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.

Harry’s Pig Shop (CLOSED) and The Taco Stand, Athens GA

Well, it took me a little while to get over to Harry’s Pig Shop. I had been wanting to visit for quite a while now, but I don’t just go to Athens every day, and when I do, I’d like to occasionally try something other than barbecue. There are quite a few good restaurants around that town, you know. Nevertheless, I moved it up my to-do list a couple of months ago after I read the good writeup at Buster’s BBQ Blog. Continue reading “Harry’s Pig Shop (CLOSED) and The Taco Stand, Athens GA” →

Little Hut Sandwich Shop, Philadelphia PA

(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.)

Our friend Chris in Jacksonville has lived all over the place, and he’s got relations and aunts (he pronounces it “onts,” magically) and kinfolk all over, so he’s a pretty reliable source for getting ideas about where a fellow should visit. When Marie and I let our friends know about the honeymoon road trip, Chris was among the first people to make a suggestion. Since we were going to be visiting Philadelphia to see Marie’s aunt and uncle, we needed to swing by the Little Hut Sandwich Shop in Ridley Park, which is not far from where they live. Apparently, Chris is under strict orders to always bring his grandmother a big cheesesteak from this little takeaway counter whenever he visits.

Boy, you want to see people fight? City of Brotherly Love my eye, you just watch what happens when a newbie wanting to visit Philadelphia asks where he should go to get an “authentic” Philly cheesesteak. I think fans of one shop literally drive across town and beat people up for what was said on the internet about somebody else’s. I once defended Roy’s Cheesesteaks here in the ‘burbs of Atlanta as being as authentic as what you can get in Philadelphia, as Roy is actually from Cherry Hill. One guy told me “he isn’t there any more, is he?” and another said that Cherry Hill’s not Philadelphia. I took a lesson from internet fights that I once spent far too long fighting, and withdrew after the first round.

Oh, we just had a ball getting to this place. See, I printed maps of each little area that we would visit and, naively, assumed that you could just take I-95 down from New York into Philly. The Jersey Turnpike isn’t really I-95, even though it’s the same road. To continue on I-95, you actually have to detour onto one of a number of perimeter highways. Thankfully, Marie had to foresight to buy an atlas just in case, and pointed out that if we continued south on the Turnpike without exiting, then we would end up in Wilmington without seeing Philly at all. This remarkably confusing problem is detailed at Wikipedia across several pages; in short, this is one of the only interstates in the country that has two separate legs, and requires drivers to use other highways to get from one to the other.

Detouring via, I think, I-195 and I-295 around Trenton just to stay on the road we wanted was actually the second weird disappointment of the day. After our wonderful trip to Boston, we drove as far as someplace in Connecticut called Cromwell for the night. We had slept pretty decently at a Super 8 and looked around for some breakfast. I can’t remember where we ended up and I’m hesitant to name it for fear of shaming the wrong place, but it was a diner and Marie wanted pie for breakfast and they served her a piece with mold on it. Seriously.

The morning was spent driving through northeastern sprawl. The highway skirted around New Haven for the most part, and then through the disagreeably ugly Bridgeport. In time, I-95 carried us through the Bronx and Queens (cue the customary verse of “Dose Were Da Days”) and across the George Washington Bridge, eventually putting us onto the Jersey Turnpike. If you remember July 2009, you might recall that the feds came down on a half-dozen or more elected officials in New Jersey for corruption. I had a little frisson of excitement hearing about this on the news as we continued, but happily, we made it out of the state before the FBI closed the borders or anything to stop any of these crooks from leaving town.

We got to Philly a little after one. The northeastern neighborhoods are ugly as sin, but the downtown is breathtaking, the bridges are gorgeous and I love how all the ballparks and arenas are in one area. We got a glimpse of the Spectrum, which was demolished about a month later. We made our way to Ridley Park and found Little Hut very easily. The teeny place only does carry-out orders, though they do have a picnic table outside.

After enjoying some great conversation with the couple who were working the counter and learning about their shop, Marie and I split a giant mushroom cheesesteak and it was just amazingly yummy. The bread was soft and chewy, and the meat was seasoned just right. Neither of us had a cheesesteak that good before, and, other than Roy’s, haven’t had one that good since, although Woody’s comes pretty close. We had a bag of Herr’s brand chips and washed it down with a Hank’s orange cream soda. Amazingly, Marie’s aunt and uncle live only about two miles from Little Hut but haven’t got around to trying them. We made sure to let ’em know where to go next time they get a hankerin’ for a steak sandwich like this.

Johnny’s Bar-B-Que & Steaks, Powder Springs GA

Somewhat overlooked in all the talk of regional barbecue styles is that there is a little outpost of restaurants in western Cobb County and Douglas County that all have very similar takes on presentation, sauce and preparing the chopped pork. I know that I’m not the first one to notice this. I wish that I could take credit for it, but somebody who actually deserves credit – and, you probably know me, I’m just not very good about remembering where I read things – noted an interesting similarity between the chopped pork at Austell’s Wallace Barbecue and a place in Douglasville that I have not yet tried, Hudson Hickory House in Douglasville. I made the connection, but didn’t note it anywhere, between Wallace and Briar Patch Restaurant, which is near Dallas and Hiram. A couple of weeks ago, I revisited Johnny’s Bar-B-Que and Steaks for the first time in four or five years and realized just how similar this place is to the others.

If you pull up these on a map, you’ll see that they’re all in the same little quadrant, north of I-20 and east of I-285. Now, I can’t speak with certainty about Hudson Hickory House, but I have seen a photograph of a chopped pork plate at Courthouse Bites and read a description of the meal at BBQ Biker and I think I’m on pretty safe ground when I discuss it in general terms. All four of these older restaurants serve very soft chopped pork that is presauced and swimming in a very thin, red-to-black, mild and very tangy vinegar-based sauce, while also offering a much hotter mustard-based sauce on the table. The fries are freshly-cut, whole potato-style and very greasy. BBQ Biker describes Hudson’s as “floppy,” which can certainly be used to define the fries at the other three restaurants. The stew at each is very thick, heavy on the onions but not too many other vegetables.

When I do get the chance to visit Hudson’s, and I will, soon, I will definitely have to ask about the similarities that I’m seeing here. I’ll make a note to go after the lunch rush so somebody might have a chance to talk with me. It might not be to everybody’s taste, but this is an absolutely fascinating discovery. Barbecue lovers, you need to get out here and dig into this region and see what I’m talking about!

A couple of Saturdays ago, Marie’s mother came to town and we had a pretty good time and enjoyed some good meals, although I think her favorite of the dinners out must have been our lunchtime trip to Vingenzo’s in Woodstock. That really is some unbelievably amazing pizza. She doesn’t actually care for barbecue, madly, and so, for supper, I tried to come up with someplace that we hadn’t covered in the blog before that I knew also offered pretty good steaks and burgers. David had taken Neal and me to Johnny’s several years ago, and while I didn’t remember the details, I remembered that it was a big Saturday night family dinner place, so I asked whether we could meet at David’s place and ride over there.

If you’ve eaten at Wallace recently, then Johnny’s will give you a case of déjà vu. It’s not merely the similar style of cooking the pork; the interior and the design is very familiar. The great big room with rustic 1930s bric-a-brac on the walls feels very comfortably similar, like you’ve been here before.

I was pretty taken with the food at Johnny’s, though I would have preferred to try the meat dry. The sauce is gently tangy and not very sweet, but the mustard sauce on the table is among the hottest barbecue sauces that I have tried recently. It’s a menace, and makes a great dip for the “floppy” fries. Marie had the ribs and enjoyed them very much, her mother had a burger with some really good baked beans that she liked more than the main course, and David had a steak that didn’t set his taste buds alight, but he said it was pretty good.

Well, now the next question – as soon as I’ve made my way to Hudson, anyhow – is how many more restaurants in the area serve barbecue in this style? Four big established places in such a small radius definitely makes a trend, but I wonder how widespread it is? More research, as ever, is needed!

Manuel’s Tavern, Atlanta GA

Good grief, this place is a breath of fresh air. I visited Manuel’s Tavern maybe twice, many, many years back, and never made it a habit. More fool me. The venerable neighborhood bar, which will celebrate its 55th birthday next Saturday, is an absolute joy to visit. It’s a site absolutely radiant with Atlanta’s history, where extremely good pub food, locally-brewed beer, and, surprisingly, some of the best burgers in the city are available. I was pleased when Roadfood.com added it to their list of Georgia-reviewed restaurants, knowing that I would need to return. I was even more pleased after my visit.

Also worth smiling about: as often as I’ve had to complain about the unpleasant, paranoid propaganda of Fox News being broadcast unwelcomely at regional restaurants, Manuel’s Tavern is where Democrats eat and drink. Politics are not necessarily part and parcel of meals in the dining rooms, but of course, in the bar, guests will be drinking under photos of FDR and JFK.

Anyway, my boss, Krista, who loves this place, said that she’d like to join me when I made my way to Manuel’s. We were not able to sync schedules, so she asked me to go without her, just so long as I had her favorite burger, prepped her way.

Manuel’s was originally the site of a delicatessen called Harry’s. Manuel Maloof bought it in 1956, brought his brother Robert on board to help run it, expanded it into the businesses on either side and created one of Atlanta’s most beloved neighborhood joints. There seems to be room inside for hundreds, with teeny little corridors leading into rooms that guests might never know were there.

The walls are a living history lesson of the city. In 1956, the Braves had not yet relocated from Milwaukee. You can see the lineups of the 1956 and 1958 AAA Crackers on one wall instead. Newspaper stories by Ron Hudspeth relate the days when Manuel spent as CEO of DeKalb County. Any guest could spend hours studying all the memorabilia and writings posted along the dark wood paneling.

Manuel’s two best-selling burgers are the McCloskey Burger – a half-pound patty with lettuce and tomatoes – and the J.J. Special, served with two cheeses and onions along with a heap of wonderful steak fries and some onion rings. Normally, J.J. Specials are served on wheat toast, but I was instructed to have one on a Kaiser roll. It was terrific. That these burgers fly under everybody’s radar is criminal; they are, flatly, among the very best burgers in the city. Along with a pint of Athens’ wonderful Terrapin pale ale, it was a really nice lunch.

While families are welcome in Manuel’s, the clientele tends to skew older and the conversations flesh out the remarkable sense found here of the city’s stories in a nutshell. Even as Atlanta razes and wrecks its history and old, beloved businesses fail – the Atlanta Book Company, right across the street, shuttered earlier this month – the oral history of the city is being retold at Manuel’s tables. I raised my eyes from my novel – Gregory Mcdonald again – as four older men talked about the days when Paul Newman would race at Road Atlanta. If you’re a local, then as your eyes read that line, you probably remembered the old Road Atlanta logo from T-shirts you had not seen in three decades.

This is a place where stories are told, and as new customers and families find the place, where new ones will be written. I was too drunk, too young and too stupid to enjoy Manuel’s when I was 22. Today, I love it more than I can express. Fellows, we all need to meet here soon and plan to spend a long and wonderful happy evening.

Update (3/11/13): Heard the good word last week that Manuel’s is going smoke-free in 2014. That’s terrific news.

Pork Tamales from Zocalo

Last month, I shared how our trip to Mississippi found me looking, unsuccessfully, for tamales in the wrong part of the state. The tamales that I did find, at Petty’s BBQ in Starkville, were not at all like what I was expecting. Obviously, regional and family recipes are going to vary, and that’s a great thing, but I was sort of hoping for something in particular – thick, starchy cornmeal boiled in a corn husk – and did not get it. I resolved that at some point, I’d make sure that the road took me back to the Mississippi Delta and I could hunt around for other takes on the dish.

So I was quite surprised when, just a few weeks later, I found homemade tamales for sale at the Marietta Square Farmers Market. They’ve actually been right under my nose for ages at the Zocalo stand. I’m such a chump. I’ve been shopping at the farmer’s market with Marie for all this time and occasionally snuck a few samples of chips-n-salsa and it never even occurred to me to look twice at what these good folks offer. They sell tamales, prepared the night before, in bags of a half-dozen for $15.

Zocalo opened its first restaurant in 1995. I’ve never visited, but evidently, I should. It appears to be one of the first Mexican restaurants in Atlanta to make the strong claim of being traditional. For many years, they didn’t even serve chips-n-salsa, as that is an American tradition. The restaurant slowly grew from its location on 10th Street into two other stores. Sadly, the recession hit it pretty hard and the stores in Decatur and Grant Park shuttered. The owners, brothers Marco and Luis Martinez, needed a new revenue stream, and fast. They’d already capitulated on the chips-n-salsa issue, and began looking into placing a small variety of pre-packaged salsas in grocery stores.

I should digress here, especially since I’ve mentioned Mexican-style places in this blog several times this month, and explain that while I do feel strongly about traditions being upheld and want to applaud restaurants that do it the original, right way, I personally used to really, really love the pleasure of absolutely gorging myself stupid on chips-n-salsa. Times and tastes change, and red salsas no longer hold the attraction that they once did. I still keep a bag of Golden Flake brand Maizetos in the pantry, and usually eat them with Zapatas brand medium green salsa verde. The typical red ketchupy salsa usually found on tables at all the El-This-Los-That places around Atlanta, well, that’s not what I’m looking to eat anymore. Michael, a buddy of mine in California, once explained, “that stuff’s not salsa, it’s Marinara sauce.” I still sample with a smile, but the days of keeping the server at hard work constantly refreshing me are long, long gone.

So anyway, the fellows at Zocalo decided to try out a line of salsas at the farmers market on Peachtree Road. They found they were definitely onto a winner, but perhaps not necessarily one that can be packaged and shipped away quite just yet. Instead, they keep their kitchens open all night from Friday to Saturday morning, making tamales and, I believe, seven fresh varieties of salsa, and then send sales teams to something like thirty different farmers markets in Georgia, Florida and in Chattanooga selling salsa that’s just a few hours old. This has proved to be a really good idea. According to a profile in Atlanta Magazine in March, they sold 54,000 units last year and are hoping to hit 70,000 in 2011.

After all this discussion, I hope I’m not hitting too sour a note when I say that the tamales were really just okay. We enjoyed some for supper the night that we bought them, along with some astonishingly good brandywine tomatoes and guacamole that Marie made from avocados that she bought that morning. We couldn’t quite get the tamales to heat evenly through, although the pork, spiced with adobo salsa, really was quite tasty.

Clearly, what is still needed is a trip to the Delta and a tamale straight from a boiler, with none of this business of packing in ice and reheating. But that’s okay; I am certainly grateful of Zocalo giving me the chance to try the real thing, and I made sure they knew of my appreciation. The following week, I asked Marie to bring me home a container of their amazing arbol salsa to eat at home with Maizetos. It’s the least I could do.

Jim Stalvey’s, Covington GA

I had not realized quite how much attention that I have been paying to Urbanspoon until I looked up Jim Stalvey’s Restaurant, noted the surprisingly low user ranking (44%, if I recall, the morning that we visited), and asked myself why on earth we were going to head out that way. The answer, of course, was that the venerable steakhouse is one of those with a glowing review at Roadfood.com and we intend to hit (almost) all of the ones in Georgia, and so we just had to brave that 44% and hope for the best. It worked out just fine. 56% of the people who voted for that restaurant were quite spectacularly wrong. If you’re looking for a good steak, you need to head out to Newton County and then log on to Urbanspoon and give that ranking a boost.

The building is a very old one, sort of classic suburban family restaurant design, and easy to overlook among the sprawl of US 278. I asked about it, wondering whether it might have once been a Ponderosa or something like that. It was apparently built in the early 1960s as the home of a restaurant called Bock & Kid. Jim Stalvey, a restaurateur from the north Georgia town of Rome, had already moved to Covington and opened a place in town with the horrible name of The Crest. In 1980, he moved into this site with a business called The Prado. In time, the Prado evolved into Stalvey’s Restaurant and Lounge.

Stalvey has continued to open and operate restaurants along this leg of I-20, though the last few years have not been kind to them. At the end of 2005, one of his websites – not updated since then – boasted that he and his company ran seven. Presently, I count just four: Stalvey’s, a fast food place called Quik Chick, and two Butcher’s Block delis. Perhaps one day, we might visit the others. If they are as good as the main restaurant, they’re worth the trip.

The four of us drove out to Covington with Neal some three Saturdays back. Covington has always been one of those towns that we pass through without stopping; I’ve been curious what else might be out here.

The must-try items at Stalvey’s are said to include the onion rings and the fried cauliflower. I had the former and thought they were completely delicious. Happily, they were available as a side for my steak and not just as a more expensive appetizer. The steak was really wonderful. I had a small six-ounce sirloin, priced right at just $8.99. It was not as good as Marie’s own grilling at her best, but better than many, many steaks that I have ordered in restaurants in the past.

Marie also had a steak – the filet was available as a special, also for $8.99 – and was very pleased with it. Neal had the chicken livers and really enjoyed them. He said they were not quite as good as the ones at Doug’s Place in Emerson – those are the gold standard – but still very good. I’m glad that we came by for lunch and were able to enjoy them. Apparently, if I understand it correctly, the restaurant offers both steaks and a traditional southern meat-and-two menu, on a white board, during lunch hours, but in the evenings, it’s all about either steak or ribs. The smokehouse is in front of the restaurant, but barbecue is only offered in the evenings.

Everything that we had tasted incredibly fresh and wonderful; the only slightly bum note came with the French dressing that Marie had with her salad and did not enjoy. Happily, the salad was made with such incredibly fresh veggies – these cucumbers are just to die for – that it did not need dressing at all.

Now, admittedly, Urbanspoon is a very poor judge of traditional restaurants like this. Its more prolific users seem to be more interested in the hot new joints in town, eating where everybody else eats, and often enjoying food that, as Calvin Trillin terms it, is always served on a bed of something else. The very low positive rating for Stalvey’s probably indicates a period of inconsistency for this restaurant. What surprises me more, however, is that only 26 people had rated it at all. This is a restaurant that more people should talk about. If you can get a better steak for this price, with sides and vegetables this good, anywhere for forty miles, I’ll be stunned.