Bar-B-Q King, Charlotte NC

A couple of weeks ago, the great city of Charlotte found itself at the center of a really dumb political debate centered around the quality of its barbecue. The 2012 Democratic National Convention will be held in Charlotte, and Michelle Obama was quoted as saying that, among other reasons she was looking forward to the event, she hoped to enjoy the city’s “great barbecue.” Cue The Charlotte Observer, who issued an editorial skeptical of Mrs. Obama’s quote, as everybody knows that their city has no great barbecue. To get the best stuff, you have to drive an hour north to Lexington. Continue reading “Bar-B-Q King, Charlotte NC” →

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” →

Mamie’s Kitchen, Conyers GA

A few months ago, when we learned that Marie was pregnant, we knew that our long road trips would have to be curtailed at some point. Sitting in a car for hours and hours and then taking a long hike through some state park’s nature trail is a bit much in the third trimester, even for somebody as enthusiastic as Marie. I suggested that we take the spring off from road tripping, but before we do that, we’d have two last long drives. We’d do one day this month, and then go back to Saint Simons Island to visit her parents in March before raising the drawbridge. I started charting out our February trip before Christmas, because I’m impatient that way. What I came up with was pretty eyebrow-raising: I estimated that the 613 mile trip would take us just over fourteen hours and see us stopping by eight different restaurants in three states. So for the next couple of weeks, we’ll be recounting those stops.

At least we were by ourselves. We had the whole day to just be together, talk, hold hands, and enjoy some occasional “companionable silence,” as P.D. James terms it, with the rowdy children spending the day with my mother. The kids missed some very good meals and one or two that did not completely thrill me, but even the least of the stops was interesting and curious, and I’m pretty sure that we’ll be returning to one place in South Carolina many more times in the years to come, especially if we can make a move to Asheville in a couple of years and find this place about a seven-minute detour on a trip from there back to the Georgia coast to see her family.

First up was one of the remaining destinations on our list of Georgia restaurants reviewed on Roadfood.com. We had thirteen to go for a full set, and one of these is a breakfast joint, Mamie’s Kitchen in the suburban town of Conyers. I always hate driving out I-20 this way. I used to know this guy in high school who lived off Evans Mill Road and pretended he was the nephew of Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Jim Shooter in order to con gullible chumps like us into thinking we could start a comic book company. He called me on the phone once, irate that “some Christians” were misunderstanding the lyric of a song by a popular eighties group called Mr. Mister, and making it all about God and stuff. Turns out he was the one who misunderstood them, and that the line really is not “Kyrie lays upon the roads that I must travel.” I mention this because, for the umpteenth damn time driving east on I-20, I got that stupid song stuck in my head. This time it was particularly awful and all the time we were looking for Mamie’s Kitchen, I was singing that blasted chorus to myself.

Mamie’s Kitchen has been around for decades, selling really inexpensive breakfasts, and it seems that most of them go out the drive-through window. They do offer a breakfast buffet, but it seems that many people just enjoy stopping in for a biscuit or two and relaxing in what must surely be one of the most comfortable and relaxed little getaways that I have seen recently. Here, a small early morning meal in the company of friends is just a perfect way to get the day started.

We had the good fortune to visit at the same time as a table of regulars were enjoying what appeared to be a usual Saturday morning ritual for them. Four men, one about our age and the others a good deal older, were enjoying their umpeenth cups of coffee and talking in happy voices about anything and everything. On a first-name basis with all the ladies who work there, they playfully bantered back and forth about refills and harmless flirtation and foolishness. Maybe I am an eavesdropping jerk, but I just love people-watching. It does me good to know that I’m in the company of happy people.

Marie and I each had a biscuit, hers with chicken and mine with deliciously salty country ham. The biscuits were warm from the oven and so delicately fresh that they’d have liked to disintegrate with a touch. I would have gladly had another, but we really couldn’t linger and really should not have indulged in more, for we had a second breakfast awaiting us two and a half hours down the road. So we left the table to its conversation about the Holy Land and whether one of them was going to whup their waitress or whether she would be whupping him first – my odds were on that outcome – and made our way. The sun was even good enough to rise while we were inside, allowing me to photograph the building. The morning was off to a remarkably good start.

Barbecue Kitchen, College Park GA

We finished up what I termed as our barbecue road trip two Saturdays ago at a little place in College Park hidden just off the interstate. It’s a very old little joint called Barbecue Kitchen, and I had never heard of it until the good folk at Roadfood.com added it to their small list of reviewed restaurants here in Georgia. It’s very easy to find, just off I-85 going south after the Downtown Connector has split, and I am surprised, now that I have been here, that I never heard of it before. In all the many conversations and lists about barbecue in the Atlanta area, this place has remained one of the city’s best-kept secrets.

It must be said that, however, that my kids didn’t enjoy it at all, and rather wished that it had remained a secret. On the other hand, happily, I had a simple, good meal here and quite enjoyed the experience. Several months ago, I wrote a chapter about The Old Hickory House in Dunwoody, reflecting how this fading restaurant is not at all what it used to be. Barbecue Kitchen is exactly how the Old Hickory House used to be. It was like stepping back in time thirty years to when that place was packed, loud and vibrant.

While my meal was indeed very good, I really was not able to finish it. We tried sharing plates and small portions at our earlier destinations, but Barbecue Kitchen absolutely leveled us with the amount of food that they pile in front of guests. I coined the phrase “insane metric buttload of food” to describe how much was put in front of me. Even if I was not already satisfied by our small meals in middle Georgia, this would have been too much for me to finish. This place gives you free refills on your vegetables, probably with the understanding that nobody’s going to be hungry enough after a first course to still be wanting more.

So this time out, we decided that I would order a barbecue plate, and Marie would get three veggies, and the kids would each get a single side and a dessert. Now, maybe I was stymied by pork-goggles or something, but that looks like a really gigantic pile of food that our server, a delightful lady who, saucily, would not divulge how long she’d been with the restaurant, but conceded that her husband would often bring her to supper here when they were dating, laid down in front of me. I wouldn’t really call any of it exceptional, but very good comfort food. I enjoyed the stew best of all. The sauce, very thick and amazingly sweet, got Marie’s seal of approval. She also enjoyed her green beans and creamed corn.

For their desserts, the kids each had a slice of cake. My son had coconut and my daughter had red velvet. They had been very good on this road trip and deserved them, I thought. Normally, the cliche is that you can get dessert only if you clean your plate. On this trip, nobody cleaned their plates. We were all completely stuffed. The lesson learned, perhaps, is that the next time we do a little eating tour, we need to space the restaurants out a little bit more. Two small meals and one gigantic one in such a short afternoon simply does not work!

Piggie Park, Thomaston GA

Two Saturdays ago, I was about as sick of snow as it is possible to be. I’m sure I was not the only one. The winter storm that walloped Atlanta earlier this month was the biggest in eighteen years. We spent three days trapped in our house, and I didn’t get back to work at all until the Friday, and then I had to climb over a danged fence just to get to where I needed to be, because the employee parking lot was inaccessible. Long story. Anyway, if you’re a local, you have your own tale of woe and boredom and board games, and if you’re not, here’s the confirmation that Atlantans just don’t handle snow well at all.

So by Saturday, I was screaming to be outdoors somewhere without any white stuff anywhere, so I charted out a day trip down to middle Georgia, where Marie and the kids and I could stretch our legs and enjoy some sun. So naturally, then, because we’re contrary, the first place we went didn’t require us to get out of the car and actually do any leg-stretching, as it was a drive-in. I planned this day trip to hit two more of the Georgia restaurants featured at Roadfood.com, and the first of these was down in what some of the sillier locals and billboards call “T-Town,” a little place called Thomaston.

Thomaston’s a bit of a drive from Cobb County. We took I-75 through the city and exited on Tara Boulevard, just a few exits beyond the southside perimeter, and continued down US 19 for about fifty miles. With the exception of a single bookstore which I’ll mention in the next chapter and the impressive edifice of Atlanta Motor Speedway near Griffin, there’s not a heck of a lot of anything other than food on this road these days, but not a lot of traffic or backup, either. (There is, incidentally, a magnificent barbecue shack called Southern Pit which we really love, and will revisit for this blog on a visit later this year.) It was a very nice day for a drive in the country, especially after being cooped up indoors for so long, although I sort of wish it was a degree or three warmer so we could have had the windows down.

Piggie Park first opened about sixty years ago, and while they serve burgers and milkshakes, this place is, with good reason, best known for its sliced barbecue pork. This was absolutely exceptional, and the best of the three barbecue joints that we visited that afternoon. The pork was so moist, yet not at all greasy, and with a lovely smoky taste. The sauce was the traditionally dark ketchup and vinegar combo of middle Georgia.

Since we would be visiting three restaurants in a (barely) four-hour block, we broke up the orders so that we could all sample the goodies at each place without, in theory, getting completely stuffed. At Piggie Park, the four of us split a barbecue plate with fries and slaw, one sandwich with a side of fries and two bowls of Brunswick stew. Everything was extremely good, and we all loved the fries, which, unlike the pork, really were delightfully greasy and full of flavor.

I think the restaurant is definitely worth an hour and a bit’s drive; I just wish there was some more to do there. I’m not sure what else there is to do in Upson County. Maybe sometime when the weather is nicer, we can justify a trip out this way to a nice state park or something and do a little hiking. Since a trip to this drive-in won’t even give us the exercise of going from the car to the building’s front door, we’ll need to do something else.

Our next stop was a few miles back up the road, at a place we drove past on our way to Piggie Park. More about that in the next chapter…

Mary Mac’s Tea Room, Atlanta GA

I had been wanting to go to Mary Mac’s for a really long time. It’s the last surviving example of a brief late ’40s trend of restaurants opened by war widows looking to both stay afloat and remain a little classy, so they called their establishments “tea rooms” in the hopes of attracting a better sort of clientele than the lowlifes who went to juke joints and meat-and-threes. This fad did not last, but this one place on Ponce, started by Mary MacKenzie, survived. It is no longer in family hands – MacKenzie sold it to Margaret Lupo in 1962, who in turn sold the business to John Ferrell in the mid-nineties – but it certainly thrives. It’s one of Atlanta’s best-known destination restaurants, a place that turns a traditional meat and three into a very classy experience, and one of the very best examples of southern cooking in north Georgia, with some really amazing food.

The Saturday after my dad passed, I took Neal up on his offer to get out and relax a little. He had the goal of trying to track down a bizarre little promotional tie-in to the TV series Fringe, a short-pressed LP hiding out in various record stores, so we went by a couple of the few places in Atlanta left that still sell the darn things with no luck, and stopped at Mary Mac’s for lunch. There is a small parking lot behind the restaurant, but it fills up almost instantly. Diners will have better luck parking along Myrtle Street and enjoying a short walk.

The staff at Mary Mac’s enjoys welcoming new guests with a small, complementary bowl of pot likker. This is the slightly salty liquid left behind after boiling greens, and it starts meals here off just right. Everything here is incredibly tasty and fresh. I had a small house salad with thousand island dressing, and it looked and tasted like those vegetables were still in the ground the night before, and Neal and I shared an appetizer of fried green tomatoes. These were truly wonderful, easily the equal of the fabulous ones prepared at Blue Willow Inn and The Fickle Pickle, and served with a very light and tasty remoulade.

My meal was very good, or, at least, the sides were. I was indecisive about what to get, briefly considered the meat loaf, and finally settled on some chicken tenders. These were perfectly decent, but honestly, I should have just ordered a veggie plate. I keep telling myself that and never listen. I had pickled beets and the mac and cheese, both of which were just amazing, and Brunswick stew, which was also very good. Neal, on the other hand, really scored with his chicken livers, which he says were every bit as good as the exceptional ones at Doug’s Place in Emerson. Like me, he ordered one side too many, but enjoyed what he could finish.

We were finishing off our meal and basking in satisfaction when a woman who looked to be a little ways older than us but still bouncing with a spring in her step came up behind Neal and put her hand on his shoulder before asking how we were doing and how our food was. This unexpected burst of familiarity probably wouldn’t pass muster up north. Neal said later that he thought it was some relation of his coming to say hey.

She explained that she liked to come around and make sure everything was okay, and that while she wasn’t the one who cooked our food – I had asked whether we had her to thank – she did sample everything in the kitchen. While I joked around about how that explained why each of my beets had a bite taken already – a joke from a color Popeye cartoon that I doubt anybody else remembers – she went right to work rubbing Neal’s shoulders with such vigor that his eyes about popped out of his head.

She left her card and went onto another table. The back of her T-shirt read “I got my belly filled and my back rubbed at Mary Mac’s.” Free pot likker and shoulder rubs. They must want repeat business or something.

Nu-Way, Macon GA

Among long-term Maconites, it’s an open secret that whatever your opinion of Georgia’s two best-known hot dog empires, the big one up in Atlanta borrowed a thing or two from the original down here in middle Georgia. Nu-Way is one of the oldest existing restaurants in the state, having opened its first store on Cotton Avenue in 1916 under the aegis of James Mollis. The small chain, presently at eleven stores around Macon and Warner Robins, is still very famous for its grilled wieners and, of all things, Coke served over a flaky ice that’s pretty familiar to Atlantans. Since Nu-Way is having some considerable success with its expansion throughout three counties, it has more in common with a regional chain like Pal’s Sudden Service in northeastern Tennessee than with a single-location downtown hot dog stand, even though that’s kind of how Marie and I view it. Continue reading “Nu-Way, Macon GA” →