Firehouse Subs, Kennesaw GA

I was reading about how Firehouse Subs recently got over a huge slump in year-to-year sales by hiring the same ad company that Papa John’s Pizza uses, and convincing all of their franchisees to pony up a larger-than-normal royalty to pay for all the radio ads they were going to run. I’m going to suggest that learning stories like this and getting a broad view of the restaurant industry this way is no bad thing; almost all of our dining out dollars are spent at locally-owned businesses, and I rarely pay any attention to the corporate world of small chains like this one, with 415 small stores in twenty states.

In fact, while the franchises did apparently see nearly-double-digit year-to-year growth – and the temptation to turn this sentence into an impenetrable parody of incoherent marketing bafflegam is a great one – its message was still completely lost on potential customers like me. I very rarely listen to commercial radio, and when I do, I switch over to a college station the instant I hear an ad start. So it wasn’t the Arbitron market synergy that got us back into a Firehouse, it was my son. We let him pick someplace in Marietta, wherever he wanted, for his birthday.

We used to eat at Firehouse from time to time, but got out of the habit around the time that Marie moved in. Since she can cook so darn well, there wasn’t much need to go out and eat as often, and so when we did, it was usually to someplace a little more special and local. In time, Dagwood’s, which is somehow still hanging in there, became our go-to place for sandwiches, and I don’t think I’d been to a Firehouse in almost four years.

In the meantime, I missed out on what could be the start of a very fun new development: they have introduced their own branded soft drink.

The first Firehouse Subs was opened in Jacksonville in 1994 by Robin and Chris Sorenson, who, like their father, had previously served their community as firefighters. Honestly, there’s an artificial over-emphasis on firefighting memorabilia and imagery, down to the dalmatian-spotted tabletops, that comes across as hopelessly manufactured and downright silly. Calling your best-selling sandwich a “hook and ladder” is one thing, but serving up the kids’ meals in a red plastic hat is just ridiculous.

Happily, the food is still quite good, impossible orders of magnitude better than competitors like Subway or Blimpie. There’s a short delay in getting sandwiches out to guests, as the meats and cheeses are all steamed before being placed in the buns. The result is tasty and different, especially because this chain does not scrimp in the quality of its ingredients.

Probably the best thing on the menu here is the meatball sub, which is served with delicious melted cheese and a really good, mildly spicy tomato sauce. My kids each had one of these. Marie enjoyed a steak and cheese with mushrooms, which was nowhere close to the best in the city but not bad, and I had a club with turkey, ham and bacon. Even though it has been years since I was last here, I remembered that I enjoy topping my sandwich with the house hot sauce. It’s not especially hot, more of a mild and sweet brown sauce made from datil peppers, but it goes extremely well with a ham sandwich. For guests wanting something much spicier, the chain emphasizes the “fire” in their name by way of a remarkable collection of bottled hot sauces, some of which are just stupid hot with scotch bonnets and habaneros and overpower the sandwich.

Yet it was the soda fountain that got my attention on this trip. Since it was for his birthday, I told my son he could have a combo meal with a drink. (We almost always just get water at restaurants, to save on money and calories. Exceptions are sometimes made for sweet tea with barbecue, but this is a rule that children, all children, really loathe.) He noticed that Firehouse has its own branded beverage in the fountain – a cherry limeade that guests can make even more tart by adding limes of their own. I thought this was a really terrific idea and it tastes quite good, too. I hope this is a successful move by the company and it leads to more of their own drinks.

I’m certainly going to remember the cherry limeade when it gets really hot in a couple of months. With the Chilito’s next door selling their wonderful horchata, I’m not going to be sure where I should stop to get something to drink.

(There are apparently something like twenty Firehouse Subs locations in the Atlanta area. Identical experiences can be had at each of them, but, corporate shenanigans being what they are, curious soda fans interested in their branded limeade might do well to phone before driving to a store, in case their home office has pulled it.)

Dave Poe’s BBQ, Marietta GA

For Marie’s birthday in March, she and I enjoyed a nice lunch at Sam’s BBQ1. When I wrote it up, I noted that not too long ago, Sam was in business with a fellow named Dave Poe, and they had opened a second location on the other side of Marietta, on Whitlock. We’d actually eaten at this one before, in 2007 or 2008, around the time Marie was thinking about moving in, but to be honest, I wasn’t paying any attention whatsoever to that meal at the time, as I was aggravated with one kid or the other over something. Never do this. Never eat when you’re annoyed. You won’t enjoy the meal and you’ll forget almost immediately that you ever had it. If you must eat when you’re annoyed, make it something you won’t enjoy anyway.

So Sam & Dave split up shortly after the release of their single “Knock it Out the Park,” which failed to chart. Or maybe that was a different Sam & Dave. Sam got BBQ1 and Dave got this place on Whitlock and, because Cobb County might as well be Antarctica as far as the Atlanta foodie community is concerned, both restaurants slipped completely off my radar, even though I live here, and it took me ages to even remember that either place was around. Well, on Friday last week, I finally got back over to Dave Poe’s place for lunch, and, I promise, this time I’ll remember the experience. I even wrote it down in a blog and everything.

There’s a lot to like about Dave Poe’s, and one of the standouts is the slogan “traditional 19th century pit-cooked.” They use lots of classical imagery on their website advertising, not merely “old Americana” and Coca-Cola nicknacks, but stylish museum pieces with garish, amusing copy atop them speaking longingly about the restaurant, tongue firmly in cheek. The fun and very original design totally belies the restaurant’s location in a nearly-dead strip mall, with a parking lot that’s been used for mortar practice.

Early last month, Jon Watson, writing for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s “Food and More” blog, compiled his list of the metro area’s five best examples of pulled pork. Dave Poe’s and Sam’s BBQ1 ranked joint fourth on the list, as Watson could not determine any difference between the meat at the two places. Granted, I tried them a month apart and not on the same afternoon, but I have to agree that they tasted the same, and there’s no crime in that. This is extremely good pulled pork. (Watson’s is a very interesting list, by the way. You should have a look at it; two of the other four restaurants there are on my to-do list as well.)

I drove over there with Randy and Kimberly, and we enjoyed very similar lunches. They had some fried okra that they said was quite good, but we each had pulled pork, fries and Brunswick stew. Now here, I see that I can’t make a comparison between this place and Sam’s, as Marie and I did not get any stew there last month. This stew is really terrific and I enjoyed the daylights out of it. To have found stew this good at this place and at Speedi-Pig in the same month is a very pleasant surprise! That said, Kimberly said that she preferred the stew at Bub-Ba-Q in Woodstock, which is certainly quite good, but I really like this even better. I liked it so much that, two days later, Marie and my son and I had business in east Cobb, so we had supper at Sam’s BBQ1. I conspired this just so I could try Sam’s stew and confirm that, yes, it is just as good.

Unfortunately, Sam’s does have it all over Dave’s in one regard: the sauces. The ones here are fine – there’s a more-tomato-than-vinegar sauce and a more-vinegar-than-tomato one, and they are each pretty good, but Sam’s has that amazingly delicious mustard sauce that I completely loved. Mind you, the pork is so moist and smoky that it would be fine without any sauce at all, but Sam’s is one of the best mustard sauces that I’ve ever had. Perhaps the next time that Sam and Dave meet up to talk about royalties owed by Atlantic Records, Dave should ask Sam about the mustard sauce, and Sam should ask Dave the name of his graphic designer. And each of them should ask their realtors to suggest a location that’s not in such a blighted, dead chunk of retail failure.

La Fonda Latina, Atlanta GA

Heaven only knows why I enjoy a restaurant as spectacularly unreliable as La Fonda Latina. It can’t be because of the service. You know, I figure that I have spent many chapters in this story singling out really good restaurants for their really good service. It is only fair, therefore, to occasionally single out a pretty good restaurant for its downright mediocre service. Only fair.

La Fonda is the sister restaurant to Fellini’s Pizza, a more-than-pretty good restaurant that serves up one of my favorite pizzas in the city. Fellini’s is simple and incredibly tasty and incredibly reliable and the service is also occasionally iffy. However, both the food and the service are better than Antico, which everybody’s been raving about for months. Actually, the pizza’s only a little bit better than Antico, which indeed serves up a very good pie, but the occasionally iffy service is a thousand times better than the surly antagonism that Antico dishes up.

Anyway, the cozy relationship of these two restaurants has resulted in a very interesting trio of locations where the owners have managed to construct or conspire a La Fonda and a Fellini’s right next door to each other: on Ponce near North Highland, on Peachtree in Buckhead, and on Roswell Road in Sandy Springs. The design of these particular buildings is incredibly interesting. They look remarkably 1960s, with that weird, undulating awning that reminds me of the old chain of Treasure Island discount stores.

Our friend Matt picked the Roswell La Fonda to meet up for supper one night last week, the evening that the kids and I returned from Chattanooga. We learned then that this La Fonda is the loudest restaurant in the city, and that the service was really quite remarkably mediocre, even by La Fonda standards. But wasn’t the food good?

As we got back into town with about an hour to spare before we met the group, David drove us over to the Buckhead Borders. This was an interesting sight. It’s one of the stores that’s closing, and right now everything is 20-30% off, which would be eyebrow-raising if Borders didn’t send me an email coupon every week to buy a book for 33% off. Actually, Borders seems to send me an email every stinking day, either to give me a coupon I’m not going to use, or tell me that the store nearest me is closing, or tell me that they’re very concerned that I seem to be the only person in the United States not to have purchased The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo from Borders.com.

We got back to the restaurant and lucked into a parking space. This La Fonda and Fellini’s complex has an agonizingly small parking lot, and, typically, it’s right next door to a gigantic, mostly unused shopping center with parking spaces aplenty and, because the shopping center is owned by jerks, parking here and eating at La Fonda is a guaranteed way to get your car towed. David and the kids and I were the last to arrive; Marie, Neal, Matt and his wife Kelley had already made it in and got a table on the patio, surrounded by noise and an awful lot of screaming children with Chick-fil-A kids meals while the grown-ups had something ostensibly a little nicer.

Actually, what the grown-ups had was almost certainly nicer. La Fonda has a good reputation for being one of the best places in the city to enjoy paella. That’s what Matt and Kelley each had, with different ingredients. Honestly, paella is not my favorite meal – it seems a high price to pay for a hell of a lot of rice and not nearly enough meat – but I have found myself craving it from time to time, and La Fonda does a fine job with it. My son and I split an order of three really terrific and delicious chicken tacos, served, as almost all of the meals are, with yellow rice and black beans, and an order of fried plantains and garlic sauce. Marie had a quesadilla with spinach and onions.

And we all had terrible service. I don’t know who our server ever was, because we seemed to have about nine different ones. I suspect that whomever our server originally was, he or she got pressganged into helping another table where one woman was having paella and her three screaming children were having Chick-fil-A kids meals, and then our next server was told to get an order of something else to some other table and we last saw that guy on the other side of the restaurant. In between nine different people putting things on our table and getting pulled to do other things on everybody else’s table, we got perhaps one refill of chips – most broken into fingernail-sized crumbs – and salsa – quite good, perhaps, yet also indistinguishable from this restaurant’s lazy attempt at gazpacho – and no refills of anything to drink other than water. Neal had a diet soda and, once it was done, he was out of luck.

It sounds like a night out at the restaurant from hell, but it was at least good to enjoy everybody’s company and talk about the fun trip we took to Chattanooga and the neat barbecue that we found there. The food was just super, although I’ve always felt it just a little pricey. As for the service, I just figured, heck, this was a Thursday night. I bet Fridays and Saturdays here, assuming you can find a place to park, are completely ridiculous.

When we left, though, I was thinking, as good as those chicken tacos were, it sure has been a while since I enjoyed a slice or two of Fellini’s.

Morelli’s Gourmet Ice Cream, Atlanta GA

Over the previous two chapters, I’ve related our wonderfully fun barbecue tour of some areas south of the city. We capped this off by getting some ice cream in East Atlanta. I read about Morelli’s on Urbanspoon and added it to my wishlist a couple of months ago. By a happy coincidence, our friends Victoria and James moved over to that neighborhood – just around the corner from it – a few months ago and have been raving about it. When we met them for lunch last month, we agreed that we needed to get together again and see whether all the fuss over this ice cream was warranted.

What happened here is that the owner, Donald Sargent, was looking for a new business opportunity, found a space that a Bruster’s was leaving, invested in all their equipment and started turning out some of the most decadent and wild flavors in the city. They go through 150 or more gallons of heavy cream each week making their ice cream. They have the expected chocolate and cookies and cream and other fun, traditional flavors, but they’ve also got some pretty wild ones. These include the very popular maple bacon and the possibly more popular salted caramel, and some that are way off in la-la land like olive oil, feta and sweet corn.

Two years ago, Bon Appetit named Morelli’s one of the five best ice cream parlors in the country, singling out their coconut jalapeño and ginger lavender. There’s been a line ever since.

Service here can be a little slow, in part because the terrific, friendly staff will let guests try one or two samples before making an order, but we got here between rushes around 3:30 and didn’t have a very long wait. My only quibble was that they didn’t assemble Marie’s chocolate sundae very well. It was delicious, but it was a challenge for Marie to eat it before it toppled over!

I had a cup of salted caramel, and, still stuffed from barbecue, could not finish it, but boy, I enjoyed what I had. Even more critical than the flavor was the texture of the ice cream. This just really tasted freshly mixed. It hadn’t been sitting in that freezer for very long at all. Oooh, and apparently, I have since learned, they’ll let you mix half-scoops in a single cup. I bet a half-vanilla half-caramel is just amazing.

Victoria’s just a couple of weeks from having her boy, and so she and Marie had a lot to talk about. We enjoyed kicking back on Morelli’s patio for probably a little longer than etiquette might have suggested, since there were plenty of people in line and looking for a table, but you know, we ate an awful lot last Saturday and I needed to sit down for a while. We’ll have to go visit our friends again very soon, once we have some babies to introduce to each other, and try another restaurant in the neighborhood… and then pop back for some dessert here.

Sprayberry’s Barbecue, Newnan GA

I stand by something not entirely professional that I said once that got started on that old Geocities barbecue page that I used to maintain. John Kessler is the restaurant writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and many years ago, he sparked an e-mail issue that went on for several months with my readers and Google-surfers. He’d given a rave review to a barbecue place that I then visited with stars in my eyes, ready for the best meal of my life, only to find wet crock pot bilge on my plate. So I related my displeasure on that page – this would have been sometime in 2002 – and enjoyed correspondence with barbecue fans on the subject for months. One older gentleman compared the restaurant in question to the Iraqi army, a point that still tickles me. Everybody hated this place.

I figure that if I was getting that much positive feedback for a crappy “hey, I learned HTML from a book in 1997” Geocities page for disagreeing with the food critic, then Mr. Kessler must have been buried in hate mail. So a few months later, he had a fantastic new column up, wherein he and some buddies took an awesome barbecue tour around the region to try out all the restaurants that all his feedback told him was better than this place in question. It was a really good column, and I say that even though they went to Old MacDonald in Buford, which I love absolutely and am long past due to revisit, and didn’t like it. (Having said that, I looked up Old MacDonald on Urbanspoon and was really stunned by its low rating and poor reviews. Apparently there has been a change of ownership and it has plummeted downhill…? Well, that’s not encouraging.)

Anyway, what absolutely baffled and upset me was this: these Atlanta Journal-Constitution writers went down to Newnan to eat at Sprayberry’s Barbecue and did not like it. This place was Lewis Grizzard’s favorite restaurant. He ate there once a month. When the beloved writer passed, the restaurant memorialized him by bundling his favorite meal together on the menu as The Lewis Grizzard Special. And here was a negative, dismissive review of Grizzard’s favorite meal in the pages of the AJC. I never thought I’d live to see the day.

Once upon a time, when Atlanta was newly called “Hotlanta,” Maynard Jackson was mayor and the most amazing event on the area’s calendar was an inner tube race -slash – bacchanalia down the Chattahoochee past the old swingers’ apartments that drowned three drunks annually, Lewis Grizzard and Ron Hudspeth ruled that newspaper. Those were awesome days. You want to see some fun newspaper writing, go dig up some evening papers from the late seventies, where those two would drink their weight in bourbon, show up sauced after the staff had gone home and crank out some incredibly funny tale of some crackpot kinfolk in a one-horse town who once had a recipe for black-eyed peas that would cure cancer, when applied, in a poulice, to the back of your knee before your dog died and your pigtailed cousin’s skirts got too short. The AJC was a freaking wonderful paper then, with these two redneck drunks ranting about whatever the hell misty-eyed nostalgic Southern weirdness crossed their minds, and then Celestine Sibley saying much the same thing, only sober, the next section over.

To see this same newspaper then dismiss this great drunk’s favorite restaurant, well, it just made a fellow utter something a little unprofessional.

Sprayberry’s was the last stop on the little barbecue tour that Marie and I took a week ago, but it is a place that I’ve visited every couple of years for ages. They have two locations, including a large, interstate-friendly one right off the I-85 Newnan exit, but the one to see is the building further into town. Sprayberry’s opened in 1926 and has been attracting the attention of food writers for decades. Apart from Grizzard, whose love of the place was legendary, and spilled out into a good dozen of his columns, Roadfood’s Jane and Michael Stern wrote about the restaurant in 1990 for their syndicated Taste of America feature. Strangely, however, Sprayberry’s is not currently included among the Georgia places reviewed on their current site. I wonder why.

Now it does have a reputation as being a pretty expensive place for barbecue, especially when compared with Speedi-Pig over in Fayetteville. Here, Grizzard’s regular meal of a pulled pork sandwich, onion rings and stew will run you ten bucks before a drink and tip. Yikes! It’s all very good, but the sticker shock can be rough.

I really enjoyed eating here with my dad once. In 2006, I was out of work for a few months when the insurance company that I was with closed. Dad was beginning to have to slow down and not drive long distances, but he had a new potential customer down in Newnan, so, since I wasn’t doing anything, he asked me to drive him here to meet him. My daughter and I dropped him off with his client that morning and picked him up two hours later and we had lunch at the exit ramp location. I remember confusing my daughter with the unusual drinks on the menu. A holdover from the days before fountain fruit sodas were very common, you can get an “orange special,” which I believe is two parts orange soda to one part grape, and a “grape special,” which is two parts grape soda to one part orange. Of course, you could make this or ask for this anywhere, but only Sprayberry’s puts it on the menu.

That was a good day. I especially liked the part where Dad picked up the check.

On our own dimes, Marie and I split a Grizzard special. The pulled pork – a little smoky and very moist – is served without sauce. That comes in a bowl, like they serve it at Wallace Barbecue in Austell. The sauce is not quite the usual tomato-vinegar mix you get in the region. It is a little sweeter than you would expect from a vinegar sauce, and thinner. Guests can either spoon the sauce over the meat, or dip chunks of it in the bowl. The onion rings are also very sweet, and made with a buttermilk batter. They are among my very favorites. The stew, more “Virginia Brunswick” than “Georgia Brunswick,” is thick enough to be eaten with a fork. It’s quite different from the amazing stuff they offer at Speedi-Pig, but very agreeable all the same. Oh, and they serve it with a bowl of really amazing sweet pickles. Mention how much you like them and they might just bring you another bowl of ’em.

I’ve always really liked Sprayberry’s. True, not all of the food here is drop-dead amazing, but it’s all presented with so much care and love, and considering that most of the staff seems to be high school kids, I remain very pleasantly surprised by just how well they coach and train their employees. I get a kick out of the throwback feel of the menu, which, apart from the silly sodas, includes such things as congealed salad and an “aristocratic” hamburger, which has a salad and French dressing atop the patty. You can also get that very old Southern Saturday night classic, a hamburger steak smothered in onions. In fact, the old-fashioned, upscale feel to the menu here puts Sprayberry’s more in line with, say, Atlanta’s Colonnade than most of the barbecue shacks that I like the most. It adds up to a very unique experience at a place that’s been doing it right for 85 years.

Don’t worry, Lewis. Pay your old newspaper no never mind; Sprayberry’s is still in good shape.

Classic Que in Griffin and Fayetteville GA

I remember our first trip to Southern Pit very well. It was May 28, 2009, and while we weren’t blogging yet, I was nevertheless using Roadfood.com to find new and fun places to eat on our way on our trips down to Saint Simons Island and back. On that trip, Marie and the kids and I stopped in for lunch on our way to go get married, which is why it’s fairly easy to remember the date. I’m good about remembering the day we got hitched (the 30th); Marie’s birthday, slightly less so, on account of her decision to never enter that date anyplace like Facebook where I get a ~~cheat~~ friendly reminder. We had a huge lunch that day, and Marie capped things off with some delicious blackberry cobbler. I later waxed hyperbolic about how awesome this place was, and returned a few months later with Matt and our friend Kevin, shortly before he flew back out to California to resume work in academia.

As we’re entering the last few weeks of pregnancy, I struck a compromise between our twin desires to get out and drive and yet not stray too far from home. I’ve worked up a pair of short afternoon barbecue tours for Marie and I to enjoy small road trips without exhausting her. The first one is what I termed the “West Central Georgia Tour,” and was originally intended to bring us to two of the remaining stops on our goal of all the Roadfood.com-reviewed sites in the state: Southern Pit and Melear’s Barbecue in Fayetteville. Unfortunately, or not, considering its low reputation of late, Melear’s closed in January. So the revised plan saw us driving down I-75 to Griffin, then going north and west to Fayetteville for Speedi-Pig, and then further west to Sprayberry’s in Newnan before returning north on I-85. By chance, and not design, all three of the places we visited are reviewed on the wonderfully fun Chopped Onion, one of my favorite sites for finding barbecue joints and hot dog stands.

Should any of my Atlanta-based readers be interested in retracing our (planned) steps and doing their own simple tour as a day trip, I’d like to point out that you can also sample a McDonough barbecue restaurant called O.B.’s very easily on this path; it’s on the same exit (218) off I-75 that you take to go to Griffin. The same plan we took, with minor detours, should also take you near Uncle Frank’s in Fayetteville, Cafe Pig in Peachtree City, and Westside in Newnan. We haven’t visited any of these places yet, but you might could make a really full day of it if you’d like. Let me know how it goes for you!

By chance, the road that we ended up taking sped us past yet another place that I’d like to try one day: Dean’s Barbecue in Jonesboro. See, we had planned to drive down to exit 218 and shoot across 20 to Southern Pit, but after having dealt with insane construction traffic in north Atlanta on I-75, we were in no mood to sit and wait for all the spring break congestion that started building at exit 230. We could have sat bumper-to-bumper crawling for twelve miles, but I trusted our navigation instincts and we got off at 228 and found US 41 that way, which took us right past Dean’s. Some other day, perhaps.

We finally got to Southern Pit about forty minutes behind schedule. The place is not really easy to find; it isn’t signed very well, but if you are driving south, keep looking to your left and you should see it through the trees, its small sign dwarfed by the ones for Georgia Lawn Equipment and Toro brand mowers. Then make a U-turn across the divided highway when you get a chance.

The chopped pork here is not very dry and not especially smoky, but it is nice and pink and packed with flavor. Readers who have been following my recent series of memory issues will be pleased to hear that I ordered my sandwiches without any sauce at each business we visited, so that I could get a better taste for the meat before smothering it. They have a single sauce at Southern Pit: it’s a nice, brown tomato and vinegar mix, and is very sour and tangy.

I thought the Brunswick stew was pretty good, but was extremely pleased with the cracklin’ cornbread. I had been a little disappointed last year when I went to Harold’s and could hardly find a crackle anywhere in the bread, but this was just popping with them and it complemented the stew very well.

Sadly, I have to take a little issue with the desserts on offer. We were surprised to see blackberry cobbler available this early in the season. Marie asked about it and our server – points for truth – confirmed that they get the blackberries from Sysco. (“He said the S Word,” I whispered later.) The strawberry cream pie, he assured us, was made fresh in house, and this turned out to be quite good. Marie had a slice of that in lieu of a side for her chopped pork sandwich, and we were happy and pleased as we got on the road for stop number two.

The second visit was in Fayetteville, a town that neither of us had ever visited before. If it wasn’t painfully obvious from earlier chapters, when I’ve lived in the Atlanta area (which would be all but twelve years of my life) I’ve always been a resident of the northern ‘burbs: Smyrna, Alpharetta and Marietta. I just never got down this way very much.

A manager at Southern Pit had given us better directions to get over to Georgia-92 – just take Birdie Road west and cut off a huge corner, enjoying some very pretty land and houses along the way – but he could not have prepared us for an unexpected detour. An accident or fire shut down this highway completely, and a Fayette County sheriff sent us on a left turn. We shrugged and hoped for the best and eventually joined Georgia 85, which, happily, not only hooks up with 92 just outside the Fayetteville city limits, it is the very road – Glynn Street – that we were looking for. Unfortunately, it is marked amazingly poorly, and we did not know that it was Glynn Street until we drove right past Speedi-Pig and had to turn around.

My buddy Rex had told me that his girlfriend swears by Speedi-Pig’s Brunswick stew. It is similarly singled out by both Chopped Onion and another of my favorite barbecue blogs, the frustratingly-on-hiatus 3rd Degree Berns. None of these good people come close to telling you the real truth: this stew is amazing, easily just about the best in Georgia. It’s a toss-up between this and Harold’s, flatly. You will definitely want a large order of this stuff.

The chopped pork is diced pretty finely and, while it has a nice smoky taste to it, I did not like it nearly as much as I did Southern Pit’s meat. On the other hand, the price is just amazing. For 99 cents, you get a really good portion of meat on a “piglet” sandwich. I ordered two, but really only needed one. They have two sauces on the table, mild and hot varieties of a vinegar-tomato-pepper mix, and apparently they keep a much more potent hot sauce behind the counter, but I did not think to try it. The hot sauce wasn’t that much different from the mild, honestly. The barbecue is not at all bad here, and neither is the slaw – mayo-based and easy on the dressing – but the stew is the selling point. Run, don’t walk, to Fayetteville, friends.

I noticed that a party of four was asking one of the servers what had become of Melear’s. I expect that’s going to be a question the staff will be answering for months to come. It’s always a shame to see a much-loved, very old restaurant close its doors, even if its reviews had been pretty awful lately, and especially before I was able to try it.

We didn’t linger at either restaurant, but were still a little behind schedule as we got back on the road and headed west. More about that in the next chapter.

Willie Rae’s, Marietta GA (CLOSED)

Here’s another long overdue visit to a very popular destination in Marietta, this one right on the square. I added Willie Rae’s, which is about to celebrate its eleventh anniversary, to my to-do list many months ago after seeing a good writeup of it somewhere. This is a place that tries, with some success, to mix up a menu of southwestern, southern, and Creole-styled dishes in an upscale environment surrounded by lovely, folksy artwork on the walls.

They don’t always pull it off. One black hole on the menu is the inclusion of Lay’s potato chips as a side to some of their dishes. Try as I might, I just don’t see the point of lavishing attention on a burger in the kitchen and then serving it with plain Lay’s. But when they get it right, the results are magnificent.

Location is everything in the world of restaurants, deciding what is hip and cool. If Willie Rae’s was inside the perimeter, people would have been raving about it for ages. Sitting quietly on the Marietta Square, it’s easily ignored by the ITP crowd. Interestingly, walking around the square, you can see quite a few very good restaurants, none of which attract much commentary or blogging. Hollie Guacamole! and Tommy’s Sandwich Shop are both pretty good, as are Johnnie McCracken’s and the Marietta Pizza Company. There are four or more very nice, upscale restaurants, at least three places to get desserts, including a cupcake place – one of the latest trends – and Traveling Fare, which sells wonderful pot pies at the weekly farmer’s market, but despite ample free parking, nobody wants to venture up here except office workers and people with court business.

Well, if you do feel like braving the mean streets of Cobb County, you’re certain to get a pretty good meal at Willie Rae’s. I arrived early and looked around in a cute toy store two doors down while waiting for them to open. Within twenty minutes, there was a pretty good crowd in the place, proving that just because us weirdos with blogs aren’t yammering about it, business is still pretty good.

I was a little disappointed that I would have to pay a bit more than I wanted for some chips and salsa – apparently you can only get some by paying six bucks for a really big appetizer with cheese dip and an avocado sauce as well – so I had a small cup of very good jambalaya instead. It was served piping hot in a coffee mug on a little saucer and they didn’t scrimp on any of the meats. This was really tasty, although I don’t know that I’d like a full-sized serving of it with so many other interesting things on the menu.

I had the chicken burrito, served with a very good Caesar salad. The burrito was absolutely packed with really tasty chicken and just a few peppers. I was so pleased to pay a good price for a meal here and really get my money’s worth in very good, seasoned meat, not a big pile of rice or other fillers. The burrito was covered in a wonderful cheese sauce. I think I might have asked for a very small cup of salsa for the chicken, but it was just fine without it. It’s really a good feeling when a place meets your expectations so fully, you know?

I’d love to see some of my peers with larger audiences come up to the square and give these places a try. If Willie Rae’s was on Howell Mill, or in Asheville, people would be raving about the food and the atmosphere. The food certainly warrants it, and you’re guaranteed to get a kick out of all the fun artwork. Well, people are raving, just not people with blogs.