The Sound Table and Café Intermezzo, Atlanta GA

Date night! Marie and I got a very pleasant surprise from her father when he came to visit last weekend. He gave us a big wad of money and told us to go enjoy each other’s company at a nice restaurant or two while he watched the children and read A.A. Milne to his new grandson. Unfortunately, I left it too late to make reservations at Two Urban Licks, so I went with a backup plan, The Sound Table. This is a popular new place, just starting its second year, at the intersection of Edgewood and Boulevard in the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood, and its chef and owners had previously collaborated on the popular Top FLR.

Marie and I enjoyed a very good meal here. We were early, before it apparently gets pretty loud, and got to enjoy some conversation without yelling across the table to each other. They have an amazing cocktail list here, for diners looking for something unusual. I was briefly tempted by a simple glass of Cointreau and orange juice – it really has been a while since I had one – but we just had water, as we almost always do.

Sound Table’s menu changes quarterly, and even then they make changes each evening based on what vegetables they can source, so guests will not have much luck reading blogs and getting ideas. That said, we did enjoy an appetizer of fried chickpeas salted with curry and a wonderful small serving of lamb meatballs with Roma tomatoes that got us ready for some excellent entrees. I ordered the hanger steak with a beet salad. This was very simple but so incredibly delicious. It was merely a small plate of arugula, beets, avocado slices and anchovies, but each complemented the other very well.

My meal was good enough that I did not quite get menu envy, but I came close. Happily, the perfectly seasoned steak was tasty enough to make it quite a standout. Marie enjoyed a grilled pork chop that was just heavenly, served over butter beans and greens. She also had a bowl – a huge one, as it turns out – of excellent cauliflower, cooked with red curry and peanuts. Everything was extremely tasty and appropriately portioned. This was a very good date night detination.

We passed on dessert, as I had planned to really give Marie’s sweet tooth a workout. Unfortunately, my desire to pick up some caramels from a reasonably new place called The Sugar-Coated Radical was foiled, as they closed earlier than I was planning. We will return some other time, now that we know to arrive before the dinner hour. We drove on instead to Café Intermezzo on Peachtree, near Collier, for some decadent cake, arriving just as the sun was going down.

One day, we might return to Café Intermezzo for a full meal; it certainly has an interesting menu. Speaking of which, the drinks menu here – or perhaps “beverage book” is more appropriate, as it’s a full fifty pages long – is just about the most overwhelming and mad thing that I’ve seen in ages. I’ve occasionally wondered whether there might be a place in town, other than the GSU dorms, that serves absinthe, and now I know. Since the days of me drinking myself stupid over some damn girl in French class are long gone, I’ll pass.

Café Intermezzo has a dessert showcase that rivals the ones we see in Cobb County at Marietta Diner and its sister places. A gigantic slice of cake here will run you about eight bucks and you know with every bite that you’re indulging in something sinful. I had choclate and Marie had cheesecake and, somewhere in the beverage book, we noticed that they sell bottles of Hank’s soda. I have been on a black cherry kick lately, although the cream soda that Marie enjoyed probably complmented her cake a little better. Although really, a tall glass of milk might have done just as well.

Eventually, we had to leave the patio and get back to the suburbs, and end our date night, as parents often do, swinging by the grocery store to pick up things for the kids. We’re just so romantic, you know.

The Kitchen Table Bistro, Richmond VT

(Honeymoon flashback: In July 2009, Marie and I took a road trip up to Montreal and back, enjoying some really terrific meals over our ten-day expedition. I’ve selected some of those great restaurants, and, once per month, we’ll tell you about them.)

A month back, Marie wrote up a chapter about our trip to Middlebury, and the details about the lunch that we had there kind of got lost in the nostalgia that she was feeling for her college town, and the great pleasure I was having wandering around and watching her smile. I remember that we left Mr. Up’s having enjoyed the food a good deal, and then forgot about it so thoroughly with everything else going on around that I asked her to do the writeup, since at least she could contribute a couple of college-days anecdotes.

After we finished in Middlebury, we drove back up US-7 to Burlington, stopping at Dakin Farm along the way. Digging into the goodies that Marie bought from this place later proved a pretty solid argument for moving to Vermont. You may not have known before now that there was such a thing as maple baked beans, but you can get them for $4.58 a can when you buy a dozen. You will want to do that.

Anyway, we got back to Burlington and went back up I-89 and crossed Lake Champlain, which is completely gorgeous, and found ourselves in some small farmland in the town of South Hero, where Marie’s college buddy Debbie lives in this really neat old farmhouse. Marie and Debbie had not seen each other in years and had lots of catching up to do. So we visited for an hour and a bit, and the ladies talked about spices and herbs and rubs and sauces and all sorts of cooking things. Marie tried selling Debbie on Penzeys and Debbie tried selling Marie on whatever spice company she likes, and neither were very successful. I figure, you find a spice company that you really like, you stick with it.

There isn’t anything to eat in South Hero outside of Debbie’s kitchen. There may not be anything to eat in Burlington, either, but I’m not sure. Debbie had something special in mind for supper, and it was a good forty minutes south of there. We gassed up before we got back on the interstate, where I confirmed a long-held theory that every convenience store in the state sells Moxie. I may not cotton too much to what damn Yankees think of drinks, but at least they have the sense to stock Moxie in every gas station. Man, I love that stuff.

Since, after dinner, we’d be making our way further south to New Hampshire, we took two cars. Marie rode with Debbie for the forty minute trip and I followed. I’d like to think they talked about old boyfriends and pranks they played on the dean, and that time they interrupted lacrosse practice driving some jalopy across the Middlebury field, but Marie politely insists that she was far too boring in college to get up to those sorts of hijinks, and just spent what little free time and money she had buying old books and fresh pastries from the bakery. She even once let me read her college journal to confirm how boring she was, but all I was able to confirm was that her illegible handwriting was even worse in the early nineties. Debbie politely stayed quiet on the subject of Crazy Marie stories. I’m not sure that’s fair; stories about me being drunk and stupid hang from every tree in Athens.

Anyway, for supper, we had the priciest and nicest meal of the trip. Debbie wanted to take us to The Kitchen Table Bistro in the town of Richmond. This place got a super write-up in The New York Times in December of ’08, and it’s well known in the region for being the best restaurant anywhere around I-89. All of their food comes from local farmers, so their menu changes completely in each season. Their salads are amazing and the ladies shared some pot roast which would knock you over with a feather. About a year later, I was very taken with the pot roast that they serve at the Smith House down here in Dahlonega, but it is a very distant second to how nice this meal was.

I read a review of this place which described the service as, and I love this, “unhurried.” The impression I get is this: if you are driving this far out of the way to have a dinner in a rustic old farmhouse with elegant furniture and nice tablecloths, you are not coming for a meal with the intent of getting on the road to someplace else quickly. No, you’re here for the night. We were seated promptly, and had a lot to talk about, and dishes were brought to us periodically, and we were there for the better part of three hours.

So yes, the bread was wonderful and the pot roast was amazing and the vegetables were fresh and incredibly tasty. The desserts are decadent like you wouldn’t believe, and appropriately portioned, unlike those giant things you pay too much money for and can’t finish like some places here in town.

But the winner? You see that burger in the picture below? That, my friends, that is the best hamburger on the planet. That is the finest burger I have ever eaten, and I say that having eaten an astonishing number of hamburgers in my life and living in a city with more great hamburger joints than anyplace else in America. It’s over, we can all go home and turn off the grills now. The Kitchen Table Bistro has won. Men should weep; I know I did.

I’ll digress here, for the benefit of Google surfers. I’m done talking about the Kitchen Table Bistro. Ours isn’t a “restaurant review” blog so much as stories about how our fun life intersects with restaurants, and what happened next was even more memorable and fun than the amazing dinner that we had in Richmond.

Marie mentioned in her chapter about Middlebury that she wanted me to tell the tale of that night, so here goes. It was around 10 p.m., a Tuesday, and we were setting out from Richmond in a pretty healthy shower, intending to make Lebanon, New Hampshire within a couple of hours to get some shuteye. What we learned was that while I’m usually good with staying awake until midnight with not much problem, a day as busy as this one wears me out quickly. Vermont itself does not help.

After about 45 minutes of interstate, my brain finally processed what it had not been seeing all along. Well, with the darkness and rain and practically no other drivers, and exits maybe every ten or twelve miles, Central Vermont was reminding me of that Atari 2600 game, Night Driver. Suddenly I realized why: there were no billboards. There is no roadside advertising of any kind in Vermont, nor indeed in New Hampshire and most of Massachusetts. Now, at least in those two states, companies can put their logos on the gas-food-lodging signs, but not in Vermont.

For about fifteen minutes, I thought this was a terrific idea. Vermont is completely gorgeous, and I’m glad the scenery is not spoiled by billboards, like it is down here in the south. But I started getting sleepy, and then I noticed the downside to Vermont’s strategy: my eyes were looking around for ads for motels and I only saw darkness. There is a slight advantage to having all these deeply ugly towns build up along I-75, with hundred-feet-high restaurant signs and light pollution turning the night into the ugliest Christmas tree you ever saw; at least you know there’s a darn Super 8 nearby.

Since you can’t even put a logo on a “lodging” road sign in Vermont, however, it’s a little tough to let drivers know you’re out there. All drivers get in Vermont is a little “bed” icon on a thin blue rectangle beneath the exit sign. (And not the “next exit 1 mile” sign, the “exit now” one.) Well, the next exit was for Northfield, and there was a bed icon, so I pulled off.

At the foot of the exit was a further sign telling us there was lodging five miles to the right, so we went that way. Again, it’s pitch black, no lights, pouring rain, and first we miss a turn where the road we wanted went right and we went straight, and then, once we got turned around, we went down the slope from hell. The sign said it was a 10-degree decline. Oh, the little rental Chevy was going to love climbing back up that.

After about four miles, we saw another little sign saying that some inn or other was a mile and a half on the right, on Prospect Street. This was as we entered the town of Riverton, which was the darkest I have ever seen a town. It is home to Norwich University, which was pitch black, like it had been abandoned long ago. (This much made sense, later. It turns out that is a military college, so of course they observe lights out very strictly.) There were no street lights, just pounding rain, although we did see one black-shirted teenager wandering around, wet, in the dark.

We turned on Prospect, and briefly saw several gorgeous, creepy old houses in the headlights. Then we found the hotel, which was the creepiest, oldest, darkest, spookiest house of them all. Words can’t do this justice. You ever thought horror writers were making up crazy-ass scary hotels miles from any highway? It’s true. I’ve seen this movie, and I know how it ends! I mean, the best we could hope for was the opening scene of Suspiria. Besides which, the Mystery Machine needed our parking place. This was not, to put it more directly, a hotel that looked anything like a desk clerk was still going to be awake for late, unexpected travelers. That it was a pitch black and spooky hotel somewhere in a pitch black and spooky town next to a pitch black and spooky college in a roaring thunderstorm just made it worse.

Debbie had earlier offered us couch space in her farmhouse. We declined because we had a breakfast destination in Manchester, New Hampshire, which is better than three hours’ drive from South Hero. I was starting to regret that decision a little. Next month, I’ll tell you how good the breakfast was, but right then and there, all I wanted to do was sleep somewhere safe, and not go pounding on the door of the dark, spooky hotel.

Thus adrenalized, we got outta town and climbed that 10-degree slope while the car sputtered and spat and hated every inch of it. We got back on the interstate laughing about it and were charged enough to drive for several more miles, before we pulled off at the next exit to ask a gas station clerk where the hell anybody was supposed to sleep in this state and not get done in by an axe murderer, and finally pulled into a Super 8 in White River Junction, just this side of Lebanon, completely exhausted and spent.

I have a lot of sympathy and enthusiasm for the no logo movement, and think that billboard companies are just about the worst things in the universe, and I love how unspoiled and beautiful the land up here is. It was not fun at the time, and that is a really long highway to go without a single chain hotel on it, but we’ve learned a lesson. In the south, we take easy-stop interstate hotels for granted. In New England, you make reservations. We’ll know for next time!

The Last Resort Grill, Athens GA

I have loved Last Resort Grill for years. Some time before Marie and I started the food blog, I wrote up what would prove to be one of its antecedents on my LiveJournal, back when I was using that service for more than, basically, announcing new entries in my other blogs. In 2007, my little feature Twenty Southeastern Restaurants You Must Try Before You Die – actually only eighteen now, as two of them have closed – proved to be a little popular and got me thinking about expanding my food world. It’s certainly a very dated list; compiled today, I would certainly not include Gold Star Chili or Five Guys or Sticky Fingers. But tastes change. The point is, I have long considered Last Resort to be a destination restaurant, and Marie and I try to visit once a year or so, on those increasingly rare occasions that we’re actually in Athens at the same time. Continue reading “The Last Resort Grill, Athens GA” →

Bocado, Atlanta GA

So I finally took the plunge! Bocado is one of Atlanta’s best-known newer restaurants, and if I’m not mistaken, every blogger in the region has already visited the place. It’s been on my to-do list for ages, but other things and other meals kept coming up. They have a really convenient location on Howell Mill right where it meets Marietta Street, and I’ve been known, occasionally, to drive right past it in the early evenings, when Williams Street is really blocked up and I need an alternate way over to the interstate. I’ve just never had the opportunity to stop in before.
Continue reading “Bocado, Atlanta GA” →

Mama’s Boy, Athens GA

I’m afraid that I have done Mama’s Boy a terrible disservice in waiting so long to tell you about our trip here before Christmas. You see, and you’ll forgive me having my silly notions about how I schedule chapters in our blog, I had the bright idea to hold back an entry about Athens for a few weeks, until I visited the town again. That way, for some fool reason, I could have two chapters about Athens back-to-back instead of a single Athens story each month. Continue reading “Mama’s Boy, Athens GA” →

Bluegrass Kitchen, Charleston WV

One day, not immediately, but one day soon, Marie and I are going to move from Atlanta to some place a little north of here. We’ve since decided that it will be Asheville, fingers crossed, but when we started discussing the future in 2007, we assembled a short list of towns that we might find attractive, and which would not make my children’s distance from their mother in Louisville, Kentucky any longer than it presently is. Marie read up on some towns in that radius and suggested that we add Charleston, West Virginia to that short list. She’d never seen the place; I had passed through briefly one evening in 2006 on my way to Toronto and found the city very charming. As we began constructing our honeymoon road trip, I decided to retrace that two-day drive to Toronto and linger in Charleston for a longer stay to let us consider the town at length.

Naturally, one thing worth considering is whether there’s anything to eat in Charleston. I was helped a great deal by that city’s small foodie network, which seems to congregate around some really terrific blogs like the delightfully-named Fork You. At the time, I was working for a company up in Alpharetta. I would take lunch from eleven to noon (and at the time, I was earning enough to justify eating out every day, which was nice), and from noon to one, I would cover the receptionist desk while she ate. This gave me an hour to read about restaurants in other cities, sensibly after I’d finished a good meal already. I lurked on Fork You and other blogs and message boards for several days before narrowing the choices for supper in Charleston down to Tasty Fish and Bluegrass Kitchen, two restaurants owned by the same people. Marie picked the latter.

Well, we got to Charleston… eventually. We were shooting for arriving at a comic shop that I had read about online around 4.30 but the traffic delays on the interstates in North Carolina and Virginia – more than an hour – had us finding the city at 5.45, well after the shop had closed. On a Saturday. Anyway, the long-faded “Marvel Comics on sale here!” sign didn’t actually inspire me with confidence. It looks, from what I saw online and from the outside of the store like something pretty disappointing anyway, so never mind.

I have to say that Charleston’s southern areas are less than inspiring, although the McCorkle Avenue exit is pretty fantastic – it’s like exiting down a spiral slide. Charleston’s downtown is much easier on the eye. The state capitol building is really gorgeous and there’s a small, if active, urban community.

I recall that we had to drive around a bit to find parking for Bluegrass Kitchen, settling on a lot about a block away. There was already a wait despite the early hour, and we ended up, after about fifteen minutes, sitting at the bar, We had a very nice conversation with our server / bartender about the city and what she likes and doesn’t like about this little part of West Virginia, and it really does seem like a good place, with good people

I had some pretty good enchiladas and some downright fantastic fried green tomatoes. Marie had a knockdown amazing dish of “rags pasta” in piri-piri tomato sauce with shredded beef and smoked Gouda cheese. Everybody seems to like Bluegrass Kitchen, and with good reason. It’s a shame that the corner of the city they’ve found hasn’t reawakened yet. In a city like Atlanta, it’s the sort of neighborhood you’d think twice about walking around in, as many of their neighbors have closed up shop and it doesn’t give off a “returning to life” vibe so much as an “on life support” one. I hope a couple more businesses step in to that intersection soon.

We weren’t quite done with Charleston after supper, but more about that next month.

The Real Chow Baby, Atlanta GA

There probably won’t be quite so many features in this column about restaurants as unabashedly corporate as this one, but since The Real Chow Baby is, at this stage, just a local chain with only two locations, I think it will be acceptable to write about it. I’m willing to overlook the small army of attractive young servers in matching black t-shirts and headsets, although they do reinforce the feeling that somebody’s investment in these restaurants is far more financial than emotional.

Real Chow Baby opened its first restaurant on Howell Mill some years ago, and a second in 2008 in the Cobb Galleria Center, giving area residents, at long last, a reason to actually set foot inside this misbegotten mall other than the annual Anime Weekend Atlanta convention. The Galleria’s been an embarrassment for a really long time now. When I was in middle school, it was opened with so much hoopla – an upscale mall! an AMC theater with eight screens! a video arcade with an airlock! – but it languished, a sad suburban wannabe that looked longingly at Phipps Plaza and just wished it could be that cool.

I guess about ten years ago, Cobb County finally took pity on the diseased beast, which had been coughing blood since the cinema closed, and gutted the upper floor of the mall, transforming it, quite impressively, into an extension of a mid-sized convention center that connected, above and across the shopping area, to the Waverly Hotel on the mall’s far side. There is still, nevertheless, a lot of vacant real estate inside. The excellent Sky City blog provided a terrific photoessay about the Galleria last October, which you can go read. The mall hasn’t changed a jot since those photos were taken, indeed since the top floor was converted to conference rooms and the Eckanakar people put in a reading room years ago, except that a gallery of horrible art across from Jock’s and Jill’s closed . And Sky City’s writer is quite right: unless a trade show’s in town, you’d think this mall had long been abandoned.

I overlooked the Real Chow Baby when we first noticed it during AWA 2008, but last year, Marie and I found ourselves free from children for a few hours on Friday and elected to have supper there, since it was so close to the con and looked reasonably nice. I was so taken with it that I asked whether she’d mind excusing ourselves and going back for lunch the next day. I never, never do that.

I’ve been so taken with The Real Chow Baby that I’ve eaten there probably twenty times since the con last September. They serve a stir-fry buffet, where you build a bowl from a huge array of ingredients. You can start with white or brown rice or four different pastas, work your way through dozens of veggies, add ladles of seventeen different sauces, about seven meats and then about a dozen spices. The potential for experimentation, while not mathematically endless, is pretty darn huge.

Fortunately, Marie likes this place almost as much as I do, and it didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to persuade her that bowls full of stir-fry were exactly what she wanted for her birthday dinner last week. (She had two birthday dinners, because she’s that awesome, and I’ll tell you about the second in a couple of days.) Our daughter and I met Marie after work on Friday, where there is usually a pretty good crowd of weekend revelers and families. We each sampled three bowls and enjoyed all but one of them.

Now, three bowls of stir fry sounds like a lot, and it would be, if you foolishly piled high with the food. You see, a one-trip dinner order at Real Chow Baby runs you $11.99 on the weekends – lunch is only eight – but for a buck more, you can have unlimited trips to the buffet. This is one of the city’s best-kept secrets. If you make yourself just a teeny bowl with no more than two ladles of sauce, then you can sample several different flavors, and mix and match sauce offerings without worrying about whether you’ve gorged yourself stupid. I like to start with a medium-sized bowl, very heavy on the hot spices, and then have two smaller bowls with milder taste.

Marie’s second concoction of the night mixed black bean sauce and hot mustard over white rice. None of us liked it very much, but it didn’t really matter, because you can abandon something you don’t enjoy and try something different. If you can exercise enough willpower to keep your portion sizes reasonable, then this is definitely a place to provide you with an excellent meal or twenty.

(Update: On July 19 2010, this location split off from the other and became known as “Big Chow Grill.”)