Bub-Ba-Q, Woodstock GA

When Bub-Ba-Q opened its second location in Woodstock in the summer of 2009, there was considerable hoopla on a message board that I used to frequent, and which no longer exists. I mention it in this vague way to show that yes, I can table those unfunny attempts at recurring jokes when I promise to do so. If I’m not mistaken, this Woodstock branch is located in a space that was occupied for a few years by a Slope’s, which is a small chain of barbecue restaurants with four or five locations in the northern suburbs.

The original Bub-Ba-Q is in the town of Jasper, and I’ve not visited it yet. The restaurants are a culmination of a lot of hard work and something that I don’t believe I’ve come to on this blog before: a touring schedule. Before Bub-Ba-Q set its sights on a strong restaurant presence, the owners were out on the festival circuit, spreading the word and improving their product at cookoffs and invitationals. This is a world that I might need an expense account to really appreciate properly, should any kind sponsors be out there ready to send me to Kansas City or that great big one in Lynchburg that runs every October. The Jack Daniels’ World Championship Invitational is the one to beat. Last year, Bub-Ba-Q came third overall, with its amazing brisket second place among all challengers.

They are best known, however, for a meal that I have not yet tried. They offer a deep-fried pork burrito that’s served smothered in Brunswick stew and called a Hog-a-Chonga. It’s probably not really in keeping with my nature to shy away from something that sounds so decadent, but really, what I like best at a barbecue restaurant is a simple plate of chopped pork with two sides, and Bub-Ba-Q does a splendid job of it.

Last week, Marie and the kids and I got together with several friends for supper here. We’ve started a little rotation among some of our buddies in town for doing something once a week, evolving from a long-established weekly movie night to incorporate dinners. That this gives us more opportunities to write chapters here on the blog as well as socialize and see our friends is a nice side effect. I also confess that I hope we’ll get to enjoy occasional restaurants that I wouldn’t think to try on my own as other members of the gang pick things.

Kimberly, who we hope is saving Randy from ever again eating at one of those Chinese buffets, picked Bub-Ba-Q. Also present were our friends Todd and Samantha, and Neal, who ordered that second-place-in-the-world brisket and was very pleased with it. My son had a pork sandwich along with fried mac-n-cheese, another terrific house specialty, and Marie had their very good ribs. I had my standard plate of pork with baked beans, which were pretty good and corn fritters, which were excellent.

Zesto, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

I think that one of the most interesting little facets to following the world of restaurants is finding little fast food chains that only exist in a city or two. Last month, I mentioned Milo’s in Birmingham, a chain better known for its amazing sweet tea, and how it co-exists in north Alabama with another chain called Jack’s. Each of them manage to survive on the same interstate exits as the better-known national chains like McDonald’s and Burger King. I’m not saying you’ll get really great hamburgers at places like this, but I firmly believe that they’re important, that they give regions their own, special identity, and that anybody – traveler or resident – who’d stop at a national chain over a small regional one when they just want a quick $3.99 value meal has got a seven-inch screw loose somewhere.

There are probably a lot more of these types of restaurants than anybody really knows about. Locals will often overlook them, mistakenly figuring that national success is a measure of quality, and treat these restaurants as oddball minor league wannabes. On the other hand, because the foodie subculture emphasizes (a) independently-owned single locations and (b) really great meals, regional chains only rarely come up in the conversations. They just don’t fit the topic, you might say. I noticed that in Asheville, there is at least one outlet of the Greensboro-based Cook Out, a chain 75 units strong that has not left the state of North Carolina. I’m very curious to try that one day, but honestly, can anybody count just how many superior meals we’d be skipping if we stopped into Cook Out over all the other really great places in Asheville?

Similarly, Atlanta has at least two chains that nobody ever talks about. Neither will serve up spectacular meals, but they’ll do them quickly and cheaply and, hopefully, with a lot of local character. One of these days, I need to tell you about Martin’s, a chain of fifteen stores that’s only open for breakfast and lunch. Twelve of their stores are all northeast of the metro area and only one is as far south as Clayton County, and it tastes a lot like Hardee’s did before Carl’s Jr. bought them out. Martin’s basically illustrates my definition outside Atlanta’s I-285 perimeter, and Zesto is what I’m talking about inside the perimeter.

To be strictly accurate, while Zesto, today, is a regional chain with six stores, back in the 1940s its ancestor corporation was about as large as a national chain could get in those days. According to the fascinating history on its web site, there were Zestos selling soft-serve ice cream in 46 states. I imagine that it and Tasti-Freez were the two biggest competitors to Dairy Queen.

By 1955, the corporation and its franchises dissolved their agreements, leaving the stores to make it on their own. Almost all of the old Zestos were probably gone within a few years. There are still pockets of otherwise unrelated restaurants here and there throughout the country that use the old name but don’t offer the same menu or ingredients, including three around Columbia, South Carolina that appear to be uniquely owned, but the Zesto restaurants in Atlanta have thrived and grown a little.

There are five Zestos in the city, plus with a more recent arrival in the teeny town of Tyrone, which is somewhere between Atlanta and Peachtree City, and each of them plays up the “1950s diner” experience. In the case of the store on Ponce de Leon, it really basks in the glow of nostalgic chrome and neon. The food is not at all bad, although nobody ever dropped their Chubby Decker back onto the wax paper in impressed shock at how amazing it was. There’s an amusing story about how the better-known Big Boy threatened to sue Zesto in 1961 over their imitation burger, named, then, a Fat Boy. I’ve always found Zesto’s burgers to be a little dry; adding a little slaw to a Chubby Decker really brings a refreshing flavor to it.

Zesto flirted, for a time, with the “fresh-mex” concept when it became popular in the late ’90s. The restaurant did the unthinkable then and converted their location on Piedmont Road into a sister restaurant called Burrito Brothers. In time, this was scaled back, and now three of the six stores are discreetly “co-branded” this way, offering tacos and nachos on the menu along with the burgers and chicken. I have never got around to trying these, actually. I guess Zesto is just first in my mind as a burger place.

In Marie’s mind, however, Zesto is a milkshake place first and foremost, with burgers just an appetizer to the real thing. So a couple of weeks ago, my daughter had complained that we had not enjoyed a Zesto milkshake lately, and I said we’d get around to it. (Children, as ever, think parents are made of money.) On Saturday, Marie was due to return to Atlanta from her family business in the Netherlands around 7. I figured, rightly, that she was due some pampering after all those sky miles and would appreciate a chocolate banana malt, so the kids and I picked her up and stopped at the Zesto on Ponce for supper.

I had a chili burger that dreamed of being a Varsity chili burger when it grew up and split an order of quite good chicken fingers with my daughter, and my son had a Chubby Decker and slaw. We all shared fries and heard about Marie’s trip and then we indulged in some quite good shakes. I usually either get the caramel or butterscotch, have trouble deciding between even these two simple choices, and have already forgotten which it was. My son had the blueberry, which was awesome. And Marie should have had a chocolate banana malt, only I forgot to ask them to add malt powder and I don’t think that she liked it as much, only she was too polite to mention it.

It’s good to have her home. I mean, we have to go back to Asheville in two days for a festival and more eating, and her being in the Netherlands would make that kind of difficult.

Taqueria del Sol, Decatur GA

Last weekend, Marie and our son took a trip back down to St. Simons Island to visit her family, and had a couple of good meals that she will tell you about presently. In their absence, my daughter and I joined David for a day of record selling – it’s like record shopping, only you come home with fewer things that you didn’t need in the first place and a little more money – and had a pretty good lunch at the Decatur location of Taqueria del Sol. I’ve been meaning to eat at one of these places for ages, and actually tried a couple of times but gave up for lack of parking, so I’m glad we finally got the chance.

We didn’t even have to stand in the line very long! This place is pretty infamous for its long line, but, as the Mendoza Line once sang, it moves quickly. Taqueria del Sol serves simple food very fast, so there’s never a long wait for your meal. I figure that’s how they know who ordered what without giving your table a number or card for the server to find you. In the time it takes you to order your food and get your water and silverware and sit down, your food’s almost finished being prepared, so the server maybe only has two or possibly three different tables which could be the destination.

I genuinely do not care at all about reporting news about which fancy restaurant is employing which big-name chef, and my eyes glaze over whenever I see such business in blogs, but in this case it is worth a mention. Taqueria del Sol’s menu was devised by a guy named Eddie Hernandez. Once upon a time, he was in charge of the food at a wonderful place called Sundown Cafe on Cheshire Bridge Road where I never ate enough. I’m happy to note that the food is very similar at the taqueria, which was devised as sort of a quickie kid sister to Sundown and eventually took it over. The table salsa – available as a separately-priced Salsa Trio on the taqueria’s menu – seems to be the same, for starters.

Mr. Hernandez never really stops experimenting, so there’s apparently always something neat to try here. Sundown Cafe was known for having wonderfully eclectic and fun specials, and this tradition carries on here. Last week, they were offering tacos with the chicken fried in a potato crust, and I found these to be very tasty. I had one of those along with a fish taco and a “Memphis” (pork and slaw, natch). The tacos are very tasty, served quickly and cost only two bucks and change each. If it wasn’t for the line, you could call it fast food, really. Skip the chips and salsa and you’ve got a fine meal for seven dollars.

Taqueria del Sol has expanded to a small chain with four locations: the one we visited in Decatur, which is across the street from Farm Burger and one of our town’s best record stores, Decatur CD, the original on Cheshire Bridge, one on Howell Mill and one on Prince Avenue in Athens. It’s certainly worth another visit soon; I have more tacos to try.

Other blog posts about Taqueria del Sol:

Adventurous Tastes (Aug. 7 2008)
Amy on Food (May 1 2009)
Food Near Snellville (July 10 2009)
Foodie Buddha (Sep. 18 2009)

The Vortex, Atlanta GA

You know that saying about how I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend your right to say it? And how sometimes, people say and do things obnoxious enough to give you a little bit of pause and make you wonder whether you really mean it? I’m not necessarily talking about politics, though heaven knows certain BP apologists in Texas really make a man wish that “gag orders” actually entailed the use of ballgags.

The Vortex is an example of what happens when you stick by that rule. It’s democracy in action. You can praise a restaurant for having the greatest, most lovable, take-no-prisoners attitude about stupid customers in the city, if not anywhere. You can cheer when a business stands up and says that, actually, the customer is not always right, and lets you know that in their house, you will follow their rules or get lost. You can shout from the rooftops that finally, there’s a place that gets it, that won’t compromise principles and will not allow idiots to waste their time when they have a business to run. When their business involves selling the best hamburgers that I’ve found in Atlanta, it’s even easier to say “Damn right, the Vortex is exactly the place for me.”

Then you get to stop cheering with your fists in the air when they enforce a rule that you don’t like at all. Hey, mac, you’re the one who demanded that freedom in the first place.

Some years back, the state of Georgia enacted one of the few laws that our legislature has ever come up with that was worth a damn when they restricted smoking in restaurants. Basically, they told restaurants that if they insisted on allowing idiots to smoke, then they couldn’t allow anybody under 18 in their place. The Vortex was one of those places which figured they’d handle the loss of family customers by becoming a haven for smokers, and really didn’t appreciate the government telling them how to conduct their business.

It annoys me that of all the weird predictions that the Judge Dredd comic has made about our society that have come true, we’re stuck with riot foam and constantly expanding waistlines and artificial food, while the best future invention of all has yet to appear. In Dredd’s Mega-City One, smoking is only allowed in buildings called smokatoriums, and nowhere else. They don’t sell the best hamburgers in the city in a smokatorium and they don’t have the best bartender in the city there, either. Her name is Carla and on those very rare occasions I visit the Vortex, it’s an absolute pleasure to sit at the bar and be served by somebody so damn perfect at her job as she is.

It’s not just that I object to smelling cigarette smoke. Heck, I dated a smoker for a few months in 2004, but, as I’ve mentioned a few times previously, that was something of a mistake-filled year. No, it’s not just my own objection to smoking, though I remain convinced that the best burger I’ve found in the city would be even better without that stench in the air, but that I can’t take my family. Marie gave it a try one early evening a couple of years back before the haze got thick, concluded that their burgers are indeed amazing and left in a flash, blinking in the sunlight and breathing with her head between her knees. The kids? They’re not welcome. The signs in the front lobby restating that no, seriously, they really will not seat you if you’re under 18, and that if you have a problem, take it up with your congressmen are hilariously worded, but they’re also a little saddening.

One day last week, I sat at the bar and enjoyed the living daylights out of a Spanish Fly, which is an amazing hamburger served with ground chorizo and Monterrey jack cheese. On this occasion, I had some fries as a side. I only visit maybe once a year, and usually I can’t help myself and order some tater tots. I think the Vortex is principally responsible for the citywide trend of offering the darn things. I don’t know why I ordered them for so many years. It’s not like you’re getting anything from tots other than the nostalgia factor of saying “Hey! I had these in public school,” so heaven knows what the appeal might be. I need to quit that and try the potato salad or something next time.

The Vortex offers a huge list of burgers, and gleefully emphasizes the ones that just aren’t good for anybody. Bacon, fried bananas, eggs, habanero relish, peanut butter… it really is a remarkable menu full of delicious, dangerous things. I’ll really enjoy taking my son in about five years’ time.

I’ve thought about placing a carry-out order for burgers and having a picnic with my family over in Freedom Park. That way, everybody gets to experience how good the food is, but we miss out on the thrill of being in the place. The interior is a trip, a wild, loud, dark, bric-a-brac filled mess that’s somewhere between a dive bar and a very weird diner. So by mixing such a fun design with incredible service, excellent food and their uncompromising attitude, this should be the best restaurant in town.

If only if it wasn’t for that “allowing smoking” business…

Frankie’s Italian Ristorante, Marietta GA

I don’t remember exactly what prompted us to stop into Frankie’s that first time, only that the situation was awful and my kids, very small at the time, were upset. They’d suffered some disappointment or other, their weekend went wrong and they were cranky and aggravated and wherever we were going to eat supper was closed or something. I figured Frankie’s, a small place on Canton Road north of us, would be an expensive dinner, but one which might just cheer them up a little. Indeed it was pretty pricy, but it was excellent and did the trick perfectly. I then spent the next two years with my wallet locked away with the kids whining that they wanted to go back.

Honestly, I protest too much over a reasonable evening out for a nice meal – dinner for four will cost you about $60 – but this was back when I was raising the two children by myself on a pretty tight budget. Until I got my student loan paid off, I didn’t have the extra dollars. I bought a lot of garbage I didn’t need and deprived myself of some good meals, but we all make poor decisions.

That first trip, we had pizza and sandwiches. As befits a New York-styled Italian-American joint, they do these extremely well, but it wasn’t until Marie and I started dating quite some time later that I came back. I discovered the chicken scarpariello then and I don’t know what the heck else is on the menu anymore. This stuff is amazing.

Have you ever had chicken scarpariello before? It’s said to mean “shoemaker’s chicken” and it mixes sausage and chicken with mushrooms, olives, potatoes and pepperoncini in a thick, slightly spicy brown sauce. It’s not really Italian; it apparently was first concocted in Boston. I found a recipe for the dish at Almost Italian; that site suggests making sure you have bread to sop up the sauce. A wonderful blend of olive oil, wine, lemon and spices, I’ve been doing that for quite some time now.

After we got back from Memphis, we didn’t eat out for a couple of weeks, save to two places that we’ve already written up here in this blog. Last weekend, I suggested that Marie pick a place that we haven’t written up, either someplace new or an older favorite we haven’t visited in a while. It didn’t take her long to come up with Frankie’s. We have an excellent meal every few months here. It’s a small place, cozy, with a small parking lot. They have a second location a few miles away on the other side of Marietta which I’ve never visited. This one does us just fine. With its cute caricatures of Italian-American icons like Dean Martin and Don Corleone, it skirts the side of tacky but it pulls it off all right.

Marie usually has the pasta primavera. The kids don’t have favorites yet, but I think my son might want to have the stromboli again the next time he goes. It does the same things that the big chains do – endless garlic bread, bottomless salad – but it does it a whole lot better and with a really unique and classy style. Why anybody in Marietta would want to eat at an Olive Garden instead of Frankie’s is beyond me.

We’ve enjoyed meals here with each of our families and, last year, when we returned from getting married down on St. Simons Island, this is what Marie and I had for supper our first night back. I could stand a 20% off coupon every once in a while, but you know the place you enjoy your first married supper together and the place you eat with your folks? That’s a special place, really.

Guthrie’s, Dunwoody GA (CLOSED)

Now here’s a restaurant with an uphill battle. Guthrie’s has been around since 1965, and the formula that we know them by – limited menu, incredibly tasty sauce – was finalized in 1982. They have a strong claim to being the place that invented and perfected the chicken finger restaurant formula, yet somehow they’ve been completely passed in the market by one of their imitators, Zaxby’s. Now, Zaxby’s isn’t bad, and we’ve been known to stop in many times over the years, but when I first discovered a Zaxby’s in the nearby town of Watkinsville, I described it to all my Athens friends as “kind of like Guthrie’s, but with more stuff.”

Guthrie’s couldn’t have had much less stuff at all. The menu consists of really incredibly amazing chicken fingers, Texas toast, fries and slaw, served in a handful of ways. I recall that if you stopped at the Guthrie’s on Baxter Hill, you could get them in a plate, in a box, in a smaller size without slaw or between two slices of bread. Those were your only options. They were absolutely essential to the dorm dining experience. Everybody who lived in the high-rise dorms had Guthrie’s all the time and those of us by the stadium regularly; so did thousands of tailgaters and high school students. The line out the door whenever Clarke Central was playing at home in the fall was every bit as insane on a Friday as on a UGA game day.

That Guthrie’s was the third in the chain, which is quite successful today in its home state of Alabama, with scattered outposts in other Southern states. In the early nineties, Guthrie’s opened a second Athens store, over by Cedar Shoals High School, so their students could enjoy the same Friday night craziness. This was a hugely important Athens tradition in the 1980s and 1990s, and its simplicity fueled wonderful urban legends. Some said there was a secret menu, and some said that if you left a penny in the sauce – a sort of peppery brown mayo, totally delicious – overnight, you could retrieve it polished and glittering.

Then one day in the late ’90s, the Athens locations were gone. It was very abrupt and their departure fueled a whole new raft of urban legends, which I’ll decline to repeat in these pages. Some stories are best left unreported, if unconfirmed. Talk radio should try that sometime.

Several years later, Guthrie’s returned ever-so-briefly to the Athens region, opening a store twenty-ish miles north in Danielsville. It’s gone now, but there are two stores in the Atlanta area along with the twenty-ish restaurants in Alabama and six in other states. I was working in the Ravinia building when the Dunwoody store opened in 2004 and a co-worker mentioned it. She thought, wrongly, that it was a Zaxby’s knockoff. I let her know it was the other way around, but you can bet that Guthrie’s glacier-like speed at expanding is going to run into that everywhere. If they try moving into Louisiana, they’ll be called a Raising Cane’s clone.

Guthrie’s is an occasional destination for us, whenever we need a quick meal on the top end of I-285 while going out of town through Spaghetti Junction. On Friday, Marie and I had hoped to get lunch further up the road as we started an anniversary getaway, but trouble leaving work early meant that we didn’t get on the perimeter until after the lunch rush had already ended, and the Spaghetti Junction backup already showing signs of starting. (You’ll notice I don’t say who had trouble leaving early. Maybe I’m polite, or maybe I just don’t want you to think ill of me.) This store has expanded their menu just a little, adding wings and breakfast to their offerings, but what they need to do is hire somebody to straighten that place up some. Nobody ever stopped at Guthrie’s wanting cleanliness – that Baxter Hill store looked like a war zone from sunup to sundown – but I’m starting to get at the age where I want somebody to get out from behind the counter and wipe down dirty tables.

Then again, it’s not like this is haute cuisine; it’s finger-gooping greasy fried chicken fingers, done right. You remember how one day you went through a Zaxby’s drive-thru and didn’t have to wait for your food and the sauce came prepackaged in a factory-made plastic cube with the ingredients on the label? Guthrie’s reminds you of the days before Zaxby’s got corporate enough to change into that. Or, if you will, the days before there was a Zaxby’s. I hope that they’re always around, somewhere, and that there will always be people who will spread the word that theirs was the better restaurant, first.

Now if only I could convince Guthrie’s to serve up those fried mushrooms and Fanta Cherry that their imitator has. Don’t you judge me.

Antico Pizza, Atlanta GA

Some chapters back, I suggested that Atlanta’s top five pizzerias are probably good enough to challenge any other city’s top five pizzerias, or at the very least good enough for myself and a representative of Chicago to at the very least greatly enjoy every last bite of proving the other wrong. I had been hearing really great things about Antico, a teeny little place on Hemphill just down the road from Ikea, and wondered whether it would be good enough to break into my personal list of the metro area’s top five.

Wonder no more; it isn’t. It’s still quite good, and certainly worth a visit, but I didn’t leave as satisfied as I had hoped.

Antico’s pies are very tasty, large enough for two, and come to around twenty bucks. They use fresh ingredients, including some amazing cherry tomatoes and wonderfully tasty bufala cheese. If they could just do something about the presentation, it would elevate a good meal into something special.

Antico is easy to find. It’s easy to drive right past, too, as Neal and I discovered early Thursday evening. He had the day off and suggested we get together for supper before our usual Thursday night get-together with friends, and I suggested pizza. We found the place with no difficulty, and arrived before the evening dinner rush.

The restaurant appears to have a very limited seating area, doing most of its business as takeout. It turned out that the room that I thought was merely the kitchen actually doubled as a dining room, with space for more than twice as many customers. I can’t swear that I’ve ever seen that kind of setup before.

But even before we sat down at what appeared to have been Antico’s only table, I had gone off the place. We placed our order at the register with an unpleasantly surly woman who grouchily told us the house rules and that there were no substitutions. That’s actually a rule that I’m fine with; I figure that if you’re one of those people who tries to order a Reuben with cole slaw instead of kraut, you’ve got no business ordering a Reuben in the first place. Anyway, she was a grouch, and underlining it the emphatic way that she did annoyed me, and the only drink options are bottled (teas, water and three Coke products), which I didn’t like either. Then we had to read something before we sat down.

Okay, so there’s a single large table in what appeared to be the only seating area. You have to pass through this room to get to the combination kitchen/dining room. The table seats eight, and so I figured this would be a nice little shared experience similar to how they serve up at the Smith House in Dahlonega. Only the Smith House employs an army of incredibly friendly servers who routinely check on you and make sure that you’re doing fine, and the Smith House would never, ever do anything so unbelievably tacky as tape a label to every seat around the table which read something like “If you move this seat, you will be asked to leave.” Neal and I, who took places at the far corner of the table, each seem to spend an inordinate amount of time with our eyebrows raised over some damn fool thing or other, but that warning on those chairs really might take some beating.

After an agreeably short wait, a server whose face I never saw appeared between us to drop a large metal serving tray on the table. Apparently you don’t get individual plates here, either, although you do get quite a lot of pizza grease. If the pie wasn’t made from excellent dough with such good ingredients, it would have been worth complaining about. I just shrugged, tore a section from the roll of paper towels on the table and soaked up a little of the oil before eating. Varasano’s, my favorite pizza in the city, used to get some stick for its pies having damp centers, but I’ve never seen as much oil and grease on a Varasano’s pie as what I sopped up last night.

I’m probably making this experience sound a lot worse than it was. Every restaurant, after all, has the right to restrict its drink selections, label its chairs the way they want, and even leave diners abandoned without a greeting, a how-is-everything, or any other cordial triviality, and I treat these as part of a restaurant’s character and these eccentricities as charming in their own way, and don’t wish for them to sound like complaints. Antico makes a simply excellent pizza, despite their odd choices, and if I lived in the neighborhood, I would probably eat here regularly. That is, if I didn’t feel like driving to one of at least five better places in the city.

Reviews of Antico have appeared on dozens of blogs. A few of these are…

Amy on Food (Oct. 3 2009)
Eat It, Atlanta (Oct. 11 2009)
Octosquid (Oct. 16 2009)
Atlanta Etc. (Dec. 10 2009)
Lane Chapman (Jan. 30 2010)