OU for U Cafe, Dunwoody GA (CLOSED)

I first heard about OU for U Cafe several weeks ago, and was excited about having such a neat-sounding place available just a traffic light away from Marie’s job. Since I have a couple of short days each week, then, assuming she’s not trapped all day in meetings, I could take her to lunch somewhere in Dunwoody and get her back before her employer falls apart without her.

That might just happen when she takes maternity leave.

Despite a glowing review from Food Near Snellville, it was several weeks before Marie and I could get our schedules synched enough to have lunch together. It was certainly worth the wait; if there’s a better lunch place in this neighborhood, it’s news to me. There’s a Rising Roll Gourmet about a stone’s throw from OU for U, and it’s not a tenth as good as the delicious, kosher food in this deli.

(If, unlike me, you actually have a brain, the “OU” pun might have clued you into this being a kosher business. Me, I read that it was kosher, and I saw the name, but was somehow unable to connect the dots. Then again, it took me more than a decade to figure out why comics writer Pat Mills named a squabbling double-act “Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein.” Being married to a punster like Marie has not helped; it’s just made me close my eyes.)

Considering the suggestions made by other writers, I told Marie that both the egg salad and the falafel came recommended. That worked for her; she ordered the egg salad and a small cup of cream of mushroom soup. I thought the egg salad was pretty good but not extraordinary, but the soup was really excellent. My own lunch was sort of the inverse of hers; I had a tomato-and-stuff soup that was okay, and not nearly enough bread along with it. I should have gone with the lentil soup; everybody seems to be raving about it.

Now, that falafel on the other hand… let me tell you about this. For many years, I have told and retold the story of these unbelievable falafels that I used to get in Athens.

In the mid-nineties, there was a gentleman – I used to think he was from Turkey, but a part of me is saying that’s wrong – who came to Athens to clean house for his daughter while she was in a doctoral program at UGA. During the day, he rented a cart and started serving the sort of grub that he used to have back home from a little space on whatchacallit street, beneath Park and Leconte Halls and across from the P-J plaza, a discreet distance from the guy with the hot dog cart. I had a couple of pretty good sandwiches from him and then I tried his falafel and that was that. I had another falafel for lunch from this guy every single day for the rest of the quarter. Then the term ended, my work and class schedule became stupid, his daughter got her doctorate, and that was the end of the falafel cart.

OU for U didn’t serve me a falafel that good, but it was the first time in fifteen years that I’ve had a falafel come close enough to remind me of what I’ve missed. Alternating between a little extra chilled tahini from a squeeze bottle and some punch-packed hot sauce, this was a remarkable little sandwich. I would not mind another trip out that way at all.

In July 2012, OU’s owners, while still keeping kosher, elected to change their name and also changed the menu quite considerably. Now called Cafe Noga, they are no longer vegetarian.

Mamie’s Kitchen, Conyers GA

A few months ago, when we learned that Marie was pregnant, we knew that our long road trips would have to be curtailed at some point. Sitting in a car for hours and hours and then taking a long hike through some state park’s nature trail is a bit much in the third trimester, even for somebody as enthusiastic as Marie. I suggested that we take the spring off from road tripping, but before we do that, we’d have two last long drives. We’d do one day this month, and then go back to Saint Simons Island to visit her parents in March before raising the drawbridge. I started charting out our February trip before Christmas, because I’m impatient that way. What I came up with was pretty eyebrow-raising: I estimated that the 613 mile trip would take us just over fourteen hours and see us stopping by eight different restaurants in three states. So for the next couple of weeks, we’ll be recounting those stops.

At least we were by ourselves. We had the whole day to just be together, talk, hold hands, and enjoy some occasional “companionable silence,” as P.D. James terms it, with the rowdy children spending the day with my mother. The kids missed some very good meals and one or two that did not completely thrill me, but even the least of the stops was interesting and curious, and I’m pretty sure that we’ll be returning to one place in South Carolina many more times in the years to come, especially if we can make a move to Asheville in a couple of years and find this place about a seven-minute detour on a trip from there back to the Georgia coast to see her family.

First up was one of the remaining destinations on our list of Georgia restaurants reviewed on Roadfood.com. We had thirteen to go for a full set, and one of these is a breakfast joint, Mamie’s Kitchen in the suburban town of Conyers. I always hate driving out I-20 this way. I used to know this guy in high school who lived off Evans Mill Road and pretended he was the nephew of Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Jim Shooter in order to con gullible chumps like us into thinking we could start a comic book company. He called me on the phone once, irate that “some Christians” were misunderstanding the lyric of a song by a popular eighties group called Mr. Mister, and making it all about God and stuff. Turns out he was the one who misunderstood them, and that the line really is not “Kyrie lays upon the roads that I must travel.” I mention this because, for the umpteenth damn time driving east on I-20, I got that stupid song stuck in my head. This time it was particularly awful and all the time we were looking for Mamie’s Kitchen, I was singing that blasted chorus to myself.

Mamie’s Kitchen has been around for decades, selling really inexpensive breakfasts, and it seems that most of them go out the drive-through window. They do offer a breakfast buffet, but it seems that many people just enjoy stopping in for a biscuit or two and relaxing in what must surely be one of the most comfortable and relaxed little getaways that I have seen recently. Here, a small early morning meal in the company of friends is just a perfect way to get the day started.

We had the good fortune to visit at the same time as a table of regulars were enjoying what appeared to be a usual Saturday morning ritual for them. Four men, one about our age and the others a good deal older, were enjoying their umpeenth cups of coffee and talking in happy voices about anything and everything. On a first-name basis with all the ladies who work there, they playfully bantered back and forth about refills and harmless flirtation and foolishness. Maybe I am an eavesdropping jerk, but I just love people-watching. It does me good to know that I’m in the company of happy people.

Marie and I each had a biscuit, hers with chicken and mine with deliciously salty country ham. The biscuits were warm from the oven and so delicately fresh that they’d have liked to disintegrate with a touch. I would have gladly had another, but we really couldn’t linger and really should not have indulged in more, for we had a second breakfast awaiting us two and a half hours down the road. So we left the table to its conversation about the Holy Land and whether one of them was going to whup their waitress or whether she would be whupping him first – my odds were on that outcome – and made our way. The sun was even good enough to rise while we were inside, allowing me to photograph the building. The morning was off to a remarkably good start.

K Cafe, Alpharetta GA (CLOSED)

A few years ago, when I was a cubicle dweller in Alpharetta, I went out to lunch almost every day at one of the approximately seventeen thousand restaurants along Windward Parkway. Now, many people who enjoy talking and writing about food don’t really pay attention to this corridor, as you will find very few independently-owned restaurants, or examples of farm-to-table or sustainability or the latest foodie trends, or even anything with a very local flavor. This should not be surprising, because this is a lunchtime corridor for office workers like I was at the time. Area residents simply don’t come back to this strip for dinner time, meaning restaurants that want to try out here have to budget pretty closely and cross fingers for a lunch rush or die. The turnover in this area is absolutely brutal. I worked here for a little less than three years, and I bet the restaurant turnover was close to 20%.

Most of these are chains, of course, but what I have found incredibly interesting are the number of out-of-town chains that experiment with a store here first before trying elsewhere in the city. Some of these may be franchisees hoping to build into the Atlanta market or some might be company-owned and considering a footprint in Atlanta. There have been a couple of successes; I believe that the first Five Guys and Lenny’s Sub Shops in this region were on Windward. Z Pizza is still hanging on, with one of its two Atlanta locations here, and Tacone Flavor Grill, from California, has had its only Atlanta store here for about five years*. There have been several more fascinating failures. Apple Spice Junction, Taxi’s Hamburgers, Tin Star and Logan Farms are all out-of-towners who have tried to set up shop here on this stretch of road and bit the dust. If, like me, you are intrigued by regional chains, then there was usually something of interest on Windward to catch your eye. At least there was in 2006-2009, anyway.

Windward can’t even keep a barbecue place open. I was not surprised that the very popular Pig n’ Chik – not popular with me, mind you, but it has plenty of fans – closed its Windward store recently, as they might have opened in the single worst location in the history of real estate. Big D’s Barbecue, from up in Dawsonville, only had a location here for about eight months. Even One Star Ranch, at one time a baseball’s throw south of Windward on Highway 9, shuttered some weeks ago.

I had been intending for ages to see what was going on up at exit 11, but never got around to it. I did myself a huge disservice in not heading back that way, because the very best restaurant on Windward Parkway, the locally-owned Red Hen, closed in December. Now this place really was special, and they cooked up a really amazing hamburger, easily one of the best in the region. When I heard about that, I followed a link or two to the notice about the closure on a blog called Roots in Alpharetta. I enjoyed this blogger’s writing and continued to see what he had to say about the town where I used to work. There, I found something quite remarkable.

You know Krystal, right? The only local fast food place that I’ll eat, and don’t you judge me, right? Since October, they have been quietly, and without promotion, hype or commentary, testing a new “fast casual concept” on Windward Parkway, in the strip once occupied by a Carvel ice cream store. It is called K Cafe, and I just had to get back to my old stomping grounds and try this place.

I popped in on Thursday just after the lunch rush, and had a surprisingly tasty burger, but the most impressive things here were the service and the ketchup, which I am still loving and tasting. It might not last beyond the prototype stage, but the restaurant opened with an incredibly neat concept: ketchup of the month. Apart from your basic, “classic” ketchup, if you will, K Cafe is testing a rotation of different flavors to go along with it. This time out, it’s a chipotle ketchup which is just amazing, and goes very well with the fries. These, incidentally, proved to be the only minor disappointment of the meal. Basic cookie-cutter shoestring fries, these were not at all like the wonderfully chewy and potato-heavy fries you get at a Krystal. That chipotle ketchup would taste even better with those.

The service was first-rate. The girl at the register asked whether it was my first visit and showed off some of the sample foods prepared and resting in a refrigerated display case along with the desserts. K Cafe is not too different from a Panera or Rising Roll, just with burgers as well. They do a variety of sandwiches and salads, all of which have Moe’s-like silly names. She recommended their chicken salad, but I just wanted their basic burger. While they do serve traditional Krystals here if you want them, the patties on their proper burgers here are somewhat thicker, you’ll be glad to hear, and come fully dressed – with diced tomatoes, oddly – on ciabatta bread.

The other staffers who came by, including a manager who introduced himself, were similarly attentive and good-natured. I think that everybody is aware that this place is under a corporate microscope and under pressure to do well. With that in mind, Windward might prove to be a reasonable location for a place with this kind of menu. It really feels like a “lunch place,” something for quick, simple, tasty and inexpensive meals. Most of the sandwiches and burgers, which come with a side, cost about six bucks, so it’s perfectly reasonable and perfectly tasty. Plus there’s the wonderful novelty factor of trying someplace corporate-but-unique. If the concept fails (see below), I can still tell my grandkids about it, just like some folk can talk about those long extinct Kentucky Roast Beef stores that the Colonel once attempted.

Now, some no-frills restaurants are able to make the transition from junky fast food to something a little better. Whether Krystal has managed it won’t be for me to say; some corporate synergy bipartisan executive board steering committee will figure that out, but I think that it’s a success. On the other side of the equation, there’s the Taco Stand. I heard that this favorite from Athens had opened a store in Alpharetta, returning to this market after their Buckhead store closed a couple of football seasons ago, probably in anticipation of how badly the Bulldogs would end up playing. So I looked it up and swung by after finishing up at K Cafe, intending to grab a couple of two buck tacos and some chips and salsa. Heh.

The Taco Stand’s new place is three exits south, off Mansell Road, where restaurants usually live a little longer. Around North Point Parkway and the Old Alabama Road Connector, there are lots of homes, apartments and malls and movie theaters to keep families interested in the evenings, and so the restaurant turnover between exits 8 and 9 does not appear to be quite as murderous as on exit 11. I smiled broadly as I spotted the Taco Stand’s classic Milledge Avenue location’s lettering and pulled in. There was a car parked out front with the engine running as I snapped a couple of pictures. The driver, a twentysomething girl, was already waiting in the airlock at the host station of the Taco Stand for somebody to notice her.

If you figured that things were going to go spectacularly wrong at the point that I used the words “airlock,” “host station” and “Taco Stand” in the same sentence, you figured right. That evening, I was telling my family about my trip over a wonderful supper of lemon pepper chicken and rice that Marie had prepared. My son had already told me that he wanted to go check out this new Taco Stand. I got to this point in the anecdote, and when the words “host station” passed my lips, Marie visibly winced and my son’s head instantly fell, his chin hitting his chest.

So anyway, this girl and I waited for almost two minutes before somebody popped his head in from the dining room and asked “Uhhh, two?” The girl replied “I just need a to-go menu.” The fellow said that he’d be right back.

The dining room, classy, spotless, and perhaps a quarter full, looked so spectacularly unlike a Taco Stand that I started looking around for that Mr. Spock with the beard. There was a second door, perhaps to an eighteen-and-up smoking section with a bar. “This must be the upscale Taco Stand,” I said to the girl, who said that this place definitely needed to get its customer service together. She gave it one more minute and left. I learned later that the store’s grand opening was actually a couple of days off, and that they were just doing a soft opening to work out the kinks. I wish these guys the best of luck – I love the Stand – but I gave them one more minute and left as well. Losing two guests to an inattentive host – that’s the sort of kink that needs working out. Just as soon as you figure out what in the name of Herschel Walker a Taco Stand is doing with a host station in the first place.

*(2/26/11) Tacone evidently closed about three weeks after I wrote up this entry.

(8/3/11) Sadly, Krystal seems to have ended this experiment, and closed this prototype store at the end of July. They scrubbed the concept’s website and Facebook page almost instantly, suggesting that this experiment was not successful. What a shame!

Woody’s Famous Philadelphia Cheesesteaks, Atlanta GA

Years ago, Woody’s Cheesesteaks, a little shack at the bizarre, horribly designed intersection of Monroe and Virginia, was one of those places that I would always drive past, wondering whether the food was any good, but unable to find out because they had already closed. They used to keep really unfriendly hours, but had a pretty devoted clientele in the neighborhood.

I think that another problem has always been the warring strip malls in the region and their parking enforcement. It should make sense to park over at the Midtown Art Cinema’s lot, walk over to Woody’s and then come back for a movie, but you risk having your car towed for that. Heck, I’m afraid to leave my car at the movie lot and walk as far as the Trader Joe’s. No, you have to fight for one of the small handful of spaces at Woody’s or the teeny strip mall behind it, get a meal and then move your car sixty seconds’ drive down Monroe to see a movie, which is a criminal waste of gas and time you could spend getting a little exercise.

Well, this past Saturday, we were going to see a movie after lunch, but that was down at the Plaza, so I suppose it was okay to park here and then move the car. (You do know that I’m being a little intentionally silly, right?)

Now, back when Woody’s was originally open during its unfriendly lunch-and-a-bit hour, it did have a very good reputation for serving up, after an apparently considerable wait, some really excellent grilled-to-order cheesesteaks. The original owner, David Pastoria, was much loved, but with a little exasperation for the long lines and short hours. Or maybe not “short” so much as “erratic.” He decided to step down in 2009, and passed ownership of Woody’s to Steven Renner, who has made some changes to the place. For one thing, nowadays they’re open more often than not.

I never tried Pastoria’s original, of course, but my son and I stopped by just as they opened, meeting our friends Matt and Kelley, who came into the city to see the original Frankenstein with us at the Plaza Theatre. This is part of the monthly – at least I think it’s monthly – Silver Scream Spook Show, a complete riot of fun, silly costumes, bad jokes and go-go dancers from the local Blast-Off Burlesque troupe. Now that the Spook Show has resumed operations after a few months’ break, we are looking forward to going to see them from time to time, and having an early lunch somewhere in Atlanta beforehand.

Honestly, we need not have arrived at Woody’s quite as early as eleven to have time to make it over to the Plaza, but it gave us the chance to see the place in action before it got too busy. We didn’t have the really long wait for our orders that diners of the original Woody’s have reported, but maybe about five minutes. They serve their sandwiches in table-covering butcher paper. Matt and I each had a traditional cheesesteak, mine with added mushrooms. Kelley had a hot dog and my son had an Italian sub. We all enjoyed them, but I was a little surprised that less meat had made it into my roll than I would have thought.

It was a pretty good sandwich and quite filling, but it was not quite as good as a Mad Italian cheesesteak, and nowhere close to the awesome ones available at Roy’s in Smyrna. My son was raving about his Italian sub, but that could be the Jack Benny in him. Every sandwich my boy has is the best sandwich that he’s ever had, so he’s not the most reliable of reporters. His milkshake, made with Breyer’s ice cream, certainly was terrific. In all, it was a pretty good meal, certainly among the better cheesesteaks in the city. With much more convenient hours for dinner and late night guests – they’re open until 4 in the morning on the weekends – I could see us stopping in again if we are in the area, and if we can find a parking place without anybody being a jerk about it.

Flip Burger Boutique, Atlanta GA

Here’s a place that, surprisingly, I had not been for more than a year. Flip opened its first store in Atlanta on Howell Mill Road in late 2008, to instant acclaim, incredibly long lines, and mixed reviews from a hipster crowd that can’t decide whether it wishes to embrace the hype or react against it. I ate there a couple of times in ’09 and really enjoyed it. They offer really good, fancy-schmancy hamburgers and incredibly decadent milkshakes. Richard Blais and his team, including a chef named Mark Nanna, then opened a second store in Birmingham which the good people of north Alabama are even crazier about. Last fall, when Marie and I took our daughter out for a second eating trip to that city, we spoke with a girl at Penzeys Spices who told us that we absolutely had to go to Flip. A third store opened here in the Buckhead community a few months ago.

So Flip is certainly a local success story, and one which shows every sign of being able to grow and expand more over the next few years. I could definitely see Chattanooga’s north shore district supporting a Flip.

A couple of Fridays ago, Marie and I took a break from the kids – mercifully, they’re old enough to be left on their own for a few hours – and got out for some grown-up time. We met my co-worker Victoria and her fiance James for an hour or so and enjoyed some of those really good burgers and shakes.

The best advice I can give anybody who’s been thinking about trying Flip is to arrive early and arrive curious. The menu contains all sorts of incredibly odd and fascinating sandwiches. My favorite is the simple, classic southern burger, served with homemade pimento cheese and a wonderful green ketchup, but they also serve patties made from turkey, crab, veal and other unexpected meats. On this trip, I had a chorizo sausage burger, which was served with cheese, hash browns and a fried egg, and while I did not enjoy it as much as the southern burger, it was still quite wonderful.

Victoria kept it simple with a bacon cheeseburger, and James had the crab, each also having one of those unaccountably trendy iceberg wedge salads, but Marie surprised me by passing on a burger this evening and just having some of the fries and rings that I ordered – memo to self, your wife is owed an order of fried zucchini next time – and having a big orange creamsicle shake, which is the most amazing thing ever.

The line got long behind us. Absurdly so. I think that the only thing that I dislike about Flip is that their space is small enough that diners can’t help but be aware of all of the people waiting for a table. Is this some restaurant psychology trick? If so, it works. I would have gladly spent a good deal longer visiting and talking, but I felt downright guilty hogging a table with another two dozen people lined up and waiting. So I got a Krispy Kreme milkshake to go – it’s every bit as wonderful as it sounds – and we called it a night. We should definitely go back, though. There are still a mess of burgers here that we have not tried.

Barbecue Kitchen, College Park GA

We finished up what I termed as our barbecue road trip two Saturdays ago at a little place in College Park hidden just off the interstate. It’s a very old little joint called Barbecue Kitchen, and I had never heard of it until the good folk at Roadfood.com added it to their small list of reviewed restaurants here in Georgia. It’s very easy to find, just off I-85 going south after the Downtown Connector has split, and I am surprised, now that I have been here, that I never heard of it before. In all the many conversations and lists about barbecue in the Atlanta area, this place has remained one of the city’s best-kept secrets.

It must be said that, however, that my kids didn’t enjoy it at all, and rather wished that it had remained a secret. On the other hand, happily, I had a simple, good meal here and quite enjoyed the experience. Several months ago, I wrote a chapter about The Old Hickory House in Dunwoody, reflecting how this fading restaurant is not at all what it used to be. Barbecue Kitchen is exactly how the Old Hickory House used to be. It was like stepping back in time thirty years to when that place was packed, loud and vibrant.

While my meal was indeed very good, I really was not able to finish it. We tried sharing plates and small portions at our earlier destinations, but Barbecue Kitchen absolutely leveled us with the amount of food that they pile in front of guests. I coined the phrase “insane metric buttload of food” to describe how much was put in front of me. Even if I was not already satisfied by our small meals in middle Georgia, this would have been too much for me to finish. This place gives you free refills on your vegetables, probably with the understanding that nobody’s going to be hungry enough after a first course to still be wanting more.

So this time out, we decided that I would order a barbecue plate, and Marie would get three veggies, and the kids would each get a single side and a dessert. Now, maybe I was stymied by pork-goggles or something, but that looks like a really gigantic pile of food that our server, a delightful lady who, saucily, would not divulge how long she’d been with the restaurant, but conceded that her husband would often bring her to supper here when they were dating, laid down in front of me. I wouldn’t really call any of it exceptional, but very good comfort food. I enjoyed the stew best of all. The sauce, very thick and amazingly sweet, got Marie’s seal of approval. She also enjoyed her green beans and creamed corn.

For their desserts, the kids each had a slice of cake. My son had coconut and my daughter had red velvet. They had been very good on this road trip and deserved them, I thought. Normally, the cliche is that you can get dessert only if you clean your plate. On this trip, nobody cleaned their plates. We were all completely stuffed. The lesson learned, perhaps, is that the next time we do a little eating tour, we need to space the restaurants out a little bit more. Two small meals and one gigantic one in such a short afternoon simply does not work!

Mary Mac’s Tea Room, Atlanta GA

I had been wanting to go to Mary Mac’s for a really long time. It’s the last surviving example of a brief late ’40s trend of restaurants opened by war widows looking to both stay afloat and remain a little classy, so they called their establishments “tea rooms” in the hopes of attracting a better sort of clientele than the lowlifes who went to juke joints and meat-and-threes. This fad did not last, but this one place on Ponce, started by Mary MacKenzie, survived. It is no longer in family hands – MacKenzie sold it to Margaret Lupo in 1962, who in turn sold the business to John Ferrell in the mid-nineties – but it certainly thrives. It’s one of Atlanta’s best-known destination restaurants, a place that turns a traditional meat and three into a very classy experience, and one of the very best examples of southern cooking in north Georgia, with some really amazing food.

The Saturday after my dad passed, I took Neal up on his offer to get out and relax a little. He had the goal of trying to track down a bizarre little promotional tie-in to the TV series Fringe, a short-pressed LP hiding out in various record stores, so we went by a couple of the few places in Atlanta left that still sell the darn things with no luck, and stopped at Mary Mac’s for lunch. There is a small parking lot behind the restaurant, but it fills up almost instantly. Diners will have better luck parking along Myrtle Street and enjoying a short walk.

The staff at Mary Mac’s enjoys welcoming new guests with a small, complementary bowl of pot likker. This is the slightly salty liquid left behind after boiling greens, and it starts meals here off just right. Everything here is incredibly tasty and fresh. I had a small house salad with thousand island dressing, and it looked and tasted like those vegetables were still in the ground the night before, and Neal and I shared an appetizer of fried green tomatoes. These were truly wonderful, easily the equal of the fabulous ones prepared at Blue Willow Inn and The Fickle Pickle, and served with a very light and tasty remoulade.

My meal was very good, or, at least, the sides were. I was indecisive about what to get, briefly considered the meat loaf, and finally settled on some chicken tenders. These were perfectly decent, but honestly, I should have just ordered a veggie plate. I keep telling myself that and never listen. I had pickled beets and the mac and cheese, both of which were just amazing, and Brunswick stew, which was also very good. Neal, on the other hand, really scored with his chicken livers, which he says were every bit as good as the exceptional ones at Doug’s Place in Emerson. Like me, he ordered one side too many, but enjoyed what he could finish.

We were finishing off our meal and basking in satisfaction when a woman who looked to be a little ways older than us but still bouncing with a spring in her step came up behind Neal and put her hand on his shoulder before asking how we were doing and how our food was. This unexpected burst of familiarity probably wouldn’t pass muster up north. Neal said later that he thought it was some relation of his coming to say hey.

She explained that she liked to come around and make sure everything was okay, and that while she wasn’t the one who cooked our food – I had asked whether we had her to thank – she did sample everything in the kitchen. While I joked around about how that explained why each of my beets had a bite taken already – a joke from a color Popeye cartoon that I doubt anybody else remembers – she went right to work rubbing Neal’s shoulders with such vigor that his eyes about popped out of his head.

She left her card and went onto another table. The back of her T-shirt read “I got my belly filled and my back rubbed at Mary Mac’s.” Free pot likker and shoulder rubs. They must want repeat business or something.