Category: goodbye

Dressner’s Village Cafe, St. Simons Island GA (CLOSED)

Marie volunteered to write one of the entries about a restaurant we visited down on the coast last weekend, and settled on doing a writeup for one of her dad’s favorite haunts.

Dressner’s is a tradition of sorts with the Hendersons. Well, actually there was a little place that isn’t there any more that really sold my dad on moving to St. Simons, but aside from that there’s no place more likely to get our business for breakfast. The other two options are the Sandcastle, reviewed earlier, and the 4th of May, about which more later. Maybe next trip. It’s been rising in the ratings. Continue reading “Dressner’s Village Cafe, St. Simons Island GA (CLOSED)” →

The Square Bagel, Marietta GA (CLOSED)

For me, the simplest way to distinguish between a deli and a sandwich shop is just this: a deli serves Dr. Brown’s soda. If your business claims to be a deli and does not actually serve it, then you are fibbing. Consequently, the European Deli in Athens is not a deli. The Square Bagel in Marietta is. There’s probably another level of authenticity that depends on whether the restaurant serves Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray. Frankly, I think that’s just about the nastiest beverage ever concocted outside of a Jones holiday weirdo pack, but any deli that serves Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray is a proper New York deli.

Marie and I invited Kimberly to go to lunch with us here this past Saturday. We like Kimberly a lot, even if we’re not entirely sure why she’s marrying our friend Randy. “Don’t get me wrong,” I told her once, “if I was trapped in a foxhole behind enemy lines, I’d hope to have somebody as good as him feeding me ammo. But…” and here I paused, “…you do know that he sometimes goes to those all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets, don’t you?”

The Square Bagel seems to have been around forever. I ate here once while I was wasting a day waiting to be dismissed from jury service something like the fifth time I’d been called, and it’s not like I didn’t enjoy it; it’s just that during my years as a single dad, I often got in the habit of picking places all the time based on whether they were open for supper. Delis that rely on breakfast and freshly-made bagels for as much of their business as this place does often close before I could get to them back then, and so it slid off my radar for a while, but in considering places to visit for this blog, I figured I was overdue for a return visit and Marie needed to give it a try.

Like the best delis, Square Bagel has one of those absurdly dense menus that take you forever to read through. If you’re going at lunch, it’s obvious you want a sandwich, but unless you know up front that what you want is pastrami, turkey, cheese, slaw and Russian dressing on rye, and that’s not the sort of thing I ever know, you have to dig through a long list of sandwiches with funny names until you find the ingredient list you were looking for.

I don’t know who came up with putting Russian dressing on sandwiches, but that man deserves a beer. One of the little cafes in the Ravinia complex where I used to work served sandwiches like the one I got at Square Bagel and I think I had one for lunch every day for two weeks. Saturday’s was a delicious, nostalgic little treat, really.

Marie had egg salad on a bagel, and she and I both had potato pancakes as our side. She didn’t enjoy her side as much as I did mine, but I’m always happy to have a latke, especially one with such a slight taste of onion as this had. I’ve been trying to wean myself off potato salad, and it’s hard, especially when I wandered over to the counter and saw all the really decadent trays of twelve thousand-calorie dishes cooling there.

Kimberly had some sort of roast beef sandwich with horseradish on the side. We had to debate that point a little. My feeling is that if you’re ordering a sandwich with horseradish, you’re intending for it to be a sinus-clearing hurricane of a meal. Horseradish shows you’re serious, while mayo shows you just want to clog your arteries with fat. Kimberly said that it’s possible for horseradish to be too strong. I call shenanigans on that. The default state of horseradish should be only-just-tolerable; the problem with today’s youth is that they’ve grown up accustomed to that wimpy stuff they serve at Arby’s.

Kimberly’s horseradish came on the side. She took a little smear on her knife and said “Yeah, that’s strong.” I dipped one of her French fries in it and had a big swallow. Nostril hairs I never knew I had stood to attention. “No, that’s just right,” I said.

The Burger Club, Vinings GA (CLOSED)

Perhaps unjustly absent from the ongoing tales I tell on this blog is a sense of history and place. We live in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, a town with many very good restaurants but few claims to culinary originality and superiority. Atlanta in fact has almost no claims to a solid tradition in any one style of dining. The city is a jack of all trades, but a master of none.

Except hamburgers. There is not a population center anywhere in this country with as many excellent burger joints as Atlanta. I could write about nothing but burgers here for months and not scratch the surface. The Wall Street Journal agrees that, between Ann’s Snack Bar and The Vortex, we’re untouchable. That’s not to say that better individual burgers might not be out there in your own town – in point of fact, take thirty bucks to a little place I know in Vermont in the summer and you will be served a burger so many times superior to any you’ve ever had that you will weep, knowing the game is over – but shack for shack and joint for joint, the batting average of Atlanta beats the hell out of any other city in America.

We’ve come up with some pretty crazy concoctions to enhance the beauty of burgers in this town. It’s certainly enough to grill or fry a perfect patty, but only in Atlanta would somebody come up with the Luther Burger, which dispenses with the bun and serves the patty between two halves of a Krispy Kreme doughnut, and named for crooner Luther Vandross. Mulligan’s, the joint that came up with the recipe, closed a few years ago, but not before giving their seal of approval to Turner Field to continue the tradition at Braves games.

Over the last decade, while perfecting their recipes for perfect burgers and debating the merits of angus versus kobe beef, a few places have also tinkered with oddball experiments like the Luther. Over in Vinings, the Burger Club, a family restaurant run by the team behind the upscale Paul’s and Social Vinings, has a dozen or so weird and wonderful house specialties on the menu. Among them, their own take on the Luther. Called the Artery Annihilator, this doughnutty mess also includes bacon and cheese. No, I didn’t order one; I’m in rotten enough shape as it is and don’t want my arteries annihilated.

Fortunately for us all, my son was in town this week.

So the Burger Club moved into a space vacated by an Atlanta Bread Company that had been there forever. It’s on Paces Ferry Road, right in the heart of Vinings, next door to the fire station. It’s slightly separate from the Vinings Jubilee open-air mini-mall, where my bored crowd of high school punks would often go on Friday evenings in the late ’80s after we’d been kicked out of Cumberland. The parking lot has space for about two dozen Smart cars, or two Cadillacs. Since my parents wanted to take their precious grandson to supper, but drive nothing but Cadillacs, parking was a challenge.

Me, I had the Gastro Pub Burger, which is served with bacon and a blend of red onion marmalade and Roquefort cheese, with tater tots on the side. The burger was indeed a good one, but heaven only knows why I can’t resist these darn tots. Perhaps because I just had onion rings the day before, I passed on those, but surely any of their sides would have a little more oomph to them than a bag of frozen Ore-Ida brand tots, no matter whether I sprinkle a little salt on them or not.

In fact, my dad, who, like my mother and Marie, just had a basic beef burger without any of the specialty trimmings, said that his onion rings were among the best he’s ever had. Then again, he always eats his onion rings with Heinz 57 sauce. Nobody has a lot of sympathy for that.

But my son, well, he had his arteries annihilated. He was last heard muttering something about a “perfect blend of savory and sweet” before lapsing into a coma. Normally I’d have a bite, but I’m trying to cut down on the life-ending things. Back when I was making mistakes in 2004, though, I’d probably have had a dozen a day. It was that kind of year.

(Sadly, The Burger Club closed in December, 2010.)

Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppe, Kennesaw GA (CLOSED)

It won’t be long, I fear, before blogs like this will be the only proof that this small chain ever existed. The little Dagwood’s empire has already crumbled and collapsed, leaving just a scattered handful of franchises available. One of them is nearby in Kennesaw and serves up one of the most amazing sandwiches you can find, but nobody confidently predicts that a new generation will enjoy it.

Like many of you, I first heard of the chain thanks to some targeted Google keyword sponsored links in my gmail. For a while in 2006, it seemed like every time I received an email with the word “comics” in it, Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppe popped up on the side. Eventually I got curious enough to check it out, and was delighted by the incredible cuteness of what I saw. Apparently, Dean Young, the current writer of the King Features comic strip Blondie, which was created by his father in 1930, decided to fulfill a lifetime dream of a chain of sandwich shoppes making wild meals just like the ones that Dagwood Bumstead would concoct.

I stress that “incredible cuteness” only goes so far. I do not believe that I have looked forward to reading a new installment of Blondie since I was ten, and don’t expect to again until I’m in a retirement home. I admit some archaeological curiosity about what the strip might have been like in 1930, when Blondie was a carefree, rich flapper girl with daddy issues. What I’ve heard sounds preferable to the suburban mediocrity that King Features has been inflicting upon us for more than forty years.

In 2006, the chain had not left Florida. Throughout 2007, they started popping up in the midwest, South Carolina and Texas, and one arrived in Suwanee, Georgia. Surprisingly, in the spring of 2008, one opened near us, at the intersection of Barrett Parkway and Ridenour. I would never have known this had I not, by chance, chosen to come back that way from the far end of Whitlock, just to have something different to look at on my way. This amazing little secret has somehow, despite the ridiculously awful location, unbelievably awful hours (they usually close at 7) and occasionally awful teenage staff in place when we’ve visited, managed to stay open for two years.

How much longer is anybody’s guess. If you try looking up simply Dagwood’s on Google, you’ll first get a half-dozen unrelated restaurants from all across the country who have appropriated the name from the comic strip. If you search for Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppe, you’ll find a completely different story: tales of franchisees suing the owners, closed stores, and websites, once geared to franchises’ regions, which have defaulted to Go Daddy placeholder pages. It would appear that the Florida stores are gone, leaving the one here in Kennesaw and a handful in Indiana and Kentucky. Possibly one in Springfield, Missouri. In fact, when I first visited the local store in May of 2008, I was unaware that things were already falling apart. That very month in the magazine Franchise Times, there appeared a quite remarkable article by Jonathan Maze about how the many investors and franchises were lining up their lawyers. That Dagwood’s exists anywhere at all right now is frankly amazing.

So Marie and our daughter and I went to supper here last week and the stink of failure was so heavy that I felt I needed to order their trademark Dagwood sandwich, suspecting that I won’t have many more chances. The bad vibe was so heavy that when we left, I forgot and neglected to snap a picture of the building for the blog, necessitating this photo from our first visit, two years previously.

Over those two years, the quality of the food has not altered a jot. These are, despite everything else in this entry, leagues superior to any other sandwich chain, except Jersey Mike’s, which I completely love. Why anybody would stop at a Jimmy John’s, a Subway or a Quizno’s over Dagwood’s I couldn’t tell you. Food-wise, Dagwood’s is genuinely terrific, and the Dagwood itself is, as pictured, a giant jawbreaker of a meal, a real treat that you can barely finish. The restaurants offer Zapp’s brand chips on the side, and even have packs of their cracked pepper and sea salt flavor repackaged as Dagwood’s Zesty Pepper, so I suppose that the good people at Zapp’s, at least, were sold on this chain’s solvency.

But everything else about this place is increasingly underwhelming. At least the teens who were blaring their music at maximum volume a few months ago have gone, but the ones who replaced them were in a real hurry to get out of there as quickly as possible, and had stacked the chairs in the window shortly after six so they could clean the floors. While we were eating, two different parties drove up, saw the stacked chairs, backed out and drove away, concluding that they were closed.

One of Dagwood’s greatest follies is that about a quarter of its counter space is given over to Blondie merchandise, despite the indisputable fact that nobody between the ages of ten and seventy can be said to be a Blondie collector. Bafflingly, there is a single collected edition of the comic strip in print, but they didn’t sell that in the restaurant, just glasses and tchotchkes. Well, the merchandise shelf is, as expected, collecting dust, and the flat-screen TV which was set up to show Blondie comics, panel-by-panel, on a loop has been switched off for months.

The food’s still good. It’s excellent. But nobody seriously expects it to still be available this time next year. If you’d like to go, phone first.

(Update 8/24/11: They lasted longer than I thought, but we confirmed today that they closed earlier this month. Not a surprise, but a shame nonetheless.)