Last week, I went down to Allen’s for a twenty-five cent beer. I didn’t get one. Honestly, you’d think, having been immortalized in song thusly, a place would keep its drink specials. Even if the song was twenty years old and reflected on a scene that was a decade and change in the past already. Continue reading “Allen’s, Athens GA (CLOSED)”
Cook Out, Asheville NC
We’ve mentioned in the previous chapters that Marie very graciously selected the restaurants that we visited on our most recent trip to Asheville, and, even more graciously, paid for them. However, I wasn’t entirely ready to leave town without one last stop. About two hours after lunch, time spent shopping, letting my daughter have the run of things, and the uncompromisable trip to The Chocolate Fetish on Haywood for Marie to load up on dark chocolate sea salt caramels, we drove to the east side of town to show my daughter Tunnel Road, one of Asheville’s more commercial strips, full of chain restaurants and hotels. Well, there’s more than that. There is a very, very good comic shop out here called Comic Envy, a reasonably good barbecue place called Fiddlin’ Pig that I’m sure we’ll revisit, an independently-owned toy store, and a Mexican restaurant called Papas & Beer that has a heck of a lot of fans, but mostly Tunnel Road is clogged with chains. Continue reading “Cook Out, Asheville NC”
City Bakery Cafe, Asheville NC
This is Marie, contributing the latest episode which tangentially involves desserts. This visit was to City Bakery Cafe in Asheville. It was my turn to choose the restaurants to visit on this trip. I let Grant suggest one of the places he has on his list, picked a place we’d been to before, and the third was the City Bakery Cafe. Actually, what attracted me in the first place was the bakery portion of the name. I am extremely fond of cookies, pastries, and fresh crusty bread. Continue reading “City Bakery Cafe, Asheville NC”
Double D’s Coffee and Desserts, Asheville NC
This latest trip to Asheville saw us really getting some exercise. After we enjoyed a terrific lunch at Luella’s, we drove through the city and then west a few miles on I-40 and US 23, and then south down NC-151 to the Blue Ridge Parkway for a couple of hours stretching our legs at Graveyard Fields. In the late afternoon, we made it to our hotel, checked in and relaxed for a while before going downtown for supper. We ate at Early Girl Eatery, about which I wrote back in June, and had a very good meal, although perhaps not a match for the truly great breakfast that we’d earlier enjoyed. We passed on dessert, as we had other plans. Continue reading “Double D’s Coffee and Desserts, Asheville NC”
Luella’s Bar-B-Que, Asheville NC
We made our third 2010 trip to Asheville this past weekend, this time in part to show off the city to my daughter in the hope that she would love it like we do – mission accomplished, by the way – and in part to just soak up the mountain air, the wonderful people and the excellent food. I sort of cheated on the meal selections, however. I first suggested that Marie pick where we would eat, hoping that we’d try some new things and maybe revisit one of the places that we enjoyed on earlier visits, and then immediately started looking around myself, greedily and hungrily. Continue reading “Luella’s Bar-B-Que, Asheville NC”
Doug’s Place, Emerson GA
Would you believe that Randy and Kimberly finally got married? It’s only been a week, but we haven’t heard anything about them fighting over him taking her to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, so I choose to believe the honeymoon’s still on. Then again, he did write to let me know that he perceived a heck of a lot of Asian restaurants in Asheville, where they went, so who knows what they got up to.
Their ceremony was held on Red Top Mountain near Cartersville, and looking around for something to eat on the way brought up a restaurant in the small town of Emerson called Doug’s Place. This opened up a floodgate of forgotten memories, none of which, it turns out, really have anything to do with this very agreeable Southern-style meat-and-three. When I found a photo of Doug’s Place – the one on John Bickford’s very entertaining From My Table – I suddenly remembered that when I was a child, a chunk of Interstate 75 along this stretch was closed for a couple of years while the US Army Corps of Engineers was doing some sort of digging or reconstruction of Allatoona Lake. When my parents took me along for their monthly visit to see my grandparents in Fort Payne, we would exit early and drive up US 41 through Cartersville. On about three or four occasions, I swear that we stopped for breakfast around here, and wondered whether it might have been Doug’s Place.
It wasn’t – suspicion now lies on a Cartersville restaurant called Cody Jay’s which occupies a building that, thirty-odd years ago, was the home of a place called J.R.’s – but getting to the bottom of things was kind of fun. I first asked my mom whether she remembered what that place in Bartow County we would stop in the seventies was called. Unsurprisingly, since, to hear my mom tell it, whatever good times there ever were ended around the time Nixon got in trouble with the lib’rul media, and, perhaps not coincidentally, I was two, she didn’t remember any such thing. Mom carried Dentyne cinnamon-flavored chewing gum in her purse for the better part of fifteen years, but she thinks I’ve made up this story to confound her, because everybody knows that she hates chewing gum. Getting her to identify thirty year-old breakfast stops is like getting her to identify Godzilla films that were on channel 17 on a specific evening that my parents had friends over for pinochle when I was nine. She’s not very helpful with that, either.
Wherever we ate back then, it wasn’t Doug’s Place, but heaven knows I irritated two or three people trying to get to the bottom of it. Before this place became Doug’s about fifteen years back, it was apparently Morris’s, but the building itself dates to the 1890s. There are two small dining rooms and a large, screened porch to wait for a table, and some really delicious southern food inside.
We had an early lunch, arriving at Doug’s in between rushes. There were only a couple of recently bussed tables available when we arrived, and a long line developed while we ate. The interior of the restaurant is quite small, and it’s not possible to move around to the restroom or cash register without slightly jostling other guests.
The food is mostly quite terrific, although sadly, yet again, everybody else at the table enjoyed a better entree than me. I had the country fried steak with gravy, and I wouldn’t call it bad, but I certainly wasn’t in the mood for it after having a bite of Marie’s wonderful fried chicken, and one of the truly excellent chicken livers that Neal ordered. He concluded that these livers were even better than those at Vittles, which he enjoys more than me, and I had to agree. My daughter inhaled her gumbo, leaving me unable to comment on its quality, but I imagine that it must have been pretty good for her to down that much of it so quickly.
For sides, Marie enjoyed a small cup of broccoli and cheese soup. Neal and I each had baked beans which were quite good and I also had some delicious fried green tomatoes. Each of us also ordered the creamed corn. I would not call it great – Bear’s Den in Macon cooks up much better and much creamier – but I was still quite pleased. If I had taken my sides with a different entree, it would have been a superb meal rather than merely a very good one.
I am surprised that Doug’s Place has managed to stay so far off the radar of people who enjoy this kind of food. Obviously the locals enjoy it and with great reason, but this is quite genuinely the sort of thing that should attract a much larger crowd of travelers who love southern cooking, meat-and-threes, or any unique roadfood destinations. I noticed that the restaurant did post an article from Southern Living where they got a little praise, but doing what they do as well as this, there should be articles from forty different magazines and regular appearances on The Food Network. For now, we’ll call it one of the region’s best-kept secrets.
Forno Italian Restaurant, Jasper GA
You ever had one of those trips where you feel compelled to go home and look at a map and figure out where in the heck you were? Last week, I had one of those. Since Wednesday is my free day, I took a former boss of mine up on her invitation to take a nice drive way out, and I mean way out, in the country, where she’d moved as part of her “urban evacuation” earlier in the year. I knew that Melissa was a goodly ways north and east of Ball Ground, but when she took the wheel up and over more back roads to go from her house to lunch, whatever navigational skills that I had abandoned me.
After not too long a drive up sparsely populated trails, during which time Melissa told me about an interesting run-in, along a stretch by a weatherbeaten old barn, with a police officer who had asked her whether she had seen three ne’er-do-well hillbillies who were up to some nebulous rottenness… oh, all right, the Pickens County cops were looking for a meth lab. Anyway, we ended up in a small strip mall in the community of Marble Hill near Jasper, punctuated by an IGA grocer that caters to the vacationers at nearby Big Canoe. Alongside the strip is a quite nice little Italian place that recently found new ownership and apparently a very new menu.
This is the first time that I’ve run into this issue doing these writeups. Melissa suggested this restaurant based on the food that they served on her previous visits, but since she last went there, they have revamped almost completely. Previously, Forno served pizza, burgers and hot dogs with a Chicago theme. The original owner, who was from the Windy City, decorated the interior with pictures of area landmarks and street signs, along with an amusing poster explaining the various components of the famous Chicago dog. If you’ve been to the wonderful Bobby G’s in Alpharetta, you have a general idea of what I mean, although Forno is not quite so densely decorated.
The new owner has dispensed with the old menu, although the Illinois decor remains for now. He’s spruced the place up a little, and is trying to turn it into an upscale Italian-styled destination, with higher-end entrees. I’m not certain how easily such a conversion can be managed with the TVs in each booth to watch the game of your choice still reflecting the previous sports bar feel, but that’s the goal.
It’s really not fair to judge a place based on the quality of its buffet, but I’ll plead poverty. Expecting a burger and the attendant cost, I was a hair sticker shocked at a menu full of $15-16 entrees, and so Melissa and I just had the pasta buffet. The salad was not bad, although Melissa correctly observed that most of the available ingredients also made for good pizza toppings, and the pastas, which included ziti with sausage in a red sauce and ziti with chicken in a cream sauce with vegetables, were acceptable and tasty if not outstanding, and the service was just fine.
I do have to confess a little skepticism about Forno’s long-term prospects. As always, I wish restaurant owners all the best luck and success in the world, but their menu does seem awfully high priced for being out in the middle of nowhere. Of course, looking at it on the map, it’s really closer to State Route 515, and the Atlanta-to-Ellijay traffic, than I would have thought, but most of its potential customers certainly live in the back of beyond. It looks like this is a place that’s going to have to work very hard to convert lots of locals into regulars to stick around. My fingers are crossed for them!
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