Red Burrito, Woodstock GA

About a week and a half ago, I got so aggravated with this girl that I used to date that I have to tell you about it. Now, you might think that “girls that Grant used to date” would not necessarily be on top of the list of people whom I would want to stop and visit with my newborn baby on the way home from the hospital, and normally, you would be right. However, I’ve stayed friendly with Jennifer for years, even if we are not as close as we once were, and she’s known Marie since before Marie and I began dating. Jennifer manages a comic book store in Woodstock, which is not at all bad as far as Diamond catalog stores go. It is downright terrific for anybody interested in buying modern comic books and superhero tchotchkes, although sadly lacking in boxes full of embarrassing dot matrix Star Trek fanzines, untranslated Brazilian James Bond comics, indefineable weird Japanese things and stacks of 1960s British newspaper comics, and there’s not a single 1970s National Lampoon with since-unreprinted Gahan Wilson pages in the joint. That’s why I never visit. Screw Iron Man, I’m into the good stuff.

Well, since I wanted to show off the baby, and since Jennifer’s store was on the way home, and since Jennifer’s more than midway through her own pregnancy, I suggested to Marie that we swing by and see whether she was in. Marie, sleepy but still glowing, agreed that we should, and so we stopped by for a few minutes to say hello and brag about our youngun. Jennifer invited us to come by the next day for Free Comic Book Day, we waved goodbye, pulled back out onto Towne Lake Parkway, and I did a complete double-take because I thought I saw something quite unexpected. After we got the baby back home and settled, I went online and confirmed it. Yes, the Hardee’s people have opened a Red Burrito in Woodstock.

Red Burrito is the fast-food Mexican chain run by CKE, which is the parent corporation of Carl’s Jr. They bought Hardee’s in 1997 and seemed to shut down about a third of them, which was just about the closest thing to a mercy killing I’ve ever seen in the restaurant business. This is actually a point I’ve been meaning to come back to for ages; remind me to tell you about Chicken Express one day. Anyway, noticing the success of their rival Yum! Brands and their dual-branded Taco Bell / KFC / Long John Silver / A&W stores, CKE decided to make similar restaurants with double menus. On the far side of the Rockies, there are Carl’s Jr. stores dual-branded with Green Burrito, and on this side, there are Hardee’s dual-branded with Red Burrito. These have steadfastedly avoided the Atlanta area until about a month ago. The first two Red Burritos have finally opened in Lithia Springs and in Woodstock. There’s another one up the road outside of Rome.

So the next evening, the older children and I went back to the comic store for my son to get a free Sonic the Hedgehog book, and for me to express my aggravation. I could not believe that, knowing how I feel about small-market regional fast food, she would work one parking lot’s distance from this place and not tell me that it had opened. Jennifer, kindly, explained that she remembered well how I feel about regional, small market sodas, but had no idea that I cared about regional fast food chains. I suspect that she was drawing a polite veil of no-longer-caring-in-the-slightest about how, for years, I have gone on about White Castle and Whataburger and Jack in the Box.

Oh, all right, so I wasn’t really aggravated, but I get so few opportunities to aggravate other people by showing up at their place of business and yammering on about fast food chains when they’re exhausted and tired of working a big promotional day with hundreds of extra visitors these days. How could I resist?

So, aggravation duly caused, the children and I went up to finally try a Red Burrito. I first heard of them ages ago when, curious about some point or other, I looked up Hardee’s on Wikipedia and saw the reference. I’ve since seen a billboard for one on I-95 in northern Florida, and we drove past one in Asheville when we were last there, but my curiosity over a fast food taco wasn’t enough to pull me from our schedule in one of America’s best food cities.

And the result was, well, about what you’d expect. The burrito itself – I ordered chicken – was not bad, although the thin, light green sauce that the poor kids behind the counter claimed was guacamole was pretty laughable. The chips, rice and beans were salty and perfectly acceptable for this sort of food. It’s better than Taco Bell, whatever that’s worth. It’s multiple orders of magnitude better than that godawful Taco Bell in Canton.

However, these tacos here are just absolutely pathetic. I’ve never seen something so sad. They just drizzled a few crumbs of ground beef into the bottom of a shell, added six or seven shreds of lettuce and a baby’s handful of cheese and served it up with, literally, two fingers’ width of space remaining between the cheese and the top of the shell. I ordered two tacos and I very much doubt that I got as much filling as I would have in just one from Taco Bell. Now, whomever is in charge of quality control here needs to step in and do something about this. They hired a simply terrific high schooler to take our order, but whomever is in the back actually making the food needs to go build ships in bottles if he’s that obsessed with very small things.

My curiosity has been sated. The food here is pretty good. “Better than Taco Bell” isn’t much of a recommendation, especially when it’s still not even close to being on par with Del Taco. Still, it’s nice to enjoy something new, isn’t it?

Firehouse Subs, Kennesaw GA

I was reading about how Firehouse Subs recently got over a huge slump in year-to-year sales by hiring the same ad company that Papa John’s Pizza uses, and convincing all of their franchisees to pony up a larger-than-normal royalty to pay for all the radio ads they were going to run. I’m going to suggest that learning stories like this and getting a broad view of the restaurant industry this way is no bad thing; almost all of our dining out dollars are spent at locally-owned businesses, and I rarely pay any attention to the corporate world of small chains like this one, with 415 small stores in twenty states.

In fact, while the franchises did apparently see nearly-double-digit year-to-year growth – and the temptation to turn this sentence into an impenetrable parody of incoherent marketing bafflegam is a great one – its message was still completely lost on potential customers like me. I very rarely listen to commercial radio, and when I do, I switch over to a college station the instant I hear an ad start. So it wasn’t the Arbitron market synergy that got us back into a Firehouse, it was my son. We let him pick someplace in Marietta, wherever he wanted, for his birthday.

We used to eat at Firehouse from time to time, but got out of the habit around the time that Marie moved in. Since she can cook so darn well, there wasn’t much need to go out and eat as often, and so when we did, it was usually to someplace a little more special and local. In time, Dagwood’s, which is somehow still hanging in there, became our go-to place for sandwiches, and I don’t think I’d been to a Firehouse in almost four years.

In the meantime, I missed out on what could be the start of a very fun new development: they have introduced their own branded soft drink.

The first Firehouse Subs was opened in Jacksonville in 1994 by Robin and Chris Sorenson, who, like their father, had previously served their community as firefighters. Honestly, there’s an artificial over-emphasis on firefighting memorabilia and imagery, down to the dalmatian-spotted tabletops, that comes across as hopelessly manufactured and downright silly. Calling your best-selling sandwich a “hook and ladder” is one thing, but serving up the kids’ meals in a red plastic hat is just ridiculous.

Happily, the food is still quite good, impossible orders of magnitude better than competitors like Subway or Blimpie. There’s a short delay in getting sandwiches out to guests, as the meats and cheeses are all steamed before being placed in the buns. The result is tasty and different, especially because this chain does not scrimp in the quality of its ingredients.

Probably the best thing on the menu here is the meatball sub, which is served with delicious melted cheese and a really good, mildly spicy tomato sauce. My kids each had one of these. Marie enjoyed a steak and cheese with mushrooms, which was nowhere close to the best in the city but not bad, and I had a club with turkey, ham and bacon. Even though it has been years since I was last here, I remembered that I enjoy topping my sandwich with the house hot sauce. It’s not especially hot, more of a mild and sweet brown sauce made from datil peppers, but it goes extremely well with a ham sandwich. For guests wanting something much spicier, the chain emphasizes the “fire” in their name by way of a remarkable collection of bottled hot sauces, some of which are just stupid hot with scotch bonnets and habaneros and overpower the sandwich.

Yet it was the soda fountain that got my attention on this trip. Since it was for his birthday, I told my son he could have a combo meal with a drink. (We almost always just get water at restaurants, to save on money and calories. Exceptions are sometimes made for sweet tea with barbecue, but this is a rule that children, all children, really loathe.) He noticed that Firehouse has its own branded beverage in the fountain – a cherry limeade that guests can make even more tart by adding limes of their own. I thought this was a really terrific idea and it tastes quite good, too. I hope this is a successful move by the company and it leads to more of their own drinks.

I’m certainly going to remember the cherry limeade when it gets really hot in a couple of months. With the Chilito’s next door selling their wonderful horchata, I’m not going to be sure where I should stop to get something to drink.

(There are apparently something like twenty Firehouse Subs locations in the Atlanta area. Identical experiences can be had at each of them, but, corporate shenanigans being what they are, curious soda fans interested in their branded limeade might do well to phone before driving to a store, in case their home office has pulled it.)

Taco Cabana, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

You can’t miss this restaurant at the intersection of Piedmont and Monroe. It’s the place that looks like the two fellows from Miami Vice are about to beat up on the guy bringing in all the cocaine in his DeLorean. Taco Cabana has always been this garish, and that’s part of why they spent about six years in court defending their look.

In the late eighties and early nineties, this spot was occupied by a nearly-identical restaurant called Two Pesos. This was the only Atlanta location of a chain that had started in Houston in 1985. I ate here several times when I was in high school and when I came home during my first year of college. In fact, my very first car – and here’s an odd memory – died for good one night after a meal here. It was a wonderful, gigantic 1979 Oldsmobile Delta 88 and that great beauty would have driven me to Europe and back, had I asked. I was having car trouble all day, and fretted with two friends at Two Pesos what I would do if it couldn’t be repaired. Well, it couldn’t. It cranked twice more, once when I left the restaurant after a horrible, grinding shriek of metal, and once, for the final time, after it conked out again at a traffic light down the road. So Two Pesos was my last meal with that Oldsmobile.

What I didn’t know then was that Two Pesos was already years into a losing battle defending their business. Two Pesos had been started by some businessmen, allied with a former manager of one of San Antonio’s Taco Cabana stores, in 1985. Within a couple of years, Two Pesos had blanketed Texas with locations, and the much slower-growing Taco Cabana found themselves facing competition from a lookalike copycat which had established themselves in cities like Houston and Dallas, flinging locations as far afield as Colorado and Georgia to establish themselves ahead of where Taco Cabana could go.

So Taco Cabana sued Two Pesos for ripping off their look, feel, design, store layout and menu to such a degree that customers were left confused as to which came first. The Supreme Court eventually weighed in Taco Cabana’s favor. Left with a lower court order to completely reconstruct every one of their existing stores, Two Pesos elected instead to sell out to Taco Cabana. The Atlanta store was remade and remodeled into a Taco Cabana over the course of about an afternoon.

I’m not sure why I never popped back by the business, whatever its name, after that fateful evening when my car cranked for the last time. I remember they always had decent food at great prices, but the road just never took me by again. Well, not when I was ready for a meal there, anyway. Years and years passed and I read about the slugfest that the two restaurants had in court and figured that I should stop by again. It might make a readable story, if nothing else. Or something weird might happen.

Now, one thing that I didn’t like about my trip to Taco Cabana is that they don’t have chips, although they offer them. For ninety-nine cents, you get a pair of flour tortillas that you can rip into small pieces and eat with their tasty salsas. Somebody should tell that guy behind the register that those aren’t chips. So I had two tortillas along with a platter of two chicken tacos, rice and beans. I asked for one hard shell and one soft in order to sample some different flavors, and thought that chicken was very good for this sort of food. There was nothing very unusual or weird in my meal, but it was a step or two up from what you’d get at a similar place, and priced right. I liked the layout and the big patio space, which is probably quite fun and relaxing in warmer weather.

So then I went to my car and it would not start. I turned the key and nothing happened. The whole electrical system was not responding.

I know this must be impossible to believe, but twenty-one years after my Oldsmobile sputtered and died after I had a meal in this building, I came here for the first time and the hotdamned restaurant killed my Camry. You want to tell me the odds of that?

Turned out I had one of those very rare car problems that I can actually solve. One of the battery terminals had a loose connection. I avoided a freakout, shook my head in disbelief, popped the hood, jiggled it, bit my lip, tried again, thanked God and drove, nerves wracked, to my brother, who spent a few minutes replacing bits and tightening things and making sure I was roadworthy again.

I figure Taco Cabana is surely the safest restaurant in the city now. My car’s had problems there twice. It’s like Garp buying that house in John Irving’s novel after an airplane crashes into it. There’s just no way in the universe I could possibly have car problems there three times, right?

Stonewall’s BBQ, Braselton GA

When I planned our eight-meal, 600-mile trip through South Carolina, I also divided up the driving chores, optimistic that Marie and I would each handle about half of the load. However, I noticed that she was really getting tired while I was driving back down I-85 from Charlotte. She passed on a snack at Spartanburg’s Del Taco, was so beat by the time we arrived at The Beacon that she wasn’t sure whether she wanted lettuce on her hamburger, and, taking the wheel for what was planned to be the 120-mile leg from Spartanburg to our final restaurant destination in Braselton, Georgia, she took a deep, deep breath and gave it her best, but still pulled over before we left the state, completely exhausted and unable to stay awake. She did a terrific job, but this road trip took an awful lot out of her. I took over the driving and she closed her very patient eyes for another well-deserved nap. She missed a really pretty sunset. Continue reading “Stonewall’s BBQ, Braselton GA” →

Del Taco, Spartanburg SC (CLOSED)

Del Taco left the Atlanta market eight years ago and – no kidding – I have been missing it ever since. I have explained that I allow myself one locally-available fast food weakness, Krystal. If Del Taco were to move back into Atlanta, I’d enjoy one last styrofoam container of chili cheese fries eaten with a red plastic fork and sadly wave goodbye to Krystal, because I love Del Taco and that would be that. So when I learned that there was one in Spartanburg, my carefully-crafted seven-meal trip swelled to eight. There was just no way I was going to drive past a Del Taco without stopping. Man, was it ever good. Often times, almost all the time, the memory cheats on you, but Del Taco is, somehow, as good as I remember it. Continue reading “Del Taco, Spartanburg SC (CLOSED)” →

Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken, Rock Hill SC

So the first three meals on our day trip through the Carolinas had been, one after another, each better than the one before. Something had to give, and it did. When I looked over the map, it looked like the only population center of note between Columbia and Charlotte on I-77 was the town of Rock Hill. I looked over South Carolina’s listing on Roadfood.com to see whether they suggested anyplace worth stopping in that town, and found a chicken place called Lee’s. I penciled that in and moved on, not realizing until later that the place was not quite what I thought I would find at Roadfood.com. Continue reading “Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken, Rock Hill SC” →

K Cafe, Alpharetta GA (CLOSED)

A few years ago, when I was a cubicle dweller in Alpharetta, I went out to lunch almost every day at one of the approximately seventeen thousand restaurants along Windward Parkway. Now, many people who enjoy talking and writing about food don’t really pay attention to this corridor, as you will find very few independently-owned restaurants, or examples of farm-to-table or sustainability or the latest foodie trends, or even anything with a very local flavor. This should not be surprising, because this is a lunchtime corridor for office workers like I was at the time. Area residents simply don’t come back to this strip for dinner time, meaning restaurants that want to try out here have to budget pretty closely and cross fingers for a lunch rush or die. The turnover in this area is absolutely brutal. I worked here for a little less than three years, and I bet the restaurant turnover was close to 20%.

Most of these are chains, of course, but what I have found incredibly interesting are the number of out-of-town chains that experiment with a store here first before trying elsewhere in the city. Some of these may be franchisees hoping to build into the Atlanta market or some might be company-owned and considering a footprint in Atlanta. There have been a couple of successes; I believe that the first Five Guys and Lenny’s Sub Shops in this region were on Windward. Z Pizza is still hanging on, with one of its two Atlanta locations here, and Tacone Flavor Grill, from California, has had its only Atlanta store here for about five years*. There have been several more fascinating failures. Apple Spice Junction, Taxi’s Hamburgers, Tin Star and Logan Farms are all out-of-towners who have tried to set up shop here on this stretch of road and bit the dust. If, like me, you are intrigued by regional chains, then there was usually something of interest on Windward to catch your eye. At least there was in 2006-2009, anyway.

Windward can’t even keep a barbecue place open. I was not surprised that the very popular Pig n’ Chik – not popular with me, mind you, but it has plenty of fans – closed its Windward store recently, as they might have opened in the single worst location in the history of real estate. Big D’s Barbecue, from up in Dawsonville, only had a location here for about eight months. Even One Star Ranch, at one time a baseball’s throw south of Windward on Highway 9, shuttered some weeks ago.

I had been intending for ages to see what was going on up at exit 11, but never got around to it. I did myself a huge disservice in not heading back that way, because the very best restaurant on Windward Parkway, the locally-owned Red Hen, closed in December. Now this place really was special, and they cooked up a really amazing hamburger, easily one of the best in the region. When I heard about that, I followed a link or two to the notice about the closure on a blog called Roots in Alpharetta. I enjoyed this blogger’s writing and continued to see what he had to say about the town where I used to work. There, I found something quite remarkable.

You know Krystal, right? The only local fast food place that I’ll eat, and don’t you judge me, right? Since October, they have been quietly, and without promotion, hype or commentary, testing a new “fast casual concept” on Windward Parkway, in the strip once occupied by a Carvel ice cream store. It is called K Cafe, and I just had to get back to my old stomping grounds and try this place.

I popped in on Thursday just after the lunch rush, and had a surprisingly tasty burger, but the most impressive things here were the service and the ketchup, which I am still loving and tasting. It might not last beyond the prototype stage, but the restaurant opened with an incredibly neat concept: ketchup of the month. Apart from your basic, “classic” ketchup, if you will, K Cafe is testing a rotation of different flavors to go along with it. This time out, it’s a chipotle ketchup which is just amazing, and goes very well with the fries. These, incidentally, proved to be the only minor disappointment of the meal. Basic cookie-cutter shoestring fries, these were not at all like the wonderfully chewy and potato-heavy fries you get at a Krystal. That chipotle ketchup would taste even better with those.

The service was first-rate. The girl at the register asked whether it was my first visit and showed off some of the sample foods prepared and resting in a refrigerated display case along with the desserts. K Cafe is not too different from a Panera or Rising Roll, just with burgers as well. They do a variety of sandwiches and salads, all of which have Moe’s-like silly names. She recommended their chicken salad, but I just wanted their basic burger. While they do serve traditional Krystals here if you want them, the patties on their proper burgers here are somewhat thicker, you’ll be glad to hear, and come fully dressed – with diced tomatoes, oddly – on ciabatta bread.

The other staffers who came by, including a manager who introduced himself, were similarly attentive and good-natured. I think that everybody is aware that this place is under a corporate microscope and under pressure to do well. With that in mind, Windward might prove to be a reasonable location for a place with this kind of menu. It really feels like a “lunch place,” something for quick, simple, tasty and inexpensive meals. Most of the sandwiches and burgers, which come with a side, cost about six bucks, so it’s perfectly reasonable and perfectly tasty. Plus there’s the wonderful novelty factor of trying someplace corporate-but-unique. If the concept fails (see below), I can still tell my grandkids about it, just like some folk can talk about those long extinct Kentucky Roast Beef stores that the Colonel once attempted.

Now, some no-frills restaurants are able to make the transition from junky fast food to something a little better. Whether Krystal has managed it won’t be for me to say; some corporate synergy bipartisan executive board steering committee will figure that out, but I think that it’s a success. On the other side of the equation, there’s the Taco Stand. I heard that this favorite from Athens had opened a store in Alpharetta, returning to this market after their Buckhead store closed a couple of football seasons ago, probably in anticipation of how badly the Bulldogs would end up playing. So I looked it up and swung by after finishing up at K Cafe, intending to grab a couple of two buck tacos and some chips and salsa. Heh.

The Taco Stand’s new place is three exits south, off Mansell Road, where restaurants usually live a little longer. Around North Point Parkway and the Old Alabama Road Connector, there are lots of homes, apartments and malls and movie theaters to keep families interested in the evenings, and so the restaurant turnover between exits 8 and 9 does not appear to be quite as murderous as on exit 11. I smiled broadly as I spotted the Taco Stand’s classic Milledge Avenue location’s lettering and pulled in. There was a car parked out front with the engine running as I snapped a couple of pictures. The driver, a twentysomething girl, was already waiting in the airlock at the host station of the Taco Stand for somebody to notice her.

If you figured that things were going to go spectacularly wrong at the point that I used the words “airlock,” “host station” and “Taco Stand” in the same sentence, you figured right. That evening, I was telling my family about my trip over a wonderful supper of lemon pepper chicken and rice that Marie had prepared. My son had already told me that he wanted to go check out this new Taco Stand. I got to this point in the anecdote, and when the words “host station” passed my lips, Marie visibly winced and my son’s head instantly fell, his chin hitting his chest.

So anyway, this girl and I waited for almost two minutes before somebody popped his head in from the dining room and asked “Uhhh, two?” The girl replied “I just need a to-go menu.” The fellow said that he’d be right back.

The dining room, classy, spotless, and perhaps a quarter full, looked so spectacularly unlike a Taco Stand that I started looking around for that Mr. Spock with the beard. There was a second door, perhaps to an eighteen-and-up smoking section with a bar. “This must be the upscale Taco Stand,” I said to the girl, who said that this place definitely needed to get its customer service together. She gave it one more minute and left. I learned later that the store’s grand opening was actually a couple of days off, and that they were just doing a soft opening to work out the kinks. I wish these guys the best of luck – I love the Stand – but I gave them one more minute and left as well. Losing two guests to an inattentive host – that’s the sort of kink that needs working out. Just as soon as you figure out what in the name of Herschel Walker a Taco Stand is doing with a host station in the first place.

*(2/26/11) Tacone evidently closed about three weeks after I wrote up this entry.

(8/3/11) Sadly, Krystal seems to have ended this experiment, and closed this prototype store at the end of July. They scrubbed the concept’s website and Facebook page almost instantly, suggesting that this experiment was not successful. What a shame!