In the previous chapter, I mentioned that a long-term goal for us doing this blog is to visit each of the twelve SEC cities, and write up one restaurant from each town. We accomplished this in Auburn on Saturday when we visited Toomer’s Drugs, one of the oldest soda fountains in the southeast. It was opened in 1896 across from what was then called the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama, which is why Bear Bryant typically referred to Bama’s instate rival as “that cow college.” He was probably just jealous that he couldn’t get a lemonade this good in Tuscaloosa. Continue reading “Toomer’s Drugs, Auburn AL”
Mrs. Story’s Dairy Bar, Opelika AL
I don’t know whether we’ll ever manage it, but I had it in mind, a month or so ago, that Marie and I might could visit all of the SEC schools and feature at least one restaurant from each in this blog. On the one hand, we’re in Athens, Knoxville and Nashville kind of regularly anyway, but on the other, that would mean a trip to the benighted Gainesville, Florida. Auburn, however, seemed like a decent test of the waters, since it’s only about an hour west of Columbus. Plus, I have a very reliable guide to the town in the form of my friend Cheryl. Continue reading “Mrs. Story’s Dairy Bar, Opelika AL”
Dinglewood Pharmacy, Columbus GA
Did I ever tell you about the time that I drove two hours for a chili dog? It was 2002 and I was living in Alpharetta and woke up one Saturday morning in the summer with no particular plans but an insatiable craving for a scrambled dog from Dinglewood Pharmacy, about two hours’ south of me in the middle Georgia city of Columbus. Continue reading “Dinglewood Pharmacy, Columbus GA”
Lemon Grass, Marietta GA
Oh, here we go again. Another chapter in which I experience menu envy. This time, nobody should be surprised. We gave a Thai restaurant a stab, and frankly, I never know what to order when we’re trying Thai. I was reasonably certain that I’d enjoy whatever I got, and I certainly did, but somebody else at the table really had something amazing.
I’m deeply inexperienced with Thai food, and readers might have noticed that I have yet to feature a single entry from one of the ostensibly amazing restaurants from Atlanta’s culinary wonderland that is Buford Highway. Really, I just don’t know where to start or what to try, but I’ve half a mind to keep my ears open for some other local bloggers having a get-together on that side of town and see whether Marie and I might join them. The overwhelming consensus, however, is that what we have here in darkest Cobb County is Americanized and not very traditional. Lemon Grass, here in Marietta, still manages a few thumbs up from the locals, despite a carry-out menu full of letter/number combinations and little “pepper” icons for the hot dishes like every Americanized Chinese place in town that leaves a menu on your mailbox. I wonder whether these restaurants all get their tri-fold menus from the same printing company?
At any rate, my main experience with Thai food would be from the dearly missed Thai of Athens, which closed about three years ago. I haven’t seen my favorite meal there, salt and pepper suegai, on anybody else’s menu. On one occasion, my son and I successfully convinced his sister that our satay chicken was actually fried spider. Last I heard, QuikTrip was looking into building on the old Thai of Athens location. They should make them track down the former owner, a lovely woman who was friends with a girl I used to date, and get her recipe for iced tea as a concession for whatever zoning must be addressed on that site first.
This past week, it was our friend Samantha’s turn to choose something for us to do, and she suggested this place. She discovered it about six years ago. The restaurant itself opened in 1994 in a very neat little hidden area in the East Lake shopping center on 120, just outside the loop. The shopping center is, unusually, two separate buildings which curve away from each other and create a little outdoor plaza leading back to the small patch of woods behind the property. There’s a Wild Wings Cafe on one side that takes advantage of the architecture to create a “luau”-themed back patio, while Lemon Grass shies away from pedestrian traffic like a quiet, discreet oasis.
There were six of us for supper, and while my daughter was in some sort of mood and tried to bring everybody down with tweenage surliness, we all really enjoyed our meals. Marie and I tried the chicken tom yum soup and it was not at all bad, but I did not enjoy the lemon grass in the bowl at all. This proved to be the only disappointment of the evening. David had the traditional hot and sour soup and it was better than most of the bowls that I have tried at Americanized Chinese places. Neal and Samantha each had the coconut soup, and that was, clearly, the best of the lot. When I return, I am definitely having a bowl of that.
As for the entrees, Marie and my daughter and I split one of the chef’s specials, the pineapple duck curry. This is boneless duck cooked with coconut milk, pineapple, tomato, onions, basil and bamboo shoots in a curry sauce. I thought this was really terrific, and Neal, who had an order himself, agreed. We also shared a bowl of laad na rice noodles, with chicken cooked in a thick gravy with broccoli, carrots and mushrooms. I preferred the duck, but this was certainly quite nice. David had a beef salad, with ribeye served over a bed of lettuce, mint leaves and cilantro that he enjoyed, but Samantha, who knew exactly what to order, brought the best thing to the table. She had the nam sod. This is prepared in a similar way to larb, but it mixes finely ground pork with ginger, peanuts and onions with lime juice and it’s served with raw cabbage, the idea being that you can use that for a wrap or just scoop the pork mixture onto it. They hide this treat away on the appetizers menu when I would happily enjoy that as my entree.
My daughter eventually explained that she was grumpy because she concluded that she was going to starve to death because everything here was going to be too spicy for her. I’m pleased to report that she is still alive, liked the laad na noodles, and most of our meals were only lightly spiced. The menu, incidentally, offers five levels for diners: mild, medium, hot, Thai hot and “crazy hot.” They add that crazy hot is not recommended. I’ve rarely been the sort of person to listen to that sort of recommendation, but when sharing dishes with family and friends, it’s polite to not make them suffer the way you’d sometimes like to burn yourself. Maybe some other time.
Jalapeno Charlie’s, Atlanta GA
If we can afford a little leniency when a big festival draws gigantic crowds and puts a restaurant and all its servers under undue stress, we should probably give a little extra praise when a restaurant handles the spectacle with ease. This past weekend, downtown Atlanta was host to a pair of gigantic crowd-generators: the Dragon*Con convention and the Chic-fil-A “Kickoff Classic,” this year between LSU and North Carolina. Jalapeno Charlie’s, located on the corner of Peachtree and International and across the street from the Hard Rock Cafe, handled the crunch extremely well. We arrived during a comparatively slow period, so it wasn’t too wild, and we agreed that their food was not bad, and the service was excellent.
Dragon*Con brings buddies to town from all over the southeast, and Marie and I get the chance to say hello to friends and family who’ve come from Athens, Jacksonville, Memphis, Nashville and Starkville, among other places. The actual paid attendance of the con is something like 40,000. Unpaid attendance of people who’ve come to ogle the thousands of costumers is probably about the same. Our friends from Nashville are frequently among them. Tory, whom you may recall from our last trip to that awesome city leading us down an alleyway past dumpsters to a Greek place for lunch, had colored her hair Draco Malfoy-blonde but was wearing a different house’s colors. Looking like Draco is all the rage in Gryffindor this year, apparently. I’ve known her and Brooke (hair colored blue and purple) for ten years now and they’ve taken me to many good restaurants in Nashville, and were already nailing down some places for me to go when I head back that way later in the year. Fortunately, one of those trips should be on a Wednesday so I can enjoy the weekend-unfriendly Mas Tacos.
Anyway, Marie went down to get right in the thick of the Dragon*Con madness and, for Sunday night supper, rounded up her brother along with Brooke, Tory, Brooke’s boyfriend Matt, and their friend Holly from Kentucky. I got to the restaurant before them and snagged us a large table, although not, sadly, one on the balcony overlooking Peachtree.
Jalapeno Charlie’s is a chain-in-waiting. It’s a “concept” owned by the people behind Fire of Brazil, and while the only location, currently, is in downtown Atlanta – in the space just above Fire of Brazil, in fact – you can tell that the corporate minds are looking forward to open the new stores in other cities soon.
As for the food, it’s not at all bad, but the menu, which purports to offer “Mexican-Latin fusion,” kind of needs a kick in the backside. Really, this town is quite used to having complementary chips and salsa brought to the table; charging five bucks for it in a restaurant like this is just tacky.
And that’s a shame, because the food is quite good, with a number of neat dishes. Marie’s brother, Karl, really went for the interesting concoctions. He shared an appetizer of fried plantains topped with chicken and melted cheese that was quite good, and just enough of a tweak from the usual “cheese nachos” that you always see at these sorts of places. But his entree was the real surprise. Called a molcajete, this was a bubbling “soup” served in a thick black bowl shaped, for some reason, like a pig. It was a stew of chicken in a tomato-based sauce with carrots and celery and served so darn hot it needed to sit for a few minutes before Karl could dig in.
I had the fish tacos, tilapia with a mild ranchero sauce, and they were very good, even though they provided more evidence, as though more were needed, that I probably need to take a class on how to photograph food, because every time I try to shoot tacos, the picture looks awful. The only failing on my dish was the half-thought inclusion of a handful of blue corn chips. Not only were these tasteless and bland, but they drove home how nice it would have been to have a nice basket of fresh chips and salsa. Marie had a chicken quesadilla and was very satisfied with it. They really piled the ingredients high and didn’t scrimp on the fillings.
To be honest, I was enjoying the company so much that I’d have suffered a far worse meal with no complaints. It’s always wonderful to visit with out-of-town friends, and I think that the Jalapeno Charlie’s crew did a great job managing the weekend crush. If one ever opens in your town, it’s probably worth a visit. Just bring lots of friends and plan to talk about the latest Doctor Who rumors and Harry Potter costumes.
Metro Cafe Diner, Atlanta GA
This is Marie, returning to my usual specialty of sweet things. This entry is on the Metro Cafe Diner in downtown Atlanta. As we’ve mentioned previously, it’s really not terribly fair to judge a place based on its performance when there is a convention the size of Dragon*Con right around the corner. On both corners, actually; it’s a huge con. Nevertheless, the place did well. I actually had breakfast there twice in one day due to the sleep schedules of the folks I was meeting, and it was fine both times. The service was a little faster in the early morning before all the tables were full, but only very slightly. There was less amusing rushing around, though.
The place is something of a hybrid. There are black marble walls, and there is a bar on the ground floor where apparently karaoke is inflicted upon the diners. I can’t imagine the acoustics are all that great, but we were able to converse comfortably at the tables despite the music so I may be wrong. You walk up this odd triangular staircase past a display of cakes big enough to rival the Marietta Diner’s offerings, and then get packed into one of two little side passages filled with booths. It is not the most spacious of places.
The prices seemed a trifle high, and they didn’t even boost them for the crowds. However, presentation is pretty and the quality of the food was good. I enjoyed my French Toast with strawberries sans the usual Radioactive Red Stuff that comes with such fare. The slices of bread were thick and buttery and if they could possibly have done with a bit of my favorite cinnamon, that is only because I like my cinnamon just a little hotter than usual. My brother seriously got into his Eggs Benedict Florentine. The eggs were cooked perfectly.
Overall this is a place I would recommend, especially since my sister reported favorably on the cakes, but it is a little on the odd side.
Thompson Brothers Bar-B-Q, Smyrna GA
The Thompson Brothers moved here from Oklahoma quite a few years ago and I kept telling myself that I needed to get over to their little storefront on 41 and promptly forgot. They’re either in the space or next door to the space once occupied by one of a local chain of CD stores whose name I can never remember, Atlanta Disc Exchange or something. In the summer of 1991, I was supposed to be dropping off menus and coupons for a pizza place and I ended up here, buying a Maura O’Connell CD, after the apartment complex on the other side of Herodian, where Dan Barken used to live, caught me “soliciting” and told me to beat it. That, I remember.
Anyway, I was caught in unusually heavy traffic a couple of weeks ago and switched on the only station in town that gives traffic reports worth a damn. This means taking a deep breath and listening to some mule-lipped lying loudmouth talk about all that’s wrong with our country. This he does always, even when his party’s in the White House. So I was sitting still there on I-75, drumming the steering wheel and wondering, not for the first time, whether anybody would actually notice if this loudmouth stopped speaking and just barked like a dog, when one of the Thompson Brothers called in. They’d catered some event for him or something the day or the week before, and the loudmouth said something like “You and I may not see eye to eye politically, but I have got to tell you, those were some amazing ribs you cooked for us.” The next couple of minutes were almost pleasant, listening to the loudmouth shut the hell up about his politics and just tell his gigantic audience how wonderful the food here was and how much he appreciated the good job Thompson Brothers did for him.
So I told myself then that I really needed to quit forgetting about this place and get my butt in there. It was in part that the loudmouth, for the first time in perhaps ever, actually sounded genuine about something, and in part that his organization hired these guys and their little store instead of some much better-known brothers with a great big store about four miles up the road who’ve been supporting the loudmouth’s politics for decades. For anybody to shut this loudmouth up for two minutes to just tell the world about some good food was an act that demanded a visit, at last.
The other week, I was writing about Smyrna’s Old South Bar-B-Q and mentioned that there were some other ‘cue joints within a hop, skip and a jump that I had not tried. I was planning then to stop by as soon as it was convenient. This turned out to be Saturday evening; it was a fine little break between watching the UGA game at home and watching the LSU game with my dad at his place. I’m not sure whether the brothers watched either, as they seem to be Sooners fans.
The house specialty here is what they call “The Whole Nine.” This is a giant plate of beef sausage, bologna, ribs and chopped beef. I confess that I was very tempted, but after the previous night’s pizza, I was still, almost a day later, a little stuffed, so I settled on a sandwich. In deference to the Thompson Brothers’ Oklahoma origins, I ordered beef, which I almost never do in barbecue restaurants, with a side of baked beans. My daughter had a pork sandwich with stew. I sampled them and they were very good.
Interestingly, the beef is just wonderful on its own and doesn’t really go all that well with either of their sauces. They have two, a spicy-sweet one and a this-is-far-too-darn-sweet one, and they mix pretty well with the pork, but the beef is so nicely smoked that neither accompany it at all well. On the other hand, perhaps the sweet baked beans helped with the interference in flavor?
I’ve occasionally read that fans of western-style barbecue believe that their meat doesn’t need any sauce. If the Thompson Brothers’ beef, smoked out back in a cinder block smoker, is a good representation of what they have all over Texas and Oklahoma, then they’re right. I still prefer North Carolina-style, but this was a very nice change of pace.
Other blog posts about Thompson Brothers:
My BBQ Blog (Jan. 31 2008)
Smoked Pig and Sweet Tea (July 10 2011)
Foodie Buddha (July 15 2011)
The Georgia Barbecue Hunt (Oct. 7 2011)
Marie, Let's Eat! 