Cook’s Place, Columbus GA

A couple of weeks ago, Marie and I took the baby to Columbus and Phenix City for a day of eating, walking and visiting friends. We visited five restaurants and I’ll write those up over this and the next two chapters. A sixth, Fountain City Coffee, was intended, but we completely exhausted the almost nap-free baby, and so retired a little earlier than planned so he could get back in the car and go to sleep. Continue reading “Cook’s Place, Columbus GA” →

Barbecue and “Cuppycakes,” Around Athens GA

I’ll try not to get too detailed with silly backstory with this one, but I can tell already that it might be tempting. Y’all bear with me.

I was supposed to go to Athens on Labor Day weekend, but I picked up some extra hours instead. I hadn’t decided where I was going to eat, but I was looking forward to a nice, long, relaxing day. I put it off two weeks. Then we had a daycare crisis. They kind of shut down and moved on us. So my mother volunteered to watch the baby until we found new arrangements. I felt it would be wrong to spend a day playing in Athens while my mother watched the baby, so he needed to come with me. Then he started being a real handful, evidently not enjoying the routine change while simultaneously beginning serious teething. I figured I could use some help, and my daughter had spent four weeks not getting in any trouble, so she could take a hooky day and help out. Continue reading “Barbecue and “Cuppycakes,” Around Athens GA” →

Amos’s BBQ & Biscuits, Ball Ground GA

When Marie and I go out to eat, we like to think of ourselves as being pretty unobtrusive. Forgettable, even. We don’t want to draw any attention to ourselves, particularly when we start photographing food. I sort of like to think that, should a restaurant’s owner or staff Google their way to our writeup down the line, they won’t necessarily connect the chapter that we have written to the faces that were in their store some time previously. Our trip to Amos’s, however, well, that was kind of unforgettable. We have no doubt that, should anybody on the staff of Amos’s ever read this entry, then one or two of them will nod and say, “Oh, yes. I remember them. They had that baby. And that accident.”

We first noticed Amos’s on a Sunday seven months ago, before the baby was around to cause trouble. I took Marie out for a Sunday Valentine’s Day date that included a drive through Cherokee and Forsyth Counties up GA-372. We noticed Amos’s then, grumbled that it was closed on Sunday, and made our way to the Poole’s Mill Covered Bridge Park.

It has been on my to-do list ever since, of course. You just don’t drive past a barbecue joint without telling yourself you’ll try and get back sometime. Well, a few Saturdays ago, we had planned to go to Columbus and Phenix City to visit friends, but that was a very, very, very trying week – we had daycare problems of the sort I wouldn’t wish on anybody and that stress left us exhausted enough to catch mild colds – and we knew we were just going to want to sleep in on Saturday and not mess with a road trip. We put it off a week, and I’ll tell you about it in a few days. So we slept in and woke refreshed and had a late breakfast over at Stilesboro Biscuits. By the time noon rolled around, we were thinking lazily about lunch. I was all for getting at least a little ways out of town. The last three plates of barbecue I’d had were all overpriced and I just wanted to see something other than suburban sprawl getting there. That’s why we drove up to northern Cherokee to find Amos’s.

I rang Melissa, who lives not far away from the place, and invited her to join us. She was not free. This turned out to be for the best. She missed a fantastic little meal – oh, this place really, really is good – but as we drove away, laughing off the embarrassment, I reflected how if she had been able to come, we could have followed her back around these crazy mountain roads to her place, wherever it is, and maybe Marie could have taken a shower.

Yes, internet travelers, sometimes your search results tell you what you wanted to know about a restaurant and little else besides that, and sometimes they tell you about baby accidents and a little bit about a restaurant. This is how our blog works. So, that said…

Amos’s is actually in a really neat old two-story house that had been located in the Dunwoody area back when that was all woods in the late 1800s. The building was relocated to the mountain foothills about forty years ago, and has been used as a restaurant for the last several years. It’s actually a little easy to miss. The sign is not quite as visible as the gigantic wall of logs. It looks less like the fuel for their smoker and more like a spectacular perimeter fence. The property is gorgeously landscaped and features a really attractive brick and gravel lot. There’s a huge front porch, shaded on one side by trees. Three or four degrees cooler and we would have sat outside.

The food here is simply excellent. After several underwhelming and stupidly expensive Atlanta takes on barbecue over the last couple of weeks, it was so nice to get out in the country and taste some chopped pork that feels, smells and tastes just right. The fries are hand-cut, the Brunswick stew was tangy, soupy and had just the right kick of spice, and the slaw was a nice, green, vinegar-based recipe. Everything was totally delicious. They have two sauces, a traditional brown ketchup-based sauce that goes just perfectly with the meat, and an orange habanero sauce that doesn’t quite nail it, but clears sinuses all the same. My daughter begged off to visit with friends at the mall. Kid missed out, big time. This was an excellent meal, the best I’d had in some time, and considerably better than the last three barbecue places in the city that I visited. Even the best of those three – Community Q, which I liked – was not a patch on this.

Marie had finished about half of her sandwich when the baby, sitting on her lap, had an accident. Not just a small one. This is my third baby; I have seen something like this only once before, and I have told myself ever since that I must surely have been exaggerating. This is going to be held over this kid’s head on every date he ever brings home to meet us. Sometime in the 2030s, I will, indeed, be telling my future daughter-in-law about how epic the failure of this diaper was, leaving Marie in a mad, fruitless dash for the restroom.

Parents of younguns should always, always have emergency changes of clothes for themselves in the trunks of their cars. We hadn’t quite got around to that yet. Oh, the baby’s diaper bag had about four outfits for him, just nothing for a mother on the receiving end of that kind of eruption to wear. Marie, peeking her head out, asked whether Amos’s happened to sell T-shirts. They do not, but a kind server went upstairs, where the restaurant keeps some storage, and retrieved an emergency cleaning shirt for Marie to wear. There came a point where I couldn’t help, and resumed my meal. Marie had to take half her sandwich home, having understandably lost a little interest in eating, but she added a few dollars to the tip jar on the counter for the shirt, and finished stripping off in the car.

Returning home, we didn’t get to stop by that barbecue trailer parked outside a knicknack and antique store about four miles back along GA-20 on the way back to I-575. Marie, half-naked and giggling, told me not to dare stop. Well, I was also going to swing by that Best Buy in Canton and get a new iPod adapter for the car. “Home,” she ordered. Now, of course, we’ve got a barbecue trailer on the side of 20 that we need to try some other day. You just don’t drive past a barbecue joint without telling yourself you’ll try and get back sometime.

Grand Champion BBQ, Marietta GA

A few Fridays ago, my plans got stymied and so I decided to try out a new suburban barbecue joint that’s getting a lot of press and hype. It’s called Grand Champion and, while elements of it were admittedly pretty impressive, it was an expensive lesson in not necessarily letting the hype of the day overwhelm common sense. Let’s get one objection to this place out of the way first thing. Somebody at the post office has assigned this place the 30075 ZIP code and has been making the pretty bold claim that it’s in Roswell. It is not. I’ve lived here for many, many years, friends. This is Marietta. Cobb County. The Pope High School district, to be precise. In a pig’s eye this is Roswell.

Grand Champion is the latest place to claim lineage from the old Sam & Dave’s BBQ of Marietta. Co-owner Robert Owens worked there for a spell, before Sam and Dave split up. By my count, there are now five restaurants in the region that are run by members of this team. In fact, Owens apparently bakes his mac and cheese per David Roberts’ recipe. I actually tried Roberts’ mac and cheese at Community Q just a few days before and didn’t like it very much, so I passed on it here. Speaking of Community Q, I think that might be my ceiling. They charge eleven bucks, even, for a pork plate there. Any higher than that, and I’m going to start asking why. It costs $11.50 at Grand Champion, before tax. They’re located next door to a Dollar Tree, so please don’t tell me they’ve got steep ground rent to cover.

I went with a pulled pork plate with collard greens and Brunswick stew. Sadly, it appears that Owens picked up the most obnoxious lesson from Huff and company, and considers Brunswick stew a “premium” side and charges more for it. This atop the already steep price. Can we cut this nonsense out right now, Atlanta? There are five hundred barbecue joints in this state and somehow, the only ones who think that stew – stew! – is a premium anything are in the northern Atlanta ‘burbs.

Having said that, some of the food is pretty good. I’ve frequently bit off more than I can really chew with collards, and lose interest quickly, but these were better than most. The stew was indeed very notable, and rich with flavor. The sauces, in squeeze bottles on the table, were also good. The North Carolina vinegar was nice, but I really liked the dark brown Kansas City sauce a lot.

Unfortunately, the pulled pork wasn’t very smoky and it was also quite greasy, so I’d have to dock quite a few points for that. I don’t know what on earth they did to make it so greasy as to remove or overwhelm any taste of smoke from this pork, but it had the consistency and character of crock pot roast beef. It was limp and forgettable, until the Kansas City sauce brought it to life. I hate to sound like a Woody Allen character, but the food wasn’t very good, and the portions were so small!

That is the least amount of food that I have ever paid for as a “plate” in a barbecue restaurant, and very nearly the most money that I have spent. Say what you might about inconsistency in the kitchen, an off-day, or different palates and different tastes, but honestly, there’s an understood rule about judging barbecue places that, while rarely spoken, trumps all other considerations. Simply put, if I’m going to pay $12.46 for a plate of barbecue with two sides, I better not be leaving hungry. I left hungry.

Fortunately, I had business in north Cobb about an hour later, so it wasn’t much of a detour to pop into Cherokee County and swing by Hot Dog Heaven in downtown Woodstock and get something to eat.

I have read much about Hot Dog Heaven over the years, and I’m very sorry that I visited on a day when Miss Becky was not working. There are many great stories about this superhuman example of effervescent Southern hospitality dishing out Chicago-styled Vienna Beef brand dogs at low prices, and I regret that I didn’t get to recount one to you dear readers.

What I can tell you is that here, you get a great big treat for not a lot of money. I did just have lunch, and didn’t want to overindulge or load down on calories, so I just parked out front by the Betty Boop and had only a “Maxwell Street”-styled Polish sausage with grilled onions, sport peppers, and brown mustard, and chewed that delicious thing down while the Travel Channel had one of their peculiar programs about food that only very weird foreigners eat. I don’t know who the market for octopus or beef tongue ice cream is, but I guarantee you that the hot dog that I was enjoying was superior.

Woodstock might just be a little bit of a drive for a Vienna Beef dog, Chicago-style, but the wonderful, laid-back and silly atmosphere is a great little place to kick back and get away from things. I’d like to stop by again the next time I’m in the area, and try a few of the other things on their menu.

Osteria del Figo Pasta, Atlanta GA

Our Nashville-based friends Brooke and Tory came to town for Dragon*Con, and we had our usual Sunday night get-together with them during all that madness. I have to thank the convention for never scheduling anything unmissable on Sunday evenings, although this year, a special screening of an episode of Torchwood, with commentary by one of the actors, did mean we got together slightly later than I would have hoped.

I picked them up at the hotel while Marie and the children went ahead to Osteria del Figo on Howell Mill. I figured that we’d ask our guests what sort of food they were in the mood for and have a nearby restaurant already selected to breeze them there. I’m pretty sure I had every reasonable possibility other than pasta covered. If it wasn’t just down the street from our own house, twenty miles north of downtown, we’d probably have gone to Frankie’s, but I was momentarily stumped about a good, inexpensive Italian place near the convention hotels. A quick little look over Urbanspoon suggested this would be a good choice, and it really was.

The restaurant is easy to find; it is on the corner of Howell Mill and Huff, and it appears to have ample parking, which is kind of a rarity in this neighborhood. There’s a too-small airlock area, where guests line up to place their orders with a cashier. This part is a little slow, owing to a dense menu utterly full of possibilities. There are a good number of house specials, but also similar “build your own pasta” creations like you see at some of the larger national chains, with 18 sauces over 25 noodle selections. Speaking of which, there are currently seven Figo locations in Atlanta, but they don’t appear to have expanded to other cities. Most of the combinations here start at $8, and you can add meats for various prices. Figo prides itself on its meatballs, offered in a variety of recipes, for $1.50 each. This is a good place to get quite a lot of food for a reasonable price.

It looks like you can make some really fun meals up here. I went with spinach ravioli with amatriciana sauce, which is a red sauce with pancetta, tomatoes, peppers and olive oil. It was terrific. Marie had primavera over linguine and our daughter had pesto sauce over penne noodles. I am keen to visit again for lunch one day and give the artichoke ravioli with four cheese sauce a try. First Bite had that when she visited a couple of years ago and it looks very tasty.

As we waited for our food, we talked about visiting Nashville in a couple of months. This has been pretty much the longest I have gone without a trip to Nashville in a decade, and frankly, I miss the place, but this has been something of a ridiculous and crazy and busy year. So I tossed out a skeleton of a plan of what I’d like to do when we get there, and one or two places that I’d like to visit or revisit. Naming all these wonderful restaurants and wonderful meals had me quite hungry for my ravioli!

Well, after we had talked about Prince’s and Rotier’s and Ellington Place and Mas Tacos and Pied Piper and other such yummy places, and let the baby get lots of love and cuddling and attention, we enjoyed a really good meal. The food here is simply splendid, and we all enjoyed sampling each others’ dishes. Pasta really was a fine idea of Brooke’s, honestly. I’m very glad that we tried this place.

After we ate, the baby let us know that he really was in the mood to go home and be nursed and go to bed, so my daughter and I drove the ladies back to their hotel, but not before stopping at Flip Burger Boutique for a milkshake. I was sorry that Marie missed out, but Flip, incredibly noisy and ridiculous, isn’t baby-friendly at all. Unfortunately, they were out of the requested Cap’n Crunch shakes, but we enjoyed the Peach Melba and Krispy Kreme and Strawberry Shortcake and the remarkably curious Burnt Marshmellow with Nutella. (“It tastes like camping,” Tory exclaimed.) Everybody visiting Atlanta should try one of these.

There was a really odd loop of music videos going on the bar here, including Radiohead and, of all things, “Primary” by the Cure, which still strikes me as very odd to see anywhere other than the old Staring at the Sea VHS. My daughter is currently totally in love with the lead singer of My Chemical Romance. I pointed out the Cure, told her, truly, that MCR pilfered every idea it’s ever had from the Cure and, back before he ate all the pies, 1981-model Robert Smith was an awfully good-looking fellow. She disagreed with emphasis. Then I pointed out the bassist, Simon Gallup, and told my daughter that the girl I took to the prom was more totally in love with him in 1988 than she is with Gerard Way, today. She had to pause on that point. I never got much in the way of follow-up.

(Update, 11/12/11): As I promised myself weeks ago, I tried that artichoke ravioli with four cheese sauce. Marie and I went with our daughter and Neal to the Figo in Vinings and gave it a try.

It was every bit as tasty as I had hoped. My daughter had the paprika penne with arriabiatta sauce and was also very pleased with it.

Sabor do Brazil, Marietta GA

So how many Brazilian restaurants do you imagine you’d find within eyesight of the Micro Center on Powers Ferry in Cobb County? At least three. “Four,” said my daughter. “Oh, wait, never mind, that says ‘Brazilian Wax’.” Naturally, we went to the wrong one first. The wrong restaurant, not the wax place.

Back on Labor Day weekend, Marie was down at Dragon*Con, gaming with her brother and sister, while I stayed home to watch the children. David suggested that we meet for supper at the Brazilian restaurant across from Micro Center, and I thought he meant Botemkin, the popular bistro on Terrell Mill that opened in late July to some praise and hype. This has never happened before, and I darn well hope it will never happen again, but the three of us twiddled our thumbs and drank water waiting for him – I’ve mentioned before that David’s manners are impeccable, and he’s not the sort to be late without phoning – until I got impatient and called him. Well, my daughter and I twiddled our thumbs; the baby just cooed and gurgled. No, of course, David was waiting for us over on Delk Road at Sabor do Brazil, a much less expensive buffet place. Sheepishly, we apologized to the servers and withdrew.

Sabor do Brazil is a tiny little restaurant with a small dinner buffet, nicely priced at $8.99 on weekends. Honestly, the food was not at all bad, but pretty uninspiring. I had a large salad earlier that day for lunch, so I just started with a small plate with some tomatoes, black beans and rice, a little skirt steak in gravy, some fried bananas and baked flan. It was okay. Much more interesting was what I had to drink. They make their own cashew juice here, and that was very tasty.

But honestly, I go to restaurants sometimes and just have an okay meal, and figure that there’s really no reason to write a blog post about it. Even as I planned to go back for a small helping of tilapia in a tomato sauce, I figured we are really behind enough between “meal” and “blog” that I can occasionally skip a writeup.

Then a young fellow came by the table and let us know that the barbecue was ready, if we wanted to come get some. Everything changed.

Now, it is a rare day when I must flat out contradict what any of my peers in this hobby state on their blog, but I’m afraid that Malika Harricharan of Atlanta Restaurant Blog is quite mistaken to claim that this place doesn’t serve the skewers of meat roasting in an oven that you typically find at Brazilian steakhouses. Perhaps they don’t offer this at lunch, when she stopped by, but they certainly do at dinner. By my definition, this clearly is not barbecue, as the young server described it, but holy anna, is it ever terrific.

Well, most of it is. They have a number of meats roasting here, and I was not really taken with the pork ribs, which were too fatty. The beef with bacon was tremendously good, and the sausage was remarkable. Best of all was the picanha, which is top sirloin. They set the skewer upright on a plate and slice it downwards, with guests using tongs to help pull the meat away. It was tremendously good food, and I overindulged with great pleasure. David and my daughter each called it a day long before me, although in David’s defense, not knowing about this “barbecue” option – it’s just an extra dollar for the meat, a remarkable steal of a deal – he had loaded his plate with the buffet and didn’t have much room to dig in to the picanha.

Other than the young fellow who invited us to try the “barbecue,” we were served by the teenage daughter of the owner. I asked how long the restaurant had been here, and she said just about ten years. Not knowing who she was, I asked, as I do, how long she had worked here. “Oh, since it opened,” she replied. When I raised an eyebrow and asked, “Really?”, she got adorably flustered and told me, “I’m the daughter’s owner, I mean, I’m the owner of the daughter, I mean, I’m the owner’s daughter,” and that she was busing tables when she was seven.

She told me about the cashew juice, which is called simply caju in Brazil. I had no idea that the nuts that we eat are just a kernel of a much larger fruit that, in South America anyway, is used in its entirety. The fruit is eaten as a dessert or used in cooking, or the caju is extracted for a beverage. According to Wikipedia, in India, this juice, fermented, is used as the basis of an alcoholic drink called, depending on the process, either feni or gongo. Learning new things about food, and not just the stories behind restaurants, is one of the best things about writing this blog and talking to businesses. Now, I wonder where I can get a glass of feni, and how hard it’ll kick me onto my backside.

Six Feet Under, Atlanta GA

Six Feet Under has a pretty shaky reputation among food lovers, I’m sad to say. I’ve always enjoyed the meals I’ve had here, ever since my daughter came home about seven years ago after a weekend with her mother, breathlessly exclaiming how they went to a cemetery and had crab legs. That took a little work, getting to the bottom of that story.

At the time, her mother lived in town, and would have liked to have made this a regular destination for the kids, but it was always a special treat, owing to her low finances. On one occasion, among many, she had grumbled that she hadn’t any money to do anything nice with the kids on one of her weekends. I succumbed to generosity and packed up my children with $40 and a note that the girlchild, aged maybe six, haltingly penciled from my letter-by-letter dictation, explaining that she and her brother wanted fresh fish and had robbed a convenience store to get the enclosed money, and to please take them to the graveyard for fresh fish. We know that nostalgia is a prime ingredient in the very best restaurants, but how can you not absolutely love a place that inspires stories so darn cute?

Looking around, however, I do see many mixed reviews, and discouraging grumbling from quarters who find their prices too high and their portions too small. Sadly, they might be right in that one regard. I visited for lunch a few Fridays ago, and the prices on their web site are no longer accurate. They have gone up, and I paid $14.50 for what turned out to be a fistful of shrimp and scallops baked in parchment.

Oh, but they were such good shrimp and scallops…

Six Feet Under, in one of the most deliciously appropriate names in the business, is indeed across the street from Atlanta’s gigantic Oakland Cemetery, with a high deck overlooking the beautiful view. Actually, I enjoy the view of the restaurant’s second location, on 11th Street, even more. That’s just about the best view of the city’s skyline. I have eaten at each location twice now. On one of my evening trips to the 11th Street store, when Marie and I were eating downstairs, there was a power cut that knocked out the electricity for about five blocks. Fortunately, we pay with cash and weren’t held up when we wanted to leave. Driving around all those blocks of Northside and Howell Mill without any lights was eerie and wonderful; I’d have hated to have missed that while waiting for a credit card machine to come back online.

The original location is the real destination for travelers, and I would certainly rank it among Atlanta’s best seafood places, though I think that I enjoy Tin Can in Sandy Springs a little more. It’s a fabulous, ramshackle building in the lovely Grant Park neighborhood, and very popular with a big crowd. There is a small lot behind the building, but I ended up joining many others in parking on the streets behind the restaurant, about two blocks away.

I sat at the bar and really enjoyed that pricey order of shrimp and scallops. They’re baked in parchment with butter and lemon and are just wonderful. I had them with a spinach salad, homemade chips and hush puppies. Everything was completely delicious, and the ladies and gentlemen working the bar did a great job paying attention to all their guests.

Six Feet Under prides themselves on being a green business, with a composting program and, at their 11th Street store, a windmill. It’s definitely a place to show off to out-of-town guests, and, every once in a while, a nice treat for us. Don’t even have to rob a convenience store to eat here. Well, one more price hike and you might have to, but until then, it is good eating.