Nixon’s Deli, Knoxville TN

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’m starting to see that some of these, you have to look a little to find. For example, there’s Knoxville, a terrific city that I have visited better than a dozen times. Continue reading “Nixon’s Deli, Knoxville TN” →

Aretha Frankenstein’s, Chattanooga TN

Last month, I mentioned that a regular at the Roadfood message board had come through with a recommendation for lunch in the town of Carnesville. I once again visited that forum for help finding breakfast this past Saturday in Chattanooga. The same guy, who goes by the handle “Littleman,” again came through with a heads-up on a tiny little place called Aretha Frankenstein’s that just drips with kitschy character and charm. That fellow’s batting a thousand, and if I can’t help you with suggestions about where to eat in any given destination, you should probably track him down. Continue reading “Aretha Frankenstein’s, Chattanooga TN” →

The Grill, Athens GA

This is Marie, talking about The Grill in Athens, GA. Technically this visit involved desserts because I had a shake for dinner, you see.

This place has been around long enough that some of their “decor” is actually just old stuff they never took out, like the juke box attachments for the booths along the walls. The place has a lot of character. Of course it has the kitschy old style signs for beverages that no longer exist or were sold for a nickel. However, they also have a divider down the middle of the room that has glass display cases full of strange antique toys, comics and collectibles. There’s no way to take a picture of the stuff that would turn out, and I wouldn’t want to spoil the amusement factor of seeing the old toys and silly things in those displays. I wouldn’t recommend using their rest room either if you can avoid it, unless you are into the really old-fashioned kind, or you collect really bizarre bathroom graffiti. Continue reading “The Grill, Athens GA” →

The Sweet Shoppe & Soda Stop, Monroe GA (CLOSED)

I absolutely love small southern downtowns when they’re done right and show off cute local businesses. This past weekend, Marie and the kids and I drove to Athens and took US 78 from Decatur, just to have a different thing or two to look at along the way. I get the impression that 78 used to go through the town of Monroe, but somebody threw some money at Walton County in the early 1980s to build a bypass around the town. Nowadays, travelers have to struggle through sprawling chains and traffic lights to get out of Snellville and Loganville, but go out of the way to find Monroe. Continue reading “The Sweet Shoppe & Soda Stop, Monroe GA (CLOSED)” →

Cherokee Cattle Company, Marietta GA

This is Marie, weighing in on the visit we made recently to The Cherokee Cattle Company. Admittedly, my contribution on this one is in large part because there are desserts involved, though the food itself was quite tasty.

My father-in-law picked this location for his birthday dinner. It is one of a small group of four local restaurants, each of them with a different name and arranged around a different theme, owned by “friend-of-Food-Network” Gus Tselios. Marietta Fish Market, Pasta Bella, and the original Marietta Diner are the other three locations. The Cherokee Cattle Company is a steak house and actually predates the other stores. For years, it was independently owned and proudly fought off regional competition from the likes of Longhorn and Outback, but joined the “Diner Family” in 2008. The menu was changed somewhat to fall in line with the others, and to bring the somewhat outsize dinner portions and ridiculously outsize desserts to Canton Road.

One of the best things about this particular location is that of the four, it’s the only one where you don’t usually have to wait for a year and a half to get a table. Mainly it’s just that it’s the biggest of the places, and the parking isn’t quite up to the capacity of the interior (an interior, I should mention, filled with things like antler chandeliers, but if you can ignore that sort of thing you’ll be fine). One of the worst things (for me–it won’t be a problem for anyone but the other four people in the universe who dislike the stuff) is that this place has an unnatural fondness for bacon. Having it appear on my salad was a little discouraging, if for no other reason than that I honestly ought to have remembered from last time that a vegetarian salad needs a special request. However, there were folks at the table willing to take the contaminated salad off my hands, and give every appearance of enjoying the favor they did to me.

Steaks don’t make it onto my plate very often. Most of the time they’re too big for my appetite. Also, since a bad steak is worse than no steak at all, they only get ordered when there’s plenty of money in the budget, or when there is a special occasion. I chose a rib eye because Grant doesn’t like that cut much and I’m disinclined to get a bunch of different slabs of meat for home cooking when it’s so hard to keep track of what is finished when. Which is, of course, one of the benefits of going to a steak house–timing the cooking is someone else’s problem. Actually, the best steak on our table was my father-in-law’s, which came with a bucket containing enough horseradish to clean out the sinuses of Napoleon’s army on the way back from Moscow.

The sweet potato fries are almost thick enough to reach towards home fry status, which as I understand it is a little hard for sweet potatoes as the sugars caramelize rather quickly. Generally fry portions defeat me well before half-way, but these were worth munching a bit longer, in no small part because the thicker fries held their heat better.

Grant got the salmon. Just because we were down the street from the place that specializes in fish doesn’t mean he got second-best; it was very well made, quite simply (as is best for fish) and with a little bit of crispiness around the edges. However, as has been said before, he likes fish rather more than I do, so we were not in danger of menu envy this time.

We closed the meal with some of the death-defying desserts. The selections of the table included cheesecake with and without strawberries, tiramisu cake, and some kind of death by chocolate concoction. Please note that there were seven of us, my piece of cheesecake was bought separately as a take-home item, and we still managed to bring home samples of every one of the cakes along with our other leftovers. Do not come to any of the four locations without a really good appetite, or an awful lot of time, unless you plan to leave with enough for tomorrow’s lunch box and maybe a snack after work, too. But do take home some dessert even if you can’t choke it down immediately after eating yourself silly. Just because the pieces are bigger than your head doesn’t mean they skimp on the quality.

The Varsity Jr., Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

I knew that at some point, Marie and I would have to use the blog to spread the unfortunate word about a much-loved restaurant closing, and write up an obituary tribute. I certainly never expected that I would be doing this about The Varsity Jr. on Lindbergh Drive and I’m still amazed that we’re saying goodbye to it before we had the chance to take the camera down to the main location on North Avenue for a proper entry on this Atlanta landmark.

According to the restaurant, it’s a stupid problem with city politics that have doomed the landmark after forty-five years. In a letter to their customers (available as well on the restaurant’s website), the owners explain that the time was long past for an overhaul of the old building, but their architects could not come to an agreement with the city planners. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that one sticking point was the number of driveways, of all things.

This has almost coincided with the groundbreaking of a new Varsity up north in Dawsonville. Apart from the two inside the perimeter and one in Athens, there have long been suburban Varsities northward up all three arteries out of the city, in Norcross, Alpharetta and within walking distance of us in Kennerietta. There is also, incidentally, a really small mini-Varsity in Waleska on the campus of Reinhardt College. I thought that was top secret city lore, but somebody blabbed it onto Wikipedia. Anyway, so the Varsity Jr. is effectively moving to Dawsonville, leaving behind a lot of history and memories.

Almost exactly twenty years ago, Atlanta was suffering a heat wave that would make the current one seem like an autumn breeze. I was driving around my circuit of record stores that August in my second car, a giant, two-door Oldsmobile Delta 88 without air conditioning. I felt like I was about to pass out from the heat, and I stopped into the Varsity Jr. to cool off.

I haven’t thought about this in years, and my present-day self is a little sheepishly embarrassed by how silly I was acting at age eighteen, but I remember that I ordered two small Varsity Oranges – not the better known “F.O.” Frosted Orange, but their tasty not-very-carbonated drink – and a large cup of ice water. I sat in the dining room and slowly drank one of the orange sodas and then took the other drinks outside into the hundred-and-seven degree heat. I took a deep breath, lifted the water cup above my head and slowly poured that out over me. I’m sure that it felt very good at the time. I was an ostentatious kid.

I have lots of silly memories about the place. Many of them seem to have a little sadness around the edges. When my son was just a few weeks old, he decided to go live at Scottish Rite for a month with supraventricular tachycardia. His mother and I subsided on hospital food for several days before I ventured out to get something tasty. I brought back two boxes from Varsity Jr. and stood in an elevator with about six other sad-eyed parents and visitors and grease running up both my sleeves. “Boy, that smells good,” one of them said. By the time we reached the intensive care floor, I was lucky to escape with all my food.

I also remember something really unhappy. The Varsity Jr.’s location was absolutely perfect for a quick walk before or after a movie at the Tara Theater across the street. About five years ago, I took a young lady to see Howl’s Moving Castle. We were on our way to the restaurant for a late dinner afterwards and she started spinning a yarn about an ex-boyfriend that she claimed was stalking her. The subsequent conversation, after we got our food, about the constant danger she felt turned out to be both a gigantic warning sign and a great big old lie that still actively aggravates me. There’s not been a meal here since that I didn’t feel the desire to stand in front of that booth, reach backwards in time and punch myself in the jaw.

On Saturday, Marie and the kids and I had an early lunch here to say goodbye. Between us, we had three burgers with pimento cheese and four dogs, two with slaw, one with chili and one naked. We had two orders of fries, one order of rings, two FOs and one small Coke. Only a mild case of indigestion and artery-clogging followed.

We’ll have to get to the main location again before too much longer and write that up. Heaven knows I direct enough tourists that direction every week; I’m rather overdue. But Cheshire Bridge and Lindbergh without a Varsity is just crazy talk. Where are we supposed to eat after seeing a movie at the Tara now?

The Majestic Diner, Atlanta GA

One of Atlanta’s signature restaurants, the Majestic has been sobering up drunken twentysomethings for about eighty years now. It seems like exactly the sort of place that, if I was traveling, I would wish to visit in some other town. In point of fact, it is reminiscent of the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, New Hampshire, and I can imagine food lovers in other cities putting the Majestic on their to-do list just as Marie and I did when we drove through New England last year.

Surprisingly, though, it just never occurs to me to eat at the Majestic. I’ve driven past the place hundreds of times on my way to somewhere else. I’m pretty certain that the first time that I ever stopped in was in late 2007, when Neal and I went down to the Landmark to see The Life of Reilly, a terrific film that recorded the great Charles Nelson Reilly’s final performance in his one-man play.

The Majestic, I realized then, is an absolutely perfect place to sit with an old friend late in the evening and talk about the film you’ve just seen. Its presence in the strip mall that houses the Plaza, Atlanta’s oldest running movie house and last independent cinema standing, is just the most wonderful bit of planning anybody could ask for. Whether you’re looking for a quiet sitdown and a cup of coffee after something impenetrable and foreign, or you’re needing to come down after watching the Lips Down on Dixie crew perform Rocky Horror, the Majestic’s doors are always open. It’s real estate like this that brings a brief twinge of envy into my suburban situation. When you live this far out and have to arrange evening plans around PTA meetings and band practice, it’s not quite so easy to enjoy a movie and a late meal without some advance planning.

After far too many years of not visiting the Plaza – the kids and I did go to an exhibition of rarely-seen wartime cartoons there a few years back, but as I recall, we ate at the Zesto in Little Five Points beforehand – last weekend, I got a hankering to see the Silver Scream Spook Show’s presentation of Godzilla on Monster Island. My son and I had a terrific time, completely unprepared as we were for the low-budget lunacy of the costumes and craziness before the film. I did guess, however, that expecting Marie and our daughter to sit through a Godzilla movie – especially a 1970s Jun Fukuda Godzilla movie – was a little much. I suggested that we all have lunch at the Majestic and then they could go shopping while my son and I enjoyed the movie.

We’ll all argue until doomsday who had the better afternoon, but we all agree that lunch was pretty great. My son had woken late and so had breakfast after everybody else, and so he just enjoyed a “Ponce de le Orange” milkshake which was fantastically tasty. Marie had a great chili dog and I had a Majestic Special, two patties with cheese. Oddly, Marie and I ended up ordering an unplanned reversal of the lunch we’d had the week before at Green Acres in Carnesville.

The Silver Scream Spook Show is performing again in October. Maybe I can convince the ladies they need to see that, and maybe I’ll have one of those orange milkshakes when we go. I had a sip of my son’s, you see, and it was really good.