Paul’s Bar-B-Q, Lexington GA (CLOSED)

At some point in the mid-90s, I started taking an interest in what I know today is classified as “roadfood,” and decided to cast my net wide and learn about some fascinating restaurants in the small towns that surround Athens in and around northeast Georgia. I sat down with the Flagpole Guide to Athens and, for the first time in my six years in town, read the darn thing cover to cover. The restaurant listings just amazed me. There were dozens more places to eat than I ever knew about. Most intriguing, in the barbecue section, was Paul’s Bar-B-Q in Lexington, which, the listing promised, was only open on Saturdays and on the Fourth of July. Continue reading “Paul’s Bar-B-Q, Lexington GA (CLOSED)” →

Roy’s Cheesesteaks, Smyrna GA

Here’s another restaurant that I’d never have known about were it not for the old Atlanta Cuisine message boards. I thought that I liked a good cheesesteak as much as the next guy, but it turns out that I had not really enjoyed the real thing yet. I’d enjoyed some pretty good cheesesteaks in my time – The Mad Italian serves up a splendid one, and I’ve heard for years that Woody’s, on Monroe, should be a destination – but now that I know what the real thing should be, I’ve reconsidered what we’d had in the past.

I feel good about calling this the real thing because Roy grew up in Cherry Hill in South Jersey and knows what a good cheesesteak should taste like. He gets his bread in from a Philadelphia bakery called Amoroso and offers a variety of cheeses for his sandwiches. Most people probably just get it with white American, but if you want Cheese Whiz, like some folk from up there prefer, they will gladly do that for you, too. I tried a sandwich wit’ Whiz once and wasn’t completely sold, myself.

For those of us who enjoy hard-to-find sodas, there’s an even better reason to go: Roy’s may well be the only restaurant in the Atlanta region to still serve Fanta birch beer, which I believe is the best soda that Coca-Cola has ever concocted. Once upon a time, Roy started up the regional chain of Philly Connection restaurants, but franchising and overexpanding turned those into a regular disappointment. Back when Roy still ran some of those, you could get Fanta birch beer from them, but the last few times that I’ve popped my head in a Philly Connection’s door hoping for some birch beer, it was a Pepsi soda fountain that greeted me. So if you want a birch beer, and believe me, you do, make your way to Smyrna.

We’ve only been to Roy’s about six or seven times. They don’t keep extremely friendly hours, although I can’t blame them for taking an early supper and closing on Sundays, considering their location. This really is, unfortunately, a place you have to know about to find. It’s off South Cobb Drive, very near I-285, up a little road called Highlands Parkway in an easily-missed strip mall with a gas station and a nail place. The interior is very franchise-friendly — you can easily imagine some sign company retaining the schematics of everything inside, from menus to giant photos of the streets of Philly and the Liberty Bell, to refit any similar-sized space in the city — but, as of this writing, the Smyrna location is the only one.

This past Friday, my dad took me to lunch here. It turned out he wasn’t very hungry himself, so he just had some pizza bread, an Amoroso roll baked with darn good sauce and parmesan cheese, while I got a small loaded cheesesteak, as I always do. A small is more than enough to suit me, especially packed as this is with onions, peppers and pepperoni, with a bag of Zapp’s chips and a short rest before returning to the register to buy a small pack of Tastykakes. The experience just wouldn’t be the same without three peanut butter Tastykakes for dessert.

I still haven’t got around to trying Roy’s hoagies and other sandwiches, because I like the cheesesteaks so darn much. As a final point of emphasis on how tasty these are, and how authentic, last summer, I visited Philadelphia for the first time. On the recommendation of our buddy Chris in Jacksonville, Marie and I stopped by the Little Hut, a tiny takeout place in Ridley Park that his family has sworn by for many years. Roy’s and Little Hut are so similar, and so wonderful, that I can’t pick one over the other, and are absolutely a match in terms of quality. This does do Chris a small service in that Roy’s is something like 512 miles closer to him, the next time he needs an authentic Philly experience. If the Tastykakes people only sent their pies down to this market, we’d probably see him up here twice as often.

Baldinos Giant Jersey Subs, Marietta GA

One of the most amusing feats of eating that I’ve ever seen attempted came at a Baldino’s Giant Jersey Subs about four years ago. This is among my favorite sandwich shops, and it’s hidden so that just about nobody knows that it’s there. It’s in one of the little outparcel strips in front of the Harry’s Farmer’s Market on Powers Ferry and 120, just a couple of doors down from a big Yoga center. Between that place’s packed classes and the restaurant’s constant overflow of officers and airmen from the nearby Dobbins ARB, parking here is often a challenge.

Baldino’s is a small chain with only eighteen stores. Eleven of them are in Georgia (seven of which are in and around Savannah) and the other seven are in North Carolina, dotted around Fayetteville. Unless I’m mistaken, the owners have found their success in targeting their ads, specials and word-of-mouth marketing at the troops stationed at nearby military bases. The Savannah stores serve Fort Stewart, the North Carolina stores Fort Bragg, and the Marietta store is set up for a constant flow of uniformed men from Dobbins.

At least one of those men has a ravenous appetite.

I was there one evening as the store was getting ready to close. They’ve always kept very odd hours. These days they’re shut on Sunday and close every other day at seven, making a living on a huge lunch rush and a trickle of take-out orders for supper. One evening, the kids and I got in about twenty minutes before they wanted to lock the door and sat down to our usual meals. I almost always get a half Sicilian, a sub thick with delicious bread and stuffed with ham, pepperoni and capicola, and a small side cup of pasta salad. My son likes the turkey and cheese and my daughter, forever forgetting why we’ve come to any given establishment, usually gets a plate of spaghetti. Happily, it’s made with pretty darn good sauce and it’s quite cheap, so I’ve never made a fuss.

Satisfied that we were going to be the last customers, the two fellows behind the counter quickly put together their own dinners and sat down at a table a few feet away and synchronized their watches.

“You fellows going to eat all that food?” I asked, because they each had two absolutely enormous sandwiches in front of them.

“There’s this guy,” I was told. “He comes in three times a week and orders two whole number 25s. He sits down and eats both of them in twenty minutes.”

“Three times a week, he does this,” his buddy emphasized. “We’re going to try to do it.”

“I can barely finish a half seventeen. This I have to see.” Marie can barely finish a half of a half herself.

Oh, they tried. They gave it as good a go as any two championship eaters with a huge prize at stake. I think that you have to straddle a deeply uncomfortable line between speed and pace, because if you eat slowly, your brain will start listening to your belly’s “full” notice before you’re ready to stop, yet you have to keep a steady pace, because too long a pause and it’s goodnight, Vienna. Too late a pause and it’s hello, men’s room.

They each finished their first subs in good time, but nevertheless behind schedule. About two bites into the second, they started tapering off and slowing down. Time was called, their twenty minutes were up, and each of them left behind more than what I’d call a meal’s worth. They were as done as I’d ever seen a man. They had much to say about the constitution of this regular champion eater.

“How big is this guy?” I asked. “Fit. He’s in good shape. Tall.”

I’m not sure who I have to kill to get that man’s metabolism. My doctor won’t give me any more than 150 micrograms of Synthroid. I figure if only he’d up me to 600, I could eat two whole subs like that fit, tall mystery man.

Gus’s Hot Dogs, Birmingham AL

That last time that I went to Birmingham, years and years ago, on a night that Bob Dylan was coming to town to play, I had no idea whatsoever where I was going, apart from a general recommendation that I should ask around and find Reed’s Books. This was before Google Maps, and since I’ve never cottoned to buying an atlas or anything like that, traveling anywhere back then meant pointing my car in the general direction and seeing what turned up. In Birmingham’s case, it meant driving back and forth down the mostly deserted downtown streets marveling at what appeared to be a heck of a lot of hot dog restaurants. The impression that I got was during the working week, the city has a thriving financial base which supports nine or ten hot dog businesses. I don’t know whether that’s true – I’ve never sat down with anybody from Birmingham and really talked about the town – but that’s the impression that I got. Continue reading “Gus’s Hot Dogs, Birmingham AL” →

Buffalo Rock

I enjoy a great nostalgia for that feeling I had at age seventeen, going off to college and ready to both make whatever mark on the world I was going to make, and also desiring to brag to my parents about what wild, weird, wonderful things that I uncovered and experienced. So the presence of Steverino’s was a complete revelation. Not only did they serve up the biggest sandwiches I’d ever seen, they delivered them. This changed everything. Continue reading “Buffalo Rock” →

Miss Myra’s Pit Bar-B-Q, Birmingham AL

A few chapters previously, I mentioned how the discovery of mayonnaise-based white barbecue sauce in Clarkesville, Georgia had changed everything. “Oh, yes,” some people say, “that’s what they have in northern Alabama,” but that isn’t true. White sauce is still extremely obscure and not at all common. One of my co-workers was born and raised in Tuscaloosa and he’d never heard of it until I asked him about it. Heck, the girl we spoke with at a fair trade importer right in the heart of downtown Birmingham had only a vague idea what we were talking about. I don’t know that it’s as accurate to call it a regional delicacy as it is some weird thing that only a scattered few oddballs know about. Continue reading “Miss Myra’s Pit Bar-B-Q, Birmingham AL” →

Moksha Restaurant and Bar, Roswell GA (CLOSED)

“I found this amazing Indian restaurant,” Randy told me. I was skeptical. “They have an amazing lunch buffet,” he added. I was doubly so.

I have a tolerate-hate relationship with Indian food, because I’ve found so little of it that rises above a very low batting average. I think I like the idea of it more than the reality, at least locally. Here, quite a few Indian restaurants, more than most of them, go for the fine dining experience, and I almost never feel that the quality of the food warrants the price tag. Since I emphatically do not need to be served by tuxedoed waiters nor eat from fine china and fancy tablecloths, eventually I started to resent paying for it.

Now there was once a lovely little place in Smyrna which did it right: a no-frills presentation of extremely tasty food in styrofoam containers, and you could get out of there, extremely satisfied, for under seven bucks. I got to eat there only twice before I arrived once to see an “under new management” banner out front, fancy tablecloths masking the rickety and unbalanced tables, and a buffet. I don’t know that anything good had ever come from an Indian buffet in Atlanta prior to about a year ago. That was the first time I’ve ever chewed the manager of a restaurant out. I gave him an earful, telling him that raising the prices and making his restaurant exactly like the four restaurants that I drove past to get to his was amazingly stupid. I don’t know whether it was worth it or not, but I seem to recall they shut down within a year.

I’ve tried lots of places in Atlanta. It seems that what passes for Indian cuisine in this town is, regardless of the trimmings and the tablecloths, pretty similar to the El-This-Los-That faux-Mexican meals that we used to get everywhere before enough of a Hispanic population developed for the owners to stop worrying about courting the Anglos and focused on people who knew the food from back home. That’s a topic for another chapter, I think, but it was a very similar experience: the restaurant would be called “Calcutta” or “Bombay” and claim to serve “authentic north Indian cuisine,” and have the same menu and the same flavor as another restaurant twenty miles away called “Taj Mahal” or “Sitar” which claimed to serve “authentic eastern Indian cuisine.” The sole, lone exception was a place in Chamblee called Himalayas, which was a little higher than the average, and where I had rogan josh for the first time.

I’m not claiming that any of it’s really bad, but rather that I knew that my periodic cravings for sopping up a really hot vindaloo with fresh naan would be no different anywhere I went, much in the same way that I could indulge a really intense desire for chips, salsa, rice, beans and some kind of meat at any one of three hundred identikit Mexican places. Thank heaven I found Maizetos brand chips and Garden Fresh Gourmet salsa, otherwise I’d still be wasting money at some “El Sombrero” place once a week.

And the buffet. Don’t get me started. It wasn’t just that I know about Randy and his all-no-fool-would-ever-eat Chinese buffets; one right after another, for years, everything on every Indian buffet in Atlanta came from the same damn kitchen.

I give you this backstory to explain why it was, with a heavy heart and healthy skepticism, I agreed to accompany Randy to this buffet.

Holy bajole. This place is amazing.

Randy discovered Moksha because a buddy of his married into the owner’s family. That meant that Randy joined nine hundred and twenty people for a gigantic meal catered by them. He went to the restaurant, concluded that among Roswell’s many very good restaurants, this was a standout, and insisted that I join him.

Now I must say that the city of Roswell clearly does not care how amazing a treasure their city has. They have made finding this place a complete headache via an ongoing, ages-long road construction project that has worked its way up Old Roswell Road all the way back to its intersection with Warsaw and has left one lamebrained detour after another in its wake. Old Roswell has, in fact, been shifted away from the restaurant, which now sits quietly at the end of where the street used to be, hidden well away from traffic and any potential impulse eaters. Moksha is now a place you have to search out; you cannot find it by accident.

Despite the fact that its location cannot be good for business, it’s excellent for a quiet getaway. The restaurant is in an old farmhouse in the woods, with an event hall behind it. Randy remembers that the property used to belong to a fancy Southern cooking joint called Lickskillet, and it has a polite, isolated charm to it that lets you forget that you’re just a thicket of trees away from a bank and a dozen car dealers on Mansell.

Inside, there are tablecloths and a buffet. I tried to remain strong, and was rewarded by a simply terrific meal. It is, by leagues, more flavorful and tasty than any other Indian cuisine that I have found anywhere in metro Atlanta.

I don’t even pretend expertise, or even knowledge, of what I should be looking for in Indian food, but I’ll tell you this: the buffet is considerably smaller than most. The lettuce they use in the tossed salad is quite disappointing. Everything else is amazing. They have about four wonderful sauces for the salad which overcome the lettuce’s deficiency, and another little mix of chickpeas, onions and tomatoes in a light sauce which is incredible.

For my main meal, I usually get some fried vegetable pakodas along with a big spoonful of rice, and then fill up with ladles of curry. They’ve had chicken tikka marsala each of the three times we’ve gone, and occasionally rogan josh. This time, it was lamb korma, cooked in a thick, spicy cardamom sauce with onions. The flavor is so strong, with a hint of mint.

Desserts vary; often they have rice pudding, but not this time. Actually, I did really well this time and didn’t overdo it. The last time, Randy and I went late and they were ready to take away whatever we weren’t going to eat, so we ate everything. We got as far as the little airlock lobby and sat down again for about as long as we’d spent eating the meal. We were just about ready to call Marie to come get us, because neither of us could face driving home for quite some time. On Friday, I was much more sensible. I was still so stuffed at supper that I had about four bites of chicken and a forkful of rice and called it a night, but I didn’t have to undo my belt after lunch, either.

I’m sure we’ll go back again. Maybe one day we can even go with Marie. We just need to time it right and not feel compelled to finish off every drop of the chicken tikka marsala’s creamy tomato curry. Temptation like that, I just don’t need.

Sadly, Moksha closed at the end of August, 2010.