Vatica Indian Vegetarian Cuisine, Marietta GA

I’ll tell you, friends, this was not the meal that I was hoping to find. It was very, very good, and calls out for investigation from more people who love unusual flavors and unique foods. Well, I knew going in that a vegetarian Indian restaurant was unlikely to replace the dearly-missed Moksha in my affections, and this didn’t, but it was a very different and very positive experience all the same. This is definitely a restaurant that Atlanta’s foodie community should quit overlooking and come visit.

For one thing, Vatica’s owner is by leagues the most engaging, friendly and welcoming host of any Indian place that I’ve ever visited. Having done just a cursory bit of research into what I could expect here, I explained to him that I knew virtually nothing of vegetarian Indian dishes, but that I understood this place specialized in something called thali, which is basically a buffet brought to your table. He told me that he’d make me a very good thali and tell me all about it.

About five minutes later, I had a huge circular tray in front of me, with small bowls of a variety of foods. He told me what each was. My meal included rice, a spicy stew called dal, potato curry, lentil curry, sweet potatoed curry, an onion yogurt called raita, a pita-like bread called roti, the delicious, thin spicy wafers called papadam, a potato and onion samosa and a little fruit cup. I apologized for inconveniencing him, but I’m actually allergic to sweet potatoes. So those went, and he brought me a small bowl of curried squash instead.

This place definitely has it down right. That sounds like a heck of a lot of food, but everything was in very sensible, small portions. If you’re looking for a broad sampling of flavors, you can do pretty well here, getting ten different things for nine bucks and change. I was most taken with the dal and with the potato curry, but everything was very tasty. I was further surprised when, about halfway through my meal, another fellow came by with a tray to refill whatever I wanted more of, so I had second helpings of the dal, the potato curry, the lentils and another couple of papadam wafers.

Honestly, this was a good – no, a very good – lunch, but I also realized as I ate that really, what I’ve come to expect, unfairly, from Indian cuisine is really tasty meat in a really spicy, scorch-yer-tongue sauce. This was one heck of a good meal, but not at all what I was looking for. I wonder where my ongoing search to replace Moksha will take me next?

The Fickle Pickle, Roswell GA

If you’ve never taken my advice before, listen to me now: do not arrange to meet friends at The Fickle Pickle. You should definitely go, and you should absolutely plan to enjoy a delicious lunch in the company of your buddies, but seriously; this place has the dinkiest parking lot imaginable. It gets really busy on the weekends, at which point downtown Roswell’s lack of overflow parking impacts everybody’s happiness. Get everybody together at somebody’s house ahead of time, and carpool in as few vehicles as possible. You’ll do everybody a favor.

In many previous chapters in this story, I’ve shared reports of what I call menu envy, which is that particular condition of sitting down to what you thought was going to be a swell meal, only to find that somebody else at your table – or, too often in my case, everybody else at my table – has ordered something even tastier than what you got. I’m very happy to say that, for my birthday last week, just about everybody else at our table had envy over my fried green tomato sandwich. Even if they didn’t know they had that envy, or were perfectly satisfied with their own sandwiches, which I’m sure were terrific, they were eating something flatly inferior to my order. This sandwich… well, let me start by saying that the Blue Willow Inn out in Social Circle probably has better fried green tomatoes, but that would be it in the region. The tomatoes are amazing. Served up on fresh bread with a tomato jam, pepperjack cheese, greens, white onions and a thin smear of basil mayo, the kitchen is making magic. I haven’t had a better sandwich in a very, very long time. The only person at the table who was not envious of my sandwich was Kimberly, who also had the good sense and fortune to order one.

Everybody’s sandwiches were really wonderful, and they each come with a very good side. Marie was very happy with her tomato basil soup, and I was very taken with my chili. The real winner, though, apart from the sandwiches, is the top choice on their appetizer board. The fried pickles here are to die for. They’re simply out of this world, crunchy and juicy and served with a really wonderful remoulade sauce. Order accordingly: a full basket is enough for four, and you’ll certainly feel very guilty letting any of these go to waste.

While I can’t praise the food here enough, I also think the service is far better than the average. The owners have done themselves no favors by building in an old house the way that they have, and indeed my only dissatisfaction comes from how hugely inefficient a system they’ve developed. With such a popular restaurant drawing so many people into such a small space, there has to be a better way than putting names in for a table and then having your party go through a very slow cafeteria-style line to place orders and ring the table up all together. The result is confusion, lots of standing around and lots of blocked doorways. Having said that, the various servers seemed very much atop the chaos and were both very graciously accommodating for our group arriving in fits and starts throughout the hour and promptly reactive to additional orders being added to our table.

Yet I can’t help but think that if the service was that good with a flawed and inefficient system, the service would become floating-on-air perfect with a more sensible one. I am very tempted to return one weekday evening and try one of these highly-praised mac-n-cheese bowls which are only available at supper, and see how the service is during a slightly less busy time than Saturday at 12:30. I’ll certainly have some more fried pickles, too.

The Silver Skillet, Atlanta GA

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

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

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

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

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

The Colonnade, Atlanta GA

If you grew up in a southern household, you simply must visit The Colonnade to have your mind blown by this menu. They serve things here that your mother or your grandmother regularly prepared and which you had completely forgotten. Last week, Marie and our daughter and I joined David and Neal for supper here. All three of us fellows had the same eye-popping reaction to the same thing. “Pears and cheese?! My mom used to make that!” With grated sharp cheddar cheese and mayo. It must have been in the secret handbook assigned by Betty Crocker to all housewives in Georgia and neighboring states between 1964 and 1975.

One of the other amazing things on the menu is tomato aspic. This savory gelatin was apparently a somewhat common dish in postwar America, until the Jell-O company turned families onto the idea of gelatin as a sweet dessert instead. “Oh, Lord,” said Neal, sampling a half-spoonful of my order. “It tastes like V-8 Jell-O.” Turns out he’s exactly right. I found a recipe for tomato aspic which calls for tomato juice, Tabasco and bay leaf along with two envelopes of unflavored gelatin. The curiosity and novelty didn’t overwhelm the reality that it wasn’t very good, but as I told Neal as I encouraged him to give it a taste, when the heck else are you going to have the chance to try tomato aspic in a restaurant?

Naturally, I had to try both of these at the Colonnade, as they’re both missing from the menus of darn near every other restaurant around. So is calf’s liver, among others, but I had to draw the line somewhere. No, I just had your common-or-garden chicken livers. Nothing adventurous here.

The Colonnade is one of Atlanta’s oldest surviving restaurants. Only the Atkins Park Tavern is older. It opened in 1927 at the intersection of Piedmont and Lindbergh, in a house that was torn down before I was born. In 1962, the Colonnade moved to its present location on Cheshire Bridge Road in front of that unbelievably skeevy motel. I know this must come as a shock to Atlantans to hear a motel on Cheshire Bridge described as skeevy, but I calls ’em as I sees ’em.

We were mistaken on one point about the Colonnade. Looking over all these old-fashioned, timelost dishes on the menu along with the fried chicken and collard greens, we all assumed, quite wrongly, that the only things to have changed here over the decades are the prices. However, in the lobby, there is a collection of old menus from earlier days, and it would appear that curiosities like the aspic and the pear and cheese are actually relatively new. Along with the menus, there are also some newspaper and magazine reviews. One of these features the ridiculous headline “PATRONS PRAISE GOOD PLACE TO EAT.” When I wrote for a newspaper in Athens, I occasionally wanted to smack the copy editors around with a baseball bat for all the awful headlines they wrote for my articles, but lordy, I never had one that bad.

There has been one very unfortunate change at the restaurant, but it’s not one that I knew about for a couple of days. We noticed in the lobby the requisite framed, autographed poster of Guy Fieri spotlighting the Colonnade’s appearance on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. I tracked down the clip – they’re on YouTube – and was surprised to see that the Food Network series visited the Colonnade during a period where they were experimenting with some really fascinating concoctions no longer available. So if you’re a Triple-D fan making your way around the country hitting the featured restaurants – and a fine use of your time that would be – it looks like you cannot currently get the redneck sushi, the lobster knuckle sandwich or, tragically, the kangaroo sirloin. Look, I like chicken livers all right, but if I’d seen kangaroo steak on the menu, that’s what I would have ordered. The Colonnade’s brief flirtation with new, wild and a little weird has ended, and they’re back to the basics, serving up fine dining the way that your grandmother knew it.

I did find one note about the fine dining experience a little unusual, however. All of the service was very good, and we enjoyed our server’s choosing to answer Marie’s request for a recommendation in reverse. Rather than telling her what he liked best, he told her the two dishes that he did not enjoy, suggesting that she’d like anything else that she ordered, and she did. But I was a little surprised at the register. The Colonnade does not accept credit cards. That’s just fine by me; I don’t like to use credit cards. (I also play Where’s George?, so it’s important that I keep ones in circulation!) I tried not to be confrontational about it, but I was curious about the policy. “I think that’s so neat that y’all don’t take credit cards. I don’t use them either, but I was wondering why you don’t.” I guess the lady at the register gets that a lot, only rudely. “We just don’t. We never have.” That’s all the answer that she wanted to give.

So much for curiosity, but then again, I think the Colonnade is older than credit cards, and they can make that choice. The rest of you, swing by your bank’s ATM first.

Tandoor Restaurant, Marietta GA

I’m still reeling from the closure of Moksha. I must be; there’s no other explanation for this grim lack of satisfaction in the unavailability of really good, reasonably-priced Indian food in the area. Now this obviously is the sort of thing that I could have rectified already, had I put my mind to it, and I did find Desi Spice, which is pretty good, but the honest fact is that my great enjoyment of a few Indian dishes has been consistently tempered with the persistent awfulness of the restaurants that serve them. I don’t wish to list a walk of shame, but I think you’ve all eaten at the kinds of places that turn my eyebrows. I’m talking about the ones that feature the cloth napkins and nice tablecloths under the clear plastic, with the ill-fitting tuxedos totally failing to turn a server’s disagreeable and bored demeanor into anything classy. If Atlanta’s got one too many of anything, it’s the Indian equivalents of those damn fool China-This and China-That places. I’ve really, really got to be in some more kind of mood for rogan josh to put up with that burning mediocrity of presentation.

Moksha was really nice, but it was genuinely upscale and not plastic, with gorgeous interiors brightly lit by huge windows letting in the light and a super staff of smiling and helpful servers. Heck, even the gents’ was classy. I wanted to know where the heck they bought that sink so I could install it in my own home.

There is nothing in Tandoor’s decor that I want in my home, but the experience is so many leagues preferable to the surly artificiality of the typical Indian restaurant in the region that it scores highly on my scale. The food’s all right. It’s just okay, really, but it’s priced very well and they don’t make any pretension about it. Why can’t more places be like this?

At any rate, the decor in this place is pretty darn downmarket, which is a very nice breath of fresh relief or something like that. It’s in a strip mall on Powers Ferry Road which looks like it should have been a good location once upon a time, but it’s struggling. Despite the high-end car dealer on one end, most of the spaces are vacant. In fact, the storefronts that sandwich Tandoor are both closed up.

Tandoor’s prices are very nice, but you have to navigate the menu in odd ways to make things work. They have some “combo meals” to save money and give guests a broader choice of flavors, but these come with some restrictions. The $8.99 combo comes with a vegetable dish, one curried meat, rice and naan. I found this a little restrictive, sorry to say. Based on Chloe Morris’s excellent review of this place (link dead, but where it was described, with some hyperbole, as “the best Indian/Pakistani food in the city”), I was looking forward to trying the chicken boti. Unfortunately, this dish does not qualify as one of the meats that you can get in this combo.

Hoping to maximize my dollar’s worth, I asked for the girl at the register to recommend another chicken entree. She suggested that I might enjoy the chicken karahi instead. Unfortunately (again), difficulty understanding each other meant that my request for “boneless” was not made clear. I’ve since learned that karahi is typically prepared bone-in, as this meal was. It was, indeed, quite tasty and in a very good, thick, spicy, brown sauce. It wasn’t quite what I had in mind is all.

I did get to try Chow Down’s suggestion of palak paneer, a dish that I may have only had once before. This was indeed very nice and creamy and a rich, natural green color, without any artificial additives. I won’t swear that I’d order it every time, but it was a good change from my usual routine.

It was not completely satisfying. There was far more rice than I could ever eat, at the expense of the other dishes. Yet everything was flavored so nicely that I didn’t mind much. The small, downmarket decor was not a problem, but I found myself focusing on patchy, broken paint on walls that needed a new coat. I suspect this is a popular destination for lunch; at two in the afternoon, it was still mostly full. I’m afraid I’ve still got a lot of work ahead of me trying to replace Moksha, but this wasn’t bad.

Doug’s Place, Emerson GA

Would you believe that Randy and Kimberly finally got married? It’s only been a week, but we haven’t heard anything about them fighting over him taking her to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, so I choose to believe the honeymoon’s still on. Then again, he did write to let me know that he perceived a heck of a lot of Asian restaurants in Asheville, where they went, so who knows what they got up to.

Their ceremony was held on Red Top Mountain near Cartersville, and looking around for something to eat on the way brought up a restaurant in the small town of Emerson called Doug’s Place. This opened up a floodgate of forgotten memories, none of which, it turns out, really have anything to do with this very agreeable Southern-style meat-and-three. When I found a photo of Doug’s Place – the one on John Bickford’s very entertaining From My Table – I suddenly remembered that when I was a child, a chunk of Interstate 75 along this stretch was closed for a couple of years while the US Army Corps of Engineers was doing some sort of digging or reconstruction of Allatoona Lake. When my parents took me along for their monthly visit to see my grandparents in Fort Payne, we would exit early and drive up US 41 through Cartersville. On about three or four occasions, I swear that we stopped for breakfast around here, and wondered whether it might have been Doug’s Place.

It wasn’t – suspicion now lies on a Cartersville restaurant called Cody Jay’s which occupies a building that, thirty-odd years ago, was the home of a place called J.R.’s – but getting to the bottom of things was kind of fun. I first asked my mom whether she remembered what that place in Bartow County we would stop in the seventies was called. Unsurprisingly, since, to hear my mom tell it, whatever good times there ever were ended around the time Nixon got in trouble with the lib’rul media, and, perhaps not coincidentally, I was two, she didn’t remember any such thing. Mom carried Dentyne cinnamon-flavored chewing gum in her purse for the better part of fifteen years, but she thinks I’ve made up this story to confound her, because everybody knows that she hates chewing gum. Getting her to identify thirty year-old breakfast stops is like getting her to identify Godzilla films that were on channel 17 on a specific evening that my parents had friends over for pinochle when I was nine. She’s not very helpful with that, either.

Wherever we ate back then, it wasn’t Doug’s Place, but heaven knows I irritated two or three people trying to get to the bottom of it. Before this place became Doug’s about fifteen years back, it was apparently Morris’s, but the building itself dates to the 1890s. There are two small dining rooms and a large, screened porch to wait for a table, and some really delicious southern food inside.

We had an early lunch, arriving at Doug’s in between rushes. There were only a couple of recently bussed tables available when we arrived, and a long line developed while we ate. The interior of the restaurant is quite small, and it’s not possible to move around to the restroom or cash register without slightly jostling other guests.

The food is mostly quite terrific, although sadly, yet again, everybody else at the table enjoyed a better entree than me. I had the country fried steak with gravy, and I wouldn’t call it bad, but I certainly wasn’t in the mood for it after having a bite of Marie’s wonderful fried chicken, and one of the truly excellent chicken livers that Neal ordered. He concluded that these livers were even better than those at Vittles, which he enjoys more than me, and I had to agree. My daughter inhaled her gumbo, leaving me unable to comment on its quality, but I imagine that it must have been pretty good for her to down that much of it so quickly.

For sides, Marie enjoyed a small cup of broccoli and cheese soup. Neal and I each had baked beans which were quite good and I also had some delicious fried green tomatoes. Each of us also ordered the creamed corn. I would not call it great – Bear’s Den in Macon cooks up much better and much creamier – but I was still quite pleased. If I had taken my sides with a different entree, it would have been a superb meal rather than merely a very good one.

I am surprised that Doug’s Place has managed to stay so far off the radar of people who enjoy this kind of food. Obviously the locals enjoy it and with great reason, but this is quite genuinely the sort of thing that should attract a much larger crowd of travelers who love southern cooking, meat-and-threes, or any unique roadfood destinations. I noticed that the restaurant did post an article from Southern Living where they got a little praise, but doing what they do as well as this, there should be articles from forty different magazines and regular appearances on The Food Network. For now, we’ll call it one of the region’s best-kept secrets.

Happy Sumo, Norcross GA

One huge difficulty in doing anything around the sprawling mess of Atlanta is that the suburbs are so stupidly spread out and badly managed and maintained. Even something that looks, on a map, simple and straightforward like a twenty-mile shot east to the Gwinnett County suburb of Norcross is a forty-minute slog at the best of times, and better than an hour’s rumble in the evening traffic. I don’t mention this to object in any way to making a trip out that direction to a good meal; far from it, as there are plenty of good restaurants in Duluth, Norcross and points east and I’m glad to go visit them, but man, the traffic engineers who’ve been claiming to be at work on this job have been out to lunch for decades. At this point, there’s nothing wrong with the northern suburbs that two trolleys, twelve people movers, six newly-constructed bus lanes, sixty miles of north-south and east-west heavy-rail track and that big drilling Mole machine from Thunderbirds wouldn’t fix. You heard about that “Big Dig” under Boston? The northern ‘burbs need about seven of those.

At any rate, I’ve mentioned that we try to have some weekly get-together with some of our friends. We have to alternate days to accommodate different people that we know, and last week, between people being sick and people planning weddings and people having jobs, it was only Marie and the girlchild and I who were able to meet up with Matt. Almost all of us live in Cobb County on the northwest side of town; Matt and his wife live up in Gainesville, but he works thirty-odd miles south down around Johns Creek. His commute isn’t that unusual, either, which is why it’s so disagreeable that the city’s traffic planners have spent decades sleeping. Anyway, with the interstates, particularly the top end perimeter, a parking lot at 6 pm, we drove a wonderful back way that I know over to Roswell, and then spent a while crawling east along Holcomb Bridge Road to meet Matt at a place that he knows called Happy Sumo. Matt used to live just around the corner before marriage lured him to Gainesville, and this was one of his favorite places for dinner when he stayed here in Norcross.

Holcomb Bridge, it must be said, really is a depressing drive just for all the businesses that used to be along this stretch of road but have since closed. I counted two comic shops, one bookstore and one CD store that aren’t there anymore, along with two decent restaurants that I had enjoyed. To be honest, I’d rather not find the need to revisit Holcomb Bridge for this reason alone; it’s just too sad.

Happy Sumo is one of Atlanta’s many teppanyaki restaurants. These are often called hibachi steakhouses, but that’s not strictly accurate. At a teppanyaki restaurant, as popularized by chains like Benihana, the chef prepares the meal on a flat, iron surface heated by propane and uses soybean oil to cook the ingredients. We don’t often get out to Japanese steakhouses like this, although I don’t know that I’ve ever had a mediocre meal at one.

We got the requisite cutting up from our chef, who spun his utensils around and made an onion volcano and did goofy stunts involving Easter eggs and rubber chickens. It’s impossible not to be charmed by the silliness, and it put the girlchild in a pretty good mood.

Marie and I each ordered the teriyaki steak with fried rice – watch out for an additional $2 for having your rice fried rather than steamed – and my daughter had chicken. Matt had a nice combo meal of filet mignon and shrimp. It was a little pricy of a dinner, but everybody really enjoyed their food, and the tasty sauces. It was almost as good as Inoko in Athens, which is my standard bearer for hibachi/teppanyaki, and just the sort of evening out we needed.

The drive back, incidentally, was after the evening rush had ended and the interstates were accessible again. It didn’t take anywhere near as long to get home, but I still think International Rescue’s big drill could make it even quicker.