Shish Kebab, Marietta GA

Last week, it was Marie’s turn to pick a place for one of our weekly get-togethers, and she found a little restaurant in the shadow of Marietta’s infamous Big Chicken which people probably drive right past without blinking. It’s called Shish Kebab and it’s set up in what looks like an old Pizza Hut or some other ’70s-fashioned place. You see a lot of this in the area; one of these days I need to go back to Don Taco, which is a very good Mexican restaurant built into an old Hardee’s*.

David and Neal got to Shish Kebab before us. I had funny work stories to share and my daughter was impressing us by being awesomely eighties, and we settled in for some very good meals.

It’s not mentioned on the menu, but it looks like all dinner guests here get a small tossed salad. Had I known that, I probably would not have also asked for a Shirazi salad. This was a blend of diced tomatoes, cucumbers and onions with olives and lemon juice. David had an appetizer called kashk-o-badmjan, which was eggplant and mint with dried yogurt, along with a small order of seven spices, which was a cup of pickled vegetables served with a very tasty blend of spices, by design so strong that the taste of the spices overpowered the vegetables.

David and my daughter each ordered chicken barg. Asked for the difference between a basic kebab and a barg, the owner explained that they were different cuts of meat, prepared in a different marinade. They also got a slightly different selection of vegetables; Marie and Neal each had kebabs – lamb and beef – and theirs did not come with mushrooms. I happily ate up my daughter’s. They were prepared in a wonderful blend of oils that brought out so much flavor; I could eat those with every meal.

As for me, I was really only peckish enough for a sandwich, and so I had a gyro. It was very good, and really, the only step this place did wrong this evening was to serve it with a bag of Frito-Lay chips. They’ve done such a good job turning this restaurant’s interior into something fairly classy and nice, and they serve such good food and present it so well, and then they give you bags of Frito-Lay? Well, the gyro meat was very good, and supplemented with some of Marie’s excellent lamb and my daughter’s mushrooms, I was very happy with my supper.

We were invited to return for their big Saturday supper shindig, but we had plans already. That said, the prospect of a buffet with food this good and the entertainment of belly dancing really did sound tempting! Hopefully it was a big success for them and they’ll host these more often.

*Or not. Don Taco apparently closed several months ago.

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Hollie Guacamole!, Marietta GA (CLOSED)

I certainly enjoy having the small audience that Marie and I have, but sometimes I think that I’ll do a lot better by y’all once we get a book deal, an expense account and a secretary. Okay, so I’m not really counting on these things, but I bet that if we did have a secretary, then they would have pointed out a remarkable oversight that I made long before now. Back in May, I happened to spot the sign for a new burrito place in downtown Marietta, and resolved to stop in as soon as possible. About a week later, I wandered over there, hungry for such a meal, and was surprised to learn they were still about a week away from opening. I ended up driving to the Chilito’s in Kennesaw instead to get my fix and wrote them up instead. I promptly forgot that the burrito place on the square ever existed until I remembered out of the blue more than five months later. I’m serious; the place fell into a black hole of memory.

My plans for this past Wednesday got juggled around, so, having only remembered that “that burrito place” existed about 48 hours previously, I took advantage of the chance to swing by and see whether they ever opened up. I had to drive to do it, because I couldn’t remember the name, and Google couldn’t help me find the place. Now that I know the name, Google’s still not much help, because the owners have not done much of anything to let the world that they’ve been here for five months. Not even the phone company can track these people down. I’m not sure whether this might be incompetence or somebody’s very clever plan to make customers really work to find the place. But they seriously are there. Look, photographic evidence:

Okay, so let’s get one thing out of the way: that’s a really terrible name for a restaurant. All I could remember about it, once I remembered that “a burrito place on the square” existed at all, was “I think that it had some wacky name.” Amusingly, the owner had his own take on it. I asked of the couple whether one of them was “Hollie,” and he admitted that just about everybody asks that. As for why it’s spelled that way, he said he wanted something memorable. Didn’t work with me, I’m afraid.

Much like the many “fast casual” burrito places in the city, this is a build-to-order place with the ingredients on the other side of the sneeze guard and assembled per your specifications. I had the daily lunch special, which is your choice of a burrito, chips and a canned soda for six bucks. The guacamole is an additional eighty cents, but I have to tell you, it’s easily worth that. All of the ingredients of my “bowl” burrito were very tasty, particularly the fresh jalapenos, but that guac was outstanding. I highly recommend everybody give this recipe a try. While thinner, and more like a dressing than a dip, it’s actually about as good as Bone Garden’s, which has my favorite in the city.

The restaurant seems to get a pretty good crush of business from government workers during the lunch hour. I arrived at 11.30 and had the small space to myself for a few minutes before the county clerks, attorneys and deputies filed in and took up all of the handful of tables. I took from the sort of noncommital way that the owner answered when I asked how business was that as of now, Hollie Guacamole! is dependent on doing a lot of noon to one business to stay afloat, and that they haven’t been able to turn their place into a big word of mouth destination. Places on the square have always seemed to me to have a lot of trouble turning themselves into something that the public wants to search for. I’m not sure what this place is doing wrong, but when a Google search for: “hollie guacamole” marietta turns up (today) exactly five entries and three of those are echoes from one gentleman’s Twitter feed, I can only conclude that there are a hell of a lot of people missing out on this very tasty guacamole and the friendly owners. And the Lime Crush, the soda that I’ve been enjoying the most for the last several weeks.

And this is after five months. I won’t swear that I’m incredibly optimistic that they’ll make it another five at this rate, and that’s a shame*.

*They did better than I expected, but not good enough, making it to June of 2012 before the “Now Leasing” sign appeared in the window. Better luck next time, guys.

Desi Spice, Atlanta GA

It was with a heavy heart that we bid farewell to Roswell’s Moksha, which had been my favorite Indian restaurant in the Atlanta area. Well, now I’m on the lookout for something to claim its former crown, and that is going to mean eating as much Indian food as the wallet will allow. I’ll try and rise to the challenge.

Well, I exaggerate. I really don’t get out for Indian all that often, and still miss that wonderful vegetarian place in Decatur with the no-frills approach and styrofoam plates. But I’m certainly happy to keep my eyes open for something new and very tasty, and this past weekend, with Marie out of town again, I asked David whether he was free to find some grub for a Saturday lunch. The restaurant was his idea; left to me, we might have gone down to Jackson or over to Covington or someplace to fill up some of the list I’m trying to do. No matter; I am perfectly happy to stay in town and have some Indian food. There was only one obstacle: my daughter. It took this girl almost a decade to admit to liking Brunswick stew, so it’s evident that Indian cuisine is simply going to take a little longer.

I was mostly very pleased with my meal. They offer a nicely-priced lunch menu, even on Saturdays, which gets you a small appetizer, rice and dessert along with your main course. I had some mulligatawny soup with my lamb curry. I honestly won’t say that was the best lamb that I’ve ever tried, feeling a little stringier than I prefer, but the sauce was a delicious, medium hot concoction, and I liked that better than many other curries that I’ve had before. The mulligatawny had a delightful zing of ginger with its kick, but the color – a vibrant red – completely surprised me. I’ve always seen it as a yellowy orange.

Instead of soup, David had an onion pakura that he said was wonderful, and an order of chicken tikka which he shared. Much as I liked the curry, I got menu envy again, because this chicken was prepared just perfectly. It was tender and juicy and the light green sauce that came with it proved a nice, if unnecessary, accompaniment. Our desserts were the small bowl of wonderful rice pudding that I ordered, and a dish new to me, gulab jamun, a deep-fried cheese ball dipped in honey. As David felt that his blood sugar was already through the roof on Saturday, he passed that to me and darn if I haven’t found a dessert on Indian restaurant menus that I enjoy even more than rice pudding.

Well, Desi Spice is certainly very tasty indeed, and the girlchild definitely missed out by only agreeing to a stuffed paratha before decamping for the little Rita’s Italian Ice stand down below the restaurant, which was once a Bruster’s. It’s in the shopping center with the Landmark Midtown Art Cinema and the Trader Joe’s. If there was only a nice trail connecting this strip mall on Monroe with the one behind it on Ponce with the Borders, then you could easily spend all afternoon here, shopping, reading, watching good movies and having a few good meals. There are a heck of a lot of decent restaurants in the neighborhood, plus a couple that I’ve been hoping to try.

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Steak ‘n Shake, Kennesaw GA

A few years ago, the Steak ‘n Shake chain, which has 500 stores in 22 states in the southeast and midwest and is, by my definition, large enough to be called national, decided to introduce a terrific promotion which my daughter and I used to enjoy greatly. They have a “happy hour” with half-price milkshakes from 2 to 4 every weekday afternoon, and again from 2 to 4 am overnight. When I took a job that left me with a couple of weekday afternoons free, and my daughter was in elementary school, this meant that I could take her by the Steak ‘n Shake nearest us on Barrett Parkway – said to be the busiest and most profitable in the whole chain – and join the mob for a daddy-daughter milkshake treat.

Those days are actually gone for us, since she started middle school and no longer gets home until close enough to suppertime to make a milkshake “ruin yer dinner” impractical. I slightly resent the loss of quality time, but then again, that’s just one of the many downsides to having your kids grow up.

The milkshakes here are terrific – my particular poison is a mix of their banana and orange cream – but the food is only slightly on the preferable side of average. The beef is okay, albeit pressed into sadly small and weedy patties, and the fries are thin enough to make you wonder whether there’s any potato in there, but the chain does offer a dish which is actually worth a second look. It’s not the same as what you can find in Cincinnati’s chili parlors, but Steak ‘n Shake does offer their version of a 5-way.

I’ve only been through northeastern Kentucky four times, but on each of those occasions, I’ve made it a point to stop at either a Skyline Chili or a Gold Star. I imagine that people more familiar with Cincinnati would be pleased to tell me about a better, more humble, non-chain restaurant to get chili made in that city’s style, and perhaps the next time I’m in that region, I’ll give that a try. In these restaurants, you get the area’s particular chili recipe – very finely chopped ground beef served in a light stew containing (as Wikipedia terms it) “unusual ingredients such as cinnamon, cloves, allspice or chocolate,” but without the traditional chili peppers or chili powder like you would expect from other regions.

This chili is intended to be eaten over noodles or on a hot dog, and not in a bowl on its own. Over time, some traditions developed about how to order this dish in area restaurants. A two-way is simply the chili poured over spaghetti noodles, and a three-way adds a giant mound of shredded cheese. A four-way adds either beans or diced onions, and a five-way contains the lot.

Steak ‘n Shake’s version can’t be characterized as a proper Cincinnati 5-way, because the beef is not spiced the same way, nor is it chopped as finely as what you would see in a Skyline. It’s just average canned chili beef in a “special” sauce of ketchup and Worcestershire. At any rate, I got to thinking about it after reading an amusing thread about the chain’s chili over at Roadfood.com, and it made me peckish enough to want to get back over there. In a bit of nice timing, my daughter had early release last week for parent-teacher conferences and so we had an early supper together. With milkshakes, of course. It wasn’t bad at all. It was no Gold Star, but it will do until the next time I can get to Cincinnati, anyway.

Jiffy Freeze, Canton GA

One of my favorite little traveling roadfood resources is Chopped Onion, a splendid little website that specializes in detailing, not just the usual barbecue and meat-and-three joints that we look out for when making our road trips, but also hot dog and ice cream places. The site’s owner has a particular interest in old, “vintage” Dairy Queen restaurants that have not updated and upgraded their appearance. I certainly understand the fascination; long before that company nailed down its franchise look and feel and started aggressively enforcing its trademark, there were dozens of “dairy queen” restaurants all across the country that were only loosely connected with the parent corporation via use of their soft serve goo machine, just as there were once many dozens of “tastee-freez” stores and many dozens of “zesto” stores, and most of these, by far, are lost to history and memory.

This country’s move towards corporate standardization and homogenization left behind many hundreds of buildings that were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s to sell “dairy freeze zesto”-styled menus, with fast food burgers and hot dogs with a variety of slaws and soft serve goo. Eventually the hammers of trademark lawyers came down and these businesses were told to get a proper franchise agreement going or make it on their own. Most of them must have closed long ago and the stores, eventually, were bulldozed. Some, a small handful, decided to use the existing building and community goodwill to effect a name change and try making it on their own.

Jiffy Freeze looks to be one of these. While I’m not certain what it was originally, the building reminds me of an older Dairy Queen Brazier construction with neither indoor seating nor a drive-through, but they’ve been calling themselves Jiffy Freeze with no hoopla or much in the way of advertising since the mid-1970s. I was very much reminded of Mrs. Story’s Dairy Bar in Opelika, which we visited last month, although this place has a considerably larger menu. I’m not entirely sure that you’re going to get the best Philly cheesesteak in the area here, but it looks like they will try and make one for you.

This past Saturday, we were meant to have made a road trip out I-20 to Madison and Augusta, but finances were unexpectedly low, discouraging us from spending the money on gas. This left us free to attend a “couples shower” for Randy and Kimberly at her parents’ house north of Canton, for which we’d earlier sent regrets. People should really know better than to invite us for anything on a Saturday without at least ninety days’ notice. Especially during the football season. The really surprising thing is that this genuinely is not a pretentious affectation of mine; the calendar is quite honestly penciled in through mid-January. At any rate, dropping a visit to Augusta, for now, meant that we could spend an evening with our friends, and visit a little more with Kimberly’s incredibly neat and interesting father, a pastor and musician with fantastic stories to share.

I don’t know anything about the town of Canton, but a little research pulled up this Jiffy Freeze place. I thought that would be an ideal after-shower destination, but I phoned and learned that the darn place closes at the absurdly early hour of 8 on Saturday. Grudgingly, we’d have to stop in on our way to the party. Then, we ended up leaving almost a half hour late to pick up Todd and Samantha for our trip up I-575. Just as well that was a very tasty slaw dog!

Since we’d be eating in just a little while, we just split a footlong with slaw and Marie had a very, very tasty fried peach pie. The pie was a little smaller than many places make them, but it was nevertheless very good. The slaw was very creamy with mayo and made for a simply fine snack. The one disappointment, and it was a mild one, was learning that the “Mississippi Mud” that my daughter ordered was just a prepackaged chocolate ice cream sandwich from, I think, Blue Bunny. She thought it was really good, and I’m always curious to see these sorts of products when they’re unknown to me, but I was kind of hoping she’d actually get to try that actual chocolate pie for the first time.

I can’t swear that Jiffy Freeze is worth a really long drive, but it’s certainly a nice little curiosity for anyone passing through Cherokee County on I-575, and if you like good, creamy slaw, it’s worth a try. I’m very glad that little roadfood places like this are still around and drawing a crowd.

Sublime Doughnuts, Atlanta GA

About six months ago, a regular guest where I work brought in a big box of Sublime Doughnuts as a thank-you for the front desk. The treats were duly sliced into bite-sized samples for all the staff to try. Allegedly, a couple more boxes have come this way for Wednesday afternoon birthday celebrations, but, criminally, I don’t work on Wednesdays. I recall thinking that my sample was just wonderful and resolved that I needed to get back to have a lovely little breakfast from them as soon as it was feasible.

Six months went by and I finally thought to stop in for an afternoon snack. I need to try harder, don’t I?

The business was founded by a local fellow, Kamal Grant, a couple of years ago. He picked a career that’s for morning people: he’s there, in a shop on 10th Street once occupied by some other doughnut baker who chose to misspell the word the way that those dunkin’ people do, every morning at 4 am getting his doughnuts and pastries ready for a hungry audience. I really like the way that many of his creations don’t look like hockey pucks. Some, like his red velvet cake, do, but his version of a Boston creme, for example, is called the A-Town Cream and is shaped like a letter A. Elsewhere on the racks, you’ll see little hearts, stars, twists and ribbons, all of them decadently delicious.

Earlier this summer, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution named Sublime as their favorite guilty food pleasure in the city, singling out their A-Town Creams and their Reese’s peanut butter doughnuts. It looks like my peers in the food-talkin’-bloggin’ community are similarly sold on the place.

We – Marie, my daughter and my parents – stopped by on Saturday after our lunch a few miles south at Harold’s. After a quick detour to look at the federal pen and the requisite teasing of my daughter that this is where she’ll end up if she doesn’t straighten up, we drove north up Pryor and Central, up avenues where my dad, navigating and reminiscing, used to work, while we listened to the Dogs beat up on Vandy. Left on Marietta and right on Spring / West Peachtree as Vandy caught a break and had a field ruling of a fumble overturned as an incomplete pass, we started passing $10 and $20 lots for Tech fans coming into midtown to tailgate. Tenth Street, which borders one side of the Tech campus, was full of yellow and navy and black and gold. Apparently there’s now a Petro’s Chili and Chips outpost actually inside Bobby Dodd Stadium. It’s a little aggravating to be within walking distance of a Petro’s and know that the most convenient one is still three hours’ drive north.

My dad was talked out and tired and didn’t want to get out of the car when we arrived, but the fellow behind the counter at Sublime had an awful lot to say. He showed off and described all the treats on display. I got a different pastry for Marie, Ivy and my mother, and while they all came with different flavors, they all shared a wonderfully light and fluffy touch. Grant’s trick in the kitchen, reported by John Kessler in the AJC, is to fry the doughnuts at a very high temperature for a shorter period; that apparently gives them the most puff.

These are absolutely wonderful pastries, and although with prices this low and a profit margin so slim, it will certainly take a long time for Grant to grow this business, he’s got an awful lot of goodwill backing him up. I hope that Sublime thrives and becomes a destination for everybody in the city. Even all those Tech students lining up 10th need something to eat.

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Harold’s Barbecue, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

There are so many barbecue restaurants in this state that I’ve never tried. Even the old ones, like Harold’s, which has been around since 1947, I’ve just never got around to before. Well, on Saturday, we had originally intended to take another short road trip, this time out to Augusta. Unfortunately, the bank balance is a little low, so we elected to save the gasoline and find a new meal intown instead. There are four restaurants in Atlanta that are reviewed on roadfood.com that we have not written up for our blog yet. A roll of the dice brought up Harold’s, so I rang my parents and asked if they’d like to join us.

Harold’s is a simply perfect destination for a Saturday lunch. It’s very easy to find, just a quick little hop off the downtown connector at exit 244 and south less than a mile. It is in a pretty rough-looking neighborhood about a stone’s throw up the street from the federal pen. If you’ve never seen this gigantic building, you should, as it’s an architectural masterpiece. Unfortunately, Harold’s itself is in a pretty basic and deeply ugly building, and the bars around the windows and the air conditioning units don’t inspire great confidence in the local residents’ rap sheets.

I apologize for repeating much of the online information about this restaurant, but some things are so blatant that I can’t avoid coming back to it.

I’m very glad we finally stopped into this Atlanta institution. Despite the “keep driving, and fast” exterior, the inside is cozy and relaxing, and also quite chilly, since one of the air conditioners seemed to be working overtime. There’s a glorious smell of thick smoke throughout the building, and interior walls in the kitchen that are blackened from more than sixty years of smoking. It’s a building with a lot of history; we were taken care of by Harold and Hugh’s granddaughter, who’s been here for forty years herself.

As for the food, the chopped pork is pretty good. It’s very soft and dry, almost incandescently white. Unfortunately, I didn’t like either of the sauces at all, and made the considerable mistake – the novice mistake – of just pouring the hot sauce all over my food before testing it. Theirs is a thick, red, tomato-and-pepper concoction that leaves a Tabasco-style aftertaste and overpowers the subtle, smoky taste of the soft pork. While I would certainly recommend Harold’s, I would caution anybody going to try a little on the side before indulging too much.

The main dish is pretty good, but the sides are just outstanding. The Brunswick stew is probably the best anywhere near Atlanta. It’s really thick, with a very heavy corn flavor, and lots of tomatoes and stringy shreds of meat. The corn taste reminded me of the wonderful Zeb’s in Danielsville. The plates are served with a generous helping of cracklin’ cornbread. Crumble just a little of that into your stew and scoop it right back out, and that’s perfect. If I have had cracklin’ cornbread – named for the little pork cracklings that Food Network describes as “little pieces of pork fat, fatty meats, or ham skin which are left crisp and brown after the lard or fat has been rendered from them” – before, I don’t recall it. Honestly, there’s not a great deal of meat in the bread, but it’s so tasty that didn’t feel that I was missing anything.

The slaw is also excellent; a perfect blend of mayo and vinegar that goes extremely well with the stew and pork. It’s simply a perfectly balanced meal, even if the sauce was disappointing.

Harold’s attempted to expand just a little from this neighborhood, but unfortunately it didn’t last. There were two outposts south of the city, in Jonesboro and in McDonough, and a third up near us in Kennesaw, but apparently all three have closed. Only the original remains, which, honestly, is kind of the way it should be. Older joints with this much history, well, visitors should go to them for the experience almost as much as the food. With stew this good, I hope to be back for both before too long.