Barbecue Street, Kennesaw GA (take two)

A couple of months ago, I posted a chapter about a barbecue place in Columbus GA called Chicken Comer. This seems to be the origin of a very interesting mustard sauce that is occasionally found in Atlanta’s western and northwestern suburbs. It’s lava-hot, laced with cayenne, and I wondered how Chicken’s sauce, which was developed in Phenix City AL around 1929, had become standard on the tables of restaurants in places like Austell and Douglasville GA. Continue reading “Barbecue Street, Kennesaw GA (take two)” →

Hoboken Cafe, Marietta GA

If you drive west on Whitlock away from the Marietta Square, you’ll soon come to that dying strip mall which is home to the very good Dave Poe’s BBQ. Beyond that is an unusual and very small shopping center, built in a zig-zag style that was briefly fashionable in the late 1960s. Over the years, several businesses that I’ve found interesting have set up there, including a record shop and a comic store. Those are gone, but today, you can find a place to buy vintage video games, and a more traditional gaming shop. Anchoring the plaza on the street side is Hoboken Cafe, which opened two years ago and which I had never noticed before. Continue reading “Hoboken Cafe, Marietta GA” →

Kristin Sollenne’s Chicken Piccata

This is Marie, contributing an article about a recipe we tried from Domestic Chic, a new book by Kristin Sollenne that we received for preview. There are always cookbooks out there, and I know full well that the vast majority of the ones I own are going to be used for one thing and one thing only: for food porn. I have a much-abused box of slightly stained cards that have the family recipes on them; I have my Joy of Cooking which breaks automatically to the waffle and pie sections, and then…there is the endless stacks of print-outs stuffed haphazardly into a 3-ring binder of “oooh, nifty!” from the internet – some used, some not, but all forgotten the instant they are filed. Continue reading “Kristin Sollenne’s Chicken Piccata” →

Ray’s Rio Bravo, Sandy Springs GA (CLOSED)

If you’ve lived in Atlanta for any length of time, you’ve heard of Rio Bravo. This isn’t a failed restaurant chain with one or two deeply oddball fans, like me and Shrimp Boats. Thousands of people loved Rio Bravo, which opened its first location in 1984. For a while, it was by leagues the best Tex-Mex in town. Continue reading “Ray’s Rio Bravo, Sandy Springs GA (CLOSED)” →

Chicken Salad Chick, Kennesaw GA

So, my daughter. God bless her, she’s a teenager. Is she ever a teenager. Because on the one hand, she’s prone to push back against what we’d like her to do, and eat, and because on the other hand, she wants to eat where all her friends eat, she doesn’t often join us when we pick a place that sounds too weird. And by weird, we mean a Chinese place that doesn’t offer sweet and sour chicken with broccoli. Meryn Cadell once sang of a girl who longed for “the boy of your dreams who is the same boy in the dreams of all your friends.” My girl. Continue reading “Chicken Salad Chick, Kennesaw GA” →

Bar-B-Q Hut, Heflin AL (CLOSED)

When Governor Bentley released the initial list of Alabama’s Barbecue Hall of Fame, I was very pleased to see some terrific old favorites of ours who made the cut (most especially the excellent Brooks Barbeque in Muscle Shoals, which everybody should visit), but as I looked over the list, the biggest standout to me was the Bar-B-Q Hut in Heflin. This was a huge surprise, because I’ve made the quick little detour off I-20 to Heflin a half-dozen times in the last five years, and was aware of the pretty good Marie’s BBQ House in the area. I even got behind their catering truck once! But I had no idea that there was another barbecue joint in that small town, especially one that opened as long ago as 1946! Continue reading “Bar-B-Q Hut, Heflin AL (CLOSED)” →