Smokejack Blues & Barbecue, Alpharetta GA

I have a little goal here to visit and report upon one hundred barbecue restaurants before the end of 2011. I’m not sure whether we will make it – we’re almost three-quarters there – but any opportunity to grab one for the blog is one that we’ll try to take. Two Saturdays ago, I looked over the map and decided that we hadn’t trucked up GA-400 in a while, and I was curious what new restaurant developments could be seen on Windward Parkway. Alpharetta is the home of Smokejack Blues & Barbecue, a business seven years old which has expanded to a second location a little further north in the town of Cumming. Smokejack’s not getting quite all the press and attention among barbecue restaurants in that area right now – there’s a place called ‘Cue that everybody’s talking about – but I remembered having a pretty good, albeit pricy, meal there a few years ago.

When I worked in Alpharetta, there was one perk that certainly beat any that I have at my current job. To celebrate birthdays, our department would take all the staff out to eat once a month. She wasn’t with the company for really long, but I did have the pleasure of working with a girl named Kristi who was a completely fun trip, just overflowing with silliness, light, Southern slang and malapropisms. She chose Smokejack for her birthday and I remembered enjoying it greatly, even if the restaurant’s prices kept it out of my regular rotation of places to visit. Marie and I had lunch here for just under $30. That’s a heck of a lot to pay for barbecue for two, but in their defense, the restaurant tells guests up front that theirs is less a traditional BBQ place and more an upscale eatery that focuses on smoked meat.

Marie and I hoped to have our daughter and our good friend Samantha join us for lunch, but each of them asked for rain checks in the end, not feeling well. So Marie and I made it a quasi-date day, with the baby bundled in the back seat and spent a few hours enjoying each other’s company and eating pretty well.

Smokejack, located in Alpharetta’s small, but very cute, downtown, offers the usual assortment of pulled pork or chicken dishes. Most of them apparently are sauced just before they send them out of the kitchen, but they’ll serve them dry if you ask. I noted that they have a chicken sandwich with white, north Alabama-style sauce, and while normally I might be expected to give that a try, I was really in the mood for another order of burnt edges.

I had these for the first time a couple of weeks previously at Woodstock’s Bub-Ba-Q and was curious to try another restaurant’s take. I had the sauce, a delicious black, sticky-sweet Kansas City-styled goo, on the side. The beef was so good that no sauce was necessary, and I strongly advise anybody curious to order this dry. I had the burnt edges with baked beans, which were pretty ordinary, and a very tasty corn pudding that Marie and I shared. She ordered chicken thighs from the appetizer menu. These came with an orange habanero glaze and were served on a bed of pretty good slaw. She also had a side of wood-roasted vegetables that she mostly enjoyed. Brunswick stew is available, but, sadly, with a small additional charge as it is not technically a “side,” but rather a “soup.”

A little driving around town didn’t convince me that I was missing very much, foodwise, by leaving my job in Alpharetta. We got back on GA-400 and made one more stop in the area, though. Two days previously, I had visited one of the wonderful Taco Stands in Athens. They had opened a store in Alpharetta several months earlier. I had stopped in and was pretty disappointed, but chalked it up to opening week catastrophe. I was curious, now that they’ve hopefully got their act together, how they compare to one of the originals.

The honest answer is that they compare poorly, but are still pretty good. It’s a very different sort of restaurant to the Taco Stands of Athens, or even to the since-closed Buckhead watering hole. It tries to be a lot – upscale and family-friendly, even offering X-Box games for children – but it’s all so unnecessary. The prices are disagreeably higher than the originals. Seriously, a taco, $1.39 at Barnett Shoals, runs you $1.99 here. If I’m wanting Taco Stand, I don’t need an airlock and hostess station, I don’t need my tacos served in a little IKEA basket, and I don’t want to tip a server. I want my name called and I want my tacos on a tray.

That said…

There are certain realities of eating that trump fancy-shmancy considerations. Admittedly, the prime ingredient in the Taco Stand is nostalgia, but you can’t deny the awesomeness of the chicken enchilada and its wonderful dark sauce. On the other hand, while the tacos are good, they are nevertheless different, and in fact, inferior, to the tacos in Athens. They’re served on grilled flour shells rather than hard corn, and the beef is markedly different. The sauce tasted the same to me.

As much as I like the food, I really just don’t feel like the Taco Stand transfers well to this type of environment. I’ll forgive a lot for a good chicken enchilada like this, but in much the same way that a Burger King Whopper doesn’t gain anything from being served on a nice white plate, remaining, at it’s core, fast food, this “upscale” store doesn’t make the scruffy, tasty, wonderful food any better. It just makes it more expensive.

Harry’s Pig Shop (CLOSED) and The Taco Stand, Athens GA

Well, it took me a little while to get over to Harry’s Pig Shop. I had been wanting to visit for quite a while now, but I don’t just go to Athens every day, and when I do, I’d like to occasionally try something other than barbecue. There are quite a few good restaurants around that town, you know. Nevertheless, I moved it up my to-do list a couple of months ago after I read the good writeup at Buster’s BBQ Blog. Continue reading “Harry’s Pig Shop (CLOSED) and The Taco Stand, Athens GA” →

Johnny’s Bar-B-Que & Steaks, Powder Springs GA

Somewhat overlooked in all the talk of regional barbecue styles is that there is a little outpost of restaurants in western Cobb County and Douglas County that all have very similar takes on presentation, sauce and preparing the chopped pork. I know that I’m not the first one to notice this. I wish that I could take credit for it, but somebody who actually deserves credit – and, you probably know me, I’m just not very good about remembering where I read things – noted an interesting similarity between the chopped pork at Austell’s Wallace Barbecue and a place in Douglasville that I have not yet tried, Hudson Hickory House in Douglasville. I made the connection, but didn’t note it anywhere, between Wallace and Briar Patch Restaurant, which is near Dallas and Hiram. A couple of weeks ago, I revisited Johnny’s Bar-B-Que and Steaks for the first time in four or five years and realized just how similar this place is to the others.

If you pull up these on a map, you’ll see that they’re all in the same little quadrant, north of I-20 and east of I-285. Now, I can’t speak with certainty about Hudson Hickory House, but I have seen a photograph of a chopped pork plate at Courthouse Bites and read a description of the meal at BBQ Biker and I think I’m on pretty safe ground when I discuss it in general terms. All four of these older restaurants serve very soft chopped pork that is presauced and swimming in a very thin, red-to-black, mild and very tangy vinegar-based sauce, while also offering a much hotter mustard-based sauce on the table. The fries are freshly-cut, whole potato-style and very greasy. BBQ Biker describes Hudson’s as “floppy,” which can certainly be used to define the fries at the other three restaurants. The stew at each is very thick, heavy on the onions but not too many other vegetables.

When I do get the chance to visit Hudson’s, and I will, soon, I will definitely have to ask about the similarities that I’m seeing here. I’ll make a note to go after the lunch rush so somebody might have a chance to talk with me. It might not be to everybody’s taste, but this is an absolutely fascinating discovery. Barbecue lovers, you need to get out here and dig into this region and see what I’m talking about!

A couple of Saturdays ago, Marie’s mother came to town and we had a pretty good time and enjoyed some good meals, although I think her favorite of the dinners out must have been our lunchtime trip to Vingenzo’s in Woodstock. That really is some unbelievably amazing pizza. She doesn’t actually care for barbecue, madly, and so, for supper, I tried to come up with someplace that we hadn’t covered in the blog before that I knew also offered pretty good steaks and burgers. David had taken Neal and me to Johnny’s several years ago, and while I didn’t remember the details, I remembered that it was a big Saturday night family dinner place, so I asked whether we could meet at David’s place and ride over there.

If you’ve eaten at Wallace recently, then Johnny’s will give you a case of déjà vu. It’s not merely the similar style of cooking the pork; the interior and the design is very familiar. The great big room with rustic 1930s bric-a-brac on the walls feels very comfortably similar, like you’ve been here before.

I was pretty taken with the food at Johnny’s, though I would have preferred to try the meat dry. The sauce is gently tangy and not very sweet, but the mustard sauce on the table is among the hottest barbecue sauces that I have tried recently. It’s a menace, and makes a great dip for the “floppy” fries. Marie had the ribs and enjoyed them very much, her mother had a burger with some really good baked beans that she liked more than the main course, and David had a steak that didn’t set his taste buds alight, but he said it was pretty good.

Well, now the next question – as soon as I’ve made my way to Hudson, anyhow – is how many more restaurants in the area serve barbecue in this style? Four big established places in such a small radius definitely makes a trend, but I wonder how widespread it is? More research, as ever, is needed!

Manuel’s Tavern, Atlanta GA

Good grief, this place is a breath of fresh air. I visited Manuel’s Tavern maybe twice, many, many years back, and never made it a habit. More fool me. The venerable neighborhood bar, which will celebrate its 55th birthday next Saturday, is an absolute joy to visit. It’s a site absolutely radiant with Atlanta’s history, where extremely good pub food, locally-brewed beer, and, surprisingly, some of the best burgers in the city are available. I was pleased when Roadfood.com added it to their list of Georgia-reviewed restaurants, knowing that I would need to return. I was even more pleased after my visit.

Also worth smiling about: as often as I’ve had to complain about the unpleasant, paranoid propaganda of Fox News being broadcast unwelcomely at regional restaurants, Manuel’s Tavern is where Democrats eat and drink. Politics are not necessarily part and parcel of meals in the dining rooms, but of course, in the bar, guests will be drinking under photos of FDR and JFK.

Anyway, my boss, Krista, who loves this place, said that she’d like to join me when I made my way to Manuel’s. We were not able to sync schedules, so she asked me to go without her, just so long as I had her favorite burger, prepped her way.

Manuel’s was originally the site of a delicatessen called Harry’s. Manuel Maloof bought it in 1956, brought his brother Robert on board to help run it, expanded it into the businesses on either side and created one of Atlanta’s most beloved neighborhood joints. There seems to be room inside for hundreds, with teeny little corridors leading into rooms that guests might never know were there.

The walls are a living history lesson of the city. In 1956, the Braves had not yet relocated from Milwaukee. You can see the lineups of the 1956 and 1958 AAA Crackers on one wall instead. Newspaper stories by Ron Hudspeth relate the days when Manuel spent as CEO of DeKalb County. Any guest could spend hours studying all the memorabilia and writings posted along the dark wood paneling.

Manuel’s two best-selling burgers are the McCloskey Burger – a half-pound patty with lettuce and tomatoes – and the J.J. Special, served with two cheeses and onions along with a heap of wonderful steak fries and some onion rings. Normally, J.J. Specials are served on wheat toast, but I was instructed to have one on a Kaiser roll. It was terrific. That these burgers fly under everybody’s radar is criminal; they are, flatly, among the very best burgers in the city. Along with a pint of Athens’ wonderful Terrapin pale ale, it was a really nice lunch.

While families are welcome in Manuel’s, the clientele tends to skew older and the conversations flesh out the remarkable sense found here of the city’s stories in a nutshell. Even as Atlanta razes and wrecks its history and old, beloved businesses fail – the Atlanta Book Company, right across the street, shuttered earlier this month – the oral history of the city is being retold at Manuel’s tables. I raised my eyes from my novel – Gregory Mcdonald again – as four older men talked about the days when Paul Newman would race at Road Atlanta. If you’re a local, then as your eyes read that line, you probably remembered the old Road Atlanta logo from T-shirts you had not seen in three decades.

This is a place where stories are told, and as new customers and families find the place, where new ones will be written. I was too drunk, too young and too stupid to enjoy Manuel’s when I was 22. Today, I love it more than I can express. Fellows, we all need to meet here soon and plan to spend a long and wonderful happy evening.

Update (3/11/13): Heard the good word last week that Manuel’s is going smoke-free in 2014. That’s terrific news.

Jim Stalvey’s, Covington GA

I had not realized quite how much attention that I have been paying to Urbanspoon until I looked up Jim Stalvey’s Restaurant, noted the surprisingly low user ranking (44%, if I recall, the morning that we visited), and asked myself why on earth we were going to head out that way. The answer, of course, was that the venerable steakhouse is one of those with a glowing review at Roadfood.com and we intend to hit (almost) all of the ones in Georgia, and so we just had to brave that 44% and hope for the best. It worked out just fine. 56% of the people who voted for that restaurant were quite spectacularly wrong. If you’re looking for a good steak, you need to head out to Newton County and then log on to Urbanspoon and give that ranking a boost.

The building is a very old one, sort of classic suburban family restaurant design, and easy to overlook among the sprawl of US 278. I asked about it, wondering whether it might have once been a Ponderosa or something like that. It was apparently built in the early 1960s as the home of a restaurant called Bock & Kid. Jim Stalvey, a restaurateur from the north Georgia town of Rome, had already moved to Covington and opened a place in town with the horrible name of The Crest. In 1980, he moved into this site with a business called The Prado. In time, the Prado evolved into Stalvey’s Restaurant and Lounge.

Stalvey has continued to open and operate restaurants along this leg of I-20, though the last few years have not been kind to them. At the end of 2005, one of his websites – not updated since then – boasted that he and his company ran seven. Presently, I count just four: Stalvey’s, a fast food place called Quik Chick, and two Butcher’s Block delis. Perhaps one day, we might visit the others. If they are as good as the main restaurant, they’re worth the trip.

The four of us drove out to Covington with Neal some three Saturdays back. Covington has always been one of those towns that we pass through without stopping; I’ve been curious what else might be out here.

The must-try items at Stalvey’s are said to include the onion rings and the fried cauliflower. I had the former and thought they were completely delicious. Happily, they were available as a side for my steak and not just as a more expensive appetizer. The steak was really wonderful. I had a small six-ounce sirloin, priced right at just $8.99. It was not as good as Marie’s own grilling at her best, but better than many, many steaks that I have ordered in restaurants in the past.

Marie also had a steak – the filet was available as a special, also for $8.99 – and was very pleased with it. Neal had the chicken livers and really enjoyed them. He said they were not quite as good as the ones at Doug’s Place in Emerson – those are the gold standard – but still very good. I’m glad that we came by for lunch and were able to enjoy them. Apparently, if I understand it correctly, the restaurant offers both steaks and a traditional southern meat-and-two menu, on a white board, during lunch hours, but in the evenings, it’s all about either steak or ribs. The smokehouse is in front of the restaurant, but barbecue is only offered in the evenings.

Everything that we had tasted incredibly fresh and wonderful; the only slightly bum note came with the French dressing that Marie had with her salad and did not enjoy. Happily, the salad was made with such incredibly fresh veggies – these cucumbers are just to die for – that it did not need dressing at all.

Now, admittedly, Urbanspoon is a very poor judge of traditional restaurants like this. Its more prolific users seem to be more interested in the hot new joints in town, eating where everybody else eats, and often enjoying food that, as Calvin Trillin terms it, is always served on a bed of something else. The very low positive rating for Stalvey’s probably indicates a period of inconsistency for this restaurant. What surprises me more, however, is that only 26 people had rated it at all. This is a restaurant that more people should talk about. If you can get a better steak for this price, with sides and vegetables this good, anywhere for forty miles, I’ll be stunned.

Alon’s Bakery & Market, Atlanta GA

Three Fridays ago – that is how far we are backed up right now! – I had my first solo lunch with the baby. Typically, I picked a place that’s really not as baby-seat friendly as would have been ideal for one parent, but I did not know that when I picked it! This was Marie’s first week back at work, and so, on one of my short days, the baby and I stopped by for a flying visit and a few hugs to give Mommy a nice little break from her crazy day, and then we set about finding someplace in Dunwoody to get something to eat when she had to get back to work.

I picked Alon’s based on its Urbanspoon ranking. I don’t know that I had ever heard of it before. It’s the second location for this small market that serves up some terrific sandwiches. The original is in Virginia-Highlands, and Neal tells me that the dessert display that I passed tastes every bit as decadent and wonderful as it looks. Between that and the very impressive cheese counter, I was certain to tell Marie that there was a pretty stunning selection of treats just around the corner from her office.

I think that Alon’s moved in to the space that had been occupied by Eatzi’s for many years. It’s a pretty cavernous room, and it is completely packed with counter space. If a guest is looking for lunch, they will enter through a patio, the blistering heat regulated by several ceiling fans, navigate an unavoidable logjam of people entering and trying to pay at the same place, and then work towards the back, where the sandwiches are made. I will agree with my fellow blogger Evan Mah, aka The Toothfish, who observed that the prices are a little lower than most high-end delis while serving up considerably superior food.

I ordered a hot pastrami sandwich, and I don’t know whether I’ve ever had one this good. The bread was just amazing; the crust was chewy and the rest was moist and so delicate that it seemed likely to disintegrate. The meat was served at the perfect temperature and just hinted at the sweetness that too much pastrami rolls about, lazily, in. The red onions tasted fresh and it was garnished with something called cannonball mustard. Googling this brings up Alon’s as one of the most common results. It’s nice little BBs of mustard seed in a very thin little sauce, and it goes incredibly well with the meat.

I enjoyed this wonderful sandwich with a bowl of pretty delightful gazpacho. It was not, perhaps, among the best bowls I’ve ever had, but it was quite good and it was just hot enough outside for this to be a perfectly considered treat. Normally, I just have a glass of ice water with my lunch, but I didn’t think any would be available at this market, so I enjoyed a bottle of Boylan’s cream soda. This all added up to be a pretty pricy lunch for one, but I daresay it was better than anything I could have attempted in my own kitchen.

Seating is, sadly, a real challenge here, so I would advise going outside of the peak lunch rush. The tables are jammed in a little close together, leading several people to act as though they were threading the fat man’s squeeze at Rock City as they tried to get between the table nearest me and a pillar holding up the patio’s roof. The staff member who said he would try to find a highchair for me promptly vanished without trace, so I ate with the baby seat on my table. My son got several compliments from people passing through, which is as it should be. He’s an awfully cute kid.

Pure Taqueria, Woodstock GA

So there’s this burrito place in Kennesaw that has been defying my efforts to eat there for years. I went there once and learned they were closed on Sundays. I went again and they were on vacation. I’m guessing that they take off every July 4th, because it was probably a year before Marie suggested burritos and I remembered the place and we drove that way and found them closed again. That’s three times that one place has stymied my plans. They win this round.

So we went back to Woodstock for the second time that day. For lunch, we had gone to Bub-Ba-Q, an area favorite, and enjoyed their appetizer portion of burnt ends for the first time. Since I was hoping for someplace new to our blog for supper, we followed that up with a visit to Pure Taqueria in the small city’s charming downtown. It’s located right across the plaza from Canyons Burger Company, and next door to what had been The Right Wing Tavern, a popular local place that unexpectedly closed quite suddenly a week or so before. This wasn’t a place that I was in any hurry to ever enter, but it was very surprising to learn that the restaurant that really drove that downtown’s resurgence shut down so abruptly.

When I was working in Alpharetta a few years back, the original Pure – named because the small building was once the home of a Pure Oil gas station – was one of the region’s foodie faves of the hour, always drawing huge crowds of all ages. The Woodstock location is one of two additional Atlanta sites. They have also opened in Matthews, NC and a fourth Atlanta store, in Duluth, is scheduled for a September opening.

Pure is one of those very rare places where we can’t fault anything specific, but it’s just far, far too loud and hot for us old-timers and a baby looking for a nice family dinner. The food was really quite good, and our server was incredibly awesome. Committing the giant volume of nightly specials to memory isn’t the work of novices. Marie enjoyed her burrito, and I quite liked my meatballs, called albondigas, which were served in a chipotle tomato sauce. My daughter had the chicken taquitos and said that she really enjoyed those, too.

By the time our entrees were served, however, we were already sweating buckets and tired of yelling at each other to be heard over the music. Honestly, this just isn’t a summertime place for us, certainly not on a Saturday night. Unfortunately, the restaurant’s design, evoking an old garage with the huge doors and high ceilings, does not lend itself to really good air conditioning. My daughter finally gave up and went outside, where a light breeze made the high nineties feel more livable. I’d like to revisit Pure on a weekday evening in the fall, and maybe sit on the upstairs patio when it’s cooler. If the food is consistently this good, I think that we’d all enjoy that experience a good deal more.