Ye Olde Colonial Restaurant, Madison GA (CLOSED)

Here’s a place that took me the better part of eternity to get around to visiting. I first spotted Ye Olde Colonial – and yeah, let’s go ahead and acknowledge just how silly that awful name is – about fifteen years ago, when I was living in Athens and occasionally visiting Madison every couple of months. There are some amazing antique stores in and around the town square, and I remember coveting some really neat walking sticks with silver wolf’s heads and things atop them. I’m still not completely convinced that I should not, when I hit age fifty, always go out in a very nice, old-fashioned suit and a walking cane with a silver wolf’s head. But, if we’re strictly honest, the coolest thing I found back then was my Dr. Shrinker jigsaw puzzle. Continue reading “Ye Olde Colonial Restaurant, Madison GA (CLOSED)” →

Vatica Indian Vegetarian Cuisine, Marietta GA

I’ll tell you, friends, this was not the meal that I was hoping to find. It was very, very good, and calls out for investigation from more people who love unusual flavors and unique foods. Well, I knew going in that a vegetarian Indian restaurant was unlikely to replace the dearly-missed Moksha in my affections, and this didn’t, but it was a very different and very positive experience all the same. This is definitely a restaurant that Atlanta’s foodie community should quit overlooking and come visit.

For one thing, Vatica’s owner is by leagues the most engaging, friendly and welcoming host of any Indian place that I’ve ever visited. Having done just a cursory bit of research into what I could expect here, I explained to him that I knew virtually nothing of vegetarian Indian dishes, but that I understood this place specialized in something called thali, which is basically a buffet brought to your table. He told me that he’d make me a very good thali and tell me all about it.

About five minutes later, I had a huge circular tray in front of me, with small bowls of a variety of foods. He told me what each was. My meal included rice, a spicy stew called dal, potato curry, lentil curry, sweet potatoed curry, an onion yogurt called raita, a pita-like bread called roti, the delicious, thin spicy wafers called papadam, a potato and onion samosa and a little fruit cup. I apologized for inconveniencing him, but I’m actually allergic to sweet potatoes. So those went, and he brought me a small bowl of curried squash instead.

This place definitely has it down right. That sounds like a heck of a lot of food, but everything was in very sensible, small portions. If you’re looking for a broad sampling of flavors, you can do pretty well here, getting ten different things for nine bucks and change. I was most taken with the dal and with the potato curry, but everything was very tasty. I was further surprised when, about halfway through my meal, another fellow came by with a tray to refill whatever I wanted more of, so I had second helpings of the dal, the potato curry, the lentils and another couple of papadam wafers.

Honestly, this was a good – no, a very good – lunch, but I also realized as I ate that really, what I’ve come to expect, unfairly, from Indian cuisine is really tasty meat in a really spicy, scorch-yer-tongue sauce. This was one heck of a good meal, but not at all what I was looking for. I wonder where my ongoing search to replace Moksha will take me next?

The Fickle Pickle, Roswell GA

If you’ve never taken my advice before, listen to me now: do not arrange to meet friends at The Fickle Pickle. You should definitely go, and you should absolutely plan to enjoy a delicious lunch in the company of your buddies, but seriously; this place has the dinkiest parking lot imaginable. It gets really busy on the weekends, at which point downtown Roswell’s lack of overflow parking impacts everybody’s happiness. Get everybody together at somebody’s house ahead of time, and carpool in as few vehicles as possible. You’ll do everybody a favor.

In many previous chapters in this story, I’ve shared reports of what I call menu envy, which is that particular condition of sitting down to what you thought was going to be a swell meal, only to find that somebody else at your table – or, too often in my case, everybody else at my table – has ordered something even tastier than what you got. I’m very happy to say that, for my birthday last week, just about everybody else at our table had envy over my fried green tomato sandwich. Even if they didn’t know they had that envy, or were perfectly satisfied with their own sandwiches, which I’m sure were terrific, they were eating something flatly inferior to my order. This sandwich… well, let me start by saying that the Blue Willow Inn out in Social Circle probably has better fried green tomatoes, but that would be it in the region. The tomatoes are amazing. Served up on fresh bread with a tomato jam, pepperjack cheese, greens, white onions and a thin smear of basil mayo, the kitchen is making magic. I haven’t had a better sandwich in a very, very long time. The only person at the table who was not envious of my sandwich was Kimberly, who also had the good sense and fortune to order one.

Everybody’s sandwiches were really wonderful, and they each come with a very good side. Marie was very happy with her tomato basil soup, and I was very taken with my chili. The real winner, though, apart from the sandwiches, is the top choice on their appetizer board. The fried pickles here are to die for. They’re simply out of this world, crunchy and juicy and served with a really wonderful remoulade sauce. Order accordingly: a full basket is enough for four, and you’ll certainly feel very guilty letting any of these go to waste.

While I can’t praise the food here enough, I also think the service is far better than the average. The owners have done themselves no favors by building in an old house the way that they have, and indeed my only dissatisfaction comes from how hugely inefficient a system they’ve developed. With such a popular restaurant drawing so many people into such a small space, there has to be a better way than putting names in for a table and then having your party go through a very slow cafeteria-style line to place orders and ring the table up all together. The result is confusion, lots of standing around and lots of blocked doorways. Having said that, the various servers seemed very much atop the chaos and were both very graciously accommodating for our group arriving in fits and starts throughout the hour and promptly reactive to additional orders being added to our table.

Yet I can’t help but think that if the service was that good with a flawed and inefficient system, the service would become floating-on-air perfect with a more sensible one. I am very tempted to return one weekday evening and try one of these highly-praised mac-n-cheese bowls which are only available at supper, and see how the service is during a slightly less busy time than Saturday at 12:30. I’ll certainly have some more fried pickles, too.

The Silver Skillet, Atlanta GA

Let me tell you how to get one of the most decadent breakfasts that you’ve ever had. Go on down to the Silver Skillet. It’s an old-fashioned greasy spoon in Atlanta’s midtown, on 14th Street just west of the downtown connector. That’s what we call the stretch of Interstates 75 and 85 when they merge. The building has barely changed in fifty years, with faded prints of show horses on the walls and the old hand-painted signs with the daily specials behind the bar. You’ll want country ham with red-eye gravy, and two biscuits with white gravy, and a couple of eggs, preferably scrambled. And you’re probably going to want some sweet tea with it. If you’re the sort who likes coffee with your breakfast, trust me this once, you’ll want to pass this time around.

Red-eye gravy is most often made from mixing the drippings of the fried country ham with coffee. To hear my mother tell it, that’s why in northern Alabama, where she grew up, this was called, not very appetizingly, “grease gravy.” At the Silver Skillet, they apparently let their country ham, which is center-sliced and bone-in, marinate for several hours in a stew that includes – if you’re ready for this – soy sauce, brown sugar, paprika and Coca-Cola before they fry it. So it’s the grease from that marinate that gets mixed with coffee. I think that it works best as a dip. Have a small piece of ham dipped in gravy, followed by a small piece of biscuit dipped in the white gravy. Somehow manage to keep the current week’s Creative Loafing balanced in your lap under the formica table.

This ham is, by leagues, the best country ham that I’ve ever had. It is tender but chewy, and incredibly salty. You’re then dipping this salty meat into a gravy that’s at least one part soy sauce. You are going to need sweet tea, and not coffee. Probably about three glasses. And you’re still going to be licking your lips and smacking from salt overload about ninety minutes later.

At any rate, the Silver Skillet has been family-owned since 1967. The late George Decker bought the restaurant from its original owner and his daughter has run it since his passing in 1988. Open from 6 until 2 in the afternoon, there is usually a short wait during the week and a much longer one on weekends or during big events in the city that bring in the tourists. For my birthday last week, I treated myself to breakfast here. I got there just in time to claim one of two available tables, kicked back with my paper, had a very nice server call me “sweetie” and “hon” as she refilled my tea enough times for me to float away when I was finished.

Much later, after I had gassed up and stopped by someplace in the ‘burbs for some Christmas shopping, I went by a grocery store where my bank has a branch. I was still smacking my lips. It was that tasty and that salty. Clearly that’s not a meal for everybody, nor a meal for every day, but when the opportunity strikes to indulge just a little, how can anyone resist?

The Colonnade, Atlanta GA

If you grew up in a southern household, you simply must visit The Colonnade to have your mind blown by this menu. They serve things here that your mother or your grandmother regularly prepared and which you had completely forgotten. Last week, Marie and our daughter and I joined David and Neal for supper here. All three of us fellows had the same eye-popping reaction to the same thing. “Pears and cheese?! My mom used to make that!” With grated sharp cheddar cheese and mayo. It must have been in the secret handbook assigned by Betty Crocker to all housewives in Georgia and neighboring states between 1964 and 1975.

One of the other amazing things on the menu is tomato aspic. This savory gelatin was apparently a somewhat common dish in postwar America, until the Jell-O company turned families onto the idea of gelatin as a sweet dessert instead. “Oh, Lord,” said Neal, sampling a half-spoonful of my order. “It tastes like V-8 Jell-O.” Turns out he’s exactly right. I found a recipe for tomato aspic which calls for tomato juice, Tabasco and bay leaf along with two envelopes of unflavored gelatin. The curiosity and novelty didn’t overwhelm the reality that it wasn’t very good, but as I told Neal as I encouraged him to give it a taste, when the heck else are you going to have the chance to try tomato aspic in a restaurant?

Naturally, I had to try both of these at the Colonnade, as they’re both missing from the menus of darn near every other restaurant around. So is calf’s liver, among others, but I had to draw the line somewhere. No, I just had your common-or-garden chicken livers. Nothing adventurous here.

The Colonnade is one of Atlanta’s oldest surviving restaurants. Only the Atkins Park Tavern is older. It opened in 1927 at the intersection of Piedmont and Lindbergh, in a house that was torn down before I was born. In 1962, the Colonnade moved to its present location on Cheshire Bridge Road in front of that unbelievably skeevy motel. I know this must come as a shock to Atlantans to hear a motel on Cheshire Bridge described as skeevy, but I calls ’em as I sees ’em.

We were mistaken on one point about the Colonnade. Looking over all these old-fashioned, timelost dishes on the menu along with the fried chicken and collard greens, we all assumed, quite wrongly, that the only things to have changed here over the decades are the prices. However, in the lobby, there is a collection of old menus from earlier days, and it would appear that curiosities like the aspic and the pear and cheese are actually relatively new. Along with the menus, there are also some newspaper and magazine reviews. One of these features the ridiculous headline “PATRONS PRAISE GOOD PLACE TO EAT.” When I wrote for a newspaper in Athens, I occasionally wanted to smack the copy editors around with a baseball bat for all the awful headlines they wrote for my articles, but lordy, I never had one that bad.

There has been one very unfortunate change at the restaurant, but it’s not one that I knew about for a couple of days. We noticed in the lobby the requisite framed, autographed poster of Guy Fieri spotlighting the Colonnade’s appearance on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. I tracked down the clip – they’re on YouTube – and was surprised to see that the Food Network series visited the Colonnade during a period where they were experimenting with some really fascinating concoctions no longer available. So if you’re a Triple-D fan making your way around the country hitting the featured restaurants – and a fine use of your time that would be – it looks like you cannot currently get the redneck sushi, the lobster knuckle sandwich or, tragically, the kangaroo sirloin. Look, I like chicken livers all right, but if I’d seen kangaroo steak on the menu, that’s what I would have ordered. The Colonnade’s brief flirtation with new, wild and a little weird has ended, and they’re back to the basics, serving up fine dining the way that your grandmother knew it.

I did find one note about the fine dining experience a little unusual, however. All of the service was very good, and we enjoyed our server’s choosing to answer Marie’s request for a recommendation in reverse. Rather than telling her what he liked best, he told her the two dishes that he did not enjoy, suggesting that she’d like anything else that she ordered, and she did. But I was a little surprised at the register. The Colonnade does not accept credit cards. That’s just fine by me; I don’t like to use credit cards. (I also play Where’s George?, so it’s important that I keep ones in circulation!) I tried not to be confrontational about it, but I was curious about the policy. “I think that’s so neat that y’all don’t take credit cards. I don’t use them either, but I was wondering why you don’t.” I guess the lady at the register gets that a lot, only rudely. “We just don’t. We never have.” That’s all the answer that she wanted to give.

So much for curiosity, but then again, I think the Colonnade is older than credit cards, and they can make that choice. The rest of you, swing by your bank’s ATM first.

Tandoor Restaurant, Marietta GA

I’m still reeling from the closure of Moksha. I must be; there’s no other explanation for this grim lack of satisfaction in the unavailability of really good, reasonably-priced Indian food in the area. Now this obviously is the sort of thing that I could have rectified already, had I put my mind to it, and I did find Desi Spice, which is pretty good, but the honest fact is that my great enjoyment of a few Indian dishes has been consistently tempered with the persistent awfulness of the restaurants that serve them. I don’t wish to list a walk of shame, but I think you’ve all eaten at the kinds of places that turn my eyebrows. I’m talking about the ones that feature the cloth napkins and nice tablecloths under the clear plastic, with the ill-fitting tuxedos totally failing to turn a server’s disagreeable and bored demeanor into anything classy. If Atlanta’s got one too many of anything, it’s the Indian equivalents of those damn fool China-This and China-That places. I’ve really, really got to be in some more kind of mood for rogan josh to put up with that burning mediocrity of presentation.

Moksha was really nice, but it was genuinely upscale and not plastic, with gorgeous interiors brightly lit by huge windows letting in the light and a super staff of smiling and helpful servers. Heck, even the gents’ was classy. I wanted to know where the heck they bought that sink so I could install it in my own home.

There is nothing in Tandoor’s decor that I want in my home, but the experience is so many leagues preferable to the surly artificiality of the typical Indian restaurant in the region that it scores highly on my scale. The food’s all right. It’s just okay, really, but it’s priced very well and they don’t make any pretension about it. Why can’t more places be like this?

At any rate, the decor in this place is pretty darn downmarket, which is a very nice breath of fresh relief or something like that. It’s in a strip mall on Powers Ferry Road which looks like it should have been a good location once upon a time, but it’s struggling. Despite the high-end car dealer on one end, most of the spaces are vacant. In fact, the storefronts that sandwich Tandoor are both closed up.

Tandoor’s prices are very nice, but you have to navigate the menu in odd ways to make things work. They have some “combo meals” to save money and give guests a broader choice of flavors, but these come with some restrictions. The $8.99 combo comes with a vegetable dish, one curried meat, rice and naan. I found this a little restrictive, sorry to say. Based on Chloe Morris’s excellent review of this place (link dead, but where it was described, with some hyperbole, as “the best Indian/Pakistani food in the city”), I was looking forward to trying the chicken boti. Unfortunately, this dish does not qualify as one of the meats that you can get in this combo.

Hoping to maximize my dollar’s worth, I asked for the girl at the register to recommend another chicken entree. She suggested that I might enjoy the chicken karahi instead. Unfortunately (again), difficulty understanding each other meant that my request for “boneless” was not made clear. I’ve since learned that karahi is typically prepared bone-in, as this meal was. It was, indeed, quite tasty and in a very good, thick, spicy, brown sauce. It wasn’t quite what I had in mind is all.

I did get to try Chow Down’s suggestion of palak paneer, a dish that I may have only had once before. This was indeed very nice and creamy and a rich, natural green color, without any artificial additives. I won’t swear that I’d order it every time, but it was a good change from my usual routine.

It was not completely satisfying. There was far more rice than I could ever eat, at the expense of the other dishes. Yet everything was flavored so nicely that I didn’t mind much. The small, downmarket decor was not a problem, but I found myself focusing on patchy, broken paint on walls that needed a new coat. I suspect this is a popular destination for lunch; at two in the afternoon, it was still mostly full. I’m afraid I’ve still got a lot of work ahead of me trying to replace Moksha, but this wasn’t bad.

Allen’s, Athens GA (CLOSED)

Last week, I went down to Allen’s for a twenty-five cent beer. I didn’t get one. Honestly, you’d think, having been immortalized in song thusly, a place would keep its drink specials. Even if the song was twenty years old and reflected on a scene that was a decade and change in the past already. Continue reading “Allen’s, Athens GA (CLOSED)” →