I’m pretty sure – although I can’t swear to it specifically – that it was my dad who mentioned Double Cola to me. It’s the sort of drink where, if you didn’t know it was a really old beverage, dating back to the 1920s, you’d walk right past it in the convenience store, thinking it just another cheap knockoff. But my dad sold it to me as something really neat, and said, incorrectly, that you could only get it in its hometown of Chattanooga. Continue reading “Double Cola”
Sugar’s Ribs, Chattanooga TN
I started visiting friends up in Nashville a little over ten years ago now, and so I’ve seen a particular building off I-24 in Chattanooga on the way home many, many times. It was a breakfast place for ages, but in 2007, it became Sugar’s Ribs, and the combination of neon and a great big sign proclaiming the Big Time BBQ available therein made the place irresistible. Continue reading “Sugar’s Ribs, Chattanooga TN”
Chilito’s, Kennesaw GA (CLOSED)
Wednesday was one of those rotten days full of delays and lane closures and slow drivers. Contrary to what you might suspect from this food blog, Marie and I do eat in more often than we go out, although in my case, since she’s the wizard in the kitchen, it often means sandwiches and leftovers. However, I do allow myself one lunch out a week, and I was looking forward to it that morning. My destination was, typically, closed. Then it was every student driver and testing failure in Cobb County getting in my way as I headed home to reconsider my options.
I was listening to Contra, the new album by Vampire Weekend, and it cycled back around to the opening song, “Horchata.” That reminded me that I hadn’t been by Chilito’s in an incredibly long time. They brew up some really good horchata, but I was in the mood for sweet tea. I mention it just because I wouldn’t have even thought about the place were it not for that song.
You don’t see many restaurants like this one opening anymore. It’s a remnant of the “gourmet burrito” craze that started in the late ’90s and lasted for about a decade. There are certainly a few regional chains that I don’t mind at all – Barberito’s, Qdoba and Willy’s all serve reasonably tasty food – but the better examples of single-store ideas didn’t last long. Raging Burrito in midtown was very good, and I also quite liked Extreme Burrito, which lasted for maybe nine months on Baxter Street in Athens. I’ll always remember an incident there in the spring of 2000 when a friend of mine who would probably prefer to remain nameless started flirting with the waitress there and I suddenly understood why that reporter bellowed “Oh, the humanity!” when the Hindenburg caught fire.
I think that Chilito’s tried to become a similar regional chain, but it didn’t get very far. Its first store was on Bells Ferry Road near I-575, perhaps in 2005, and closed two years later. This one opened in 2006 in some unnecessary identikit development on Chastain Road and has been hanging in there for a while, mainly serving the Kennesaw State University community with promotions and student-targeted discounts. I’m not aware of any other expansion, and the restaurant’s website is, shall we say, unhelpful.
At any rate, Chilito’s is kind of like Moe’s, only not terrible. (“Always remember, kids, you can’t spell mediocre without m – o – e!”) You walk down a line having somebody on the other side of a sneeze guard slap various ingredients onto your tortilla or shell. You hope that the tortilla has not been steamed so long that it’s trapped water, and that the cilantro has been diced finely enough so that you won’t be picking a stem out from between your teeth, and you bristle that you have to pay an extra forty cents for corn. You go get salsa, some of it quite good and some of it blandly inoffensive, from another little bar with a sneeze guard with little plastic cups that are too darn tiny to be much good. There is nothing remarkable about this place, and you leave equally grateful for a low-priced meal with a “buy ten get one free” bribe card as you do for the quality of the food.
It’s a long way from outstanding, but I’ve always found it perfectly serviceable, even if I don’t go there with any regularity. The bribe card that I mentioned is finally, after Wednesday’s trip, full. It has taken me four years to get it there. This trip, I had a chicken taco salad, because that was their daily special for $5.99. The fellow on the other side of the sneeze guard filled it with black beans, not-especially-spicy chicken, queso dip, lettuce, pico de gallo, cheese and costs-forty-cents-extra corn. Not at all a bad price, especially coming with chips and a drink. (Sweet tea, and, surprisingly, awful. I had half a cup of Mr. Pibb to wash the taste away.)
Chilito’s offers fish tacos and these are, honestly, very good. I should probably get away with eating these more often. Honestly, though, the reason I haven’t eaten at Chilito’s often enough to fill up a bribe card in under four years is simple: my kids can’t stand the place. I don’t know what it is they find objectionable, beyond just a general thought that it’s “yucky,” but the psychologists tell us that children’s minds are still cooking and not fully formed yet. I try to remember that when they occasionally protest that they’d really prefer mediocre Moe’s to a nice Chilito’s fish taco.
Old Hickory House, Dunwoody GA (CLOSED)
When I was a kid, before I knew better, I always ate cheeseburgers at barbecue restaurants. My parents frequently went with friends to one of two places in Smyrna, Old South Bar-B-Q on what’s now Windy Hill Road, but what Neal reminds me was then called Cherokee Street, and the Old Hickory House that, if I remember correctly, used to be on 41 near I-285. It was one of those restaurants across the street from the Steak & Shake and the Lexus dealership – which itself used to be a Service Merchandise – and I think that my parents started having occasional Friday night suppers there after the Red Sirloin closed. You probably don’t remember Red Sirloin. We ate there almost every Friday at 6 pm for years, and I agonized every single sortie for two of those years that we were going to miss Wonder Woman on CBS at 8.
But I’m not talking about Red Sirloin, I’m talking about Old Hickory House. In the late 70s and early 80s, this was something close to an Atlanta tradition. I believe that there were at least ten of these dotted around the suburbs, and they regularly advertised on TV and radio. Everybody who grew up here remembers their old jingle, “Put some south in your mouth, at Old Hickory House…”
The chain of restaurants even had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the national spotlight. The scene in Smokey & the Bandit where Burt Reynolds first gets the better of Jackie Gleason while he’s waiting impatiently for a “Diablo sandwich and a Dr. Pepper” was filmed at an Old Hickory House in Forest Park. I believe that Bandit hides his Trans Am behind the restaurant’s sign shortly afterward. That location is long gone, as are most of the others. For the longest time, only three remained. One of those was in the lobby of a Days Inn just off Roswell Road in Sandy Springs, but it was replaced by a Chinese restaurant in the late 90s. The last two holdouts of this old tradition are in Dunwoody and Tucker.
This past Saturday, Marie and I went out to the Old Hickory House with our daughter and with David, who’s dieting and had to think long and hard about imbibing too much in the way of sweet barbecue sauce and ruining his blood sugar. What we found feels very much like a restaurant that is still serving up some pretty good food, but also on its last legs. The restaurant looks a lot like like it was built in the 1970s and hasn’t changed or been renovated at all in close to forty years; it’s just aged and seems dim. Dim and grim.
It was very quiet and slow on this Saturday evening. Not many customers were dining, and we were the youngest. Considering how I spent the first three paragraphs of this chapter reminiscing about the good ole days, that might tell you something. One week previously, we had been at Zeb Dean’s in Danielsville for Saturday night supper, where there were only a few seats free and the joint sparked with electricity and loud conversation. Here, most of what joie de vivre there was came from our server, an agreeable fellow named Junior, who made us feel very much at home.
It just didn’t feel much like a home where we wanted to stay for long. The food was not bad, although the sauce was far too sweet and mild for my liking, and the fries, which were just terrific, really reminded me of my misspent youth, foolishly eating cheeseburgers when I could have been trying barbecue, except that “it looked weird” or some other childlike excuse for not eating what you came to a restaurant to eat. The Brunswick stew here is quite good. One neat standout on the restaurant’s menu is their dressed dog, where they smother a dog with Brunswick stew. I haven’t had one of those in a really long time.
The experience somewhat reminded me of what we felt after lunch at the Mad Italian a couple of months ago; the memories of a restaurant’s glory days were more pleasing than the meal itself. Maybe the next time we ask David to join us for something to eat, we should make sure it’s a restaurant too new to be compared to its more interesting past.
Other blog posts about Old Hickory House:
3rd Degree Berns Barbecue Sabbatical (Feb. 8 2010)
Eat Buford Highway (Mar. 30 2010)
All the Single Girlfriends (May 27 2011)
Hostess Fruit and Pudding Pies
Several weeks ago, I read the most remarkably odd thread over at Roadfood.com. People – sane, rational, sensible people – were discussing Hostess Fruit Pies and the various regional varieties available in their market. This just did not strike me as a sensible use of anybody’s time. I’d long ago written off the entire Hostess corporate entity as a huge disappointment, and couldn’t see why anyone was raving about these pies.
I don’t think this was snobbishness on my part. When I was a kid, Hostess was always a treat. I grew up eating King Dons, if you remember those. Apparently, they had that name in the southeast, as opposed to Ding Dongs or Big Wheels in other places, to avoid confusion with Drake’s Ring Dings. I always got a kick out of Hostess’s funny little comic book ads, where Batman would foil the Penguin’s latest scheme by throwing a Twinkie, a Cup Cake or a Fruit Pie at him, and grumbled that since King Dons were better than any of the others, they should be advertised in those pages, too.
Also, you could usually count on getting three baseball cards on the bottom of a box of King Dons. It wasn’t just that they were chocolate, or that you could roll the aluminum foil wrapper into a little marble-sized wad and pelt somebody with it, you could get a Rollie Fingers or a George Brett card if you looked at the bottom of every box in the Big Star and shouted “Mom! Mom! This one!”
But at some point in the mid-80s, Hostess cakes just started tasting terrible. Whether the local bakery started changing the recipe or puberty made its first freewheeling jigger with my taste buds, I just didn’t want to eat King Dons or Twinkies about the time I started high school. They didn’t taste like cake anymore, and that creamy filling, once so very delicious, took on the flavor of the sort of stuff that came out of the ground at Love Canal. The company just became synonymous with “chemical sludge,” basically. Last year, I had a “Dinah Finger” at the great Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, New Hampshire and was overjoyed. That was what Twinkies tasted like before they got all chemically.
Fruit Pies, however, I never liked as much as the cakes in the first place. This is perhaps unsurprising. I was a stupid kid.
So anyway, I was reading all these yahoos raving about the taste of Hostess strawberry Fruit Pies and figured that either they’re all completely crazy or they’re onto something. And the Hostess / Interstate Baking people have an outlet store about two miles from my house.
They haven’t finished switching over all the names yet, but Interstate Baking officially changed its name to Hostess Brands in November of last year. This incorporates Hostess, Drake’s, Dolly Madison, Merita and who knows how many other little brands that have fallen before the behemoth that is Twinkie the Kid. So I popped in after work two weeks ago and navigated through shelves of Wonder Bread and Moon Pies – not, I don’t hesitate to tell you, including the rare and wonderful orange flavor – to find a lovely bunch of Fruit Pies, nicely priced at eight for $5. I figured that if I didn’t like them, then I’m sure my daughter and her friends would eat them.
Oh, no. Random neighbor children will not be getting their hands on these babies. They are wonderful. They are four hundred and freakin’ fifty calories of wonderful, but they are not for kids. They’re for Marie and me. Maybe my daughter can have one or two.
The pick of the patch is the strawberry pie. These are seasonal, while lemon, apple, cherry and chocolate are baked year-round. Missing from the local region is blackberry, which is only available, apparently, in the northwest. The shop near me did not have chocolate on the first visit. They get deliveries every Monday and chocolate was promised the second visit. Honestly, it really wasn’t worth the wait; I just didn’t care for the pudding.
But these fruit pies are just amazing. Heat one of these for about twenty seconds and eat it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and tell me that’s not a more delicious dessert than the last thing you shelled out for at a restaurant. I like the strawberry and the apple best, but the others are still really good. Just, you know, don’t plan to eat one every night.
So thanks and congratulations, Hostess, for proving that some memories from childhood are still absolutely worth revisiting. Now, if you could only see your way clear to having the bakeries here in Georgia ramp up some blackberry pies as well, I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.
Several months later (November), I found one of the rarely-sighted peach-flavored Hostess pies at a truck stop in Franklin, Kentucky:
Now all I need is time in my calorie schedule to justify eating the darn thing before it goes stale!
Curry chicken salad and grilled gouda sandwiches
This is Marie, whose usual contribution to the site is to get something different from my husband so he can have menu envy, or to write about something I cooked. This is the latter option.
Tonight’s dinner was curry apple chicken salad and grilled cheese sandwiches, and it was in no way as plebian as that sounds. The girlchild had her heart set on grilled cheese and soup, so she ate a slightly different dinner (and somewhat inferior in my mind, but she seemed quite satisfied and did have a little chicken salad on the side).
The chicken salad came from a recipe passed on by my aunt. We had our first encounter with the stuff on our honeymoon trip when we were going to spend the evening at her place in Philadelphia on our way to somewhere else. Since she didn’t know when we’d be showing up or how hungry we’d be when we arrived, she felt that it was the ideal thing to have in reserve. She was correct. It’s made with green apples, onions, diced peppers, and of course chicken. The original recipe calls for cooking the chicken by boiling it with a number of vegetables (making a really tasty broth in the process) but we didn’t need quite as much as that would make, so I just cooked a couple of chicken breasts with curry powder (a lovely blend by my favorite spice company, Penzey’s, called Singapore Spice) and let that cool overnight before slicing it and mixing in the diced apples, onions, and sweet red peppers, along with some of the white pepper I bought on our honeymoon. Left to my own devices I would add raisins to the recipe as well, but my family is unaccountably hostile to dried grapes. The salad is quite flexible. Others might add nuts or celery.
The grilled cheese sandwiches were made with some lovely gourmet Gouda that I mail-ordered from a dreadfully expensive but oh-so-good place called Zingerman’s. I think about the only thing that would get me to buy more from them is winning the lottery, because that’s about all I can think of that would let me afford their prices on a regular basis, but boy is their stuff good. I originally tried this particular cheese because I was doing an internet survey of cheeses for my father. He likes Dutch farmer’s cheese made from unpasteurized milk, and I was going on a quest to get him a whole or half wheel of something or other for Christmas. It was quite a delicious quest as it involved trying out a number of cheeses that he might possibly like, but had to be researched first. I knew on the initial order that it was NOT going to be affordable in the quantity desired, but tried anyway, and promptly became addicted. And no, as of yet he still hasn’t had any of this particular variety (at least from me). One of these days, when my willpower is high enough, he’ll get a box in the mail with a pound or two.
Anyway, each time I get an order I discover yet another way in which it is perfect and wonderful, and tonight’s meal was another addition to the list. Melted into toasted bread, in all the tasty variations, is my favorite choice. In this case, I found that alternating bites of the spicy curry and sweet/tart green apple with the crisp sandwich brought out the richness of the warm cheese, and the creamy Gouda made the curry pop. It was an entirely satisfactory meal but what’s particularly good is that some of the cheese is still left for later nibbling.
Zeb’s Bar-B-Q, Danielsville GA
At some point in the early ’90s, I drove from Athens to Greenville, South Carolina up US 29 and passed by Zeb’s Bar-B-Q, a little roadside restaurant in the oddest location. It’s about seven miles north of Danielsville, about halfway between that town and Franklin Springs, in between nothing whatsoever and a field. I thought that delightful, hand-painted sign out front was laugh-out-loud charming and quaint and wished Zeb well indeed as I sped on by. I don’t know what I thought I would be doing in Greenville, but I’m reasonably positive that I wasn’t going to eat as well there as I could have, had I stopped here instead. Continue reading “Zeb’s Bar-B-Q, Danielsville GA”
Marie, Let's Eat! 