Edna’s Restaurant, Chatsworth GA

I went a whole eight days without going anywhere outside my normal travel radius and just about went crazy. As Marie begins emotionally “nesting” and wanting to get settled and make a safe and comfortable place for the baby, perhaps I’ve been reacting against it. I spend a little free time looking over Google Maps and wondering where we might go next. Then I start planning and charting and I’m left with more looping trips through Alabama, through Tennessee, through the Carolinas, than we may ever end up taking. Continue reading “Edna’s Restaurant, Chatsworth GA” →

Classic Que in Griffin and Fayetteville GA

I remember our first trip to Southern Pit very well. It was May 28, 2009, and while we weren’t blogging yet, I was nevertheless using Roadfood.com to find new and fun places to eat on our way on our trips down to Saint Simons Island and back. On that trip, Marie and the kids and I stopped in for lunch on our way to go get married, which is why it’s fairly easy to remember the date. I’m good about remembering the day we got hitched (the 30th); Marie’s birthday, slightly less so, on account of her decision to never enter that date anyplace like Facebook where I get a ~~cheat~~ friendly reminder. We had a huge lunch that day, and Marie capped things off with some delicious blackberry cobbler. I later waxed hyperbolic about how awesome this place was, and returned a few months later with Matt and our friend Kevin, shortly before he flew back out to California to resume work in academia.

As we’re entering the last few weeks of pregnancy, I struck a compromise between our twin desires to get out and drive and yet not stray too far from home. I’ve worked up a pair of short afternoon barbecue tours for Marie and I to enjoy small road trips without exhausting her. The first one is what I termed the “West Central Georgia Tour,” and was originally intended to bring us to two of the remaining stops on our goal of all the Roadfood.com-reviewed sites in the state: Southern Pit and Melear’s Barbecue in Fayetteville. Unfortunately, or not, considering its low reputation of late, Melear’s closed in January. So the revised plan saw us driving down I-75 to Griffin, then going north and west to Fayetteville for Speedi-Pig, and then further west to Sprayberry’s in Newnan before returning north on I-85. By chance, and not design, all three of the places we visited are reviewed on the wonderfully fun Chopped Onion, one of my favorite sites for finding barbecue joints and hot dog stands.

Should any of my Atlanta-based readers be interested in retracing our (planned) steps and doing their own simple tour as a day trip, I’d like to point out that you can also sample a McDonough barbecue restaurant called O.B.’s very easily on this path; it’s on the same exit (218) off I-75 that you take to go to Griffin. The same plan we took, with minor detours, should also take you near Uncle Frank’s in Fayetteville, Cafe Pig in Peachtree City, and Westside in Newnan. We haven’t visited any of these places yet, but you might could make a really full day of it if you’d like. Let me know how it goes for you!

By chance, the road that we ended up taking sped us past yet another place that I’d like to try one day: Dean’s Barbecue in Jonesboro. See, we had planned to drive down to exit 218 and shoot across 20 to Southern Pit, but after having dealt with insane construction traffic in north Atlanta on I-75, we were in no mood to sit and wait for all the spring break congestion that started building at exit 230. We could have sat bumper-to-bumper crawling for twelve miles, but I trusted our navigation instincts and we got off at 228 and found US 41 that way, which took us right past Dean’s. Some other day, perhaps.

We finally got to Southern Pit about forty minutes behind schedule. The place is not really easy to find; it isn’t signed very well, but if you are driving south, keep looking to your left and you should see it through the trees, its small sign dwarfed by the ones for Georgia Lawn Equipment and Toro brand mowers. Then make a U-turn across the divided highway when you get a chance.

The chopped pork here is not very dry and not especially smoky, but it is nice and pink and packed with flavor. Readers who have been following my recent series of memory issues will be pleased to hear that I ordered my sandwiches without any sauce at each business we visited, so that I could get a better taste for the meat before smothering it. They have a single sauce at Southern Pit: it’s a nice, brown tomato and vinegar mix, and is very sour and tangy.

I thought the Brunswick stew was pretty good, but was extremely pleased with the cracklin’ cornbread. I had been a little disappointed last year when I went to Harold’s and could hardly find a crackle anywhere in the bread, but this was just popping with them and it complemented the stew very well.

Sadly, I have to take a little issue with the desserts on offer. We were surprised to see blackberry cobbler available this early in the season. Marie asked about it and our server – points for truth – confirmed that they get the blackberries from Sysco. (“He said the S Word,” I whispered later.) The strawberry cream pie, he assured us, was made fresh in house, and this turned out to be quite good. Marie had a slice of that in lieu of a side for her chopped pork sandwich, and we were happy and pleased as we got on the road for stop number two.

The second visit was in Fayetteville, a town that neither of us had ever visited before. If it wasn’t painfully obvious from earlier chapters, when I’ve lived in the Atlanta area (which would be all but twelve years of my life) I’ve always been a resident of the northern ‘burbs: Smyrna, Alpharetta and Marietta. I just never got down this way very much.

A manager at Southern Pit had given us better directions to get over to Georgia-92 – just take Birdie Road west and cut off a huge corner, enjoying some very pretty land and houses along the way – but he could not have prepared us for an unexpected detour. An accident or fire shut down this highway completely, and a Fayette County sheriff sent us on a left turn. We shrugged and hoped for the best and eventually joined Georgia 85, which, happily, not only hooks up with 92 just outside the Fayetteville city limits, it is the very road – Glynn Street – that we were looking for. Unfortunately, it is marked amazingly poorly, and we did not know that it was Glynn Street until we drove right past Speedi-Pig and had to turn around.

My buddy Rex had told me that his girlfriend swears by Speedi-Pig’s Brunswick stew. It is similarly singled out by both Chopped Onion and another of my favorite barbecue blogs, the frustratingly-on-hiatus 3rd Degree Berns. None of these good people come close to telling you the real truth: this stew is amazing, easily just about the best in Georgia. It’s a toss-up between this and Harold’s, flatly. You will definitely want a large order of this stuff.

The chopped pork is diced pretty finely and, while it has a nice smoky taste to it, I did not like it nearly as much as I did Southern Pit’s meat. On the other hand, the price is just amazing. For 99 cents, you get a really good portion of meat on a “piglet” sandwich. I ordered two, but really only needed one. They have two sauces on the table, mild and hot varieties of a vinegar-tomato-pepper mix, and apparently they keep a much more potent hot sauce behind the counter, but I did not think to try it. The hot sauce wasn’t that much different from the mild, honestly. The barbecue is not at all bad here, and neither is the slaw – mayo-based and easy on the dressing – but the stew is the selling point. Run, don’t walk, to Fayetteville, friends.

I noticed that a party of four was asking one of the servers what had become of Melear’s. I expect that’s going to be a question the staff will be answering for months to come. It’s always a shame to see a much-loved, very old restaurant close its doors, even if its reviews had been pretty awful lately, and especially before I was able to try it.

We didn’t linger at either restaurant, but were still a little behind schedule as we got back on the road and headed west. More about that in the next chapter.

The Georgia Pig, Brunswick GA (CLOSED)

With a heavy heart, we woke on Saint Simons for what we plan to be the last time in Marie’s pregnancy. This was the last long, overnight trip on the calendar until the summer. I slept horribly, and she not much better, and we ended up getting a later start out of town than planned, as she was not feeling at all well that Sunday morning. So we kicked back for an extra couple of hours to let her rest before giving our goodbye hugs and getting back on the road. Continue reading “The Georgia Pig, Brunswick GA (CLOSED)” →

Yoder’s Deitsch Haus, Montezuma GA

So Thursday of last week, I went by one of the cafeterias on our to-do list of Roadfood.com-reviewed restaurants, and on Friday, the four of us visited another one. We took a trip down to visit Marie’s mother and father on Saint Simons Island, a trip that puts us within striking distance of six of the remaining restaurants on that list – five in middle Georgia and one in Savannah. I decided that we’d take the furthest one from the highway, Yoder’s Deitsch Haus. If the rumblings that I’ve been hearing about gas prices are true, I figured we should probably visit the one farthest away now, while gas is only about $3.50 a gallon. Yoder’s is about thirty miles south of Macon and then fifteen miles west of the interstate, and it’s probably worth the trip with gasoline at twice the price.

Boy, this is beautiful country down here. Much of the land in this chunk of middle Georgia around Montezuma and Americus is owned and farmed by Mennonites, as is the restaurant, bakery and country store that we visited. It’s the greenest grass you’ve ever seen, and unusually dense with black and white cows clustering around streams and milling around twisted and gnarled trees. The presence of the extended Yoder family is apparent as you drive west out State Route 26, with some of the roads that feed into the main highway sharing their name as well as the businesses. The cafeteria is set up in a large, unassuming building with a small sign out front, and staffed by servers wearing the faith’s traditional, modest dress. There’s plenty of parking, and space for buses from churches all over the state to bring in groups to eat here.

In the previous chapter, I noted that at Matthews, I had a pretty good meal. That’s not a complaint; dozens of inferior restaurants serve far worse within walking distance of that business. At Yoder’s Deitsch Haus, however, we had a genuinely terrific meal with even lower prices. I’m really glad that I didn’t do these two restaurants in reverse; I’m much more pleased to have my family share such good food with me here.

Like most cafeterias – well, apparently, I think that, prior to Matthews, it had been about six years since I’ve been in one – guests can select a salad first, and then a dessert. At Yoder’s, this could be a tremendously dangerous choice, because you could probably just sit down to four slices of pie and call it the best meal of your life. I’ll come back to that. Should you go, try and restrain yourself and select your meat and two. Marie and I each had pot roast, which was very, very good. My son had fried chicken, which was even better, and my daughter had sausages, which were evidently amazing, but she gobbled the darn things up so quickly that nobody else got to try a nibble.

But as good as the meats here are, the vegetables are even better. I was a little discouraged by the dull iceberg lettuce in the salad, but all the other veggies were quite excellent, especially the beets. I could have just had a bowl of those and the dressing. Marie says that we shouldn’t call it thousand island dressing so much as “inspired by” it, so I’ll take her lead. We each had creamed corn, which was excellent, and various other treats. My son was not as taken with his mashed potatoes, which he thought were lumpy, but my daughter loved her cheesy potatoes and Marie quite liked her green beans.

Oh, but then, these desserts. Marie had a slice of cherry pie, which she said was amazing. My daughter had chocolate, which she insisted was better. My son had peanut butter, which he not only insisted was better than either of theirs’, but even better than the peanut butter pie that he had at Zarzour’s in Chattanooga three weeks previously. True to form, he then got out his phone and updated his Facebook so that all his friends stuck in fifth period could see that, once again, my boy was out on a family trip lording his awesome desserts over them. But then I allowed my children each a single small nibble of my slice of shoofly pie, which is a crazy, thick and sticky melange of molasses and brown sugar and both children wept. This is the best pie on the entire planet. Gas could get up to seven bucks a gallon, and if you come by I-75 exit 127 in Georgia, you’re still going to want to pull over and drive the thirty mile round trip for a slice of this. Marie said that it was all right, but she likes fruit pies better. Marie is, occasionally and rarely, hopelessly mistaken on points like this.

After lunch, I thanked the staff and we wandered over to the country store. My daughter and I were distracted by a goat named Martha, whom you may feed for fifty cents. Martha probably won’t allow you to pet her unless you shell out for some food first, I noticed. In the country store, we considered buying some licorice or horehound for the road, but settled on a jar of locally-made blueberry jam. Marie’s hoping to make pancakes one morning this weekend so we can try that out. The girl at the register was very amused by the two-dollar bills that we used to pay for it.

We then enjoyed the nice ride back to the interstate, bought some gasoline while it’s still only $3.50, and made our way across the state to the coast. It’s a straight shot down Georgia 26 to Hawkinsville, where you can pick up US 341, the old Golden Isles Parkway, and take the two and a bit hour last leg to Brunswick. This is probably worth discussing a little more should we actually stop along the way and eat on this road, but I find this a much more pleasant ride than the interstate, with only one mind-numbing segment, the twenty-odd miles just east of Jesup. Then Marie drove around Brunswick down every fool road in town for half an hour before she got to the causeway. Well, she lived here for years; nostalgia can do this to a driver. And she drove right past Willie’s Wee-Nee Wagon, which is on our to-do list for a later visit, so we can’t hold it against her.

Matthews Cafeteria, Tucker GA

Marie and I made it our rule to not give a negative review to any restaurant that either of us visit. It goes against the grain of this being the story of a good life spent eating well. If we have a bad experience at a restaurant, it just doesn’t make it to these pages. That doesn’t mean, however, that I can’t express a little disappointment when an otherwise good meal just plain lets me down.

I first heard of Matthews Cafeteria when the second volume of the Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives tie-in books was released. I was really looking forward to the second book, because I feel that Georgia was badly underrepresented in the first one, with only the Marietta Diner making its pages. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a pretty good restaurant, but it’s still a little overrated. I wasn’t sure, then, which Georgia restaurants had made it onto the show. You can check out the full list yourself, thanks to the excellent Flavortown USA fan site.

So the book was released – this has been a year and a half – and Georgia got two more restaurants in the print archives of Triple-D. Neither of which I’d ever heard of. It felt like Fieri got together with the ghost of Douglas Adams to upgrade Georgia from “harmless” to “mostly harmless.”

Well, Matthews stayed off my radar until it got added to the list of restaurants reviewed at Roadfood.com late last year. When we started Marie, Let’s Eat!, we agreed to visit and feature all of the 29 restaurants there, barring two for reasons I’ll mention when we finish the goal. Last year, two more were added – Barbecue Kitchen in College Park, and Matthews Cafeteria, meaning there was no getting around it, I was going to have to go to Tucker and try this mostly harmless restaurant. (One of the Roadfood.com restaurants, Melears in Fayetteville, has since closed, leaving a total of 30 on the site. At the time of writing, we are ten away from the goal of 28. Two of those ten will be appearing in this blog over the next week.) So I grumbled and complained and looked around and actually read Fieri’s team’s writeup in the book, and watched the segment on YouTube. I also asked around a couple of months ago to see whether any of my friends knew anything about the Roadfood.com restaurants on our agenda. My friend Laura, whom I have known since high school, when I listened to too much Smiths and she listened to too much Duran Duran, said that theirs is the “most awesome home cooking ever” and that she used to brunch there every week.

And then there are the reports of their Brunswick stew. Now, if you look up the Triple-D segment on YouTube, you’ll get the very curious sight of Fieri acting like he’s never heard of Brunswick stew at all, which is really weird and not especially believable, but you’ll also see this amazing concoction of chicken, creamed corn, potatoes, Worcestershire sauce and a whole mess of other stuff that looks like the most fantastic stew ever. Suffice it to say that when Thursday rolled around, I was licking my chops in anticipation of getting to Matthews as soon as they turned the metaphorical “lunch” sign on to get ahold of that stew.

Would you believe they didn’t have any? Or that the girl at the register said that they only have it on Wednesdays?!

Stymied and not a little crushed, I enjoyed what was nevertheless a pretty good meal. I went for a traditional meat and three, with a pork chop, mashed potatoes, green beans and dirty rice. Everything was quite tasty, especially the dirty rice, which was seasoned just perfectly. I think that if I actually lived in this section of Dekalb, I’d be ready to eat here most of the time. It’s a proper southern meat and three, every bit as good as, say, Vittles or Folks Southern Kitchen. In fact, there’s a Folks just a hop, skip and a jump away, down Lavista near I-285, and you can get food of the same or better quality, for better prices, at a locally-owned place here at Matthews, so there’s no reason to frequent that particular outpost of that chain. No, the vegetables are not of the same quality as the region’s highest points – Mary Mac’s and Doug’s Place – but they’re just fine for a meat and three.

I was, nevertheless, a little disappointed, not merely in the lack of Brunswick stew, but in the lack of attention from the wait staff. They seemed to employ an army of ladies in white with red aprons, but the only ones who spoke with me at all were the lady working the line serving my food and the one at the register, who told me the bad news about Brunswick stew only being served on a day I’m working downtown. I was there for the better part of forty minutes and helped myself to a couple of top-off refills of the very good sweet tea, and not one person asked after me. It’s probably just as well; I might have asked an impertinent question about why the heck there was a microwave oven against the far wall next to the bottles of A-1 and Red Rooster. Don’t know that I’ve seen that in a dining room before.

The meal, as I keep saying, was pretty good, but whatever disappointment I had with the service was more than made up for with the strawberry shortcake. This was amazingly decadent and wonderful, and almost as good as the lovely pound cake treat that Marie made a few days before. I’m sorry that my better, sweeter half wasn’t around to try it. Hers is better, but she appreciates other people’s excellent desserts even more than I do.

But while I’m registering disappointments along with the good food, let me raise one other. The previous Saturday, Marie had to work some overtime hours. I picked her up afterward and we had a little cheap date night, just the two of us, at the wonderful America’s Top Dog. The previous visit proved to be really good, but this second trip saw me trying one of their half-smokes with chili and man, oh, man, was that ever amazing. It wasn’t until I was back on 285 after lunching at Matthews that I realized what I should have done once I realized I wasn’t going to get to try this Brunswick stew was just had two veggies and a dessert, and then stopped by America’s Top Dog one exit north for another half-smoke. I had a perfectly good meal, but I was completely stuffed, and what I should have done was thought it through a little more. For somebody who looks forward to regularly visiting a fast food joint two years in the future, I sure do let my impulsive side mess me up when it comes to getting something to eat, don’t I?

Zarzour’s Cafe, Chattanooga TN

Here’s a really interesting restaurant that I supposed I would not get the chance to try. Zarzour’s Cafe opened in 1918 and has a wonderful reputation for their meat-and-three meals, but, sadly, the restaurant, for years, has only been open from 11 am to 2 in the afternoon, and only on weekdays. That’s not a very good window for out-of-town guests! Fortunately, they have elected to stay open a little bit longer each weekday – to the comparatively late hour of 3.30 – even though the kitchen itself still closes at 2. Guests in this last ninety minute window can still order some of their very famous burgers, grilled up by an exceptionally sassy lady who let us know how she drank her way out of college in Knoxville. Yes, this place is a dive in the finest possible sense of the word, and I love it absolutely. Continue reading “Zarzour’s Cafe, Chattanooga TN” →

The Beacon, Spartanburg SC

The high point of our trip through the Carolinas came with the seventh stop. We’d enjoyed some pretty good eating experiences along the way, but the most fun and most different pleasure of the tour came at a very famous restaurant in Spartanburg called The Beacon. I had heard this place referred to as similar to Atlanta’s legendary Varsity, but that doesn’t really begin to explain how wild and awesome it is. This is absolutely a place that everybody in the southeast should try at least once. Continue reading “The Beacon, Spartanburg SC” →