Sushi in the Suburbs

Several weeks ago, when Marie and I went to a little media event for Outback Steakhouse, we got to meet several area bloggers, including two writers from Exclusive Eats, and shared some favorite restaurants and meals. Asked about my favorite sushi, I found myself unable to come up with anything other than Ru San’s. I mean, I know that I’ve had sushi in some other places – I was taken to a surprisingly good place in Macon once – but, at least since we began the blog last year, we’ve only ever gone back to one of Ru San’s stores. Continue reading “Sushi in the Suburbs” →

Buckhead Burrito Grill, Kennesaw GA (CLOSED)

There are coincidences and connections all around in the restaurant business. Sometime in 2008, I read some people on a message board raving about Big Shanty Smokehouse, up in Kennesaw off Wade Green Road. I took the children up there for what would be the first of many terrific meals, and we noticed, along the way, this little burrito place in a strip mall closer to the interstate. I said then that, one of these days, we needed to stop by and give them a try. It was not a priority, as longtime readers might have read, as I have been losing my taste for, and interest in, American-styled burritos and tacos. Somebody really needs to prompt me to go get a burrito anymore.

So several months passed, and we drove up there one Sunday, only to find them closed. They don’t open on Sundays. They also take a short vacation and close down around the Fourth of July every year. I know this because around that date in 2010 and again this year, we tried coming by and, stymied, left with a shrug.

A couple of Fridays ago, we decided it was time to let Marie relax for a weekend. We complement each other very well, I think, but one way that we have really started to differ since we had the great emotional drain that is a baby is that I spend all week antsy for the freedom to get out and drive and relax by getting up at the comparatively late hour of about seven and finding someplace miles and miles away to eat, and Marie, who’s much more of a workaholic and has a more demanding desk job than I do, and could, given the chance, sleep for a whole lot longer than anybody, enjoys the occasional weekend where she can stay in bed until ten – ten! – and not do anything for two and a half days. Weekends where I really, really relax leave her completely exhausted, and weekends where she really, really relaxes leave me completely unfulfilled. We compensate by allowing me weekends where I overplan and completely fill it with things to do – oh, and I’m two months away from the most awesome weekend ever – and, once in a while, allowing a weekend with not a single thing on the agenda.

This was one of those Fridays. I asked what we were doing for supper and she said that she’d simply like to get a burrito from Willy’s. I suggested that we might could go a few exits up and give Buckhead Burrito Grill one last try. If they weren’t open, we’d come back to Willy’s. Not only were they open, and excellent, but we also learned that they moved to this location from the very space into which Big Shanty Smokehouse, the restaurant that we visited when we first saw these guys, opened. If the Buckhead Burrito Grill had not been successful enough to move into a bigger place with more parking, then the Smokehouse would not have started up in the space that they vacated, and we would never have seen this “California-style” place. Well, I think that it’s weird, anyway.

Bob and Melissa Ross started the restaurant, so named because, when they opened about ten years ago, they felt that you had to drive down to Buckhead to get a decent burrito, and they still own it. We didn’t know when we arrived that their signature item was the fish taco, and so Marie and I each had burritos. She had the “house” style, made with your basic chicken, rice, beans, cheese and pico de gallo, and I had the “Rio” style, which was chicken, rice, cheese, lettuce, and two sauces, one a hot red sauce and the other thick, creamy and peppery. They were both perfectly acceptable and tasty, probably better than what we would have had at Willy’s and leagues better than what they sell you at Moe’s. I feel like they could probably spare a few more chips in the basket, however. The salsa bar here is stocked with really terrific and tasty blends, even if, like most places, they offer little plastic dipping cups that are just too darn small, and I would have gladly indulged in many, many more chips after I finished the puny number that came with my meal.

There are a couple of newspaper reviews on the wall here, and after we read those raves, we realized we probably needed to try the fish taco. This thing deserves the hype. It’s tilapia fried in a batter full of ingredients that the woman at the register would not divulge, and served with onions, cabbage, cilantro and a really unique jalapeno yogurt that they call “Mexican tartar sauce.” Marie liked it more than I did, and I liked it a lot.

They seem to rotate their unusual desserts, which are usually deep-fried American snack foods served in a burrito with whipped cream. When we went, Snickers were on offer. Personally, I don’t like Snickers at all – a friend in middle school once described the sensation of spitting out little peanut crumbs two hours after he had a bar and I’ve never forgotten the accuracy – and so I passed, but my daughter just loved it.

Honestly, it was good to finally try this place. It’s not my favorite type of food in the world, and, to be honest, I’d be happier driving a little further down to the Smokehouse, but the fish tacos were quite surprisingly good. The next time that Marie gets a hankering for California-styled Mexican food, we’d do all right to see whether this place is open before trying anybody else in the area.

Ebony & Ivory, Smyrna GA

Have I ever told you about my sentient iPod? I’m quite serious when I say it’s alive. Six thousand songs on it, and it routinely, when shuffled, plays songs back-to-back with the strangest and most tenuous connections, like four songs in a row played by artists whom I’ve seen at one particular venue in Atlanta, or three songs in a row with the word “radio” in the title, or two songs that had made their way to the seminal soundtrack to Pretty in Pink. Once in a while, it will play songs that answer each other. There was one evening when it played Bryan Ferry’s cover of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and then “replied” with Cowboy Junkies doing “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Recently, it followed XTC with the Beatles: “My Bird Performs,” “And Your Bird Can Sing.” So I pay attention to my iPod.

A couple of Fridays ago, I was wondering what I should eat, and so I asked my iPod, aloud, “What should I eat today, o sentient iPod?” I know you’re going to think, based on the title of this chapter, that it played “Ebony and Ivory” by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, but it couldn’t do that, because I can’t stand that song and don’t have it on my iPod, but it did play “Pipes of Peace,” from Paul’s 1983 album of the same name. I probably enjoy Paul McCartney’s solo work a lot more than anybody you know, but I’ve got my limits, and that album is one of them. (London Town is another. Good grief, what a rotten record. Anyway.) But while the Pipes of Peace LP is the living definition of safe, unchallenging, soft rock treacle, that title track just manages to stand out a little, even if Paul really managed to otherwise make far too many records in a row that sounded way too much like each other, and, consequently, make himself quite irrelevant to anybody who went to high school in the late eighties. The result of this is that even though I like “Pipes of Peace,” I can’t quite listen to it without thinking about all his other early ’80s treacle, like “Ebony and Ivory,” and that reminded me that there’s a take-out barbecue place on Concord Road in Smyrna by that name.

You would agree that this is the iPod’s doing, right?

Ebony & Ivory is in a very unassuming little place near South Cobb Drive, across from the old building where Smyrna’s Fat Boy had stood for many decades. It was apparently once a Church’s Fried Chicken, but I don’t remember that, personally. Guests will have no trouble finding it, even without a street sign; just look for the big black smoker out front and follow your nose for the amazing scent of meat cooking over cherry wood. I went to speak with Victor “Ivory” Amato when I parked and told him that if his food tasted half as good as it smelled, I’d be in good shape. I was; this place is a winner.

Amato and his partner, Marcus “Ebony” Phillips, opened the small window in the summer. It’s more than just a barbecue joint; they give equal love to catfish and chicken. If you like southern cooking, there is definitely something here for you. The partners have more than twenty years’ experience in the restaurant business, and worked together at the Dantanna’s at CNN Center.

I had the pulled pork with mac and cheese and baked beans, along with a catfish taco. I think that the only thing that I don’t much like at this place is that Brunswick stew is not offered as a side, but, unusually, as a full dish which guests can order with sides of its own. Otherwise, everything from the prices to the quality of the food to Amato and Phillips’s smiles and fun, upbeat attitudes pleased me greatly.

The pulled pork was just fantastic, and while I enjoyed the white sauce that I got on the side, the meat didn’t need a drop. I am curious enough, however, to want to stop back by and get some of their other sauces next time. I might see about taking my order back to my mom’s house, as it’s only about ten minutes’ drive from the restaurant. The twenty minutes it took to get this yummy food back to my place in Marietta were agonizing.

Anyway, enjoying this good food in my own dining room, I was also really taken with the baked beans, cooked with a little pork, and the catfish taco. Overall, the food is every bit as good as the terrific stuff at Buckhead Barbecue Company, a few miles down South Cobb. My personal feeling is that BBC might just have a slight edge, as they are a full service restaurant, and I always like the opportunity to sit and visit for hours and hours when it arises, but both restaurants are serving up wonderful barbecue and are absolutely worth visiting.

Clocked!, Athens GA

This is Marie, contributing an entry about Clocked! in Athens. Every once in a while I take a trip up to the town I lived in longer than anywhere else in my life, and generally any little excuse will do for a visit. Sadly, the arrival of the baby sharply reduced the number of trips, but I still try to make it up when possible. In this particular case, a former neighbor of mine happened to be free, so we had lunch together with her husband and kids before I went and did a little shopping and visiting. Continue reading “Clocked!, Athens GA” →

Kaleidoscope, Atlanta GA

Proclaiming anybody’s burger as the best in a burger-packed powerhouse of a city like Atlanta seems like asking for trouble. Longtime readers might recall that I have considered The Vortex to be Atlanta’s best burger joint among a whole mess of very strong contenders. Our neighborhood burger restaurant, Cheeseburger Bobby’s, is the one we visit the most often, as they serve up a super product at a great price with just about the best staff of any restaurant in town. Also, they are one traffic light away from us. Sometimes, that means a lot. Anyway, if we do end up moving to North Carolina in two years, we’ll probably have to come back a lot for burgers, especially since I understand that state law doesn’t allow restaurants many cooking options for ground beef, limiting the juiciness potential. Well, I guess that the Cook Out chain is about on the same level of quality as Bobby’s. Wish that they had indoor seating, though.

In the late summer, I ran across Serious Eats’ blog A Hamburger Today and, once I started paying attention to it, I saw that a local writer named Todd Brock has been spreading the good word about Atlanta’s offerings. Back in February, he gave a major thumbs-up to Kaleidoscope, a “gastropub” in Brookhaven in a new development on Dresden Drive just a little ways below the MARTA station. Their burger won out as the Judges’ Choice over twenty competitors in the city’s October 2010 Battle of the Burgers, with the restaurant a good two months away from opening.

I figured this required a little investigation. I wasn’t disappointed.

It was a good day to start with, as Georgia didn’t just beat Auburn, we took the Tigers out behind the woodshed and administered a whipping the likes of which nobody will forget. Time had eroded my memory of how fun it is to try rocking a toddler to sleep while whooping and hollering and bellowing bits of our fight song. Suffice it to say that I was enjoying the afternoon a little more than the baby was.

We met our friends Victoria and James for supper and, while we waited for the burger, we shared baby stories and baby stories and more baby stories. We also shared a little order of roasted cashews tossed with a spicy Thai chili powder, and that was quite lovely.

Now, one thing that I’ll disagree with Brock about is the dollar that he spent getting a side of duck confit and bacon mayo for his fries. It wasn’t bad, but I’ve spent a lot better dollars myself. Where he’s not wrong is calling this absolutely worth adding to the discussion about the best burgers in town. It’s amazing. I honestly don’t know that I’ve had one better in this burger-happy city. Two patties, pimento cheese, slaw, chow chow, bread and butter pickles, and just absolutely perfect. The owner and executive chef, Joey Riley, used to be head chef at Buckhead Diner and Goldfish, among other places. Fellow knows what he’s doing.

I don’t know what to add. When the argument has been settled so effectively, there’s really not a lot else to say. So we’ll leave it there… but in the next chapter, Marie goes to Athens and finds another contender.

CamiCakes, Vinings GA and Sugar Shack, Atlanta GA

Sweet stuff! Normally, Marie tackles the little chapters about snacks and desserts, but in today’s post, I wanted to share about a couple of treats that we enjoyed a couple of Saturdays back.

Cupcake boutiques have been growing in popularity a lot lately, probably led by the success of the Gigi’s chain. It’s led to a few other locally-owned places that we have visited once or twice, and a few other small chains. One of these is CamiCakes, which has two stores in Florida and two in the Atlanta area. The second of these opened up in Vinings, and a part of me swears that they moved into a space that, until recently, housed another cupcake place. Then again, I’m so old that I remember when the ground that this strip mall occupies was home to a Majik Market.

Marie and I took the children over to my mom’s house, and she watched the baby while the three of us and Neal, whom we had not seen in a few weeks, had lunch at Vinings’ Figo Pasta. We then walked over to get some desserts here. This was not very easy, as Vinings is really, really pedestrian unfriendly.

I think that these probably do the job better than anyplace else in town. They are just terrific, and so rich that a single cake is perfectly satisfying. I had a “black and white” of chocolate cake with vanilla frosting, Marie had the chocolate raspberry almond cream – yes, you read that correctly – and Ivy had mint chocolate. We brought one back for my mom as thanks for watching the baby while we ate, because we’re even sweeter than cupcakes, we are.

So, some hours and one heck of a great football game later, we came back down I-75. This time, we were without my daughter, who went over to a friend’s house to stay up all night and drink lots of soda, as tween girls do. We had supper with friends, as you’ll see in the next chapter, and as we were leaving, I started thinking about some place we could get a late-night treat. I recalled that we passed a place called Sugar Shack in the strip malls across the street from the Brookhaven MARTA station, and hoped that it might be open.

This appears to be the only Sugar Shack around at this time, but it is looks to be corporate-designed by an ownership group, Metrotainment Cafes, for easy exporting into other locations should the demand arise. I have to say, though, that when we stopped by, things were pretty slow and there wasn’t a lot of demand for their cakes and treats.

Marie had a slice of one of their extremely good chocolate cakes, but my eye was taken by a great big round red thing. It was a red velvet Whoopie Pie. I had never heard of these treats before, although, in a really weird coincidence, my friend Natalia, who’s from upstate New York, mentioned literally three days later that she had just tried to bake one for a friend and failed. Whoopie Pies are two big “cookies” of cake surrounding an icing. The layers are softer than cookies yet firmer and less crumbly than cake and, in the case of the red velvet variety, the icing is cream cheese. It’s apparently more traditional to see them as chocolate cakes surrounding vanilla frosting.

I looked up Whoopie Pies on Wikipedia and was amused to see that Pennsylvanians and Mainers are in a long-running war of attrition as to which state can claim the delicacy. Each side has my sympathies; as a Georgian, I’m not about to cede the origin of Brunswick stew to anybody who thinks it came from some county in Virginia. The idea!

The other Camicakes store in town, on Peachtree, was where I snuck off to find myself a banana cream cupcake, and it was wonderful. I’m conspiring to stop by one or the other location again really soon for another.

Fred’s Bar-B-Que House, Lithia Springs GA

Every so often, I get a reminder that, for every new restaurant that stays on top of social media and Google alerts about their place, there are many more that have no real interest in doing that sort of thing. Take, for example, Fred’s Bar-B-Que House in Lithia Springs. Despite logging several hundred guests a day, and a welcome and thanks to every one of you, this very blog had some disagreeable misinformation posted on it a little more than five months ago, and in all that time, nobody, not the business owner nor any of his legion of patrons, mentioned it to me.

Probably back in 2001, I visited a restaurant one Saturday evening not far from McCollum Air Field called the Kennesaw Bar-B-Que House, and logged it on my old Geocities barbecue page. Some time later, it closed, and I mentioned its passing in a June chapter here that listed all those older restaurants that had closed since I first wrote about them.

A couple of months went by, and I started cleaning up Urbanspoon’s listings of barbecue places in Georgia and Alabama. As I’ve mentioned in some earlier chapters, this wonderful, useful site does have many errors, ranging from businesses that were closed before there ever was an Urbanspoon, to miscategorized places, like wing joints erroneously tagged as serving barbecue. So I was looking through the Atlanta “B” heading and found a place called simply Bar-B-Que House in Lithia Springs, and, like the one in Kennesaw, it was said to serve something called Yellow Jacket Hot Dogs. I guessed that either that business moved or this was another location. Either way, their web site was expired, but I added it to my to-do list, and, a couple of Fridays ago, drove out to enjoy some of the best chopped pork anywhere around Atlanta, in an unassuming little place that nobody online talks about. I can’t help but find this curious, as it’s more evidence that, the further you get from the city center, the less important the internet is to your business’s success. There was a huge mob of customers and guests that any trendy urban place would kill for, but not one person in this crowd apparently had any incentive to let Urbanspoon know that the name of the restaurant should be Fred’s Bar-B-Que House.

So I was quite mistaken in simply listing the Kennesaw location as closed and having no follow-up. I got only the briefest few words with Fred, who was managing the front register and window amid an increasing tidal wave of hungry customers, but he confirmed that place had been their second location, and it closed in April of 2004. The store in Lithia Springs has been doing roaring business for twenty-five years now, with hardly a mention online. This is one of those restaurants that I’d like to see turn around on that front. It really is quite interesting and very tasty. Well, the hot dog wasn’t.

Even the only sour note of my meal was nevertheless fun in a historical sense, however. The Yellow Jacket Dog – a mediocre boiled dog served with ketchup, mustard, onions and dry chili on a toasted bun – is a holdover from the dogs served from the 1950s through the 1970s at the long-closed Yellow Jacket Drive-In, which had been at the intersection of North and Hemphill two generations of Georgia Tech students ago. We’ll set aside partisan college loyalties in favor of good taste, noting that Athens has seen more than its share of below-average restaurants with the word “bulldog” stuck the name somewhere, and just say that infinitely superior dogs are available from many, many other places in town. I suppose, though, that plenty of older Tech alumni can be excused for their nostalgia in wanting to experience these old favorites again, and I am glad that the beloved old recipe has a home on Thornton Road for them. Businesses with a sense of history are always a good thing.

But honestly, I have to wonder who has time for more than just two or three bites of these unhappy dogs to confirm their awfulness when this excellent pork is available. This is genuinely terrific stuff, tender and moist and smoky and not needing any sauce to impress. The house sauce is a light brown, mildly sweet tomato-vinegar blend and it is also really good. This interstate exit is home to two really fantastic restaurants. South of I-20, you’ve got Turner’s – slash – Beaver Creek, with its pulled pork and glistening orange mustard sauce, and north of it, you have this place, with chopped pork and sweet brown tomato sauce. What the two have in common is an amazing success among the locals. Fred’s was nearly packed by 11.45, with a short wait at the window and limited chances to chat about things in the “lobby” while you wait for your number to be called. After twelve, the line snakes into the dining areas, and the big parking lot is darn near full.

I was reminded how, a couple of weeks previously, David and I enjoyed an almost solitary lunch at downtown’s One Eared Stag, nobody there but ourselves despite every blogger in the city yammering at full volume about it (and with good reason; it is amazing), and here’s this place, the only reason the line isn’t out the door is because for some weird reason it threads through the dining room. You get outside the perimeter, the definition of success is a little different. Might be, it’s a little more honest.