Now that I’ve got close to a hundred chapters of this story under my belt, I am making a more conscious effort to balance eating at old favorites with trying new places. Big City Bread Cafe is far from new – they seem to have opened their first storefront around the time my daughter was born – but they’re new to me. I try to get to Athens once a month, unless circumstances call me more frequently, and maybe I can continue having a small meal at someplace that I do not know well, before going to play and then grabbing a small meal at an old favorite before coming back to town. Or does that sound too much like I’m setting a schedule? That way lies complacency, doesn’t it? Continue reading “Big City Bread Cafe, Athens GA”
Wallace Barbecue, Austell GA
Many things cross my mind about what to talk about when Wallace comes up, but first and foremost is their sauce. They have two. One is a hot mustard-based sauce that’s bottled and on the table already. It’s terrific, and as promised, it goes very well with the restaurant’s Brunswick stew.
The other sauce is served with your order. I’d advise diners to ask for their pork dry, like David did when he and I went to supper Saturday night and ended up here. David’s on a pretty strict diet for blood sugar problems and needs to take it easy with the greasy fries and sweet sauces. I probably should have done it that way myself, because I like the way that Wallace serves their sauce on the side, piping hot, in a bowl.
The only other place that I’m aware of that does this is Sprayberry’s Barbecue down in Newnan, which is worth revisiting one day very soon, but possibly not this calendar year. The datebook is sort of packed. Now, the makeup of the sauce is quite baffling. I have heard that in Owensboro, Kentucky, they serve up a Worcestershire-based sauce, and kind of got a roundabout confirmation of that from the fifteen-sauce selection at Asheville’s Ed Boudreaux’s BBQ last month. I wonder whether Wallace might be using that as well. It’s certainly very thin and pleasantly vinegary, with pepper, but I couldn’t say beyond that. Our server, and you simply could not ask for a better one, politely declined to assist in identifying it. She explained that there’s one fellow “locked in the back” mixing up their sauces and that nobody but him knows the recipe. I just love that.
I first visited Wallace in 2002. Back then, I was working on a well-intentioned guide to barbecue restaurants here in Georgia that I had hosted on Geocities and waiting for tips on new, or old, places to try. Creative Loafing, the largest and best-known of Atlanta’s alt-weeklies, gave Wallace a good review, so I trekked down to Austell from my old apartment in Alpharetta one Saturday. That really was a haul when there’s nothing at your destination but one barbecue place and a thousand traffic lights and miles of abandoned, low-rent suburban blight along the way. Driving through the community of Mableton along what used to be called Bankhead Highway and is now Veterans’ Memorial Parkway has been one of the region’s most cringeworthy exercises for more than a quarter of a century. There’s really nothing wrong with this agonizing shithole of a road that a really powerful tornado wouldn’t fix.
Sadly, I haven’t found the chance to go back nearly often enough. I know that I’ve tried convincing my folks to have dinner out here instead of their usual barbecue haunts, but for some insane reason, my mom doesn’t like the place. Really, the only thing I have against them is the extremely greasy fries, which I had completely forgotten about. They’re really tasty, but I’m getting awfully close to forty and shouldn’t have fries twice in one day anyhow, particularly if the second meal’s fries are as greasy as this. I should have gone with the slaw.
Wallace is a pretty big place and it’s extremely popular in the area. Saturday nights, the place is packed with folks having a great time. I definitely need to find reason to head out this way again before long.
St Simons Sweets, Saint Simons Island GA
(Marie writes again… having taken a quick weekend jaunt back down to the coast, she took the camera to snap a couple of pictures of a new favorite on Mallery Street.)
St. Simons Sweets is the latest store to make an attempt at the sweet-toothed segment of the tourist crowd in the Pier area of what St. Simons residents call “The Village.” I am not sure why so many have come and gone, as a candy-and-ice cream shop seems a sure bet in any tourist area, but this is by far the best organized and busiest of them. Continue reading “St Simons Sweets, Saint Simons Island GA”
Vittles Restaurant, Smyrna GA
Over on South Cobb Drive, just below Windy Hill, Vittles Restaurant has made its fourth home. It’s been around for better than thirty years – our server explained that she’d been with the business for twenty-eight of them – and has made a name for itself as a place to go when you want a gigantic pile of food for not much money. Most of their staple meals – a meat, two sides, salad and bread – are only $5.99 on the menu. How on earth they’re able to maintain their quality and the portion sizes for that money is a mystery.
Neal, whom we met for lunch on Saturday, has heard a theory that the restaurant subsidizes their meal prices with sales from their gift shop, which starts in the inner foyer and explodes all over the restaurant’s walls. The nicknacks here are really a sight to see. If you need porcelain plaques with Bible verses or large photos of horses with inspirational quotes, this is where to buy them. The interior is absolutely covered with these things, and should you be unfortunate enough to sit in one of the front booths, you might well be stuck underneath a shelf full of statues of sad-eyed children and puppies.
Last month, I wrote about how The Vortex reacted to Georgia banning smoking in restaurants that served minors by banning minors from their restaurant. Vittles took a different approach. They moved to the building next door and turned it into two completely separate dining rooms, with children restricted to the equally-sized non-smoking room. Now I must say that while the staff at the Vortex keep a very sharp eye out for any teens or kids trying to get in, the staffers at Vittles genuinely do not seem to care.
We tried to get a group together here one Thursday last month, but were stymied somewhat. My kids and I arrived first and were told we couldn’t claim a table with room for seven in the non-smoking section because there was going to be a Bible study in 45 minutes’ time. (I suppose that I should clarify that we knew up front that there’s a Bible study at the restaurant on Thursdays, but I didn’t realize that it effectively takes over the restaurant.) So we took a booth until Neal and Tim arrived, and agreed that we’d try a large table in the smoking section. I completely forgot about the law, and it didn’t even occur to me that the kids legally couldn’t enter that room, but, and here’s the kicker, it didn’t occur to anybody else at the restaurant either. When we eventually concluded that the smoke was too heavy for either David or Marie to find comfortable, we paid for our drinks and left. None of the four or five servers or table staff in that section batted an eye at the kids.
Well, the following week, the kids and I stopped by on a whim to give Vittles a chance while Marie was out of town, and I have to say I was glad I did. There is an unfortunate amount of Sysco in the menu – fries and a faux A-1 steak sauce whose packaging steers so close to trademark infringement as to be comical for starters – but the food – I had the pork chops that evening – is mostly quite good and there is a heck of a lot of it.
We returned this Saturday to photograph the place, and the experience was not quite so pleasant. I really don’t appreciate having any politics broadcast at a restaurant, neither mine nor anyone else’s. I think that it runs counter to what I’m looking for in a meal, which I think is to get away from the world, enjoy good company and good conversation, or, if eating by myself, a good book. I do not want politics interfering with my lunch. There exists a small chain of barbecue restaurants in the northern suburbs which I will not revisit because, on two separate occasions when I stopped by for supper before tutoring students in the town of Cumming back in 2000, I had to listen to some loudmouth in the back screaming his lungs off about that year’s scapegoat destroying America.
The omnipresent Fox News on the TV in both non-smoking and the smoking rooms was mildly amusing a month ago, when Glenn Beck was on selling his gold scam to his audience of aging, paranoid suckers. But you know, I was really enjoying my country fried steak and gravy Saturday, and didn’t appreciate the latest big-screen Fox News distraction, and certainly didn’t appreciate the loudmouthed conversation behind me from one of that 18% of the country’s morons who’s convinced our president’s a Muslim because of Sean Hannity’s latest lie. It’s unfair to hold a restaurant accountable for the boorish conduct of its guests, and I don’t, even if they feed their paranoia by turning the TV to Fox instead of a baseball game or something.
We left and I borrowed Neal’s camera to shoot a picture of the building. There’s an American flag out front of the restaurant. This flag is: (a) horribly tattered and torn and ready to be honorably retired, (b) attached in some fashion to an equally tattered and torn old Georgia state flag, the one with the Confederate colors, and (c) upside down. I might have another order of that steak and gravy once they fly a new flag, and hoist it the right way up.
Ru San’s, Kennesaw GA
Now this is weird. I’ve eaten at one Ru San’s or another better than a dozen times, but I can’t remember a single occasion that lends itself to an anecdote worth relating. I remember watching DJ Shockley make a spectacular end zone dive when the Gamecocks came to town in 2005 at the one in Athens, but I was wasting time with somebody who didn’t like football that fall and might not have that quite right. I remember watching what must been a sixth generation VHS copy of an old Gundam cartoon at the one in Buckhead in 2004 and thinking that incredibly odd, that surely they could have laid their hands on a better copy of that. Of course I remember that my daughter shouts “Wasabi!” in the manner of South Park‘s “Timmy!” every time we walk into one of their locations. Perhaps sushi does not lend itself to anecdotes? Continue reading “Ru San’s, Kennesaw GA”
Bella’s Pizzeria, Smyrna GA
It’s always a little discouraging when a place that you know to be capable of giving you a good meal lets you down. We don’t eat at Bella’s very often – perhaps eight or nine times over the years – but it has a deserved reputation for giving you a perfectly good New York-style pie. It’s certainly nowhere near the best in the region, and not in my top five, but I’ve always felt it to be a reliable place.
It’s a sports bar, basically. I’m not sure how much of its loud, late-evening hoopla was designed and how much evolved from answering customer requests for things to do, but over time they’ve introduced Team Trivia and other games, and usually have live music – blues and classic rock covers, mainly – on Fridays and Saturdays. It’s a very fun neighborhood pizza place. The pie’s usually pretty good, and you can complement it with a very decent side salad with a delicious house dressing or some garlic knots which put most of their rivals to shame, and they offer Boylan’s sodas by the bottle. It’s a good place.
This past week, we had the first subpar meal we’ve ever had at Bella’s. We had a veggie pie and a stuffed pie with meatballs and ham, and neither was worth writing home about. They were certainly better than what Domino’s might like to deliver, but not at all like what I have had in the past. The dough didn’t taste right, and the sauce seemed bland and canned. I thought the cheese was fine, and the veggie toppings were all quite good, but it just felt like it was made without attention to detail. It didn’t have any spark.
When this happens with pizza, it’s hugely aggravating because you’re sharing with the group. Marie, my daughter and I met Neal here and we could all only agree that the food was “all right.” Sadly, the blow to the wallet seems a lot harsher when your meal isn’t a standout. Bella’s seems a little pricier than most of its competitors anyway, but they do offer coupons which aren’t hard to find. In fact, we got our coupon from my folks, who eat here all the time. My dad is often found shopping in that strip mall, and he loves Bella’s, but he’s also honest about their inconsistency. Most of the time, they’re pretty good, once in a while they are outstanding, and once in a very long while, they’re bland and disappointing.
I’ve mentioned before that 2004 was something of a mistake-filled year for me. The very last time one of those mistakes and I had supper together, I brought her and her daughter here. The pizza that night was completely amazing, although I think that the girl I was seeing was a little too distracted by her daughter’s really awful conduct that night to notice. I’m willing to cut Bella’s a little slack, because I know first-hand that they can do better. That and those garlic knots will knock you out.
Petro’s Chili and Chips, Knoxville TN
As I was saying, I’ve written here before about loving the idea of regional specialties, and recipes that you just can’t find all over the country. I also love small regional chains that you can’t find at home. In this respect, Knoxville is one of my absolute favorite places to spot small-market fast food, particularly on a stretch of Kingston Pike where Papermill Road dead-ends. Continue reading “Petro’s Chili and Chips, Knoxville TN”
Marie, Let's Eat! 