This is Marie, contributing a very small chapter about some very small cakes.
As any reader of this blog knows, desserts are well-nigh irresistible attractions for me. Generally, therefore, I don’t work very hard to locate places that serve chocolates, sweets, cakes and pies because they tend to creep up on me and drag me in all on their own. That’s what happened with Dreamcakes. Continue reading “Dreamcakes, Birmingham AL”
This is Marie, returning to my usual specialty of sweet things. This entry is on the Metro Cafe Diner in downtown Atlanta. As we’ve mentioned previously, it’s really not terribly fair to judge a place based on its performance when there is a convention the size of Dragon*Con right around the corner. On both corners, actually; it’s a huge con. Nevertheless, the place did well. I actually had breakfast there twice in one day due to the sleep schedules of the folks I was meeting, and it was fine both times. The service was a little faster in the early morning before all the tables were full, but only very slightly. There was less amusing rushing around, though.
The place is something of a hybrid. There are black marble walls, and there is a bar on the ground floor where apparently karaoke is inflicted upon the diners. I can’t imagine the acoustics are all that great, but we were able to converse comfortably at the tables despite the music so I may be wrong. You walk up this odd triangular staircase past a display of cakes big enough to rival the Marietta Diner’s offerings, and then get packed into one of two little side passages filled with booths. It is not the most spacious of places.
The prices seemed a trifle high, and they didn’t even boost them for the crowds. However, presentation is pretty and the quality of the food was good. I enjoyed my French Toast with strawberries sans the usual Radioactive Red Stuff that comes with such fare. The slices of bread were thick and buttery and if they could possibly have done with a bit of my favorite cinnamon, that is only because I like my cinnamon just a little hotter than usual. My brother seriously got into his Eggs Benedict Florentine. The eggs were cooked perfectly.
Overall this is a place I would recommend, especially since my sister reported favorably on the cakes, but it is a little on the odd side.
(Grant here to start this one off. For a tragically short few months, the town of Woodstock was home to a really superb burger joint that I don’t think anybody else but us ever visited. It was called Bob-O’s Burgers and Chili and it was in that same little strip mall as the Play & Trade and the ’50s-style diner and the Summit Tavern, and it was amazing. They served up Vortex-quality hamburgers made from all sorts of meat, including a cajun burger made from beef mixed with andouille sausage quite unlike anything else in the area, and chili so good you’d slap your mother for another bowl. We then tried Canyons, found it quite good but nowhere close to the greatness of Bob-O’s, and didn’t return until our hearts were broken by the better joint’s closure. That’s not to take away from all that’s good and tasty about the justifiably popular Canyons, but it is evidence that once in a while, the foodie network in Atlanta really does get hold of the wrong stick. In a fair and just world, both restaurants would thrive.)
This is Marie, contributing an entry entirely devoid of desserts, for once. This time I am talking about Canyons, one of the places we occasionally visit instead of a quick trip to Cheeseburger Bobby’s. Canyons, which has two locations, one in Woodstock and one in Atlanta’s Brookhaven neighborhood, apparently used to be independent but was acquired by Baja Fresh something like a year ago. They’ve just started the franchising process and have opened a third Canyons, co-branded with the burrito place, out in Montana.
As you can tell, we’re rather fond of sandwich and burger joints. A place has to have a little something extra in order to bring us back on a regular basis, though, and what brings me back is the sweet potato fries. The burgers are definitely tasty, but this is one of the few places where I actually finish my portion of fries and wistfully think about ordering another. That is, if we are doing the very sensible 50/50 order, which is half regular and half sweet potato. This is the only place I’ve seen to offer that option and I wish more places would offer it because really, who needs a bucket of fries the size of your head as a single portion? These are clearly intended to be shared. They shamelessly put “great” next to the sweet potato fries on their online menu, and I can’t blame them a bit.
There is regrettably no photo of the burgers from this visit, but honestly there’s nothing to pick them out of a crowd visually. It’s all in the taste. The owners talk a good game about quality Angus beef and never freezing their meat and so forth, and we’ve heard those tales from other places that weren’t exactly thrilling, but so far Canyons has come through on every meal we’ve eaten there. They offer the usual toppings plus a few extra oddities like chipotle mayonnaise. Ivy got their chicken once and although it’s a tad pricier than usual, that seems to be because they have good quality meat there too. She really enjoyed dipping the strips into the house BBQ sauce.
The decor of the place is very much reminiscent of a sports bar, although they always seem to keep the volume muted. The place has a number of flat screens usually tuned to various sporting events, though there’s generally at least one screen devoted to some popular show or other. Occasionally they remember to put the captions on. Aside from that, the pictures on the wall are all good-quality poster-size photos of people doing active things like mountain climbing. (Grant adds: That seems to be an odd shtick, but they’re consistent with it. Canyons tries to sell itself as the treat you can enjoy after a hard day climbing up and down the Adirondacks or something. Suffice it to say that a fellow could get a little self-conscious looking at giant pictures of fit, smiling runners while trying to enjoy a juicy burger.)
We would probably eat here a little more often if it were more convenient to get to, and if the bar next door, Pure Taquiera, had a slightly better taste in music. The live band last Saturday night was particularly awful! Strangely, although they offer milkshakes we haven’t actually tried one. Probably on our next visit.
This is Marie, contributing a little story about a barbecue place that Grant hasn’t visited. The review is for the Macon branch of the Pig In A Pit Bar-B-Que restaurant. Their branch in Milledgeville is the original one, and maybe we’ll make our way there eventually. Continue reading “Pig in a Pit, Macon GA (CLOSED)”
(Marie writes again… having taken a quick weekend jaunt back down to the coast, she took the camera to snap a couple of pictures of a new favorite on Mallery Street.)
St. Simons Sweets is the latest store to make an attempt at the sweet-toothed segment of the tourist crowd in the Pier area of what St. Simons residents call “The Village.” I am not sure why so many have come and gone, as a candy-and-ice cream shop seems a sure bet in any tourist area, but this is by far the best organized and busiest of them. Continue reading “St Simons Sweets, Saint Simons Island GA”
This is Marie, talking about The Grill in Athens, GA. Technically this visit involved desserts because I had a shake for dinner, you see.
This place has been around long enough that some of their “decor” is actually just old stuff they never took out, like the juke box attachments for the booths along the walls. The place has a lot of character. Of course it has the kitschy old style signs for beverages that no longer exist or were sold for a nickel. However, they also have a divider down the middle of the room that has glass display cases full of strange antique toys, comics and collectibles. There’s no way to take a picture of the stuff that would turn out, and I wouldn’t want to spoil the amusement factor of seeing the old toys and silly things in those displays. I wouldn’t recommend using their rest room either if you can avoid it, unless you are into the really old-fashioned kind, or you collect really bizarre bathroom graffiti. Continue reading “The Grill, Athens GA”
This is Marie, weighing in on the visit we made recently to The Cherokee Cattle Company. Admittedly, my contribution on this one is in large part because there are desserts involved, though the food itself was quite tasty.
My father-in-law picked this location for his birthday dinner. It is one of a small group of four local restaurants, each of them with a different name and arranged around a different theme, owned by “friend-of-Food-Network” Gus Tselios. Marietta Fish Market, Pasta Bella, and the original Marietta Diner are the other three locations. The Cherokee Cattle Company is a steak house and actually predates the other stores. For years, it was independently owned and proudly fought off regional competition from the likes of Longhorn and Outback, but joined the “Diner Family” in 2008. The menu was changed somewhat to fall in line with the others, and to bring the somewhat outsize dinner portions and ridiculously outsize desserts to Canton Road.
One of the best things about this particular location is that of the four, it’s the only one where you don’t usually have to wait for a year and a half to get a table. Mainly it’s just that it’s the biggest of the places, and the parking isn’t quite up to the capacity of the interior (an interior, I should mention, filled with things like antler chandeliers, but if you can ignore that sort of thing you’ll be fine). One of the worst things (for me–it won’t be a problem for anyone but the other four people in the universe who dislike the stuff) is that this place has an unnatural fondness for bacon. Having it appear on my salad was a little discouraging, if for no other reason than that I honestly ought to have remembered from last time that a vegetarian salad needs a special request. However, there were folks at the table willing to take the contaminated salad off my hands, and give every appearance of enjoying the favor they did to me.
Steaks don’t make it onto my plate very often. Most of the time they’re too big for my appetite. Also, since a bad steak is worse than no steak at all, they only get ordered when there’s plenty of money in the budget, or when there is a special occasion. I chose a rib eye because Grant doesn’t like that cut much and I’m disinclined to get a bunch of different slabs of meat for home cooking when it’s so hard to keep track of what is finished when. Which is, of course, one of the benefits of going to a steak house–timing the cooking is someone else’s problem. Actually, the best steak on our table was my father-in-law’s, which came with a bucket containing enough horseradish to clean out the sinuses of Napoleon’s army on the way back from Moscow.
The sweet potato fries are almost thick enough to reach towards home fry status, which as I understand it is a little hard for sweet potatoes as the sugars caramelize rather quickly. Generally fry portions defeat me well before half-way, but these were worth munching a bit longer, in no small part because the thicker fries held their heat better.
Grant got the salmon. Just because we were down the street from the place that specializes in fish doesn’t mean he got second-best; it was very well made, quite simply (as is best for fish) and with a little bit of crispiness around the edges. However, as has been said before, he likes fish rather more than I do, so we were not in danger of menu envy this time.
We closed the meal with some of the death-defying desserts. The selections of the table included cheesecake with and without strawberries, tiramisu cake, and some kind of death by chocolate concoction. Please note that there were seven of us, my piece of cheesecake was bought separately as a take-home item, and we still managed to bring home samples of every one of the cakes along with our other leftovers. Do not come to any of the four locations without a really good appetite, or an awful lot of time, unless you plan to leave with enough for tomorrow’s lunch box and maybe a snack after work, too. But do take home some dessert even if you can’t choke it down immediately after eating yourself silly. Just because the pieces are bigger than your head doesn’t mean they skimp on the quality.
Marie, Let's Eat! 