Taco Cabana, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Georgia Pig, Brunswick GA (CLOSED)

With a heavy heart, we woke on Saint Simons for what we plan to be the last time in Marie’s pregnancy. This was the last long, overnight trip on the calendar until the summer. I slept horribly, and she not much better, and we ended up getting a later start out of town than planned, as she was not feeling at all well that Sunday morning. So we kicked back for an extra couple of hours to let her rest before giving our goodbye hugs and getting back on the road. Continue reading “The Georgia Pig, Brunswick GA (CLOSED)” →

St. Francis Xavier’s International Food Tasters Festival, Brunswick GA

This is Marie, making a contribution about a rather delightful annual event at my mother’s church, the International Food Tasters Festival. It’s been going on for 21 years as a fund raiser. The event started out rather small but has been getting bigger, and by this year there had to have been at least a hundred people in the room just while we were eating, including several of my mother’s friends who were looking forward to meeting me and my family. A few restaurants even participate in providing offerings. If I remember correctly, my mother made a few contributions towards the early, small events, but she has just been going to eat since then. That’s really more of the fun part as far as I’m concerned. Continue reading “St. Francis Xavier’s International Food Tasters Festival, Brunswick GA” →

Bubba Garcia’s Mexican Cantina and Zuzu’s, Saint Simons Island GA

I was just saying last month that the presence of Jack Davis artwork is a sure sign of a restaurant’s quality, and here, for the third time this year, is a place with his wonderful and distinctive art emblazoned for all the world to see. Never mind the Zagat sticker in the window, does a place get a thumbs up from one of Mad Magazine’s Usual Gang of Idiots, that’s what I’d like to know. Bubba Garcia’s, a small cantina owned by the same group on Saint Simons Island behind the popular Gnat’s Landing, goes one better than even the good places this year with caricatures of the owners – Old Brick Pit and Mayflower Restaurant – by having the business’s mascot be a signed Jack Davis creation. Continue reading “Bubba Garcia’s Mexican Cantina and Zuzu’s, Saint Simons Island GA” →

Yoder’s Deitsch Haus, Montezuma GA

So Thursday of last week, I went by one of the cafeterias on our to-do list of Roadfood.com-reviewed restaurants, and on Friday, the four of us visited another one. We took a trip down to visit Marie’s mother and father on Saint Simons Island, a trip that puts us within striking distance of six of the remaining restaurants on that list – five in middle Georgia and one in Savannah. I decided that we’d take the furthest one from the highway, Yoder’s Deitsch Haus. If the rumblings that I’ve been hearing about gas prices are true, I figured we should probably visit the one farthest away now, while gas is only about $3.50 a gallon. Yoder’s is about thirty miles south of Macon and then fifteen miles west of the interstate, and it’s probably worth the trip with gasoline at twice the price.

Boy, this is beautiful country down here. Much of the land in this chunk of middle Georgia around Montezuma and Americus is owned and farmed by Mennonites, as is the restaurant, bakery and country store that we visited. It’s the greenest grass you’ve ever seen, and unusually dense with black and white cows clustering around streams and milling around twisted and gnarled trees. The presence of the extended Yoder family is apparent as you drive west out State Route 26, with some of the roads that feed into the main highway sharing their name as well as the businesses. The cafeteria is set up in a large, unassuming building with a small sign out front, and staffed by servers wearing the faith’s traditional, modest dress. There’s plenty of parking, and space for buses from churches all over the state to bring in groups to eat here.

In the previous chapter, I noted that at Matthews, I had a pretty good meal. That’s not a complaint; dozens of inferior restaurants serve far worse within walking distance of that business. At Yoder’s Deitsch Haus, however, we had a genuinely terrific meal with even lower prices. I’m really glad that I didn’t do these two restaurants in reverse; I’m much more pleased to have my family share such good food with me here.

Like most cafeterias – well, apparently, I think that, prior to Matthews, it had been about six years since I’ve been in one – guests can select a salad first, and then a dessert. At Yoder’s, this could be a tremendously dangerous choice, because you could probably just sit down to four slices of pie and call it the best meal of your life. I’ll come back to that. Should you go, try and restrain yourself and select your meat and two. Marie and I each had pot roast, which was very, very good. My son had fried chicken, which was even better, and my daughter had sausages, which were evidently amazing, but she gobbled the darn things up so quickly that nobody else got to try a nibble.

But as good as the meats here are, the vegetables are even better. I was a little discouraged by the dull iceberg lettuce in the salad, but all the other veggies were quite excellent, especially the beets. I could have just had a bowl of those and the dressing. Marie says that we shouldn’t call it thousand island dressing so much as “inspired by” it, so I’ll take her lead. We each had creamed corn, which was excellent, and various other treats. My son was not as taken with his mashed potatoes, which he thought were lumpy, but my daughter loved her cheesy potatoes and Marie quite liked her green beans.

Oh, but then, these desserts. Marie had a slice of cherry pie, which she said was amazing. My daughter had chocolate, which she insisted was better. My son had peanut butter, which he not only insisted was better than either of theirs’, but even better than the peanut butter pie that he had at Zarzour’s in Chattanooga three weeks previously. True to form, he then got out his phone and updated his Facebook so that all his friends stuck in fifth period could see that, once again, my boy was out on a family trip lording his awesome desserts over them. But then I allowed my children each a single small nibble of my slice of shoofly pie, which is a crazy, thick and sticky melange of molasses and brown sugar and both children wept. This is the best pie on the entire planet. Gas could get up to seven bucks a gallon, and if you come by I-75 exit 127 in Georgia, you’re still going to want to pull over and drive the thirty mile round trip for a slice of this. Marie said that it was all right, but she likes fruit pies better. Marie is, occasionally and rarely, hopelessly mistaken on points like this.

After lunch, I thanked the staff and we wandered over to the country store. My daughter and I were distracted by a goat named Martha, whom you may feed for fifty cents. Martha probably won’t allow you to pet her unless you shell out for some food first, I noticed. In the country store, we considered buying some licorice or horehound for the road, but settled on a jar of locally-made blueberry jam. Marie’s hoping to make pancakes one morning this weekend so we can try that out. The girl at the register was very amused by the two-dollar bills that we used to pay for it.

We then enjoyed the nice ride back to the interstate, bought some gasoline while it’s still only $3.50, and made our way across the state to the coast. It’s a straight shot down Georgia 26 to Hawkinsville, where you can pick up US 341, the old Golden Isles Parkway, and take the two and a bit hour last leg to Brunswick. This is probably worth discussing a little more should we actually stop along the way and eat on this road, but I find this a much more pleasant ride than the interstate, with only one mind-numbing segment, the twenty-odd miles just east of Jesup. Then Marie drove around Brunswick down every fool road in town for half an hour before she got to the causeway. Well, she lived here for years; nostalgia can do this to a driver. And she drove right past Willie’s Wee-Nee Wagon, which is on our to-do list for a later visit, so we can’t hold it against her.

Matthews Cafeteria, Tucker GA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

StaQs BBQ, Smyrna GA (CLOSED)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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