Doug’s Place, Emerson GA

Would you believe that Randy and Kimberly finally got married? It’s only been a week, but we haven’t heard anything about them fighting over him taking her to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, so I choose to believe the honeymoon’s still on. Then again, he did write to let me know that he perceived a heck of a lot of Asian restaurants in Asheville, where they went, so who knows what they got up to.

Their ceremony was held on Red Top Mountain near Cartersville, and looking around for something to eat on the way brought up a restaurant in the small town of Emerson called Doug’s Place. This opened up a floodgate of forgotten memories, none of which, it turns out, really have anything to do with this very agreeable Southern-style meat-and-three. When I found a photo of Doug’s Place – the one on John Bickford’s very entertaining From My Table – I suddenly remembered that when I was a child, a chunk of Interstate 75 along this stretch was closed for a couple of years while the US Army Corps of Engineers was doing some sort of digging or reconstruction of Allatoona Lake. When my parents took me along for their monthly visit to see my grandparents in Fort Payne, we would exit early and drive up US 41 through Cartersville. On about three or four occasions, I swear that we stopped for breakfast around here, and wondered whether it might have been Doug’s Place.

It wasn’t – suspicion now lies on a Cartersville restaurant called Cody Jay’s which occupies a building that, thirty-odd years ago, was the home of a place called J.R.’s – but getting to the bottom of things was kind of fun. I first asked my mom whether she remembered what that place in Bartow County we would stop in the seventies was called. Unsurprisingly, since, to hear my mom tell it, whatever good times there ever were ended around the time Nixon got in trouble with the lib’rul media, and, perhaps not coincidentally, I was two, she didn’t remember any such thing. Mom carried Dentyne cinnamon-flavored chewing gum in her purse for the better part of fifteen years, but she thinks I’ve made up this story to confound her, because everybody knows that she hates chewing gum. Getting her to identify thirty year-old breakfast stops is like getting her to identify Godzilla films that were on channel 17 on a specific evening that my parents had friends over for pinochle when I was nine. She’s not very helpful with that, either.

Wherever we ate back then, it wasn’t Doug’s Place, but heaven knows I irritated two or three people trying to get to the bottom of it. Before this place became Doug’s about fifteen years back, it was apparently Morris’s, but the building itself dates to the 1890s. There are two small dining rooms and a large, screened porch to wait for a table, and some really delicious southern food inside.

We had an early lunch, arriving at Doug’s in between rushes. There were only a couple of recently bussed tables available when we arrived, and a long line developed while we ate. The interior of the restaurant is quite small, and it’s not possible to move around to the restroom or cash register without slightly jostling other guests.

The food is mostly quite terrific, although sadly, yet again, everybody else at the table enjoyed a better entree than me. I had the country fried steak with gravy, and I wouldn’t call it bad, but I certainly wasn’t in the mood for it after having a bite of Marie’s wonderful fried chicken, and one of the truly excellent chicken livers that Neal ordered. He concluded that these livers were even better than those at Vittles, which he enjoys more than me, and I had to agree. My daughter inhaled her gumbo, leaving me unable to comment on its quality, but I imagine that it must have been pretty good for her to down that much of it so quickly.

For sides, Marie enjoyed a small cup of broccoli and cheese soup. Neal and I each had baked beans which were quite good and I also had some delicious fried green tomatoes. Each of us also ordered the creamed corn. I would not call it great – Bear’s Den in Macon cooks up much better and much creamier – but I was still quite pleased. If I had taken my sides with a different entree, it would have been a superb meal rather than merely a very good one.

I am surprised that Doug’s Place has managed to stay so far off the radar of people who enjoy this kind of food. Obviously the locals enjoy it and with great reason, but this is quite genuinely the sort of thing that should attract a much larger crowd of travelers who love southern cooking, meat-and-threes, or any unique roadfood destinations. I noticed that the restaurant did post an article from Southern Living where they got a little praise, but doing what they do as well as this, there should be articles from forty different magazines and regular appearances on The Food Network. For now, we’ll call it one of the region’s best-kept secrets.

Forno Italian Restaurant, Jasper GA

You ever had one of those trips where you feel compelled to go home and look at a map and figure out where in the heck you were? Last week, I had one of those. Since Wednesday is my free day, I took a former boss of mine up on her invitation to take a nice drive way out, and I mean way out, in the country, where she’d moved as part of her “urban evacuation” earlier in the year. I knew that Melissa was a goodly ways north and east of Ball Ground, but when she took the wheel up and over more back roads to go from her house to lunch, whatever navigational skills that I had abandoned me.

After not too long a drive up sparsely populated trails, during which time Melissa told me about an interesting run-in, along a stretch by a weatherbeaten old barn, with a police officer who had asked her whether she had seen three ne’er-do-well hillbillies who were up to some nebulous rottenness… oh, all right, the Pickens County cops were looking for a meth lab. Anyway, we ended up in a small strip mall in the community of Marble Hill near Jasper, punctuated by an IGA grocer that caters to the vacationers at nearby Big Canoe. Alongside the strip is a quite nice little Italian place that recently found new ownership and apparently a very new menu.

This is the first time that I’ve run into this issue doing these writeups. Melissa suggested this restaurant based on the food that they served on her previous visits, but since she last went there, they have revamped almost completely. Previously, Forno served pizza, burgers and hot dogs with a Chicago theme. The original owner, who was from the Windy City, decorated the interior with pictures of area landmarks and street signs, along with an amusing poster explaining the various components of the famous Chicago dog. If you’ve been to the wonderful Bobby G’s in Alpharetta, you have a general idea of what I mean, although Forno is not quite so densely decorated.

The new owner has dispensed with the old menu, although the Illinois decor remains for now. He’s spruced the place up a little, and is trying to turn it into an upscale Italian-styled destination, with higher-end entrees. I’m not certain how easily such a conversion can be managed with the TVs in each booth to watch the game of your choice still reflecting the previous sports bar feel, but that’s the goal.

It’s really not fair to judge a place based on the quality of its buffet, but I’ll plead poverty. Expecting a burger and the attendant cost, I was a hair sticker shocked at a menu full of $15-16 entrees, and so Melissa and I just had the pasta buffet. The salad was not bad, although Melissa correctly observed that most of the available ingredients also made for good pizza toppings, and the pastas, which included ziti with sausage in a red sauce and ziti with chicken in a cream sauce with vegetables, were acceptable and tasty if not outstanding, and the service was just fine.

I do have to confess a little skepticism about Forno’s long-term prospects. As always, I wish restaurant owners all the best luck and success in the world, but their menu does seem awfully high priced for being out in the middle of nowhere. Of course, looking at it on the map, it’s really closer to State Route 515, and the Atlanta-to-Ellijay traffic, than I would have thought, but most of its potential customers certainly live in the back of beyond. It looks like this is a place that’s going to have to work very hard to convert lots of locals into regulars to stick around. My fingers are crossed for them!

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Happy Sumo, Norcross GA

One huge difficulty in doing anything around the sprawling mess of Atlanta is that the suburbs are so stupidly spread out and badly managed and maintained. Even something that looks, on a map, simple and straightforward like a twenty-mile shot east to the Gwinnett County suburb of Norcross is a forty-minute slog at the best of times, and better than an hour’s rumble in the evening traffic. I don’t mention this to object in any way to making a trip out that direction to a good meal; far from it, as there are plenty of good restaurants in Duluth, Norcross and points east and I’m glad to go visit them, but man, the traffic engineers who’ve been claiming to be at work on this job have been out to lunch for decades. At this point, there’s nothing wrong with the northern suburbs that two trolleys, twelve people movers, six newly-constructed bus lanes, sixty miles of north-south and east-west heavy-rail track and that big drilling Mole machine from Thunderbirds wouldn’t fix. You heard about that “Big Dig” under Boston? The northern ‘burbs need about seven of those.

At any rate, I’ve mentioned that we try to have some weekly get-together with some of our friends. We have to alternate days to accommodate different people that we know, and last week, between people being sick and people planning weddings and people having jobs, it was only Marie and the girlchild and I who were able to meet up with Matt. Almost all of us live in Cobb County on the northwest side of town; Matt and his wife live up in Gainesville, but he works thirty-odd miles south down around Johns Creek. His commute isn’t that unusual, either, which is why it’s so disagreeable that the city’s traffic planners have spent decades sleeping. Anyway, with the interstates, particularly the top end perimeter, a parking lot at 6 pm, we drove a wonderful back way that I know over to Roswell, and then spent a while crawling east along Holcomb Bridge Road to meet Matt at a place that he knows called Happy Sumo. Matt used to live just around the corner before marriage lured him to Gainesville, and this was one of his favorite places for dinner when he stayed here in Norcross.

Holcomb Bridge, it must be said, really is a depressing drive just for all the businesses that used to be along this stretch of road but have since closed. I counted two comic shops, one bookstore and one CD store that aren’t there anymore, along with two decent restaurants that I had enjoyed. To be honest, I’d rather not find the need to revisit Holcomb Bridge for this reason alone; it’s just too sad.

Happy Sumo is one of Atlanta’s many teppanyaki restaurants. These are often called hibachi steakhouses, but that’s not strictly accurate. At a teppanyaki restaurant, as popularized by chains like Benihana, the chef prepares the meal on a flat, iron surface heated by propane and uses soybean oil to cook the ingredients. We don’t often get out to Japanese steakhouses like this, although I don’t know that I’ve ever had a mediocre meal at one.

We got the requisite cutting up from our chef, who spun his utensils around and made an onion volcano and did goofy stunts involving Easter eggs and rubber chickens. It’s impossible not to be charmed by the silliness, and it put the girlchild in a pretty good mood.

Marie and I each ordered the teriyaki steak with fried rice – watch out for an additional $2 for having your rice fried rather than steamed – and my daughter had chicken. Matt had a nice combo meal of filet mignon and shrimp. It was a little pricy of a dinner, but everybody really enjoyed their food, and the tasty sauces. It was almost as good as Inoko in Athens, which is my standard bearer for hibachi/teppanyaki, and just the sort of evening out we needed.

The drive back, incidentally, was after the evening rush had ended and the interstates were accessible again. It didn’t take anywhere near as long to get home, but I still think International Rescue’s big drill could make it even quicker.

Hillside Orchard Farms, Tiger GA

There’s one other little place – so far – that Marie and I love to visit up in Rabun County, although I’m sad to say that this one tries my daughter’s patience just a little. Between Tallulah Falls and Clayton, there’s apparently a little town called Tiger. We haven’t found the town itself – it’s allegedly a stop sign and a post office somewhere along Old US 441 – but a few miles south of where that town is said to be, in an unincorporated community called Lakemont, you can find just about the best roadside jam-n-cider operation I’ve ever discovered. There are a few signs, but it’s still easy to miss. It’s called Hillside Orchard Farms, and if you’re driving north from Tallulah Falls up US 23, look for the signs and you’ll turn to the left and then make an immediate right and go about half a mile.

I think I like this place so much not just because of the quality of the canned and bottled treats, which I’ll get to in just a moment, but because of its isolation and ever-so-brief feeling of peace and absolute tranquility. It’s a very old-fashioned tourist stop, the sort that I imagine might have been common in the pre-interstate days. Apart from the sales room, there is a small restaurant which we have not tried yet, a cornfield maze, a nice little walk up to a petting zoo, a lazy little river that borders the property, and a “gold mine” for the kiddies complete with a little prospector mannequin. In the fall, there are some additional stands where locals sell some arts and crafts and occasionally, like this past Saturday, a bluegrass band plays for the visitors. If you think that there’s anything nicer than sitting back on one of the last warm weekends of the year enjoying some beautiful scenery and bluegrass in Marie’s company, you’d be mistaken.

All of this, however, bores my daughter silly. Well, she is only eleven.

Let’s be fair; plenty of roadside stands have jars of jams and preserves that have suspiciously similar and cautiously-worded labels about how they’re specially bottled for the operation in question. Short of an interrogation, you’re probably not going to know exactly for sure whether the bottle of “vidalia onion steak sauce” you can buy at A. Schwab’s in Memphis is all that different from the bottle whose label uses the same wording and the same font that you can buy at Hot Thomas in Watkinsville. It amuses me to think that there’s some outfit that makes house brand sauces for big grocery store chains four days a week, and then changes the packaging on Friday to ship out to all the roadside stands to con tourists.

I can’t speak for everything in Hillside Orchard’s inventory, but I do know for sure, now that I’ve seen it, that they do have a large canning and bottling facility about another half-mile up the road. And their sales room is sitting on a pretty big plot of farmland, so I’m comfortable believing that a fair chunk of their products are, genuinely, locally-made. Now maybe that “vidalia onion steak sauce” with that tan label and italic font isn’t, but when you’ve got a place offering all these fresh apples and other fruits along with bottles of these amazing ciders, I choose to believe the best.

The jams and preserves are all completely wonderful. We’ve tried quite a few as spreads for biscuits and loved every one. We have also tried a few of Hillside Orchard’s ciders and enjoy the spiced apple and the peach very much. My favorite, however, is the muscadine cider. A half-gallon of that is absolutely worth six bucks, but every once in a while, we have lucked on an inventory clearance and got a big bottle for three. I did kind of frustrate myself on the drive home, though, when I realized that I had intended to pick up a bottle of strawberry cider and give that a try, but plain forgot.

Fortunately, we’ll be going to Asheville again this month and will be driving right through this neck of the woods. I’m awfully curious about that strawberry cider. I wonder whether it might still be on sale?

Oinkers, Clayton GA

The first time that we went up to hike at Tallulah Gorge a few years ago, we dragged our exhausted carcasses back to the visitors’ center and asked where we could get some good barbecue in the area. The nice lady at the gift shop didn’t skip a beat. “It’s about ten miles up the road,” she said. “Do you mind the drive?” Y’all have probably figured out that I certainly don’t object to a fifteen minute trip for good barbecue.

Going north from Tallulah Gorge, where we try to visit about twice a year, Oinkers is on the right a couple of miles after that new-looking overpass that they built for the Rabun County High School. It’s pretty easy to miss; if you make it into the morass of fast-food chain restaurants of downtown Clayton, you went too far. We’ve come to Oinkers three times now, and each time enjoyed a good Saturday lunch with an absolutely packed house and a parking lot where about half the cars sport Rabun plates and half are from out of town. US 23 runs from I-40 and the Great Smokey Mountains Expressway, near Asheville, through Atlanta and to points down south, so it’s a perfect artery for travelers looking to enjoy the fall colors. In fact, we’ll double-check the mileage later this month, but Oinkers seems to be right around the halfway point between our place in Marietta and the city of Asheville.

Locals and travelers alike have learned that this is a lunchtime destination, and arrive in bulk. There is always a wait, even when it rains, as it did on us about a year ago, and then you have to worry about them running out of food. Well, maybe you don’t have to worry, but I’ve never seen a place that posts quite so many notices about how they only prepare enough food as they think they might need on any given day, and might run out. Evidently, this was once a problem, and so they’ve tried to get the word out that it doesn’t matter how much people might want to eat here, the restaurant might well get overwhelmed.

Oinkers’ specialty is chopped pork with vinegar sauce, but this is definitely a sauce that novices to Carolina-style vinegar need to sample sparingly. Fortunately, for people like Marie who prefer their sauce tomato-based, they also offer a “sweet sauce,” thick and tasty with molasses. Me, I like the hot vinegar sauce, which packs a very nice, peppery punch.

After our most recent trip to Tallulah Gorge last week, we settled on having two small meals. I wanted to revisit the wonderful Hawg Wild down south in Clarkesville, but I also wanted to talk about Oinkers, so we resolved to do both. Oinkers was, as usual, completely packed, and so the staff kindly sat us at the servers’ table.

Between the three of us, we had a sandwich and a plate of chopped pork, along with some fries, stew, baked beans and applesauce, with a slice of peanut butter pie. My daughter and I agreed that the pie needed a tall glass of milk, but that was about the only complaint we could levy against the “snack.” Between authentic and interesting food and service which somehow finds a way to be attentive despite a madhouse of customers, Oinkers has carved out a niche as a local favorite, and if you’re planning to take US 23 up to Asheville from Atlanta, you will quickly find this a very agreeable halfway point.

Mallery Street Cafe, Saint Simons Island GA

This is Marie, contributing another small chapter about a place on St. Simons Island called Mallery Street Cafe. It’s brand new and has no history whatsoever; I don’t even recall having seen it the last time we came down to visit. It’s in the same location as a former CD and tape shop where as a teenager I used to spend what little of my allowance used to be left after the purchase of books and candy; in one of the shops that came in succession after that one, my sister bought altogether too much incense and smelly candles. Its current incarnation is much cuter than either, but not too much so. Continue reading “Mallery Street Cafe, Saint Simons Island GA” →

Shish Kebab, Marietta GA

Last week, it was Marie’s turn to pick a place for one of our weekly get-togethers, and she found a little restaurant in the shadow of Marietta’s infamous Big Chicken which people probably drive right past without blinking. It’s called Shish Kebab and it’s set up in what looks like an old Pizza Hut or some other ’70s-fashioned place. You see a lot of this in the area; one of these days I need to go back to Don Taco, which is a very good Mexican restaurant built into an old Hardee’s*.

David and Neal got to Shish Kebab before us. I had funny work stories to share and my daughter was impressing us by being awesomely eighties, and we settled in for some very good meals.

It’s not mentioned on the menu, but it looks like all dinner guests here get a small tossed salad. Had I known that, I probably would not have also asked for a Shirazi salad. This was a blend of diced tomatoes, cucumbers and onions with olives and lemon juice. David had an appetizer called kashk-o-badmjan, which was eggplant and mint with dried yogurt, along with a small order of seven spices, which was a cup of pickled vegetables served with a very tasty blend of spices, by design so strong that the taste of the spices overpowered the vegetables.

David and my daughter each ordered chicken barg. Asked for the difference between a basic kebab and a barg, the owner explained that they were different cuts of meat, prepared in a different marinade. They also got a slightly different selection of vegetables; Marie and Neal each had kebabs – lamb and beef – and theirs did not come with mushrooms. I happily ate up my daughter’s. They were prepared in a wonderful blend of oils that brought out so much flavor; I could eat those with every meal.

As for me, I was really only peckish enough for a sandwich, and so I had a gyro. It was very good, and really, the only step this place did wrong this evening was to serve it with a bag of Frito-Lay chips. They’ve done such a good job turning this restaurant’s interior into something fairly classy and nice, and they serve such good food and present it so well, and then they give you bags of Frito-Lay? Well, the gyro meat was very good, and supplemented with some of Marie’s excellent lamb and my daughter’s mushrooms, I was very happy with my supper.

We were invited to return for their big Saturday supper shindig, but we had plans already. That said, the prospect of a buffet with food this good and the entertainment of belly dancing really did sound tempting! Hopefully it was a big success for them and they’ll host these more often.

*Or not. Don Taco apparently closed several months ago.

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