Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppe, Kennesaw GA (CLOSED)

It won’t be long, I fear, before blogs like this will be the only proof that this small chain ever existed. The little Dagwood’s empire has already crumbled and collapsed, leaving just a scattered handful of franchises available. One of them is nearby in Kennesaw and serves up one of the most amazing sandwiches you can find, but nobody confidently predicts that a new generation will enjoy it.

Like many of you, I first heard of the chain thanks to some targeted Google keyword sponsored links in my gmail. For a while in 2006, it seemed like every time I received an email with the word “comics” in it, Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppe popped up on the side. Eventually I got curious enough to check it out, and was delighted by the incredible cuteness of what I saw. Apparently, Dean Young, the current writer of the King Features comic strip Blondie, which was created by his father in 1930, decided to fulfill a lifetime dream of a chain of sandwich shoppes making wild meals just like the ones that Dagwood Bumstead would concoct.

I stress that “incredible cuteness” only goes so far. I do not believe that I have looked forward to reading a new installment of Blondie since I was ten, and don’t expect to again until I’m in a retirement home. I admit some archaeological curiosity about what the strip might have been like in 1930, when Blondie was a carefree, rich flapper girl with daddy issues. What I’ve heard sounds preferable to the suburban mediocrity that King Features has been inflicting upon us for more than forty years.

In 2006, the chain had not left Florida. Throughout 2007, they started popping up in the midwest, South Carolina and Texas, and one arrived in Suwanee, Georgia. Surprisingly, in the spring of 2008, one opened near us, at the intersection of Barrett Parkway and Ridenour. I would never have known this had I not, by chance, chosen to come back that way from the far end of Whitlock, just to have something different to look at on my way. This amazing little secret has somehow, despite the ridiculously awful location, unbelievably awful hours (they usually close at 7) and occasionally awful teenage staff in place when we’ve visited, managed to stay open for two years.

How much longer is anybody’s guess. If you try looking up simply Dagwood’s on Google, you’ll first get a half-dozen unrelated restaurants from all across the country who have appropriated the name from the comic strip. If you search for Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppe, you’ll find a completely different story: tales of franchisees suing the owners, closed stores, and websites, once geared to franchises’ regions, which have defaulted to Go Daddy placeholder pages. It would appear that the Florida stores are gone, leaving the one here in Kennesaw and a handful in Indiana and Kentucky. Possibly one in Springfield, Missouri. In fact, when I first visited the local store in May of 2008, I was unaware that things were already falling apart. That very month in the magazine Franchise Times, there appeared a quite remarkable article by Jonathan Maze about how the many investors and franchises were lining up their lawyers. That Dagwood’s exists anywhere at all right now is frankly amazing.

So Marie and our daughter and I went to supper here last week and the stink of failure was so heavy that I felt I needed to order their trademark Dagwood sandwich, suspecting that I won’t have many more chances. The bad vibe was so heavy that when we left, I forgot and neglected to snap a picture of the building for the blog, necessitating this photo from our first visit, two years previously.

Over those two years, the quality of the food has not altered a jot. These are, despite everything else in this entry, leagues superior to any other sandwich chain, except Jersey Mike’s, which I completely love. Why anybody would stop at a Jimmy John’s, a Subway or a Quizno’s over Dagwood’s I couldn’t tell you. Food-wise, Dagwood’s is genuinely terrific, and the Dagwood itself is, as pictured, a giant jawbreaker of a meal, a real treat that you can barely finish. The restaurants offer Zapp’s brand chips on the side, and even have packs of their cracked pepper and sea salt flavor repackaged as Dagwood’s Zesty Pepper, so I suppose that the good people at Zapp’s, at least, were sold on this chain’s solvency.

But everything else about this place is increasingly underwhelming. At least the teens who were blaring their music at maximum volume a few months ago have gone, but the ones who replaced them were in a real hurry to get out of there as quickly as possible, and had stacked the chairs in the window shortly after six so they could clean the floors. While we were eating, two different parties drove up, saw the stacked chairs, backed out and drove away, concluding that they were closed.

One of Dagwood’s greatest follies is that about a quarter of its counter space is given over to Blondie merchandise, despite the indisputable fact that nobody between the ages of ten and seventy can be said to be a Blondie collector. Bafflingly, there is a single collected edition of the comic strip in print, but they didn’t sell that in the restaurant, just glasses and tchotchkes. Well, the merchandise shelf is, as expected, collecting dust, and the flat-screen TV which was set up to show Blondie comics, panel-by-panel, on a loop has been switched off for months.

The food’s still good. It’s excellent. But nobody seriously expects it to still be available this time next year. If you’d like to go, phone first.

(Update 8/24/11: They lasted longer than I thought, but we confirmed today that they closed earlier this month. Not a surprise, but a shame nonetheless.)

Just Around the Corner, Atlanta GA

I’m going to be so depressed when Marie’s job moves out to the Perimeter Mall area in the next month or so. Once a week, we meet for lunch downtown. The original idea had been to meet in Centennial Olympic Park and enjoy a nice picnic outside, but she has a longer lunch than me, and, honestly, I got a little tired of rushing back to work with a belly full of lunch and spending the next two hours feeling like I was going to lose it. So now she picks up our grub and we eat here at my job and it’s much more pleasant. Maybe this week, we can enjoy a nice meal on the tables outside.

More often than not, Marie picks up a burger and fries from Just Around the Corner, a teeny little place at the intersection of Spring and Marietta. I’ve actually only set foot in the place once, so I really can’t tell you much about it. It’s got just the sort of look to it that let you know, correctly, that they’re doing something right. It’s like one step up from a hot dog cart, with only room inside for perhaps five people. And in much the same way that some of the best meals come from street vendors – I don’t know that there have ever been falafels anywhere as good as the ones that this one Turkish fellow used to serve from a little cart just below Leconte and Park Halls on the UGA campus in the mid-90s – the burgers at Just Around the Corner are just dripping with character and style.

Over the last decade or so, Atlanta has really nicened up the area around the park, trying to make the place much more attractive to tourists. The whole area’s so much cleaner and family-friendly than its reputation holds. Nearby parking is usually under $10, and with so many museums and activities to check out, I imagine that you can easily find plenty of things to do, and have a really nice, juicy burger to top it off. And if you’re coming into town for an afternoon Hawks or Thrashers game, it’s certainly better than your options inside Philips Arena, and a lot cheaper, too.

Looks like the dogwoods are blooming in the park today. Yeah, maybe we can sit outside and enjoy our burgers with nature before it starts erupting with pollen too terribly. I’ve probably only got about 72 or fewer hours left before I will want to dig my eyeballs out with spoons, so I might try and enjoy the weather while I can, you know?

I have to tell you about this soup.

The best soup that there’s ever been, in the history of food, was the gazpacho at the late, dearly lamented Mean Bean in Athens. If you never had this soup, then you’ll never know what the best soup in the universe tasted like. Now about ten months ago, down in south Georgia, I did have a bowl of gazpacho which seemed to me to be in the same general hemisphere of coma-inducing wonder, but I was also a little distracted, what with being about five hours away from getting married, so I might have been exaggerating things just a little. I’ll have to try it again and see whether it holds up.

Assuming that it does, then it stands to follow that the third best soup in the world is the creamy tomato soup at Sweet Tomatoes, a national chain known on the west coast as Souplantation. And I can see disappointment in the eyes of a few readers through the screens of their laptops, as it’s just a month into this experiment and I’m already talking about a national chain. Tsk!

Obsession with the creamy tomato soup is widely known as writer Mark Evanier’s recurring joke, and I’m not trying to hem in on his well-worn territory, but I do have to thank him for cluing me in on the place. Depending on his mood, he’ll either casually mention it or go into full-bore rave when the soup returns to the restaurant’s rotating menu. This usually happens every March and for one week in the fall. I’ve never understood this. There are a few soups available here year-round. One of these is their signature deep kettle house chili, which is the blandest and most disappointingly ordinary chili I’ve ever had, and they serve that slop all the time?

Oh, and I’ll tell you what’s worse: they’ve also got some soups which are on an even sillier 15-day rotation. So if you go in the first half of March, you can alternate bowls of creamy tomato and their shrimp bisque, which is also outstanding, but in the second half of the month, they replace the shrimp bisque with clam chowder, which I can’t eat. Now what’s fair about that?

So anyway, about four years back, Mark was raving about this soup and I decided the kiddos needed some more vegetables, so we made an evening out of it and I was sold. I mean, this soup is really, really good. It doesn’t seem possible that anything made in such quantity can be so tasty, but I had something like six bowls of the stuff that first night. Then I remained sitting there for a very, very long time.

To be honest, Sweet Tomatoes is one of those places that flatly is not worth a visit unless you check the website beforehand and confirm that there’s a good soup on the menu. Now Marie likes the place regardless, because she enjoys making a nice salad to her specifications, but I never feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth unless I can enjoy several bowls of soup. The creamy tomato and the shrimp bisque are certainly deal-clinchers, and I also really like their El Paso chicken and lime. I’ll go to Sweet Tomatoes without a grumble if any one of the three are present. I mean, the day hasn’t come where I’ve dropped my fork in shock and raved about the lettuce and spinach I’ve just had, plus their pastas are uniformly disappointing, so there needs to be good soup.

Luckily, Marie’s birthday happens to come in March, so we can usually justify two or three visits during the month. I need to do a better job remembering to go at the start of March, however. Sunday night, we got a group of friends together to celebrate. We all arrived in the middle of a huge downpour, exactly the sort of weather that requires two or three bowls of soup.

Well, we were nine in total and an astonishing amount of soup was consumed. Neal had several bowls of their black bean chili, which surely must be superior to their regular deep-kettle-thing because it cannot possibly be worse, and was comatose for the next sixteen hours. Between us, my wife and I built a small fort of little red soup bowls. She didn’t have space on the table to set her gift cards down. That’s one of the advantages to having children; you can send them back to the line for more soup. Just keep it coming, with some of that cheesy bread to dunk in it. More tomato soup, and nobody gets hurt. Maybe we’ll go back Saturday afternoon, before they replace the creamy tomato with something inevitably inferior.

Other blog posts about Sweet Tomatoes in Atlanta:

Atlanta Foodies (Dec. 12 2008)
Food Near Snellville (July 30 2009)

The Real Chow Baby, Atlanta GA

There probably won’t be quite so many features in this column about restaurants as unabashedly corporate as this one, but since The Real Chow Baby is, at this stage, just a local chain with only two locations, I think it will be acceptable to write about it. I’m willing to overlook the small army of attractive young servers in matching black t-shirts and headsets, although they do reinforce the feeling that somebody’s investment in these restaurants is far more financial than emotional.

Real Chow Baby opened its first restaurant on Howell Mill some years ago, and a second in 2008 in the Cobb Galleria Center, giving area residents, at long last, a reason to actually set foot inside this misbegotten mall other than the annual Anime Weekend Atlanta convention. The Galleria’s been an embarrassment for a really long time now. When I was in middle school, it was opened with so much hoopla – an upscale mall! an AMC theater with eight screens! a video arcade with an airlock! – but it languished, a sad suburban wannabe that looked longingly at Phipps Plaza and just wished it could be that cool.

I guess about ten years ago, Cobb County finally took pity on the diseased beast, which had been coughing blood since the cinema closed, and gutted the upper floor of the mall, transforming it, quite impressively, into an extension of a mid-sized convention center that connected, above and across the shopping area, to the Waverly Hotel on the mall’s far side. There is still, nevertheless, a lot of vacant real estate inside. The excellent Sky City blog provided a terrific photoessay about the Galleria last October, which you can go read. The mall hasn’t changed a jot since those photos were taken, indeed since the top floor was converted to conference rooms and the Eckanakar people put in a reading room years ago, except that a gallery of horrible art across from Jock’s and Jill’s closed . And Sky City’s writer is quite right: unless a trade show’s in town, you’d think this mall had long been abandoned.

I overlooked the Real Chow Baby when we first noticed it during AWA 2008, but last year, Marie and I found ourselves free from children for a few hours on Friday and elected to have supper there, since it was so close to the con and looked reasonably nice. I was so taken with it that I asked whether she’d mind excusing ourselves and going back for lunch the next day. I never, never do that.

I’ve been so taken with The Real Chow Baby that I’ve eaten there probably twenty times since the con last September. They serve a stir-fry buffet, where you build a bowl from a huge array of ingredients. You can start with white or brown rice or four different pastas, work your way through dozens of veggies, add ladles of seventeen different sauces, about seven meats and then about a dozen spices. The potential for experimentation, while not mathematically endless, is pretty darn huge.

Fortunately, Marie likes this place almost as much as I do, and it didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to persuade her that bowls full of stir-fry were exactly what she wanted for her birthday dinner last week. (She had two birthday dinners, because she’s that awesome, and I’ll tell you about the second in a couple of days.) Our daughter and I met Marie after work on Friday, where there is usually a pretty good crowd of weekend revelers and families. We each sampled three bowls and enjoyed all but one of them.

Now, three bowls of stir fry sounds like a lot, and it would be, if you foolishly piled high with the food. You see, a one-trip dinner order at Real Chow Baby runs you $11.99 on the weekends – lunch is only eight – but for a buck more, you can have unlimited trips to the buffet. This is one of the city’s best-kept secrets. If you make yourself just a teeny bowl with no more than two ladles of sauce, then you can sample several different flavors, and mix and match sauce offerings without worrying about whether you’ve gorged yourself stupid. I like to start with a medium-sized bowl, very heavy on the hot spices, and then have two smaller bowls with milder taste.

Marie’s second concoction of the night mixed black bean sauce and hot mustard over white rice. None of us liked it very much, but it didn’t really matter, because you can abandon something you don’t enjoy and try something different. If you can exercise enough willpower to keep your portion sizes reasonable, then this is definitely a place to provide you with an excellent meal or twenty.

(Update: On July 19 2010, this location split off from the other and became known as “Big Chow Grill.”)

Blue Willow Inn, Social Circle GA

To help navigate around this blog, but also keep it simple, I decided that each restaurant entry should have just two tags, related to the type of food and the town that we’ve visited to eat it. Assuming this blog maintains my interest for a good while, eventually readers can get ideas and suggestions about where to eat by clicking a tag. I think that of all of them, the tag for Social Circle might end up being the least frequently troubled. Marie and I drove out here with our daughter Saturday and, other than nine hundred police cruisers maintaining order, we did not see anything whatsoever of interest other than the Blue Willow Inn.

Social Circle is about 45 minutes east of Atlanta out I-20. Louis and Billie van Dyke opened their restaurant in a gorgeous old home a couple of blocks north of Social Circle’s tiny downtown in November 1991. Among the framed articles on the walls of the main hallway, there’s a feature article from the inspirational magazine Guideposts that tells how their first few months were really tough, but a raving review by the late, great Lewis Grizzard turned things around almost overnight, and the restaurant has routinely served 200,000 visitors a year. They recommend that you make reservations, otherwise you might end up sitting in a rocking chair on their front porch for a while.

Blue Willow Inn serves up a really nice Southern-style buffet. The price is quite reasonable – just under $20 a head – and includes everything from ham and chicken livers to what might very well be the best fried green tomatoes that I’ve ever had. And I’m awfully particular to fried green tomatoes. The salad was pretty disappointing – uninspired iceberg lettuce in a concoction not unlike what you’d find at a Huddle House – but the rest of the vegetables more than made up for it.

Even though the restaurant is bustling with people, its layout is so nice that each room is comparatively quiet, allowing you to relax and take your time. Everybody there seemed to really be enjoying themselves, knowing that they were doing something particularly nice for lunch. We arrived a little bit before a birthday party started in one of the upstairs rooms. My daughter, who was making her way back from the buffet with seconds, put on a show of faux indignation and asked, of two people going upstairs with gift bags, why she had not been invited. The older ladies replied “Well, of course you’re invited, dear, come on up.” So my daughter put her plate on our table and ran skedaddling up to join them. Apparently she gave the birthday gal a big hug and wished her well before rejoining us, beaming. This is why, when my daughter feigns shyness to get out of something, we know she’s lying.

Desserts consist of a million billion calories in a series of decadent cakes, pies, brownies and forty pounds more banana pudding than I should have eaten. When we left, we made it as far as the porch before I had to commandeer a rocking chair for several minutes. Then we got as far as the koi pond and gift shop before having to stop again.

The parking lot is behind the restaurant, and behind it, there is a small, classy-designed strip mall. Actually, I was exaggerating earlier when I said there was nothing of interest other than the Blue Willow Inn around the area; there is also a small nostalgia-minded soda fountain in that strip mall which might have been worth a look had I not already consumed forty pounds of banana pudding and a slice of chocolate cake buried under whipped cream. How the dickens that place is meant to stay in business with the giant dessert buffet of the inn on the other side of a parking lot is anybody’s guess. Next door to the soda fountain, there’s one of those museums about Adam and Eve and the Jesus horses, for those of you who enjoy throwing up in public.

The Mad Italian, Chamblee GA

As longtime readers of my LiveJournal know, I am fascinated by local restaurant chains, especially the ones that never leave their home base. Atlanta has been home to several, and one that has sadly been hit like a freight train during the current recession is the Mad Italian. This wonderful restaurant opened in 1973 on Peachtree Road and claims to have been among the first to serve up New York and Philly-styled sandwiches in the city.

The original location is long gone, but for most of my life, there were two others, in Chamblee and in Smyrna. Around 2005, they opened one in Marietta where a short-lived barbecue restaurant had been (nobody seems to remember the name), and in 2006, a fourth location in Alpharetta moved into a site vacated by a McAlister’s Deli. The Marietta store quickly became my daughter’s favorite restaurant, and it somehow fooled my son into thinking that he liked alfredo sauce. Since everything else from Ragu to sauce packs to the offerings at other restaurants have failed to meet his requirements, he eventually gave up and concluded that what he actually likes is Mad Italian’s alfredo sauce and just quit trying to order it anywhere else.

Then again, who knows what extra ingredients are in Mad Italian’s alfredo recipe? I took a young lady out for supper there late one Saturday evening in 2006 and we had a blast with the staff, since everybody on duty that night was even more baked than my date’s lasagna.

So it didn’t come as a great surprise when the Marietta store closed in 2008, though it was a huge shock when the venerable Smyrna location, where high schoolers used to congregate after Wills High School football games in the eighties, shut down at the same time. Then again, there hasn’t been a Wills High School since 1989 either. Late last year, the Alpharetta store followed them, leaving the Chamblee location as the last man standing in what used to be a northside tradition.

For all my lovin’, Mad Italian’s had a curiously poor reputation among locals for years. Back when Atlanta Cuisine had a messageboard (come on, Tom!), the announcement that the Smyrna and Marietta stores had shuttered had met with really curious glee. Well, sure, any place where the staff can spend even one night visibly stoned stupid can’t say they didn’t have it coming, but I always liked everything on the menu, from the sandwiches (made on very light bread by Cassone Bakeries of New York) to the pasta fagioli soup (tomato-based, with shells, red and white beans) to the incredibly yummy meat sauce. I’m not savvy enough to say whether the pasta itself is any different from anybody else’s, but I really don’t believe I’ve ever had meat sauce as consistently good as Mad Italian’s, despite regular experimentation.

The sandwiches have always been terrific, too. I really have not ordered their cheesesteak often enough. There are better in the region, but any of their six-inch sandwiches, served with a small salad and a bowl of spaghetti, will give you a truly satisfying meal. How the Mad Italian has suffered while that Artuzzi’s chain is still around utterly baffles me.

My daughter has been pestering me for some time to revisit past triumphs, and since she’s been pretty good lately, I agreed to indulge her. This past Saturday, she and I took a long drive out for lunch here with our frequent dining partner David, whose restaurant choices are consistently good. I believe his family went to the Smyrna location many times in the past, but got out of the habit ages back. Marie wasn’t with us this trip; she and her brother went to Athens to raid that deli I was talking about the other day.

I don’t have a lot more to say about the trip. It’s a huge, aggravating shame that the Mad Italian’s fortunes have dipped so badly lately, and that a nearly forty years-old enterprise feels like it’s on its last legs, but it’s still a perfectly reliable place for a really decent sandwich or a big bowl of pasta with good sauce.

On the other hand, well, since Marie moved in, we’ve had her unbelievably good sauce recipes with a variety of meats and spices and, to be bluntly honest, as good as Mad Italian’s spaghetti with meat sauce is, I can’t swear that I’ve missed it. It’s a place that does everything pretty well, but there’s not one thing on the menu that I can’t get better someplace else. And honestly, when your nostalgia for a place’s fun history is louder than your present-day enthusiasm, and chuckling about stoned servers is more fun than the meal in front of you, it may be the ultimate sign that you’ve moved on.

Marietta Fish Market, Marietta GA

One of Marietta’s local heroes is Gus Tselios, a fellow whose group owns four restaurants in the area. The world-famous Marietta Diner is the flagship of his empire, and the others are Pasta Bella, the Cherokee Cattle Company and the Marietta Fish Market, which opened in December 2008. There’s absolutely no way that anybody in Atlanta can even be a quasi-serious foodie and not come to Cobb County to try out at least one of these places.

The basic gist of the restaurants is family dining, with an emphasis on freaking enormous portions. You can usually expect to spend $20 a head here, but your Jackson will buy you one supper and at least one leftover lunch. All four restaurants have menus so thick that they’ll probably stop a bullet, but the secret is simple: order from the specials. On the inside front cover of each menu, there’s an inserted page typed up that day. Unless you’re really in the mood for a standard, as I admittedly often am, you just want to focus on the one page. What Tselios and his chefs have concocted for that page will probably knock you on your backside.

All four restaurants are usually pretty packed – there’s a wait at the Diner 24/7 – but we decided to brave the Fish Market Friday night. Even at 8 pm there was a forty minute wait, but Marie’s brother was in town, and, observing Lent, wanted fish for supper. Frankly, Atlanta does not have very many seafood restaurants worth visiting, so our options were, flatly, accept a long wait or brave the drive-thru at Captain D’s. The Fish Market, happily, is just five minutes up the road and worth the wait.

Friday evening, I was in the mood for a standard – shrimp and scallops. The Fish Market has a “lighter appetite” section on their menu, where you get about half the food for two-thirds of the price. It’s not the most economically sensible policy unless you’re just trying to save a couple of bucks, and things admittedly are a little tight. Besides, they still give you so darn much as to provide leftovers for Saturday night. So I had fried baby shrimp and grilled scallops over dirty rice with cole slaw, following some pretty good fried green tomatoes and zucchini fries that we all shared and a Greek salad. Normally, we don’t splurge on appetizers, but Karl was in town, and it’s usually very difficult for Marie and I to resist any kind of fried vegetable. Fried green beans are her particular kryptonite. I don’t know that I’ve had zucchini prepared like this before. A basket is big enough for four, and those are darn tasty.

My plate would have been perfectly satisfactory had Marie not ordered from the specials. She had the red beans and rice with jumbo shrimp, and friends, you’ve never had it this good. The beans are cooked in this unbelievably good sauce, very tangy and sweet. I was pilfering beans and sausage all night just to let that sauce roll around on my tongue. Karl also ordered from the specials, and had a whole red snapper brought out on a huge platter and a bed of sauteed vegetables. He made out just fine, too.

The only member of our group not to be totally satisfied with supper was my daughter, who keeps claiming that she doesn’t actually like seafood despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, and, sighing, got an order of chicken strips from the kids’ menu. To be honest, these weren’t all that great, but they were the biggest chicken strips I’ve ever seen and could clobber your next door neighbor into unconsciousness, and frankly anybody who’d order chicken in the Fish Market probably could stand to be walloped upside the head with one herself. But that’s okay; the next good meal we’d share was one that she requested.

Other blog posts about Marietta Fish Market:

Atlanta Foodies (June 21 2009)
Atlanta Restaurant Blog (July 7 2009)
From My Table (Sep 13 2009)