of family ownership by creating some remarkable loyalty in their customer base.

Honestly, Old South is about the living definition of hit and miss. You never know what you’re going to get here. I’ve had some very good meals, and I’ve always enjoyed their really, really thick original sauce, but man, can you ever tell when somebody new is in the kitchen chopping, pulling or slicing the meat. Unfortunately, everybody’s meat was a little disappointing this time out. There was just too much fat and gristle on display.

Normally, I get chopped pork whenever I have barbecue, but I guess I was feeling a little contrary and, this past Friday night, asked for pulled pork instead. Marie and I were visiting my folks with my daughter in tow and Old South was my bright idea. My dad didn’t really feel like going out, so I phoned in an order of quite unreasonable complexity – my brother, God bless him, has really specific requirements about how he wants his grub – and they got it exactly right.

The sides here are pretty inconsistent. While I never cared for their potato salad or slaw, their Brunswick stew is among the best around. It’s an almost black brew with lots of stringy meat and corn. Some years back, I took three of my friends from Nashville, Brooke, Dash and Tory, here. None of them had tried Brunswick stew before, and I was glad to set ’em straight with the good stuff first.

Their rings and beans are certainly just fine, but I knew that my dad, who likes their onion rings better than anybody else’s, would have more than enough to share. Dad loves these, especially dipped in Heinz 57 sauce. He has been doing this for better than twenty years and still asks whether I want some, because I “really need to try this.” Overall, this meal was just “okay,” let down by the inconsistent meat. I’ve certainly had considerably better meals here, but I think the next time the road takes us to Old South, I’ll stick to having my pork chopped. It is, nevertheless, better than many of their competitors in this part of Cobb, although I can name two within a hop, skip and a jump that I have not yet tried. There’s something else I need to get on with.

Alpha Soda, Alpharetta GA

Alpha Soda is the oldest surviving restaurant still doing business in the northern suburb of Alpharetta, and is celebrating its ninetieth birthday this year. That’s pretty amazing, and it’s a good place to eat, but I somehow wonder whether the place’s glory days are many years behind it, back before they moved to their current location and changed their format somewhat.

When it opened, it was what we’d call today an olde-fashioned soda counter and sandwich shop, although in 1920, such things were hip and modern. It has moved at least five times over the years. I heard that the original location on Main Street was later the site of another long-lived restaurant, the Dixie Diner, which closed in 2002 after several decades, but I wouldn’t swear to it. After all, the first I heard of Alpha Soda was that it wasn’t worth visiting, and that proved not to be true at all.

Well, I should have known better than to take the word of a teenager. Ten years ago, I was tutoring high school kids prepping for the SAT and considering moving to their community in north Fulton County. I once asked one of my students where to get something to eat and he replied “Anywhere but Alpha Soda” and went on to describe everything that the wrong-headed fellow didn’t like about the place. He was mistaken on every front; years later, I gave it a try, enjoyed it thoroughly, and longed to give that kid a kick in the hindquarters for costing me several decent meals here.

When Alpha Soda moved to their present location in 1995, the latest owners elected to spruce it up a bit and transform it into a somewhat upscale family restaurant, with an inspired interior design that evokes the fashionable Art Deco style of the 1920s. The menu apparently more than tripled in size, with several additions from the Greek-American school of dining that serves many of the region’s large family diners well. A meal here is quite similar to what you can receive at the famous Marietta Diner, only I find Alpha Soda much quieter and laid-back.

This past week, it was our friend Matt’s turn to pick some socializin’ activity for us to enjoy, and he suggested we get a small group together here, as it’s a little closer to his place in Gainesville than the rest of us in Cobb County. Illness and work prevented a very large crowd, but Kimberly came by to eat before heading back into Atlanta to teach a class at Oglethorpe, and Marie came straight up 400 from work, and my daughter and I made the fun overland trek across Post Oak Tritt Road.

Everybody seemed to enjoy their meals, although I was left with a little menu envy yet again. I had the pecan-encrusted tilapia, which was okay. The beets and the cucumber and tomato salad that I had as side dishes were more tasty, and the great big order of homemade potato chips sprinkled with Old Bay seasoning were even better. Matt had a terrific-looking London broil and Marie enjoyed an ugly-but-delicious meatloaf sandwich served with a very good, thick marinara sauce. Heck, even Kimberly’s big chicken caesar salad was better than my tilapia. Now what’s fair about that?

Fortunately, my comparatively disappointing meal was more than made up for by the dessert. We don’t often have a dessert when we go out, but, in deference to Alpha Soda’s fountain origins, I felt it appropriate to have some ice cream. They don’t mess around with these treats.

This was one heck of a good banana split. Marie and Ivy and I, combined, couldn’t quite finish it, but we enjoyed every second of the trying. It makes me wonder what the original, olde-timey 1920s version of Alpha Soda was like, and whether it wasn’t a more consistently fun and delightful experience.

Wallace Barbecue, Austell GA

Many things cross my mind about what to talk about when Wallace comes up, but first and foremost is their sauce. They have two. One is a hot mustard-based sauce that’s bottled and on the table already. It’s terrific, and as promised, it goes very well with the restaurant’s Brunswick stew.

The other sauce is served with your order. I’d advise diners to ask for their pork dry, like David did when he and I went to supper Saturday night and ended up here. David’s on a pretty strict diet for blood sugar problems and needs to take it easy with the greasy fries and sweet sauces. I probably should have done it that way myself, because I like the way that Wallace serves their sauce on the side, piping hot, in a bowl.

The only other place that I’m aware of that does this is Sprayberry’s Barbecue down in Newnan, which is worth revisiting one day very soon, but possibly not this calendar year. The datebook is sort of packed. Now, the makeup of the sauce is quite baffling. I have heard that in Owensboro, Kentucky, they serve up a Worcestershire-based sauce, and kind of got a roundabout confirmation of that from the fifteen-sauce selection at Asheville’s Ed Boudreaux’s BBQ last month. I wonder whether Wallace might be using that as well. It’s certainly very thin and pleasantly vinegary, with pepper, but I couldn’t say beyond that. Our server, and you simply could not ask for a better one, politely declined to assist in identifying it. She explained that there’s one fellow “locked in the back” mixing up their sauces and that nobody but him knows the recipe. I just love that.

I first visited Wallace in 2002. Back then, I was working on a well-intentioned guide to barbecue restaurants here in Georgia that I had hosted on Geocities and waiting for tips on new, or old, places to try. Creative Loafing, the largest and best-known of Atlanta’s alt-weeklies, gave Wallace a good review, so I trekked down to Austell from my old apartment in Alpharetta one Saturday. That really was a haul when there’s nothing at your destination but one barbecue place and a thousand traffic lights and miles of abandoned, low-rent suburban blight along the way. Driving through the community of Mableton along what used to be called Bankhead Highway and is now Veterans’ Memorial Parkway has been one of the region’s most cringeworthy exercises for more than a quarter of a century. There’s really nothing wrong with this agonizing shithole of a road that a really powerful tornado wouldn’t fix.

Sadly, I haven’t found the chance to go back nearly often enough. I know that I’ve tried convincing my folks to have dinner out here instead of their usual barbecue haunts, but for some insane reason, my mom doesn’t like the place. Really, the only thing I have against them is the extremely greasy fries, which I had completely forgotten about. They’re really tasty, but I’m getting awfully close to forty and shouldn’t have fries twice in one day anyhow, particularly if the second meal’s fries are as greasy as this. I should have gone with the slaw.

Wallace is a pretty big place and it’s extremely popular in the area. Saturday nights, the place is packed with folks having a great time. I definitely need to find reason to head out this way again before long.

Vittles Restaurant, Smyrna GA

Over on South Cobb Drive, just below Windy Hill, Vittles Restaurant has made its fourth home. It’s been around for better than thirty years – our server explained that she’d been with the business for twenty-eight of them – and has made a name for itself as a place to go when you want a gigantic pile of food for not much money. Most of their staple meals – a meat, two sides, salad and bread – are only $5.99 on the menu. How on earth they’re able to maintain their quality and the portion sizes for that money is a mystery.

Neal, whom we met for lunch on Saturday, has heard a theory that the restaurant subsidizes their meal prices with sales from their gift shop, which starts in the inner foyer and explodes all over the restaurant’s walls. The nicknacks here are really a sight to see. If you need porcelain plaques with Bible verses or large photos of horses with inspirational quotes, this is where to buy them. The interior is absolutely covered with these things, and should you be unfortunate enough to sit in one of the front booths, you might well be stuck underneath a shelf full of statues of sad-eyed children and puppies.

Last month, I wrote about how The Vortex reacted to Georgia banning smoking in restaurants that served minors by banning minors from their restaurant. Vittles took a different approach. They moved to the building next door and turned it into two completely separate dining rooms, with children restricted to the equally-sized non-smoking room. Now I must say that while the staff at the Vortex keep a very sharp eye out for any teens or kids trying to get in, the staffers at Vittles genuinely do not seem to care.

We tried to get a group together here one Thursday last month, but were stymied somewhat. My kids and I arrived first and were told we couldn’t claim a table with room for seven in the non-smoking section because there was going to be a Bible study in 45 minutes’ time. (I suppose that I should clarify that we knew up front that there’s a Bible study at the restaurant on Thursdays, but I didn’t realize that it effectively takes over the restaurant.) So we took a booth until Neal and Tim arrived, and agreed that we’d try a large table in the smoking section. I completely forgot about the law, and it didn’t even occur to me that the kids legally couldn’t enter that room, but, and here’s the kicker, it didn’t occur to anybody else at the restaurant either. When we eventually concluded that the smoke was too heavy for either David or Marie to find comfortable, we paid for our drinks and left. None of the four or five servers or table staff in that section batted an eye at the kids.

Well, the following week, the kids and I stopped by on a whim to give Vittles a chance while Marie was out of town, and I have to say I was glad I did. There is an unfortunate amount of Sysco in the menu – fries and a faux A-1 steak sauce whose packaging steers so close to trademark infringement as to be comical for starters – but the food – I had the pork chops that evening – is mostly quite good and there is a heck of a lot of it.

We returned this Saturday to photograph the place, and the experience was not quite so pleasant. I really don’t appreciate having any politics broadcast at a restaurant, neither mine nor anyone else’s. I think that it runs counter to what I’m looking for in a meal, which I think is to get away from the world, enjoy good company and good conversation, or, if eating by myself, a good book. I do not want politics interfering with my lunch. There exists a small chain of barbecue restaurants in the northern suburbs which I will not revisit because, on two separate occasions when I stopped by for supper before tutoring students in the town of Cumming back in 2000, I had to listen to some loudmouth in the back screaming his lungs off about that year’s scapegoat destroying America.

The omnipresent Fox News on the TV in both non-smoking and the smoking rooms was mildly amusing a month ago, when Glenn Beck was on selling his gold scam to his audience of aging, paranoid suckers. But you know, I was really enjoying my country fried steak and gravy Saturday, and didn’t appreciate the latest big-screen Fox News distraction, and certainly didn’t appreciate the loudmouthed conversation behind me from one of that 18% of the country’s morons who’s convinced our president’s a Muslim because of Sean Hannity’s latest lie. It’s unfair to hold a restaurant accountable for the boorish conduct of its guests, and I don’t, even if they feed their paranoia by turning the TV to Fox instead of a baseball game or something.

We left and I borrowed Neal’s camera to shoot a picture of the building. There’s an American flag out front of the restaurant. This flag is: (a) horribly tattered and torn and ready to be honorably retired, (b) attached in some fashion to an equally tattered and torn old Georgia state flag, the one with the Confederate colors, and (c) upside down. I might have another order of that steak and gravy once they fly a new flag, and hoist it the right way up.

Ru San’s, Kennesaw GA

Now this is weird. I’ve eaten at one Ru San’s or another better than a dozen times, but I can’t remember a single occasion that lends itself to an anecdote worth relating. I remember watching DJ Shockley make a spectacular end zone dive when the Gamecocks came to town in 2005 at the one in Athens, but I was wasting time with somebody who didn’t like football that fall and might not have that quite right. I remember watching what must been a sixth generation VHS copy of an old Gundam cartoon at the one in Buckhead in 2004 and thinking that incredibly odd, that surely they could have laid their hands on a better copy of that. Of course I remember that my daughter shouts “Wasabi!” in the manner of South Park‘s “Timmy!” every time we walk into one of their locations. Perhaps sushi does not lend itself to anecdotes? Continue reading “Ru San’s, Kennesaw GA” →

Bella’s Pizzeria, Smyrna GA

It’s always a little discouraging when a place that you know to be capable of giving you a good meal lets you down. We don’t eat at Bella’s very often – perhaps eight or nine times over the years – but it has a deserved reputation for giving you a perfectly good New York-style pie. It’s certainly nowhere near the best in the region, and not in my top five, but I’ve always felt it to be a reliable place.

It’s a sports bar, basically. I’m not sure how much of its loud, late-evening hoopla was designed and how much evolved from answering customer requests for things to do, but over time they’ve introduced Team Trivia and other games, and usually have live music – blues and classic rock covers, mainly – on Fridays and Saturdays. It’s a very fun neighborhood pizza place. The pie’s usually pretty good, and you can complement it with a very decent side salad with a delicious house dressing or some garlic knots which put most of their rivals to shame, and they offer Boylan’s sodas by the bottle. It’s a good place.

This past week, we had the first subpar meal we’ve ever had at Bella’s. We had a veggie pie and a stuffed pie with meatballs and ham, and neither was worth writing home about. They were certainly better than what Domino’s might like to deliver, but not at all like what I have had in the past. The dough didn’t taste right, and the sauce seemed bland and canned. I thought the cheese was fine, and the veggie toppings were all quite good, but it just felt like it was made without attention to detail. It didn’t have any spark.

When this happens with pizza, it’s hugely aggravating because you’re sharing with the group. Marie, my daughter and I met Neal here and we could all only agree that the food was “all right.” Sadly, the blow to the wallet seems a lot harsher when your meal isn’t a standout. Bella’s seems a little pricier than most of its competitors anyway, but they do offer coupons which aren’t hard to find. In fact, we got our coupon from my folks, who eat here all the time. My dad is often found shopping in that strip mall, and he loves Bella’s, but he’s also honest about their inconsistency. Most of the time, they’re pretty good, once in a while they are outstanding, and once in a very long while, they’re bland and disappointing.

I’ve mentioned before that 2004 was something of a mistake-filled year for me. The very last time one of those mistakes and I had supper together, I brought her and her daughter here. The pizza that night was completely amazing, although I think that the girl I was seeing was a little too distracted by her daughter’s really awful conduct that night to notice. I’m willing to cut Bella’s a little slack, because I know first-hand that they can do better. That and those garlic knots will knock you out.

Cherokee Cattle Company, Marietta GA

This is Marie, weighing in on the visit we made recently to The Cherokee Cattle Company. Admittedly, my contribution on this one is in large part because there are desserts involved, though the food itself was quite tasty.

My father-in-law picked this location for his birthday dinner. It is one of a small group of four local restaurants, each of them with a different name and arranged around a different theme, owned by “friend-of-Food-Network” Gus Tselios. Marietta Fish Market, Pasta Bella, and the original Marietta Diner are the other three locations. The Cherokee Cattle Company is a steak house and actually predates the other stores. For years, it was independently owned and proudly fought off regional competition from the likes of Longhorn and Outback, but joined the “Diner Family” in 2008. The menu was changed somewhat to fall in line with the others, and to bring the somewhat outsize dinner portions and ridiculously outsize desserts to Canton Road.

One of the best things about this particular location is that of the four, it’s the only one where you don’t usually have to wait for a year and a half to get a table. Mainly it’s just that it’s the biggest of the places, and the parking isn’t quite up to the capacity of the interior (an interior, I should mention, filled with things like antler chandeliers, but if you can ignore that sort of thing you’ll be fine). One of the worst things (for me–it won’t be a problem for anyone but the other four people in the universe who dislike the stuff) is that this place has an unnatural fondness for bacon. Having it appear on my salad was a little discouraging, if for no other reason than that I honestly ought to have remembered from last time that a vegetarian salad needs a special request. However, there were folks at the table willing to take the contaminated salad off my hands, and give every appearance of enjoying the favor they did to me.

Steaks don’t make it onto my plate very often. Most of the time they’re too big for my appetite. Also, since a bad steak is worse than no steak at all, they only get ordered when there’s plenty of money in the budget, or when there is a special occasion. I chose a rib eye because Grant doesn’t like that cut much and I’m disinclined to get a bunch of different slabs of meat for home cooking when it’s so hard to keep track of what is finished when. Which is, of course, one of the benefits of going to a steak house–timing the cooking is someone else’s problem. Actually, the best steak on our table was my father-in-law’s, which came with a bucket containing enough horseradish to clean out the sinuses of Napoleon’s army on the way back from Moscow.

The sweet potato fries are almost thick enough to reach towards home fry status, which as I understand it is a little hard for sweet potatoes as the sugars caramelize rather quickly. Generally fry portions defeat me well before half-way, but these were worth munching a bit longer, in no small part because the thicker fries held their heat better.

Grant got the salmon. Just because we were down the street from the place that specializes in fish doesn’t mean he got second-best; it was very well made, quite simply (as is best for fish) and with a little bit of crispiness around the edges. However, as has been said before, he likes fish rather more than I do, so we were not in danger of menu envy this time.

We closed the meal with some of the death-defying desserts. The selections of the table included cheesecake with and without strawberries, tiramisu cake, and some kind of death by chocolate concoction. Please note that there were seven of us, my piece of cheesecake was bought separately as a take-home item, and we still managed to bring home samples of every one of the cakes along with our other leftovers. Do not come to any of the four locations without a really good appetite, or an awful lot of time, unless you plan to leave with enough for tomorrow’s lunch box and maybe a snack after work, too. But do take home some dessert even if you can’t choke it down immediately after eating yourself silly. Just because the pieces are bigger than your head doesn’t mean they skimp on the quality.