The Silver Skillet, Atlanta GA

Let me tell you how to get one of the most decadent breakfasts that you’ve ever had. Go on down to the Silver Skillet. It’s an old-fashioned greasy spoon in Atlanta’s midtown, on 14th Street just west of the downtown connector. That’s what we call the stretch of Interstates 75 and 85 when they merge. The building has barely changed in fifty years, with faded prints of show horses on the walls and the old hand-painted signs with the daily specials behind the bar. You’ll want country ham with red-eye gravy, and two biscuits with white gravy, and a couple of eggs, preferably scrambled. And you’re probably going to want some sweet tea with it. If you’re the sort who likes coffee with your breakfast, trust me this once, you’ll want to pass this time around.

Red-eye gravy is most often made from mixing the drippings of the fried country ham with coffee. To hear my mother tell it, that’s why in northern Alabama, where she grew up, this was called, not very appetizingly, “grease gravy.” At the Silver Skillet, they apparently let their country ham, which is center-sliced and bone-in, marinate for several hours in a stew that includes – if you’re ready for this – soy sauce, brown sugar, paprika and Coca-Cola before they fry it. So it’s the grease from that marinate that gets mixed with coffee. I think that it works best as a dip. Have a small piece of ham dipped in gravy, followed by a small piece of biscuit dipped in the white gravy. Somehow manage to keep the current week’s Creative Loafing balanced in your lap under the formica table.

This ham is, by leagues, the best country ham that I’ve ever had. It is tender but chewy, and incredibly salty. You’re then dipping this salty meat into a gravy that’s at least one part soy sauce. You are going to need sweet tea, and not coffee. Probably about three glasses. And you’re still going to be licking your lips and smacking from salt overload about ninety minutes later.

At any rate, the Silver Skillet has been family-owned since 1967. The late George Decker bought the restaurant from its original owner and his daughter has run it since his passing in 1988. Open from 6 until 2 in the afternoon, there is usually a short wait during the week and a much longer one on weekends or during big events in the city that bring in the tourists. For my birthday last week, I treated myself to breakfast here. I got there just in time to claim one of two available tables, kicked back with my paper, had a very nice server call me “sweetie” and “hon” as she refilled my tea enough times for me to float away when I was finished.

Much later, after I had gassed up and stopped by someplace in the ‘burbs for some Christmas shopping, I went by a grocery store where my bank has a branch. I was still smacking my lips. It was that tasty and that salty. Clearly that’s not a meal for everybody, nor a meal for every day, but when the opportunity strikes to indulge just a little, how can anyone resist?

Desi Spice, Atlanta GA

It was with a heavy heart that we bid farewell to Roswell’s Moksha, which had been my favorite Indian restaurant in the Atlanta area. Well, now I’m on the lookout for something to claim its former crown, and that is going to mean eating as much Indian food as the wallet will allow. I’ll try and rise to the challenge.

Well, I exaggerate. I really don’t get out for Indian all that often, and still miss that wonderful vegetarian place in Decatur with the no-frills approach and styrofoam plates. But I’m certainly happy to keep my eyes open for something new and very tasty, and this past weekend, with Marie out of town again, I asked David whether he was free to find some grub for a Saturday lunch. The restaurant was his idea; left to me, we might have gone down to Jackson or over to Covington or someplace to fill up some of the list I’m trying to do. No matter; I am perfectly happy to stay in town and have some Indian food. There was only one obstacle: my daughter. It took this girl almost a decade to admit to liking Brunswick stew, so it’s evident that Indian cuisine is simply going to take a little longer.

I was mostly very pleased with my meal. They offer a nicely-priced lunch menu, even on Saturdays, which gets you a small appetizer, rice and dessert along with your main course. I had some mulligatawny soup with my lamb curry. I honestly won’t say that was the best lamb that I’ve ever tried, feeling a little stringier than I prefer, but the sauce was a delicious, medium hot concoction, and I liked that better than many other curries that I’ve had before. The mulligatawny had a delightful zing of ginger with its kick, but the color – a vibrant red – completely surprised me. I’ve always seen it as a yellowy orange.

Instead of soup, David had an onion pakura that he said was wonderful, and an order of chicken tikka which he shared. Much as I liked the curry, I got menu envy again, because this chicken was prepared just perfectly. It was tender and juicy and the light green sauce that came with it proved a nice, if unnecessary, accompaniment. Our desserts were the small bowl of wonderful rice pudding that I ordered, and a dish new to me, gulab jamun, a deep-fried cheese ball dipped in honey. As David felt that his blood sugar was already through the roof on Saturday, he passed that to me and darn if I haven’t found a dessert on Indian restaurant menus that I enjoy even more than rice pudding.

Well, Desi Spice is certainly very tasty indeed, and the girlchild definitely missed out by only agreeing to a stuffed paratha before decamping for the little Rita’s Italian Ice stand down below the restaurant, which was once a Bruster’s. It’s in the shopping center with the Landmark Midtown Art Cinema and the Trader Joe’s. If there was only a nice trail connecting this strip mall on Monroe with the one behind it on Ponce with the Borders, then you could easily spend all afternoon here, shopping, reading, watching good movies and having a few good meals. There are a heck of a lot of decent restaurants in the neighborhood, plus a couple that I’ve been hoping to try.

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Sublime Doughnuts, Atlanta GA

About six months ago, a regular guest where I work brought in a big box of Sublime Doughnuts as a thank-you for the front desk. The treats were duly sliced into bite-sized samples for all the staff to try. Allegedly, a couple more boxes have come this way for Wednesday afternoon birthday celebrations, but, criminally, I don’t work on Wednesdays. I recall thinking that my sample was just wonderful and resolved that I needed to get back to have a lovely little breakfast from them as soon as it was feasible.

Six months went by and I finally thought to stop in for an afternoon snack. I need to try harder, don’t I?

The business was founded by a local fellow, Kamal Grant, a couple of years ago. He picked a career that’s for morning people: he’s there, in a shop on 10th Street once occupied by some other doughnut baker who chose to misspell the word the way that those dunkin’ people do, every morning at 4 am getting his doughnuts and pastries ready for a hungry audience. I really like the way that many of his creations don’t look like hockey pucks. Some, like his red velvet cake, do, but his version of a Boston creme, for example, is called the A-Town Cream and is shaped like a letter A. Elsewhere on the racks, you’ll see little hearts, stars, twists and ribbons, all of them decadently delicious.

Earlier this summer, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution named Sublime as their favorite guilty food pleasure in the city, singling out their A-Town Creams and their Reese’s peanut butter doughnuts. It looks like my peers in the food-talkin’-bloggin’ community are similarly sold on the place.

We – Marie, my daughter and my parents – stopped by on Saturday after our lunch a few miles south at Harold’s. After a quick detour to look at the federal pen and the requisite teasing of my daughter that this is where she’ll end up if she doesn’t straighten up, we drove north up Pryor and Central, up avenues where my dad, navigating and reminiscing, used to work, while we listened to the Dogs beat up on Vandy. Left on Marietta and right on Spring / West Peachtree as Vandy caught a break and had a field ruling of a fumble overturned as an incomplete pass, we started passing $10 and $20 lots for Tech fans coming into midtown to tailgate. Tenth Street, which borders one side of the Tech campus, was full of yellow and navy and black and gold. Apparently there’s now a Petro’s Chili and Chips outpost actually inside Bobby Dodd Stadium. It’s a little aggravating to be within walking distance of a Petro’s and know that the most convenient one is still three hours’ drive north.

My dad was talked out and tired and didn’t want to get out of the car when we arrived, but the fellow behind the counter at Sublime had an awful lot to say. He showed off and described all the treats on display. I got a different pastry for Marie, Ivy and my mother, and while they all came with different flavors, they all shared a wonderfully light and fluffy touch. Grant’s trick in the kitchen, reported by John Kessler in the AJC, is to fry the doughnuts at a very high temperature for a shorter period; that apparently gives them the most puff.

These are absolutely wonderful pastries, and although with prices this low and a profit margin so slim, it will certainly take a long time for Grant to grow this business, he’s got an awful lot of goodwill backing him up. I hope that Sublime thrives and becomes a destination for everybody in the city. Even all those Tech students lining up 10th need something to eat.

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Antico Pizza, Atlanta GA

Some chapters back, I suggested that Atlanta’s top five pizzerias are probably good enough to challenge any other city’s top five pizzerias, or at the very least good enough for myself and a representative of Chicago to at the very least greatly enjoy every last bite of proving the other wrong. I had been hearing really great things about Antico, a teeny little place on Hemphill just down the road from Ikea, and wondered whether it would be good enough to break into my personal list of the metro area’s top five.

Wonder no more; it isn’t. It’s still quite good, and certainly worth a visit, but I didn’t leave as satisfied as I had hoped.

Antico’s pies are very tasty, large enough for two, and come to around twenty bucks. They use fresh ingredients, including some amazing cherry tomatoes and wonderfully tasty bufala cheese. If they could just do something about the presentation, it would elevate a good meal into something special.

Antico is easy to find. It’s easy to drive right past, too, as Neal and I discovered early Thursday evening. He had the day off and suggested we get together for supper before our usual Thursday night get-together with friends, and I suggested pizza. We found the place with no difficulty, and arrived before the evening dinner rush.

The restaurant appears to have a very limited seating area, doing most of its business as takeout. It turned out that the room that I thought was merely the kitchen actually doubled as a dining room, with space for more than twice as many customers. I can’t swear that I’ve ever seen that kind of setup before.

But even before we sat down at what appeared to have been Antico’s only table, I had gone off the place. We placed our order at the register with an unpleasantly surly woman who grouchily told us the house rules and that there were no substitutions. That’s actually a rule that I’m fine with; I figure that if you’re one of those people who tries to order a Reuben with cole slaw instead of kraut, you’ve got no business ordering a Reuben in the first place. Anyway, she was a grouch, and underlining it the emphatic way that she did annoyed me, and the only drink options are bottled (teas, water and three Coke products), which I didn’t like either. Then we had to read something before we sat down.

Okay, so there’s a single large table in what appeared to be the only seating area. You have to pass through this room to get to the combination kitchen/dining room. The table seats eight, and so I figured this would be a nice little shared experience similar to how they serve up at the Smith House in Dahlonega. Only the Smith House employs an army of incredibly friendly servers who routinely check on you and make sure that you’re doing fine, and the Smith House would never, ever do anything so unbelievably tacky as tape a label to every seat around the table which read something like “If you move this seat, you will be asked to leave.” Neal and I, who took places at the far corner of the table, each seem to spend an inordinate amount of time with our eyebrows raised over some damn fool thing or other, but that warning on those chairs really might take some beating.

After an agreeably short wait, a server whose face I never saw appeared between us to drop a large metal serving tray on the table. Apparently you don’t get individual plates here, either, although you do get quite a lot of pizza grease. If the pie wasn’t made from excellent dough with such good ingredients, it would have been worth complaining about. I just shrugged, tore a section from the roll of paper towels on the table and soaked up a little of the oil before eating. Varasano’s, my favorite pizza in the city, used to get some stick for its pies having damp centers, but I’ve never seen as much oil and grease on a Varasano’s pie as what I sopped up last night.

I’m probably making this experience sound a lot worse than it was. Every restaurant, after all, has the right to restrict its drink selections, label its chairs the way they want, and even leave diners abandoned without a greeting, a how-is-everything, or any other cordial triviality, and I treat these as part of a restaurant’s character and these eccentricities as charming in their own way, and don’t wish for them to sound like complaints. Antico makes a simply excellent pizza, despite their odd choices, and if I lived in the neighborhood, I would probably eat here regularly. That is, if I didn’t feel like driving to one of at least five better places in the city.

Reviews of Antico have appeared on dozens of blogs. A few of these are…

Amy on Food (Oct. 3 2009)
Eat It, Atlanta (Oct. 11 2009)
Octosquid (Oct. 16 2009)
Atlanta Etc. (Dec. 10 2009)
Lane Chapman (Jan. 30 2010)