Ed Boudreaux’s Bayou BBQ, Asheville NC (CLOSED)

I admit, concede and confess that it is really, really unfair to judge a restaurant based on its performance during a giant downtown festival that brings a couple of hundred thousand people right outside and keeps the wait staff and kitchen working overtime, all the time. However, the northern Alabama-styled white sauce at Ed Boudreaux’s Bayou BBQ on Biltmore Avenue in downtown Asheville is really, really terrible. It’s the worst, the pits, the lousiest, and I was so looking forward to it that I am aggravated enough to mention it first and foremost. Continue reading “Ed Boudreaux’s Bayou BBQ, Asheville NC (CLOSED)” →

Zesto, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

I think that one of the most interesting little facets to following the world of restaurants is finding little fast food chains that only exist in a city or two. Last month, I mentioned Milo’s in Birmingham, a chain better known for its amazing sweet tea, and how it co-exists in north Alabama with another chain called Jack’s. Each of them manage to survive on the same interstate exits as the better-known national chains like McDonald’s and Burger King. I’m not saying you’ll get really great hamburgers at places like this, but I firmly believe that they’re important, that they give regions their own, special identity, and that anybody – traveler or resident – who’d stop at a national chain over a small regional one when they just want a quick $3.99 value meal has got a seven-inch screw loose somewhere.

There are probably a lot more of these types of restaurants than anybody really knows about. Locals will often overlook them, mistakenly figuring that national success is a measure of quality, and treat these restaurants as oddball minor league wannabes. On the other hand, because the foodie subculture emphasizes (a) independently-owned single locations and (b) really great meals, regional chains only rarely come up in the conversations. They just don’t fit the topic, you might say. I noticed that in Asheville, there is at least one outlet of the Greensboro-based Cook Out, a chain 75 units strong that has not left the state of North Carolina. I’m very curious to try that one day, but honestly, can anybody count just how many superior meals we’d be skipping if we stopped into Cook Out over all the other really great places in Asheville?

Similarly, Atlanta has at least two chains that nobody ever talks about. Neither will serve up spectacular meals, but they’ll do them quickly and cheaply and, hopefully, with a lot of local character. One of these days, I need to tell you about Martin’s, a chain of fifteen stores that’s only open for breakfast and lunch. Twelve of their stores are all northeast of the metro area and only one is as far south as Clayton County, and it tastes a lot like Hardee’s did before Carl’s Jr. bought them out. Martin’s basically illustrates my definition outside Atlanta’s I-285 perimeter, and Zesto is what I’m talking about inside the perimeter.

To be strictly accurate, while Zesto, today, is a regional chain with six stores, back in the 1940s its ancestor corporation was about as large as a national chain could get in those days. According to the fascinating history on its web site, there were Zestos selling soft-serve ice cream in 46 states. I imagine that it and Tasti-Freez were the two biggest competitors to Dairy Queen.

By 1955, the corporation and its franchises dissolved their agreements, leaving the stores to make it on their own. Almost all of the old Zestos were probably gone within a few years. There are still pockets of otherwise unrelated restaurants here and there throughout the country that use the old name but don’t offer the same menu or ingredients, including three around Columbia, South Carolina that appear to be uniquely owned, but the Zesto restaurants in Atlanta have thrived and grown a little.

There are five Zestos in the city, plus with a more recent arrival in the teeny town of Tyrone, which is somewhere between Atlanta and Peachtree City, and each of them plays up the “1950s diner” experience. In the case of the store on Ponce de Leon, it really basks in the glow of nostalgic chrome and neon. The food is not at all bad, although nobody ever dropped their Chubby Decker back onto the wax paper in impressed shock at how amazing it was. There’s an amusing story about how the better-known Big Boy threatened to sue Zesto in 1961 over their imitation burger, named, then, a Fat Boy. I’ve always found Zesto’s burgers to be a little dry; adding a little slaw to a Chubby Decker really brings a refreshing flavor to it.

Zesto flirted, for a time, with the “fresh-mex” concept when it became popular in the late ’90s. The restaurant did the unthinkable then and converted their location on Piedmont Road into a sister restaurant called Burrito Brothers. In time, this was scaled back, and now three of the six stores are discreetly “co-branded” this way, offering tacos and nachos on the menu along with the burgers and chicken. I have never got around to trying these, actually. I guess Zesto is just first in my mind as a burger place.

In Marie’s mind, however, Zesto is a milkshake place first and foremost, with burgers just an appetizer to the real thing. So a couple of weeks ago, my daughter had complained that we had not enjoyed a Zesto milkshake lately, and I said we’d get around to it. (Children, as ever, think parents are made of money.) On Saturday, Marie was due to return to Atlanta from her family business in the Netherlands around 7. I figured, rightly, that she was due some pampering after all those sky miles and would appreciate a chocolate banana malt, so the kids and I picked her up and stopped at the Zesto on Ponce for supper.

I had a chili burger that dreamed of being a Varsity chili burger when it grew up and split an order of quite good chicken fingers with my daughter, and my son had a Chubby Decker and slaw. We all shared fries and heard about Marie’s trip and then we indulged in some quite good shakes. I usually either get the caramel or butterscotch, have trouble deciding between even these two simple choices, and have already forgotten which it was. My son had the blueberry, which was awesome. And Marie should have had a chocolate banana malt, only I forgot to ask them to add malt powder and I don’t think that she liked it as much, only she was too polite to mention it.

It’s good to have her home. I mean, we have to go back to Asheville in two days for a festival and more eating, and her being in the Netherlands would make that kind of difficult.

The 4th of May Cafe, St. Simons Island GA (CLOSED)

This is Marie, writing because I took a trip without Grant. The young man and I went to see my folks and my brother on St. Simons Island for the 4th of July holiday. We had a great time and as usual on the island ate very well. Continue reading “The 4th of May Cafe, St. Simons Island GA (CLOSED)” →

Guthrie’s, Dunwoody GA (CLOSED)

Now here’s a restaurant with an uphill battle. Guthrie’s has been around since 1965, and the formula that we know them by – limited menu, incredibly tasty sauce – was finalized in 1982. They have a strong claim to being the place that invented and perfected the chicken finger restaurant formula, yet somehow they’ve been completely passed in the market by one of their imitators, Zaxby’s. Now, Zaxby’s isn’t bad, and we’ve been known to stop in many times over the years, but when I first discovered a Zaxby’s in the nearby town of Watkinsville, I described it to all my Athens friends as “kind of like Guthrie’s, but with more stuff.”

Guthrie’s couldn’t have had much less stuff at all. The menu consists of really incredibly amazing chicken fingers, Texas toast, fries and slaw, served in a handful of ways. I recall that if you stopped at the Guthrie’s on Baxter Hill, you could get them in a plate, in a box, in a smaller size without slaw or between two slices of bread. Those were your only options. They were absolutely essential to the dorm dining experience. Everybody who lived in the high-rise dorms had Guthrie’s all the time and those of us by the stadium regularly; so did thousands of tailgaters and high school students. The line out the door whenever Clarke Central was playing at home in the fall was every bit as insane on a Friday as on a UGA game day.

That Guthrie’s was the third in the chain, which is quite successful today in its home state of Alabama, with scattered outposts in other Southern states. In the early nineties, Guthrie’s opened a second Athens store, over by Cedar Shoals High School, so their students could enjoy the same Friday night craziness. This was a hugely important Athens tradition in the 1980s and 1990s, and its simplicity fueled wonderful urban legends. Some said there was a secret menu, and some said that if you left a penny in the sauce – a sort of peppery brown mayo, totally delicious – overnight, you could retrieve it polished and glittering.

Then one day in the late ’90s, the Athens locations were gone. It was very abrupt and their departure fueled a whole new raft of urban legends, which I’ll decline to repeat in these pages. Some stories are best left unreported, if unconfirmed. Talk radio should try that sometime.

Several years later, Guthrie’s returned ever-so-briefly to the Athens region, opening a store twenty-ish miles north in Danielsville. It’s gone now, but there are two stores in the Atlanta area along with the twenty-ish restaurants in Alabama and six in other states. I was working in the Ravinia building when the Dunwoody store opened in 2004 and a co-worker mentioned it. She thought, wrongly, that it was a Zaxby’s knockoff. I let her know it was the other way around, but you can bet that Guthrie’s glacier-like speed at expanding is going to run into that everywhere. If they try moving into Louisiana, they’ll be called a Raising Cane’s clone.

Guthrie’s is an occasional destination for us, whenever we need a quick meal on the top end of I-285 while going out of town through Spaghetti Junction. On Friday, Marie and I had hoped to get lunch further up the road as we started an anniversary getaway, but trouble leaving work early meant that we didn’t get on the perimeter until after the lunch rush had already ended, and the Spaghetti Junction backup already showing signs of starting. (You’ll notice I don’t say who had trouble leaving early. Maybe I’m polite, or maybe I just don’t want you to think ill of me.) This store has expanded their menu just a little, adding wings and breakfast to their offerings, but what they need to do is hire somebody to straighten that place up some. Nobody ever stopped at Guthrie’s wanting cleanliness – that Baxter Hill store looked like a war zone from sunup to sundown – but I’m starting to get at the age where I want somebody to get out from behind the counter and wipe down dirty tables.

Then again, it’s not like this is haute cuisine; it’s finger-gooping greasy fried chicken fingers, done right. You remember how one day you went through a Zaxby’s drive-thru and didn’t have to wait for your food and the sauce came prepackaged in a factory-made plastic cube with the ingredients on the label? Guthrie’s reminds you of the days before Zaxby’s got corporate enough to change into that. Or, if you will, the days before there was a Zaxby’s. I hope that they’re always around, somewhere, and that there will always be people who will spread the word that theirs was the better restaurant, first.

Now if only I could convince Guthrie’s to serve up those fried mushrooms and Fanta Cherry that their imitator has. Don’t you judge me.

Chilito’s, Kennesaw GA (CLOSED)

Wednesday was one of those rotten days full of delays and lane closures and slow drivers. Contrary to what you might suspect from this food blog, Marie and I do eat in more often than we go out, although in my case, since she’s the wizard in the kitchen, it often means sandwiches and leftovers. However, I do allow myself one lunch out a week, and I was looking forward to it that morning. My destination was, typically, closed. Then it was every student driver and testing failure in Cobb County getting in my way as I headed home to reconsider my options.

I was listening to Contra, the new album by Vampire Weekend, and it cycled back around to the opening song, “Horchata.” That reminded me that I hadn’t been by Chilito’s in an incredibly long time. They brew up some really good horchata, but I was in the mood for sweet tea. I mention it just because I wouldn’t have even thought about the place were it not for that song.

You don’t see many restaurants like this one opening anymore. It’s a remnant of the “gourmet burrito” craze that started in the late ’90s and lasted for about a decade. There are certainly a few regional chains that I don’t mind at all – Barberito’s, Qdoba and Willy’s all serve reasonably tasty food – but the better examples of single-store ideas didn’t last long. Raging Burrito in midtown was very good, and I also quite liked Extreme Burrito, which lasted for maybe nine months on Baxter Street in Athens. I’ll always remember an incident there in the spring of 2000 when a friend of mine who would probably prefer to remain nameless started flirting with the waitress there and I suddenly understood why that reporter bellowed “Oh, the humanity!” when the Hindenburg caught fire.

I think that Chilito’s tried to become a similar regional chain, but it didn’t get very far. Its first store was on Bells Ferry Road near I-575, perhaps in 2005, and closed two years later. This one opened in 2006 in some unnecessary identikit development on Chastain Road and has been hanging in there for a while, mainly serving the Kennesaw State University community with promotions and student-targeted discounts. I’m not aware of any other expansion, and the restaurant’s website is, shall we say, unhelpful.

At any rate, Chilito’s is kind of like Moe’s, only not terrible. (“Always remember, kids, you can’t spell mediocre without m – o – e!”) You walk down a line having somebody on the other side of a sneeze guard slap various ingredients onto your tortilla or shell. You hope that the tortilla has not been steamed so long that it’s trapped water, and that the cilantro has been diced finely enough so that you won’t be picking a stem out from between your teeth, and you bristle that you have to pay an extra forty cents for corn. You go get salsa, some of it quite good and some of it blandly inoffensive, from another little bar with a sneeze guard with little plastic cups that are too darn tiny to be much good. There is nothing remarkable about this place, and you leave equally grateful for a low-priced meal with a “buy ten get one free” bribe card as you do for the quality of the food.

It’s a long way from outstanding, but I’ve always found it perfectly serviceable, even if I don’t go there with any regularity. The bribe card that I mentioned is finally, after Wednesday’s trip, full. It has taken me four years to get it there. This trip, I had a chicken taco salad, because that was their daily special for $5.99. The fellow on the other side of the sneeze guard filled it with black beans, not-especially-spicy chicken, queso dip, lettuce, pico de gallo, cheese and costs-forty-cents-extra corn. Not at all a bad price, especially coming with chips and a drink. (Sweet tea, and, surprisingly, awful. I had half a cup of Mr. Pibb to wash the taste away.)

Chilito’s offers fish tacos and these are, honestly, very good. I should probably get away with eating these more often. Honestly, though, the reason I haven’t eaten at Chilito’s often enough to fill up a bribe card in under four years is simple: my kids can’t stand the place. I don’t know what it is they find objectionable, beyond just a general thought that it’s “yucky,” but the psychologists tell us that children’s minds are still cooking and not fully formed yet. I try to remember that when they occasionally protest that they’d really prefer mediocre Moe’s to a nice Chilito’s fish taco.

Old Hickory House, Dunwoody GA (CLOSED)

When I was a kid, before I knew better, I always ate cheeseburgers at barbecue restaurants. My parents frequently went with friends to one of two places in Smyrna, Old South Bar-B-Q on what’s now Windy Hill Road, but what Neal reminds me was then called Cherokee Street, and the Old Hickory House that, if I remember correctly, used to be on 41 near I-285. It was one of those restaurants across the street from the Steak & Shake and the Lexus dealership – which itself used to be a Service Merchandise – and I think that my parents started having occasional Friday night suppers there after the Red Sirloin closed. You probably don’t remember Red Sirloin. We ate there almost every Friday at 6 pm for years, and I agonized every single sortie for two of those years that we were going to miss Wonder Woman on CBS at 8.

But I’m not talking about Red Sirloin, I’m talking about Old Hickory House. In the late 70s and early 80s, this was something close to an Atlanta tradition. I believe that there were at least ten of these dotted around the suburbs, and they regularly advertised on TV and radio. Everybody who grew up here remembers their old jingle, “Put some south in your mouth, at Old Hickory House…”

The chain of restaurants even had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the national spotlight. The scene in Smokey & the Bandit where Burt Reynolds first gets the better of Jackie Gleason while he’s waiting impatiently for a “Diablo sandwich and a Dr. Pepper” was filmed at an Old Hickory House in Forest Park. I believe that Bandit hides his Trans Am behind the restaurant’s sign shortly afterward. That location is long gone, as are most of the others. For the longest time, only three remained. One of those was in the lobby of a Days Inn just off Roswell Road in Sandy Springs, but it was replaced by a Chinese restaurant in the late 90s. The last two holdouts of this old tradition are in Dunwoody and Tucker.

This past Saturday, Marie and I went out to the Old Hickory House with our daughter and with David, who’s dieting and had to think long and hard about imbibing too much in the way of sweet barbecue sauce and ruining his blood sugar. What we found feels very much like a restaurant that is still serving up some pretty good food, but also on its last legs. The restaurant looks a lot like like it was built in the 1970s and hasn’t changed or been renovated at all in close to forty years; it’s just aged and seems dim. Dim and grim.

It was very quiet and slow on this Saturday evening. Not many customers were dining, and we were the youngest. Considering how I spent the first three paragraphs of this chapter reminiscing about the good ole days, that might tell you something. One week previously, we had been at Zeb Dean’s in Danielsville for Saturday night supper, where there were only a few seats free and the joint sparked with electricity and loud conversation. Here, most of what joie de vivre there was came from our server, an agreeable fellow named Junior, who made us feel very much at home.

It just didn’t feel much like a home where we wanted to stay for long. The food was not bad, although the sauce was far too sweet and mild for my liking, and the fries, which were just terrific, really reminded me of my misspent youth, foolishly eating cheeseburgers when I could have been trying barbecue, except that “it looked weird” or some other childlike excuse for not eating what you came to a restaurant to eat. The Brunswick stew here is quite good. One neat standout on the restaurant’s menu is their dressed dog, where they smother a dog with Brunswick stew. I haven’t had one of those in a really long time.

The experience somewhat reminded me of what we felt after lunch at the Mad Italian a couple of months ago; the memories of a restaurant’s glory days were more pleasing than the meal itself. Maybe the next time we ask David to join us for something to eat, we should make sure it’s a restaurant too new to be compared to its more interesting past.

Other blog posts about Old Hickory House:

3rd Degree Berns Barbecue Sabbatical (Feb. 8 2010)
Eat Buford Highway (Mar. 30 2010)
All the Single Girlfriends (May 27 2011)

Moksha Restaurant and Bar, Roswell GA (CLOSED)

“I found this amazing Indian restaurant,” Randy told me. I was skeptical. “They have an amazing lunch buffet,” he added. I was doubly so.

I have a tolerate-hate relationship with Indian food, because I’ve found so little of it that rises above a very low batting average. I think I like the idea of it more than the reality, at least locally. Here, quite a few Indian restaurants, more than most of them, go for the fine dining experience, and I almost never feel that the quality of the food warrants the price tag. Since I emphatically do not need to be served by tuxedoed waiters nor eat from fine china and fancy tablecloths, eventually I started to resent paying for it.

Now there was once a lovely little place in Smyrna which did it right: a no-frills presentation of extremely tasty food in styrofoam containers, and you could get out of there, extremely satisfied, for under seven bucks. I got to eat there only twice before I arrived once to see an “under new management” banner out front, fancy tablecloths masking the rickety and unbalanced tables, and a buffet. I don’t know that anything good had ever come from an Indian buffet in Atlanta prior to about a year ago. That was the first time I’ve ever chewed the manager of a restaurant out. I gave him an earful, telling him that raising the prices and making his restaurant exactly like the four restaurants that I drove past to get to his was amazingly stupid. I don’t know whether it was worth it or not, but I seem to recall they shut down within a year.

I’ve tried lots of places in Atlanta. It seems that what passes for Indian cuisine in this town is, regardless of the trimmings and the tablecloths, pretty similar to the El-This-Los-That faux-Mexican meals that we used to get everywhere before enough of a Hispanic population developed for the owners to stop worrying about courting the Anglos and focused on people who knew the food from back home. That’s a topic for another chapter, I think, but it was a very similar experience: the restaurant would be called “Calcutta” or “Bombay” and claim to serve “authentic north Indian cuisine,” and have the same menu and the same flavor as another restaurant twenty miles away called “Taj Mahal” or “Sitar” which claimed to serve “authentic eastern Indian cuisine.” The sole, lone exception was a place in Chamblee called Himalayas, which was a little higher than the average, and where I had rogan josh for the first time.

I’m not claiming that any of it’s really bad, but rather that I knew that my periodic cravings for sopping up a really hot vindaloo with fresh naan would be no different anywhere I went, much in the same way that I could indulge a really intense desire for chips, salsa, rice, beans and some kind of meat at any one of three hundred identikit Mexican places. Thank heaven I found Maizetos brand chips and Garden Fresh Gourmet salsa, otherwise I’d still be wasting money at some “El Sombrero” place once a week.

And the buffet. Don’t get me started. It wasn’t just that I know about Randy and his all-no-fool-would-ever-eat Chinese buffets; one right after another, for years, everything on every Indian buffet in Atlanta came from the same damn kitchen.

I give you this backstory to explain why it was, with a heavy heart and healthy skepticism, I agreed to accompany Randy to this buffet.

Holy bajole. This place is amazing.

Randy discovered Moksha because a buddy of his married into the owner’s family. That meant that Randy joined nine hundred and twenty people for a gigantic meal catered by them. He went to the restaurant, concluded that among Roswell’s many very good restaurants, this was a standout, and insisted that I join him.

Now I must say that the city of Roswell clearly does not care how amazing a treasure their city has. They have made finding this place a complete headache via an ongoing, ages-long road construction project that has worked its way up Old Roswell Road all the way back to its intersection with Warsaw and has left one lamebrained detour after another in its wake. Old Roswell has, in fact, been shifted away from the restaurant, which now sits quietly at the end of where the street used to be, hidden well away from traffic and any potential impulse eaters. Moksha is now a place you have to search out; you cannot find it by accident.

Despite the fact that its location cannot be good for business, it’s excellent for a quiet getaway. The restaurant is in an old farmhouse in the woods, with an event hall behind it. Randy remembers that the property used to belong to a fancy Southern cooking joint called Lickskillet, and it has a polite, isolated charm to it that lets you forget that you’re just a thicket of trees away from a bank and a dozen car dealers on Mansell.

Inside, there are tablecloths and a buffet. I tried to remain strong, and was rewarded by a simply terrific meal. It is, by leagues, more flavorful and tasty than any other Indian cuisine that I have found anywhere in metro Atlanta.

I don’t even pretend expertise, or even knowledge, of what I should be looking for in Indian food, but I’ll tell you this: the buffet is considerably smaller than most. The lettuce they use in the tossed salad is quite disappointing. Everything else is amazing. They have about four wonderful sauces for the salad which overcome the lettuce’s deficiency, and another little mix of chickpeas, onions and tomatoes in a light sauce which is incredible.

For my main meal, I usually get some fried vegetable pakodas along with a big spoonful of rice, and then fill up with ladles of curry. They’ve had chicken tikka marsala each of the three times we’ve gone, and occasionally rogan josh. This time, it was lamb korma, cooked in a thick, spicy cardamom sauce with onions. The flavor is so strong, with a hint of mint.

Desserts vary; often they have rice pudding, but not this time. Actually, I did really well this time and didn’t overdo it. The last time, Randy and I went late and they were ready to take away whatever we weren’t going to eat, so we ate everything. We got as far as the little airlock lobby and sat down again for about as long as we’d spent eating the meal. We were just about ready to call Marie to come get us, because neither of us could face driving home for quite some time. On Friday, I was much more sensible. I was still so stuffed at supper that I had about four bites of chicken and a forkful of rice and called it a night, but I didn’t have to undo my belt after lunch, either.

I’m sure we’ll go back again. Maybe one day we can even go with Marie. We just need to time it right and not feel compelled to finish off every drop of the chicken tikka marsala’s creamy tomato curry. Temptation like that, I just don’t need.

Sadly, Moksha closed at the end of August, 2010.