Douceur de France, Marietta GA

This is Marie, talking about one of my favorite places in Marietta, a little French bistro about a mile south of the town square. The two primary attractions (for me) are the croissants and the eclairs, but that is mainly because we don’t get to eat there very often. They only do breakfast and lunch, and open about a half hour too late for me to even think about having breakfast there before work. Before my work changed locations, I would occasionally decide that the traffic report was promising enough for me to get something (usually one or two plain croissants) on my way, but since we moved that has dwindled to the pair of times I decided it was worth getting to work late to bring in something for the team to eat and picked up a dozen croissants for them and an eclair for me.

Anyone who knows me should be fully aware that the bakery case alone would bring me back to this delightful little place all by itself. We have had some quite satisfactory lunches here as well, however. I am very thankful to our friend David, who directed us to try it out, I think in reference to a conversation I had about the merits and deficiencies of the eclairs recently obtained from less authentic places. I particularly like it that there are European brand items for sale up on the shelves behind the counter, and that the only one who greets you with “bonjour” is the one who has an actual French accent.

A real croissant made properly out of tasty ingredients is a completely different thing from the horn-shaped dough balls that go by the same name from grocery stores. A proper croissant should drop flakes all over your plate when you tear off a piece, and the interior should be full of air holes, moist, and a bit stretchy. You should have difficulty cutting the thing in half for buttering or sandwich toppings unless your knife is very sharp. Also, unfortunately, it will be far less satisfactory the next day, as it should never have preservatives of any kind. The owners are from France, and the pastries definitely show the education that Luc Beaudet, the pastry chef and co-owner (with his wife) has obtained. The rotating case next to the register is quite compelling, and a good way to entertain yourself while waiting for your check to be rung up.

Now this is not the most perfect French-style restaurant in my book – that award was won away by a delightful little place in Knoxville written up in this blog last month – but it is definitely the best place within easy driving distance, and the competition in Tennessee did not provide the eclair that I ate on the day that I got my positive pregnancy test which was, indeed, the best eclair ever obtained from that place or any other. The meals I have had there, although not frequent enough, have been exceedingly satisfactory.

On our most recent visit, our son declared the chicken salad the best he’d ever had. Even granting that any meal he enjoys is the best he’d ever had while he’s eating it, the taste I had seemed more than satisfactory. On this last visit I had the tourte au poulet, in part because I was actually in a mood for cream of mushroom soup which was sadly not on the soup rotation that day, and this item has a mushroom cream sauce. It was beautifully flaky outside and nicely flavorful inside, and very filling although not terribly large. I personally am quite pleased with the portion sizes here, though it’s quite likely that larger appetites will want to order extra sides to fill up.

We would eat there far more often if they had Sunday hours. As it is, however, my business is assured just based on my two favorites.

Old Brick Pit Bar-B-Q, Chamblee GA

Here’s proof that time really does march on in the restaurant business. Once upon a time, the Old Brick Pit was one of the Atlanta region’s most well-known and popular barbecue joints. It opened in 1976 and the original owner, whose name was Newton, was immortalized in caricature by the great Jack Davis. Within a couple of years, it was among a handful of Georgia restaurants featured in one of those writeups in The New York Times that you used to see in books and newspapers in the 1970s, marveling at this peculiar Southern delicacy called barbecue. A yellowing copy of that lengthy road trip article is still framed on the wall of this fine old smokehouse, where few seem to see it.

Once upon a time, in other words, the Old Brick Pit was, along with Harold’s and Fat Matt’s, one of the city’s best-known and beloved places. But time has unfairly left this place behind. You never see it talked about or shared among younger foodies or lovers of great barbecue or roadfood. Despite a pretty good location on Peachtree, just north of and across the street from Oglethorpe University, it has slipped so far off everybody’s radar that I just flat out forget about the place unless I just happen to be nearby.

I’ve eaten here only twice. The first time was many years back when I was maintaining that old Geocities page about barbecue places in Georgia. I’m pretty sure that we were the only guests on that Saturday afternoon. Marie and the kids and I stopped by a couple of Saturday evenings ago and we were, again, apart from some take-out orders, the only guests. That’s certainly not the way that it should be.

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, we spent New Year’s Day with my father in the hospice, where he would pass away the following morning. Now, our lunchtime visit to America’s Top Dog had been a little more upbeat and enthusiastic. We still had some optimism that Dad would improve somewhat and enjoy one last bowl game with his beloved Alabama Crimson Tide. Spending the day with him, seeing that he wasn’t improving at all and had no ability to focus on or stay awake for the game stopped that optimism in its tracks. So when we went out for supper, we were in a much quieter mood, and the slow pace of the restaurant fit my state of mind.

Sepulchral. That’s a word I’ve often wanted to use but never found the right occasion.

The building is built around the old brick pit of the name, and man, it smells fantastic. You’ll definitely wish you could go around the counter and check out that beauty . The food was mostly very good. Old Brick Pit uses a thin tomato and vinegar mix with their sauce. We all had chopped pork as we often do, but their ribs come pretty highly recommended as well. The slaw and the Brunswick stew were both very tasty. None of us really cared for the peach cobbler, however. Marie’s order just got passed around for each of us to see who would want to finish it.

Marie and the children were ready to return to the hospice after we finished. I chose to linger for a little while, enjoying my delicious sweet tea, reading the little touchstones of the past mounted on the walls and enjoying that gorgeous Jack Davis artwork. Part of me didn’t want to leave.

That was the last meal that we had while my father was still alive. He passed the following morning at 6:23. I wish he was able to enjoy it with us. Dad probably wouldn’t have liked it quite as much as he did our trip to Harold’s a couple of months ago, but Dad certainly liked barbecue. Dad’s probably tracked down Bear Bryant in heaven by now, and they’ve bonded over a nice plate of sliced pork and onion rings, which was his favorite variation. I like mine chopped, and with stew myself, but my old man would agree that when it comes to barbecue, it’s all good.

America’s Top Dog, Chamblee GA (CLOSED)

(I’ll apologize in advance for the darker-than-normal tone and sad nature of this and the following entry, but new readers and Google surfers might not be aware that the chapters of this blog are fragments of the story of our life based around memorable meals rather than a conventional series of restaurant reviews. I do wish that our very nice trip to the awesome America’s Top Dog could have come at a brighter point in our life, but it worked out that it didn’t. Life’s like that.)

We started the new year with my father in hospice. We didn’t know how long we would be there, and my mother held onto the hope that we would rally back home. Personally, I was telling myself that we would have a week – it turned out to be just over 36 hours – and that our work schedules would not be disrupted quite yet. I don’t know why; I knew that Dad was not coming home, and, as dark as this may seem, I concluded that we were simply going to move operations to the Emory / Oglethorpe University neighborhood for six or seven days. We were going to have to get food somewhere, and that would give us the opportunity to have some more meals in these communities than we normally enjoy. Going out to eat would also bring some welcome breaks into the children’s routines, and the sadness of the hospice and the farewell visits from longtime family friends.

In fact, the last bit of terrific news before my dad went into hospice on the 31st was that my son had decided to move back home and resume school down here with us. While the first couple of weeks of the year have been very sad and awful, I am very glad that we were able to get Dad that one last bit of welcome news before he lost coherence and consciousness. Having my son back has been at least three-quarters fantastic. He’s squabbling with his sister all the time and he’s having difficulty with the concept of keeping his bedroom clean – must have been fairly lax up in Kentucky, I figure – and the teenage stinker has figured that he’s shoehorning his way into a looping day trip through the Carolinas in a few weeks that Marie and I thought that we would be enjoying by ourselves, but my son’s home, and the boy likes to eat.

So giving the family breaks with distracting meals around or on the way to the North Druid Hills corridor were on the agenda. Unfortunately, the first of these, to a faux-Mexican sports bar, was too mediocre to pass muster here. So yes, our last meal of 2010 – otherwise such a good year – was one not worth the effort of recounting, and not merely because the Georgia Bulldogs looked like they wanted to get beat by a high school team playing its first game ever. We would have a much, much better experience at our first meal out in 2011.

In November, I noticed a writeup for a hot dog place in Chamblee that sounded very interesting. It might not have been the best business decision by America’s Top Dog’s owner to open on a very rainy New Year’s Day – for the forty or so minutes we were there, there were no other guests – but I am certainly glad that he did, because a very filling and wonderful meal was exactly what we needed to distract us from going back to the hospice for another day. And this place? Friends, it is a terrific and wonderful treat. It is perhaps not quite the same “local” experience as some of Atlanta’s other hot dog shops – Barker’s and Brandi’s in Cobb County set the standard in the region – but this place sets guests up with the amazing, authentic taste of hot dogs from around the country.

Just six days earlier, I tried onion sauce for the first time down at Orange Tree in Jacksonville. They serve onion sauce here at America’s Top Dogs, along with 39 other options on an unbelievable toppings bar. Incidentally, speaking of Orange Tree in the same sentence as onion sauce, proving that there’s no such thing as a recurring joke so lousy that it can’t recur in the real world, I found myself unwittingly ordering “orange rings” at America’s Top Dog. Hi-hat!

This topping bar will blow your mind. The goal here is to give guests the option of recreating any regional specialty here in Atlanta. If there’s something he’s missed, I can’t think what. The real humdinger, I say, is the presence of proper Cincinnati-style chili that is every bit the equal and equivalent of Gold Star and Skyline. I haven’t tried Gold Star since I was last in Lexington in the spring of 2008, and am no expert in the variation, but it tastes exactly as I remember and occasionally crave the stuff. They do Texas-styled chili as well, of course, but having the milder, cinnamon-and-chocolate-tinged Cincinnati take as well is a really unexpected treat. I’m not aware of any place anywhere around Atlanta that offers this. I had a small bowl of it, rather than dressing my dog with it. Honestly, I kind of missed the pasta that it is traditionally served over, but it was so nice to have another taste of it after more than two years.

As for my dog, I dressed it somewhat traditionally, with mustard – it looks like they have four different ones – and onions, slaw and pickled relish. My daughter surprised me by having two dogs with Texas chili, which she does not normally order on dogs, along with nacho cheese, pickles and, oddly, potato chip crumbs, which was new to me. My son had the most adventurous palate of the table, and made his with Cincy chili, pickled cucumber relish, cole slaw and shredded cheddar cheese. Both kids also had barbecue sauce on their dogs.

Poor Marie, still on a no-nitrate diet, was stuck again with a hamburger, but she didn’t mind as she says that the burger was fantastic. And we were very pleased with the sides. We ordered both a basket of rings and a large order of fries. This was far more than a table of four needed. Both were really excellent – these are surely among the best rings and fries in the Atlanta area – but we were stuck with an awful lot of excellent fries that didn’t keep well and should have been eaten. Bear that in mind as you consider an order for your own party.

We obviously came at an awful time, but it did allow us the chance to hear the owner brag about his hamburgers and his Cincinnati chili, which, he tells us, even Cincy residents proclaim both authentic and superior to some from back home. Eating out on New Year’s Day didn’t give us a feel for what the place should be like, and what the foot traffic should normally be. I kind of had to work to accept the reality that most people don’t go out in the rain on January 1 for a hot dog in a pedestrian-unfriendly location – it’s in the Big Lots strip mall on Chamblee-Tucker Road inside I-285 – and not just think that Saturday at 1 pm, there should be many more people eating lunch out. I choose to imagine that any other Saturday, this place is nice and busy. It certainly should be, and I look forward to seeing the place packed the next time we are back out that way.

(Update 11/17/11): Since writing the above entry, Marie and I went over to America’s Top Dog several times and enjoyed it greatly, especially the Washington, DC-styled half-smokes. Sadly, I went to their second store, in Duluth, earlier today and they no longer carry half-smokes, as their supplier changed their minimum monthly ordering requirements to a number too huge to store, much less sell in a month. Nevertheless, their basic dogs remain one of the city’s best treasures, especially paired with a small order of onion rings.

(Update 11/25/11): Strangely and sadly, just eight days after visiting the Duluth store, I can confirm that the original, in Chamblee, has shuttered. Duluth is still going and still awesome, so go check them out!

(Update 1/6/12): Even more sadly, it would now appear that Duluth has closed as well. That’s just awful news. I will miss these guys.

Other blog posts about America’s Top Dog:

Food Near Snellville (Feb. 16 2011)
The Blissful Glutton (Apr. 6 2011)

Miyako, Austell GA

My daughter had enjoyed her November trip to Happy Sumo in Norcross, one of our friend Matt’s favorite places, so darn much that she wanted to go to a Japanese steakhouse for her birthday. In doing so, she ensured that one particular establishment in Kennerietta got my undying hatred. Before I can tell you about my very good trip to Miyako, I have to mention that.

This is the first restaurant story that I’ve actually sat down to write since my father passed away earlier this month, which accounts for the short break in sharing stories last week. Well, we knew that it was coming, which is how I was able to pre-plan a break in the blog. For years, my parents have taken the family out for birthday suppers, and my daughter has usually announced hers about ten months in advance. She then spends the rest of the year changing her mind about where she wants to go, but this time, she finally settled on a Japanese teppanyaki steakhouse. Well, we knew that my dad’s deterioration was getting worse, and that this one mid-December evening was going to be my daughter’s last birthday with my father and so we hoped the evening would be pretty special. It was not. We ended up leaving this establishment (which shall remain nameless here, although I doubt anybody who wants to learn it will have much difficulty) after more than an hour’s wait at the table and constant lying assurances that a teppanyaki chef was right around the corner. I finally, roaring, bawled the owner or manager or whomever the incompetent fool was out in a manner few have ever seen me in, for ruining this most bittersweet and important of evenings for my family. You should have seen the guy. I had him bent over so far backwards that he looked like he was doing the limbo.

A few days before Christmas, my daughter got a kind of a consolation prize. She wasn’t able to enjoy the birthday supper with her granddaddy that she wanted, but my mother did take her and her brother to a different, obviously superior, steakhouse called Miyako. It’s on the East-West Connector between Smyrna and Austell. About a week and a half later, neither of us then aware of my kids’ visit, David rang me up and asked if he could give me a break from worrying about my dad’s failing health and take me to lunch here. He’d just found the place – it is not far from where he lives – and was raving about their lunch special.

Some days later, I asked my kids about their visit to Miyako, and they told me that it was really great and that they had a good time. My son says that he really enjoyed the shrimp, and quite liked pouring the “yummy yummy” sauce, which is what Miyako terms that yellow stuff, a strange mix of mayo and sugar and, sometimes, ketchup, that goes really well with seafood or vegetables, over his rice.

For my part, when David and I went by Miyako on a brisk afternoon a couple of weeks ago, I remembered what Matt always orders when he goes to his favorite steakhouse in Norcross, and asked for filet mignon and steamed rice. It works for him and it worked terrifically for me. But what really impressed me at Miyako, even more than the high quality of the entree, was just how well they do all the extras.

The salad had a nice ginger dressing, certainly, but it was a much milder, white, light cream rather than the thick and chunky orange-colored dressing that most Japanese restaurants serve. I mean, I don’t mind that thick orange stuff, but when you see the same dressing all over the place, you realize that it’s coming from Sysco’s “oriental restaurant” catalog. The light dressing that Miyako offers is much tastier. Even the miso soup tasted considerably different and with a sharper taste, with much more mushrooms and onions in the broth than any Japanese restaurant that I have ever visited.

I’m the sort of person who always looks for silver linings. The reason that I brought up those morons who ruined my daughter’s last birthday dinner with my dad is that if it were not for that incident, Mom wouldn’t have looked around for an alternate for them, and I, too, probably would have passed on David’s suggestion of a steakhouse lunch, in favor of something different. So we didn’t get that dinner, but my children and I did get to discover a very good restaurant in its place. Now the next trick is to get Matt out this way so that he can compare Miyako to the place in Norcross that he enjoys so much. I bet that he’ll really like it.

AJ’s Famous Seafood & Po Boys, Marietta GA

Some years back, I played, and by that I mean, “dumped a lot of disposable income on,” a collectible miniatures game – you’ve got the same Wikipedia I have, look it up – and would occasionally go over to Great Escape Comics and Games here in Marietta for a tournament. For the most part, I thought that the food options around this store, which is a pretty good one, and certainly worth a visit, were quite limited. There was the now-closed Mad Italian, of course, where I should have eaten more frequently, but I thought that darn near everything else up and down 120 around that shop was some dumb fast food chain. I was proven wrong a couple of months ago when Samantha shared a terrific Thai meal at Lemon Grass with us, and now I’ve found a very respectable, tiny seafood restaurant just across the street from Lemon Grass. AJ’s Famous Seafood & Po Boys is a couple of doors down from the Kroger and I’d never have known about it had my plans not changed last week.

See, I was hoping to go to Athens last Thursday, but the region was hit by a pretty awful, albeit mercifully short, ice storm. Frozen rain came down in buckets Wednesday night and the police said that there were a thousand accidents in the Atlanta area that night. It melted off very quickly and by lunchtime Thursday, things were back to normal, but everybody’s nerves were frazzled and I didn’t know whether I wanted to risk any ice patches between home and Athens. So around eleven, I started getting peckish and had no idea what I wanted to eat. Well, actually, I had a pretty good idea, but that will have to wait until my next trip to Athens. So I pulled up Urbanspoon to see what might sound good in Marietta that I had not noticed before. There it was, a restaurant that I should have been visiting since they opened in 2005 and I was looking for something to eat on that stretch. What a ridiculous development!

AJ’s sandwiches are available as a full-sized po boy, or on a bun, like I had. They also serve up their varied fish, shrimp or oyster options as dinner-sized platter portions with several sides. Their bread is crispy but soft, and comes dressed with lettuce, tomato, pickle and one of several spreads. I just went with mayo with my shrimp, saving their house “AJ sauce” – somewhere between remoulade and thousand island dressing and quite tasty – for my appetizer. I don’t often order appetizers, unless it’s a really memorable standout. An alligator taco certainly qualifies.

Now, see, this is what I love about paying a little more attention to the quality of the food that I’m finding. Five years, this place has been serving alligator, and I had no idea. I love gator; I’ve only had it a few times, but I think it’s terrific. Apparently, AJ’s will occasionally offer up a gator and sausage chili. Holy bajole, I’d like to try that. Anyway, the taco comes with a good portion of fried gator, with cabbage, onion and cilantro.

Now, my big shrimp bun was very good, but I’m not sure that I wouldn’t have been just as pleased, and not quite as stuffed, with three alligator tacos and a side of red beans and rice. For a last-minute fill-in meal, this was really a nice treat, and I look forward to stopping by again one day soon.

Donut King, Snellville GA

One of my favorite foodie blogs is the “increasingly-inaccurately named” (as Douglas Adams might have termed it) Food Near Snellville. I noticed his work several months ago – he and Jennifer Zyman’s Blissful Glutton have been in a war of attrition for the top spot on Urbanspoon for the Atlanta region – and even though he’s based in one of this region’s many traffic-clogged, sprawling messes, he gets out to plenty of good restaurants and writes with a sense of infectious fun. To celebrate his finally claiming the number one spot from Blissful Glutton, we headed over to his turf.

Okay, that’s a complete lie. To be perfectly honest, Snellville, nothing more to me than that oft-gridlocked, badly traffic-managed corridor between Stone Mountain and Loganville, just happened to be on the road back from Walnut Grove, which we visited a week ago for our roadfood tour. Well, since we’re never in that neck of the woods, I wondered whether there might be anything we could grab for a snack after lunch at Kelly’s, just to try something a little different. And as for finding a new thing to try, I did this little trick: I zoomed in really close on US 78 in Google Maps until the names of restaurants started showing up. Donut King stood out, so I figured we’d each grab a treat there.

Yeah, sometimes here, you get lovingly-told stories of our life spent eating well and the wonderful histories that we have with favorite restaurants, and sometimes you get this. Anyway, there’s some really good doughnuts in Snellville.

Honestly, other than food, I’m hard-pressed to come up with a single reason to visit Snellville. Well, fair’s fair, food is, you know, second to friends as the best reason to visit anywhere, but the town is seriously lacking in bookshops and record stores. Several years ago, the kids and I were coming back from Athens this way just to have something different to see and we stopped into this utter craphole of a CD store where my son bought a VHS copy of the awful film Space Jam and the idiot behind the register wouldn’t let my daughter use the restroom. Even that place is gone now.

Food-wise, Snellville looks to be a chain paradise, with only a few standouts. Sri Thai sounds very promising, and FNS gave that place a good review. Actually, doing a little research, the most interesting thing that I’ve learned is that the national chain Dickey’s Barbecue Pit has one of its three Georgia locations in Snellville*, only it’s not listed on the corporate website, while four forthcoming restaurants are shown as “coming soon.” That’s just lovely, I say sarcastically. There’s no such thing as a good nationwide chain of barbecue restaurants. (*note: a commenter has informed me that this store has already closed.)

As for Donut King itself, I’m glad we made it an early start for the day, because this place closes at the unfortunate hour of 1 in the afternoon. It’s in a strip mall with a Provino’s and a Philly Connection and sixty thousand cars. It’s not particularly easy to get into, and a downright pain in the neck to get out of. But the dougnuts, well, they’re wonderful. Marie puts on airs of not actually liking doughnuts very much, but she found her chocolate frosted to be incredibly yummy, and the girlchild in the back seat was making happy “mmmmm” sounds as she wolfed down her eclair.

Despite their early closing time being a little inconvenient for curious eaters, the business clearly does a good job anticipating demand and bakes and fries accordingly. As you see in the photograph above, I had Marie hold her doughnut out for me to shoot. The last few times we’ve gone into a dessert place, I’ve had good results from shooting the display case showing off all the treats. Here, we arrived so late that most of their food was gone, and while my food composition skills are still admittedly meager, there’s no way any photographer could bring that decimated display to life. Thus said, the community must clearly love this place to have cleaned it out so thoroughly by 12.30 that only slim pickings were left for us. They were really good slim pickings, but it left me curious what Donut King looks like at five in the morning.

Kelly’s BBQ, Walnut Grove GA

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, we’re attempting to visit as many of the Georgia restaurants that are featured at Roadfood.com as we can. Coming back I-20 from Madison, we had lunch at a second such restaurant in a day. Madison itself was as fun as ever, although planning to have an early breakfast there and an early lunch in another town doesn’t allow you a lot of opportunities when many of the stores don’t open ’til eleven. Well, we did a little window shopping at least, and enjoyed some of the pretty buildings and houses while taking a nice walk.

Now, it turns out that the roadfood list does have a small error in it. It suggests that Kelly’s BBQ is in Covington, and I don’t believe that’s true at all. It’s actually ten miles north of there in a small crossroads community called Walnut Grove, which is actually closer to Loganville than Covington. And Urbanspoon’s no better; it says the restaurant’s in Covington, too! It’s at the intersection of state highways 81 and 138 and, sensibly, when it first opened in the 1970s, it was a restaurant called Crossroads. The man who rechristened it Kelly’s took over in the mid-80s, and he sold it three years ago to new owners who have kept the menu, the recipes and, where possible, the low prices – Marie and our daughter and I ate for $15 – but have expanded the building to allow more indoor seating. It no longer looks quite the way it appears in the photos at Roadfood.com, so it’s missing a little bit of the quaint, roadside stand feel.

Also missing from Kelly’s these days is a giant pig. The restaurant used to have a really enormous sculpted pig next to the building that weighed several hundred pounds, but a couple of years ago, some fast-moving criminals came by in a truck in the dead of night and spirited it away. The Walton County sheriff’s department would appreciate any information.

A large plate of chopped pork here gives you plenty to share. There’s more than enough pork for one, along with bread, fries, slaw and Brunswick stew. There are three sauces available, mild, hot and sweet, and the pork already comes wet with the house’s mild sauce. I’d recommend you order it dry and sauce it up to your liking. The sauces are all vinegar-tomato blends and guests can buy them by the bottle.

The only disappointment that any of us had was with the slaw. Now me, I like any style, variety or recipe of slaw just fine. Mayo, vinegar, red, mustard, it’s all good to me. But the closer it gets to that really finely-diced, mayo-heavy Chick-fil-A style slaw, the less Marie likes it. She ordered a small cup with her chopped pork sandwich, and I knew as soon as they brought the tray to our table that she wasn’t going to enjoy it. So I gave her most of my stew, which was very good, and tasted heavily and delightfully of corn.

Kelly’s offers a lot more than just barbecue; they have burgers and steaks and plenty of other things which, if they’re as good as the tasty chopped pork, are probably worth a try. On the other hand, ever since I was old enough to understand what the heck one is supposed to order at a barbecue restaurant, I’ve kind of figured that burgers are there in lieu of a kid’s menu. Don’t get me wrong; I like burgers more than most, but chopped pork this wonderful, tender and moist is going to win out every time.