Piggie Park, Thomaston GA

Two Saturdays ago, I was about as sick of snow as it is possible to be. I’m sure I was not the only one. The winter storm that walloped Atlanta earlier this month was the biggest in eighteen years. We spent three days trapped in our house, and I didn’t get back to work at all until the Friday, and then I had to climb over a danged fence just to get to where I needed to be, because the employee parking lot was inaccessible. Long story. Anyway, if you’re a local, you have your own tale of woe and boredom and board games, and if you’re not, here’s the confirmation that Atlantans just don’t handle snow well at all.

So by Saturday, I was screaming to be outdoors somewhere without any white stuff anywhere, so I charted out a day trip down to middle Georgia, where Marie and the kids and I could stretch our legs and enjoy some sun. So naturally, then, because we’re contrary, the first place we went didn’t require us to get out of the car and actually do any leg-stretching, as it was a drive-in. I planned this day trip to hit two more of the Georgia restaurants featured at Roadfood.com, and the first of these was down in what some of the sillier locals and billboards call “T-Town,” a little place called Thomaston.

Thomaston’s a bit of a drive from Cobb County. We took I-75 through the city and exited on Tara Boulevard, just a few exits beyond the southside perimeter, and continued down US 19 for about fifty miles. With the exception of a single bookstore which I’ll mention in the next chapter and the impressive edifice of Atlanta Motor Speedway near Griffin, there’s not a heck of a lot of anything other than food on this road these days, but not a lot of traffic or backup, either. (There is, incidentally, a magnificent barbecue shack called Southern Pit which we really love, and will revisit for this blog on a visit later this year.) It was a very nice day for a drive in the country, especially after being cooped up indoors for so long, although I sort of wish it was a degree or three warmer so we could have had the windows down.

Piggie Park first opened about sixty years ago, and while they serve burgers and milkshakes, this place is, with good reason, best known for its sliced barbecue pork. This was absolutely exceptional, and the best of the three barbecue joints that we visited that afternoon. The pork was so moist, yet not at all greasy, and with a lovely smoky taste. The sauce was the traditionally dark ketchup and vinegar combo of middle Georgia.

Since we would be visiting three restaurants in a (barely) four-hour block, we broke up the orders so that we could all sample the goodies at each place without, in theory, getting completely stuffed. At Piggie Park, the four of us split a barbecue plate with fries and slaw, one sandwich with a side of fries and two bowls of Brunswick stew. Everything was extremely good, and we all loved the fries, which, unlike the pork, really were delightfully greasy and full of flavor.

I think the restaurant is definitely worth an hour and a bit’s drive; I just wish there was some more to do there. I’m not sure what else there is to do in Upson County. Maybe sometime when the weather is nicer, we can justify a trip out this way to a nice state park or something and do a little hiking. Since a trip to this drive-in won’t even give us the exercise of going from the car to the building’s front door, we’ll need to do something else.

Our next stop was a few miles back up the road, at a place we drove past on our way to Piggie Park. More about that in the next chapter…

Mary Mac’s Tea Room, Atlanta GA

I had been wanting to go to Mary Mac’s for a really long time. It’s the last surviving example of a brief late ’40s trend of restaurants opened by war widows looking to both stay afloat and remain a little classy, so they called their establishments “tea rooms” in the hopes of attracting a better sort of clientele than the lowlifes who went to juke joints and meat-and-threes. This fad did not last, but this one place on Ponce, started by Mary MacKenzie, survived. It is no longer in family hands – MacKenzie sold it to Margaret Lupo in 1962, who in turn sold the business to John Ferrell in the mid-nineties – but it certainly thrives. It’s one of Atlanta’s best-known destination restaurants, a place that turns a traditional meat and three into a very classy experience, and one of the very best examples of southern cooking in north Georgia, with some really amazing food.

The Saturday after my dad passed, I took Neal up on his offer to get out and relax a little. He had the goal of trying to track down a bizarre little promotional tie-in to the TV series Fringe, a short-pressed LP hiding out in various record stores, so we went by a couple of the few places in Atlanta left that still sell the darn things with no luck, and stopped at Mary Mac’s for lunch. There is a small parking lot behind the restaurant, but it fills up almost instantly. Diners will have better luck parking along Myrtle Street and enjoying a short walk.

The staff at Mary Mac’s enjoys welcoming new guests with a small, complementary bowl of pot likker. This is the slightly salty liquid left behind after boiling greens, and it starts meals here off just right. Everything here is incredibly tasty and fresh. I had a small house salad with thousand island dressing, and it looked and tasted like those vegetables were still in the ground the night before, and Neal and I shared an appetizer of fried green tomatoes. These were truly wonderful, easily the equal of the fabulous ones prepared at Blue Willow Inn and The Fickle Pickle, and served with a very light and tasty remoulade.

My meal was very good, or, at least, the sides were. I was indecisive about what to get, briefly considered the meat loaf, and finally settled on some chicken tenders. These were perfectly decent, but honestly, I should have just ordered a veggie plate. I keep telling myself that and never listen. I had pickled beets and the mac and cheese, both of which were just amazing, and Brunswick stew, which was also very good. Neal, on the other hand, really scored with his chicken livers, which he says were every bit as good as the exceptional ones at Doug’s Place in Emerson. Like me, he ordered one side too many, but enjoyed what he could finish.

We were finishing off our meal and basking in satisfaction when a woman who looked to be a little ways older than us but still bouncing with a spring in her step came up behind Neal and put her hand on his shoulder before asking how we were doing and how our food was. This unexpected burst of familiarity probably wouldn’t pass muster up north. Neal said later that he thought it was some relation of his coming to say hey.

She explained that she liked to come around and make sure everything was okay, and that while she wasn’t the one who cooked our food – I had asked whether we had her to thank – she did sample everything in the kitchen. While I joked around about how that explained why each of my beets had a bite taken already – a joke from a color Popeye cartoon that I doubt anybody else remembers – she went right to work rubbing Neal’s shoulders with such vigor that his eyes about popped out of his head.

She left her card and went onto another table. The back of her T-shirt read “I got my belly filled and my back rubbed at Mary Mac’s.” Free pot likker and shoulder rubs. They must want repeat business or something.

Bar-B-Que Shack, Athens GA

Here’s a restaurant that’s never really received a fair shake from me. The Bar-B-Que Shack, which opened in 1993, has been around long enough to reasonably qualify as the oldest surviving joint of its kind in Athens. There are older – much older – places in nearby Danielsville, Watkinsville and Lexington, but unless I’m forgetting about one, all of its peers – Carrithers, Spring House, J.R.’s, Peanut’s Redneck – have long since gone. The two Fresh Air outlets might claim to have been around since the 1920s, but that’s when the original store down in Jackson opened. The ones in Athens didn’t open until 1996 or so. The one on the west side of town, between the Pepsi plant and Bogart was the site of Peanut’s Redneck – and yes, that really was its name, Peanut’s Redneck Bar-B-Q – when I moved to town in ’89. J.R.’s opened sometime in the mid-90s, in the building that once housed Walter’s. That was a mid-eighties favorite of R.E.M., who recorded a “theme” to the restaurant that appears on their odds-n-sods 1986 LP Dead Letter Office. That building is now home to Hollis’s Ribs. The turnover in barbecue places in Athens has always seemed just a little brutal. Continue reading “Bar-B-Que Shack, Athens GA” →

Mama’s Boy, Athens GA

I’m afraid that I have done Mama’s Boy a terrible disservice in waiting so long to tell you about our trip here before Christmas. You see, and you’ll forgive me having my silly notions about how I schedule chapters in our blog, I had the bright idea to hold back an entry about Athens for a few weeks, until I visited the town again. That way, for some fool reason, I could have two chapters about Athens back-to-back instead of a single Athens story each month. Continue reading “Mama’s Boy, Athens GA” →

Douceur de France, Marietta GA

This is Marie, talking about one of my favorite places in Marietta, a little French bistro about a mile south of the town square. The two primary attractions (for me) are the croissants and the eclairs, but that is mainly because we don’t get to eat there very often. They only do breakfast and lunch, and open about a half hour too late for me to even think about having breakfast there before work. Before my work changed locations, I would occasionally decide that the traffic report was promising enough for me to get something (usually one or two plain croissants) on my way, but since we moved that has dwindled to the pair of times I decided it was worth getting to work late to bring in something for the team to eat and picked up a dozen croissants for them and an eclair for me.

Anyone who knows me should be fully aware that the bakery case alone would bring me back to this delightful little place all by itself. We have had some quite satisfactory lunches here as well, however. I am very thankful to our friend David, who directed us to try it out, I think in reference to a conversation I had about the merits and deficiencies of the eclairs recently obtained from less authentic places. I particularly like it that there are European brand items for sale up on the shelves behind the counter, and that the only one who greets you with “bonjour” is the one who has an actual French accent.

A real croissant made properly out of tasty ingredients is a completely different thing from the horn-shaped dough balls that go by the same name from grocery stores. A proper croissant should drop flakes all over your plate when you tear off a piece, and the interior should be full of air holes, moist, and a bit stretchy. You should have difficulty cutting the thing in half for buttering or sandwich toppings unless your knife is very sharp. Also, unfortunately, it will be far less satisfactory the next day, as it should never have preservatives of any kind. The owners are from France, and the pastries definitely show the education that Luc Beaudet, the pastry chef and co-owner (with his wife) has obtained. The rotating case next to the register is quite compelling, and a good way to entertain yourself while waiting for your check to be rung up.

Now this is not the most perfect French-style restaurant in my book – that award was won away by a delightful little place in Knoxville written up in this blog last month – but it is definitely the best place within easy driving distance, and the competition in Tennessee did not provide the eclair that I ate on the day that I got my positive pregnancy test which was, indeed, the best eclair ever obtained from that place or any other. The meals I have had there, although not frequent enough, have been exceedingly satisfactory.

On our most recent visit, our son declared the chicken salad the best he’d ever had. Even granting that any meal he enjoys is the best he’d ever had while he’s eating it, the taste I had seemed more than satisfactory. On this last visit I had the tourte au poulet, in part because I was actually in a mood for cream of mushroom soup which was sadly not on the soup rotation that day, and this item has a mushroom cream sauce. It was beautifully flaky outside and nicely flavorful inside, and very filling although not terribly large. I personally am quite pleased with the portion sizes here, though it’s quite likely that larger appetites will want to order extra sides to fill up.

We would eat there far more often if they had Sunday hours. As it is, however, my business is assured just based on my two favorites.

Old Brick Pit Bar-B-Q, Chamblee GA

Here’s proof that time really does march on in the restaurant business. Once upon a time, the Old Brick Pit was one of the Atlanta region’s most well-known and popular barbecue joints. It opened in 1976 and the original owner, whose name was Newton, was immortalized in caricature by the great Jack Davis. Within a couple of years, it was among a handful of Georgia restaurants featured in one of those writeups in The New York Times that you used to see in books and newspapers in the 1970s, marveling at this peculiar Southern delicacy called barbecue. A yellowing copy of that lengthy road trip article is still framed on the wall of this fine old smokehouse, where few seem to see it.

Once upon a time, in other words, the Old Brick Pit was, along with Harold’s and Fat Matt’s, one of the city’s best-known and beloved places. But time has unfairly left this place behind. You never see it talked about or shared among younger foodies or lovers of great barbecue or roadfood. Despite a pretty good location on Peachtree, just north of and across the street from Oglethorpe University, it has slipped so far off everybody’s radar that I just flat out forget about the place unless I just happen to be nearby.

I’ve eaten here only twice. The first time was many years back when I was maintaining that old Geocities page about barbecue places in Georgia. I’m pretty sure that we were the only guests on that Saturday afternoon. Marie and the kids and I stopped by a couple of Saturday evenings ago and we were, again, apart from some take-out orders, the only guests. That’s certainly not the way that it should be.

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, we spent New Year’s Day with my father in the hospice, where he would pass away the following morning. Now, our lunchtime visit to America’s Top Dog had been a little more upbeat and enthusiastic. We still had some optimism that Dad would improve somewhat and enjoy one last bowl game with his beloved Alabama Crimson Tide. Spending the day with him, seeing that he wasn’t improving at all and had no ability to focus on or stay awake for the game stopped that optimism in its tracks. So when we went out for supper, we were in a much quieter mood, and the slow pace of the restaurant fit my state of mind.

Sepulchral. That’s a word I’ve often wanted to use but never found the right occasion.

The building is built around the old brick pit of the name, and man, it smells fantastic. You’ll definitely wish you could go around the counter and check out that beauty . The food was mostly very good. Old Brick Pit uses a thin tomato and vinegar mix with their sauce. We all had chopped pork as we often do, but their ribs come pretty highly recommended as well. The slaw and the Brunswick stew were both very tasty. None of us really cared for the peach cobbler, however. Marie’s order just got passed around for each of us to see who would want to finish it.

Marie and the children were ready to return to the hospice after we finished. I chose to linger for a little while, enjoying my delicious sweet tea, reading the little touchstones of the past mounted on the walls and enjoying that gorgeous Jack Davis artwork. Part of me didn’t want to leave.

That was the last meal that we had while my father was still alive. He passed the following morning at 6:23. I wish he was able to enjoy it with us. Dad probably wouldn’t have liked it quite as much as he did our trip to Harold’s a couple of months ago, but Dad certainly liked barbecue. Dad’s probably tracked down Bear Bryant in heaven by now, and they’ve bonded over a nice plate of sliced pork and onion rings, which was his favorite variation. I like mine chopped, and with stew myself, but my old man would agree that when it comes to barbecue, it’s all good.

America’s Top Dog, Chamblee GA (CLOSED)

(I’ll apologize in advance for the darker-than-normal tone and sad nature of this and the following entry, but new readers and Google surfers might not be aware that the chapters of this blog are fragments of the story of our life based around memorable meals rather than a conventional series of restaurant reviews. I do wish that our very nice trip to the awesome America’s Top Dog could have come at a brighter point in our life, but it worked out that it didn’t. Life’s like that.)

We started the new year with my father in hospice. We didn’t know how long we would be there, and my mother held onto the hope that we would rally back home. Personally, I was telling myself that we would have a week – it turned out to be just over 36 hours – and that our work schedules would not be disrupted quite yet. I don’t know why; I knew that Dad was not coming home, and, as dark as this may seem, I concluded that we were simply going to move operations to the Emory / Oglethorpe University neighborhood for six or seven days. We were going to have to get food somewhere, and that would give us the opportunity to have some more meals in these communities than we normally enjoy. Going out to eat would also bring some welcome breaks into the children’s routines, and the sadness of the hospice and the farewell visits from longtime family friends.

In fact, the last bit of terrific news before my dad went into hospice on the 31st was that my son had decided to move back home and resume school down here with us. While the first couple of weeks of the year have been very sad and awful, I am very glad that we were able to get Dad that one last bit of welcome news before he lost coherence and consciousness. Having my son back has been at least three-quarters fantastic. He’s squabbling with his sister all the time and he’s having difficulty with the concept of keeping his bedroom clean – must have been fairly lax up in Kentucky, I figure – and the teenage stinker has figured that he’s shoehorning his way into a looping day trip through the Carolinas in a few weeks that Marie and I thought that we would be enjoying by ourselves, but my son’s home, and the boy likes to eat.

So giving the family breaks with distracting meals around or on the way to the North Druid Hills corridor were on the agenda. Unfortunately, the first of these, to a faux-Mexican sports bar, was too mediocre to pass muster here. So yes, our last meal of 2010 – otherwise such a good year – was one not worth the effort of recounting, and not merely because the Georgia Bulldogs looked like they wanted to get beat by a high school team playing its first game ever. We would have a much, much better experience at our first meal out in 2011.

In November, I noticed a writeup for a hot dog place in Chamblee that sounded very interesting. It might not have been the best business decision by America’s Top Dog’s owner to open on a very rainy New Year’s Day – for the forty or so minutes we were there, there were no other guests – but I am certainly glad that he did, because a very filling and wonderful meal was exactly what we needed to distract us from going back to the hospice for another day. And this place? Friends, it is a terrific and wonderful treat. It is perhaps not quite the same “local” experience as some of Atlanta’s other hot dog shops – Barker’s and Brandi’s in Cobb County set the standard in the region – but this place sets guests up with the amazing, authentic taste of hot dogs from around the country.

Just six days earlier, I tried onion sauce for the first time down at Orange Tree in Jacksonville. They serve onion sauce here at America’s Top Dogs, along with 39 other options on an unbelievable toppings bar. Incidentally, speaking of Orange Tree in the same sentence as onion sauce, proving that there’s no such thing as a recurring joke so lousy that it can’t recur in the real world, I found myself unwittingly ordering “orange rings” at America’s Top Dog. Hi-hat!

This topping bar will blow your mind. The goal here is to give guests the option of recreating any regional specialty here in Atlanta. If there’s something he’s missed, I can’t think what. The real humdinger, I say, is the presence of proper Cincinnati-style chili that is every bit the equal and equivalent of Gold Star and Skyline. I haven’t tried Gold Star since I was last in Lexington in the spring of 2008, and am no expert in the variation, but it tastes exactly as I remember and occasionally crave the stuff. They do Texas-styled chili as well, of course, but having the milder, cinnamon-and-chocolate-tinged Cincinnati take as well is a really unexpected treat. I’m not aware of any place anywhere around Atlanta that offers this. I had a small bowl of it, rather than dressing my dog with it. Honestly, I kind of missed the pasta that it is traditionally served over, but it was so nice to have another taste of it after more than two years.

As for my dog, I dressed it somewhat traditionally, with mustard – it looks like they have four different ones – and onions, slaw and pickled relish. My daughter surprised me by having two dogs with Texas chili, which she does not normally order on dogs, along with nacho cheese, pickles and, oddly, potato chip crumbs, which was new to me. My son had the most adventurous palate of the table, and made his with Cincy chili, pickled cucumber relish, cole slaw and shredded cheddar cheese. Both kids also had barbecue sauce on their dogs.

Poor Marie, still on a no-nitrate diet, was stuck again with a hamburger, but she didn’t mind as she says that the burger was fantastic. And we were very pleased with the sides. We ordered both a basket of rings and a large order of fries. This was far more than a table of four needed. Both were really excellent – these are surely among the best rings and fries in the Atlanta area – but we were stuck with an awful lot of excellent fries that didn’t keep well and should have been eaten. Bear that in mind as you consider an order for your own party.

We obviously came at an awful time, but it did allow us the chance to hear the owner brag about his hamburgers and his Cincinnati chili, which, he tells us, even Cincy residents proclaim both authentic and superior to some from back home. Eating out on New Year’s Day didn’t give us a feel for what the place should be like, and what the foot traffic should normally be. I kind of had to work to accept the reality that most people don’t go out in the rain on January 1 for a hot dog in a pedestrian-unfriendly location – it’s in the Big Lots strip mall on Chamblee-Tucker Road inside I-285 – and not just think that Saturday at 1 pm, there should be many more people eating lunch out. I choose to imagine that any other Saturday, this place is nice and busy. It certainly should be, and I look forward to seeing the place packed the next time we are back out that way.

(Update 11/17/11): Since writing the above entry, Marie and I went over to America’s Top Dog several times and enjoyed it greatly, especially the Washington, DC-styled half-smokes. Sadly, I went to their second store, in Duluth, earlier today and they no longer carry half-smokes, as their supplier changed their minimum monthly ordering requirements to a number too huge to store, much less sell in a month. Nevertheless, their basic dogs remain one of the city’s best treasures, especially paired with a small order of onion rings.

(Update 11/25/11): Strangely and sadly, just eight days after visiting the Duluth store, I can confirm that the original, in Chamblee, has shuttered. Duluth is still going and still awesome, so go check them out!

(Update 1/6/12): Even more sadly, it would now appear that Duluth has closed as well. That’s just awful news. I will miss these guys.

Other blog posts about America’s Top Dog:

Food Near Snellville (Feb. 16 2011)
The Blissful Glutton (Apr. 6 2011)