So Kong Dong Tofu House, Doraville GA

On the 30th of last month, Food Near Snellville racked up a big milestone: 500 Atlanta-area restaurants written up. So you know what I did that evening? I tweeted my congratulations to him, dropped off the girlchild at a football game, picked up Marie from work, and went out to meet Adam and Emily from Spatialdrift at our 500th Atlanta-area restaurant: So Kong Dong on Buford Highway. Continue reading “So Kong Dong Tofu House, Doraville GA”

Highway 61 Revisited – part two

In case you missed part one of this little travelogue, this is a little journey up the first 25 mile stretch of GA-61 from Carrollton, through Villa Rica and the unincorporated community of New Georgia to Dallas and the intersection with GA-120. Along this corridor are five rarely-discussed barbecue restaurants and, one day last month, I visited all five. Continue reading “Highway 61 Revisited – part two”

Highway 61 Revisited – part one

Backstory: A few months ago, I got a whim to visit the small city of Carrollton in west Georgia, to see what barbecue and books could be found. Matt and his wife Kelley came along, and we had a good day, and I came home with an astonishing list of nine previously unknown-to-me barbecue joints along the way that warranted a return trip to document. Nine! A little research when I returned revealed that only one of them, Merle’s, had been written up by another hobbyist blogger, but let this be a lesson to any of us, blogger or writer of books published by university presses, who thinks to make a claim that they know the be-all and end-all of a region’s barbecue. Nine! Continue reading “Highway 61 Revisited – part one”

Article 14, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

We were invited to visit Article 14 in midtown on the occasion of a new fall menu spearheaded by the executive chef, Chris Blobaum. Article 14 is one of a small number of places in town owned by Legacy Restaurant Partners, including a trio of well-known places at Marietta Street and Baker downtown: Der Biergarten, Stats, and the really good Max’s Coal Oven Pizza, one of our city’s most underrated pizza joints. Continue reading “Article 14, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)”

Frannie’s Gluten-Free Muffins

Normally, when I write a post, I start it out by saying “This is Marie,” so you’ll know that it is me and not Grant, but that seems strange when we have a picture on the side of somebody else. I’m contributing a tiny little post about a tiny little muffin. Look at them right here, being held up by their baker, Frannie. Aren’t they cute? Actually, I’m going to take a moment to talk about food allergies; if all you want to know is what I thought about the muffins, that’s in the last three paragraphs.

For a considerable portion of our baby’s infancy, he had eczema. Not the worst case ever (that would be his sister) but plenty of his baby pictures show him with big red scratched-up streaks all over, especially on his face. Poor little man. Anyway, I was convinced he had allergies to all sorts of things, because he’d flare up when I ate certain things, dairy and tomatoes especially. So I struggled with that for a while and finally put him on formula. The change didn’t help much because he was actually NOT ALLERGIC to any of my favorite suspects, although I remain convinced that the worst flare-ups were way too consistently and closely associated with certain foods to be totally coincidental. Anyway, this is a long way to get around to explaining why I read a lot of articles at Scary Mommy like this one and this one and getting even less sleep than I might have otherwise either worrying about things I couldn’t control, or obsessively trying to find recipes which excluded whatever allergen I suspected that week. Continue reading “Frannie’s Gluten-Free Muffins”

Righteous ‘Que, Marietta GA

While I’m not certain quite how many barbecue restaurants in the Atlanta region are left to try, we’ve been to 53 of them since we started, and only have another five or six on the radar. Most of those that remain have already been visited by Andy of Burgers, Barbecue and Everything Else, a very good blog that covers out-of-the-way and small places like we do, although his travel radius is much larger. So I dropped Andy a line and asked whether he’d like to meet up at some place that neither of us had yet visited. We batted some ideas back and forth, and I remembered that Dustin, who writes the (sadly) mostly dormant Georgia Barbecue Hunt, had found a new place in Marietta called Righteous ‘Que at the end of July. Continue reading “Righteous ‘Que, Marietta GA”

Victory Sandwich Bar, Decatur GA

I sure am glad that we got together with Bella Vivere and with Spatialdrift for lunch one Saturday last month. Not just because we all enjoy each other’s company and I think we get good blogging ideas from each other, and not because the place that was suggested, Victory Sandwich Bar, turned out to be really tasty and a great little lunch, but because, at last, I know the best place to park in Decatur. Emily told me about a secret weekend parking spot that is so darn wonderful that, should she ever want to head up to Athens for a Saturday, I’m going to let her and Adam in on my secret parking spot up there as well. Continue reading “Victory Sandwich Bar, Decatur GA”