Gigi’s Cupcakes

When Grant was planning the itinerary for an afternoon together, he included Gigi’s because of my taste for sweets and our daughter’s more specific adoration of cupcakes. Sadly, neither of us showed much enthusiasm. The girlchild was under the weather and wanted to sit out this food trek, asking only for a comfort snack of Krystal to be borne home to her after we were done. In my case the problem was the memory of another dedicated cupcake store in Nashville. When I reminded him of that visit, Grant diplomatically replied that he understood I had been “underwhelmed” by that place. So I figured I would hold my enthusiasm until we went to his selection. More on that later. Continue reading “Gigi’s Cupcakes” →

Smokejack Blues & Barbecue, Alpharetta GA

I have a little goal here to visit and report upon one hundred barbecue restaurants before the end of 2011. I’m not sure whether we will make it – we’re almost three-quarters there – but any opportunity to grab one for the blog is one that we’ll try to take. Two Saturdays ago, I looked over the map and decided that we hadn’t trucked up GA-400 in a while, and I was curious what new restaurant developments could be seen on Windward Parkway. Alpharetta is the home of Smokejack Blues & Barbecue, a business seven years old which has expanded to a second location a little further north in the town of Cumming. Smokejack’s not getting quite all the press and attention among barbecue restaurants in that area right now – there’s a place called ‘Cue that everybody’s talking about – but I remembered having a pretty good, albeit pricy, meal there a few years ago.

When I worked in Alpharetta, there was one perk that certainly beat any that I have at my current job. To celebrate birthdays, our department would take all the staff out to eat once a month. She wasn’t with the company for really long, but I did have the pleasure of working with a girl named Kristi who was a completely fun trip, just overflowing with silliness, light, Southern slang and malapropisms. She chose Smokejack for her birthday and I remembered enjoying it greatly, even if the restaurant’s prices kept it out of my regular rotation of places to visit. Marie and I had lunch here for just under $30. That’s a heck of a lot to pay for barbecue for two, but in their defense, the restaurant tells guests up front that theirs is less a traditional BBQ place and more an upscale eatery that focuses on smoked meat.

Marie and I hoped to have our daughter and our good friend Samantha join us for lunch, but each of them asked for rain checks in the end, not feeling well. So Marie and I made it a quasi-date day, with the baby bundled in the back seat and spent a few hours enjoying each other’s company and eating pretty well.

Smokejack, located in Alpharetta’s small, but very cute, downtown, offers the usual assortment of pulled pork or chicken dishes. Most of them apparently are sauced just before they send them out of the kitchen, but they’ll serve them dry if you ask. I noted that they have a chicken sandwich with white, north Alabama-style sauce, and while normally I might be expected to give that a try, I was really in the mood for another order of burnt edges.

I had these for the first time a couple of weeks previously at Woodstock’s Bub-Ba-Q and was curious to try another restaurant’s take. I had the sauce, a delicious black, sticky-sweet Kansas City-styled goo, on the side. The beef was so good that no sauce was necessary, and I strongly advise anybody curious to order this dry. I had the burnt edges with baked beans, which were pretty ordinary, and a very tasty corn pudding that Marie and I shared. She ordered chicken thighs from the appetizer menu. These came with an orange habanero glaze and were served on a bed of pretty good slaw. She also had a side of wood-roasted vegetables that she mostly enjoyed. Brunswick stew is available, but, sadly, with a small additional charge as it is not technically a “side,” but rather a “soup.”

A little driving around town didn’t convince me that I was missing very much, foodwise, by leaving my job in Alpharetta. We got back on GA-400 and made one more stop in the area, though. Two days previously, I had visited one of the wonderful Taco Stands in Athens. They had opened a store in Alpharetta several months earlier. I had stopped in and was pretty disappointed, but chalked it up to opening week catastrophe. I was curious, now that they’ve hopefully got their act together, how they compare to one of the originals.

The honest answer is that they compare poorly, but are still pretty good. It’s a very different sort of restaurant to the Taco Stands of Athens, or even to the since-closed Buckhead watering hole. It tries to be a lot – upscale and family-friendly, even offering X-Box games for children – but it’s all so unnecessary. The prices are disagreeably higher than the originals. Seriously, a taco, $1.39 at Barnett Shoals, runs you $1.99 here. If I’m wanting Taco Stand, I don’t need an airlock and hostess station, I don’t need my tacos served in a little IKEA basket, and I don’t want to tip a server. I want my name called and I want my tacos on a tray.

That said…

There are certain realities of eating that trump fancy-shmancy considerations. Admittedly, the prime ingredient in the Taco Stand is nostalgia, but you can’t deny the awesomeness of the chicken enchilada and its wonderful dark sauce. On the other hand, while the tacos are good, they are nevertheless different, and in fact, inferior, to the tacos in Athens. They’re served on grilled flour shells rather than hard corn, and the beef is markedly different. The sauce tasted the same to me.

As much as I like the food, I really just don’t feel like the Taco Stand transfers well to this type of environment. I’ll forgive a lot for a good chicken enchilada like this, but in much the same way that a Burger King Whopper doesn’t gain anything from being served on a nice white plate, remaining, at it’s core, fast food, this “upscale” store doesn’t make the scruffy, tasty, wonderful food any better. It just makes it more expensive.

Another Visit to Saint Simons Island GA

As many of our readers know, Marie and I are fortunate and happy to make four or five trips to the Georgia coast each year to visit her mother and her father, who are very happy to have a grandson come and visit. Saint Simons Island is packed with very good restaurants. There are, disagreeably, a few chains on the place, but a couple of them are local chains, so we give those guys a little business. Continue reading “Another Visit to Saint Simons Island GA” →

The Varsity, Kennesaw GA

Over the last eight chapters in the blog, I have written about the four-day trip that we took to visit Marie’s brother and sister in Mississippi. These were posted here slightly out of sequence, as I was anxious to share some stories about places outside our regular stomping grounds around Atlanta. Not that anybody other than me is keeping track of these, but the next four entries (plus the next Honeymoon Flashback, later this week) are about some places that we visited before this road trip.

First up is a place that we visit with something approaching frequency, the Kennesaw location of The Varsity. I’m sure this is not a place that needs much introduction. It is as iconic as American restaurants get, and the downtown location, which I’m sure I’ll revisit and write about one day, is a major tourist attraction for the city.

The Varsity has done more things right than wrong over the years – moving their beloved Varsity Jr. location from Cheshire Bridge out to Dawsonville, because serving a long-established neighborhood is not as profitable as snagging outlet mall shoppers, must surely count as a “wrong” – and one of their neater ideas has been building satellite locations along each of the northern arteries that feed into the city. Whether you’ve followed the sprawl into the suburbs up Interstate 75 or 85 or GA-400, there’s a Varsity for you, and each of these stores do a darn good job capturing the feel of the original.

Usually, if we are in the mood for a burger, and don’t feel like making a production or a caravan or a road trip out of it, we just hop over to Cheeseburger Bobby’s, which makes one of the best burgers in Cobb County. The Varsity, let’s be fair and honest, is a fairly weak competitor in those stakes, but their fries are better than Bobby’s, and so are their onion rings, and so is their chocolate milk – you just won’t believe how well chocolate milk over ice goes with a burger until you try it – and they also add one thing that I sure do wish that Cheeseburger Bobby’s would consider for their own patties: pimento cheese.

I mentioned a few chapters back that I greatly admire the writing of John T. Edge. About a week before our trip, I read his delightful Hamburgers and Fries, one of a short series of books, very Calvin Trillin in feel and flavor, in which Edge flies around the country trying regional takes on the most classically American of foods. He has slug burgers in Mississippi and steamed burgers in Connecticut and, most drool-worthy of them all, pimento cheeseburgers in South Carolina.

I know virtually nothing about South Carolina. It’s always been a state that I have driven through; I have never stayed overnight in the state. I recognize this as a deficiency that needs correcting, and longer visits and more detailed investigations of South Carolina are on the long-term agenda. From what I understand, though – and, admittedly, a good chunk of what I understand is what I have read in Edge’s books – many of the older hamburger joints throughout the Palmetto State have long offered pimento cheeseburgers. It is apparently one of that region’s specialties.

I’m reminded of the similarity between the Varsity’s hot dogs and chili and the ones that you can get at Macon’s Nu-Way. When the Varsity’s founder, Frank Gordy, was first driving around the south nailing down ideas for what he wanted his restaurant, then called The Yellow Jacket, to serve, it’s suggested that he decided to replicate the Nu-Way experience. That was somewhat lost when the Varsity expanded and grew to its current enormous size, but you can still absolutely see Nu-Way’s influence. I wonder whether in 1928, pimento cheeseburgers were common in Atlanta, or did Gordy find a place or two in South Carolina that inspired him to do them here?

Every so often, I find myself craving pimento cheese on a burger, served all hot, gooey and greasy. Marie doesn’t often remind me that she’s a damn Yankee, but when she quickly corrects my order of pimento cheeseburgers and asks for her own with a slice of cheddar, I remember all right. Ah, but it’s those differences that keep us interesting, right?

Jack’s, Tallapoosa GA

I’m not going to name any names, but when I made an announcement – someplace that I won’t identify – that I finally went back to a Jack’s, a guy who runs a blog that I enjoy reading very much just turned up his nose quite publicly at the notion. Never mind all the good and interesting restaurants that we enjoyed on our trip through Alabama and Mississippi that I described, the only thing worth a reply, and a nose-upturned one at that, was my visit to a Jack’s.

That’s okay. This is not very good food. It would appear that, after fifty years in business, Jack’s has quite successfully managed to make a perfect clone of Burger King, and nobody calls that good. But it’s very interesting food, to me. Jack’s is wrapped around my childhood in a way that I will never extricate. I find this chain absolutely enthralling, even though they have not done very much to earn it.

When you are a child, you have a very different perspective on space than as an adult. Throughout the 1970s, my parents would routinely take me to visit family in Fort Payne, Alabama. We’d go out there once every four or five weeks. The path would almost always wind through Cartersville, Rome and Coosa, but then often take one of several different directions, depending on whether Dad wanted to get there in a hurry, or if nostalgia for his own misspent youth would send us to Fort Payne via Boaz or some other small community. I swear one was called “Blood Bucket,” but I can’t find any evidence of it anymore.

Once we were in Fort Payne, we might use my Pappy’s house as a staging point for trips to visit any number of places in northeast Alabama. None of the towns that I see looking over Google Maps seem familiar, but we would often drive to old businesses and speak to old acquaintances. There was a Jack’s in every town. I’d know that red circle logo anywhere.

When you’re a child, of course, you can’t really work out that “this is a chain almost totally exclusive to north Alabama.” You just figure that there are Jack’s everywhere, and when you are at home, Mom and Dad just don’t drive down any roads that have them. I don’t even know how often we actually stopped to eat at one. Probably not often, as I had an Aunt Rosie who wouldn’t dream of allowing anybody to eat a fast food hamburger when she had forty pounds of fried chicken, turnip greens and potato salad to feed all of us. I just know that Jack’s is part of my seventies restaurant memory the same way that the Krystal Kritters and the initial use of that creepy Burger King and his R2D2-knockoff French fry robot are.

About a month before that last bolt clicked into place and we started up this blog to document our travels and the fun we have eating, I took a drive out to Carrollton after a short day at work to try a Jack’s for the first time in a really, really long time. The restaurant had come up in conversation a few days previously when I was visiting Dad and some other friend of his had stopped by. This friend had heard, erroneously, it turns out, that a Jack’s was coming up in Douglasville or someplace nearby. That got me curious, so I drove out there, and had a… decentish meal. I imagine that it’s probably about the same caliber as the better-known (and confusingly similarly-named) Jack in the Box or Whataburger, each of which I have damned with faint praise in this blog’s pages before.

On our way back from Mississippi, I made sure that we stopped again. Marie and I had noticed this location about a month previously, when we visited Tallapoosa to try the excellent barbecue and stew at The Turn Around. It is apparently one of only three Jack’s in Georgia. There is one in Corinth, MS and sixty-some odd in northern Alabama. Around Birmingham, there are some very neat interstate exits where the local chains Jack’s and Milo’s duel it out alongside their better-known national rivals like Burger King and Wendy’s.

Jack’s isn’t essential eating, of course, but it’s always interesting to me to visit a restaurant like this that I can’t get at home. Driving I-20 through Alabama takes you past about a dozen or more exits where travelers can sample one. I think it’s worth a visit once in a while.

Starkville, Mississippi – part two

So I’ve been talking about our trip into the Deep South and finding some pretty good food along the way. Nothing in Mississippi had really completely knocked me for a loop, but Starkville might just not be the right place in the state. All the evidence points towards the Delta region, or Hattiesburg, being full of interesting places to eat.

But that’s not to say that Starkville is completely without charms. We certainly didn’t have any bad meals here, although the stunning number of crummy national fast food joints on Highway 12 will make anybody slowly shake their head. The first full day was pretty good, but the discoveries of the second day were even better. Continue reading “Starkville, Mississippi – part two” →

Starkville, Mississippi – part one

Not long after moving to Starkville, Mississippi, my brother-in-law Karl joined the local chapter of a fraternal organization. On our first evening there, we got to meet some of his friends from that group when we went to their usual Thursday evening post-meeting dinner retreat, the Central Station Grill. This is one of the city’s nicer, in the “clean and upscale” department, restaurants, the sort of place that most undergraduates at Mississippi State probably “take” their parents for a nice dinner in the hopes that Dad’ll get the tab. The food here was pretty good, but my children had better not try that scam with me. Wherever they go to college, and I hope that they will go far away and cultivate memories unencumbered by my own, they should know to “take” me to someplace with a lot more soul than this. Continue reading “Starkville, Mississippi – part one” →