Roxx Tavern, Atlanta GA

I’m already more amused than annoyed that the British group Swing Out Sister had to cancel their American tour because of that volcano in Iceland. With air traffic in England grounded, they had no choice but to close the whole thing down. I was looking forward to seeing them, don’t get me wrong, but the disappointment is already fading, and I suppose that it will make an interesting, albeit short, tale for the old folks’ home.

It did, however, leave us with a Thursday night free. David, who had organized the tickets for the concert, suggested that Marie and I join him for supper at Roxx Tavern on Cheshire Bridge Road, and Neal was able to join us as well. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the place before, despite driving past it what must be dozens of times. It’s set up in an old McDonald’s, with the former playground area repurposed into a large patio. The weather was absolutely perfect for a nice evening out in the city, both enjoying Neal’s wonderful new convertible and eating outdoors. It’s not so hot yet that we need air conditioning. Yet.

Roxx serves everything from burgers to meat loaf to veggie platters, with daily specials including things like tacos or spaghetti and meatballs. Marie, who had the Chicken “Roman Holiday” pictured above, and I have debated a bit about what to call restaurants like this, and we’ve settled on “classic American.” Not that we frequent chains like Chili’s or Applebee’s – although I have been known to darken Applebee’s door on occasions past when the Gwinnett Gladiators scored a power play goal and everybody in the arena can turn in their ticket for a buy one-get one free offer – but that’s the sort of place we’re talking about. It has a big bar and it pretends to be the neighborhood “spot,” you know? Except Roxx is the real thing; their food is really quite good and presented with a unique and fun kick to it. The menu is very large and presented with some amusing house rules of expected conduct, printed with a tip of the hat to the Vortex and its hilarious, similar document of customer expectations.

Most of their appetizers have silly names. After some consideration, I decided on the potato ruins – twice-fried wedges – instead of the Elvis pickles (figure it out). David said that their meat loaf was amazing, so I gave it a try. It was indeed very good and was served with a flavorful red sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy and an enormous side of succotash with lima beans, corn and tomatoes.

David had a salad and Greek chicken and Neal had a great big burger with homemade potato chips. Marie’s chicken was completely wonderful, and I was left once again with menu envy. At the very least, I should have gone with the Elvis pickles to start and had chips instead of mashed potatoes. By the end of the meal, I was really feeling like I overdid things, which is not a feeling I often experience. Just as well I didn’t try to finish with a fried twinkie, really.

Varasano’s Pizzeria, Atlanta GA

Here’s a little article that’s less about a restaurant and more about how individuals judge the value of an item. I’ve made a couple of references in earlier entries to how much I miss the message boards at atlantacusine.com. Perhaps because those references strike an “order of business” tone rather than a playful one, they probably come across as strident and bossy, and less like a fun recurring joke. Since I’m openly taking inspiration from, and paying homage to, the great Calvin Trillin in this blog, I’d like more recurring characters and gags like his buddy Fats and his daughter’s insistence on plain bagels, and less order of business in this venture. Trillin, after all, never wasted space in his stories complaining about the editorial board of The New Yorker or whatever. Perhaps this could be a deficiency in this blog; after all, I sincerely hope that it eventually finds enough of a flow and a voice to be entertaining for readers across the country, even the ones who will never visit this region.

And yet, before I close the subject and quit bellyaching about Tom Maicon closing the forums, I think I should expand upon something I mentioned in the first chapter. Word of mouth absolutely trumps even the most enthusiastic review. This is something I have certainly noticed from all of the dozens of short book and comic reviews that I have written. Maicon may tell the world about what he’s certain is the finest restaurant he’s ever come across just as emphatically as I’d like to tell the world that Robo-Hunter is my favorite comic serial, but people above the age of, say, eleven really do filter critical praise, knowing the writer is all-too human.

After all, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has employed a food critic of remarkably good taste and a vibrant writing style, but John Kessler will always be known to me as the man who strongly recommended the worst barbecue restaurant in the city, and, within six months, also gave a dismissive shrug to the late, great Lewis Grizzard’s favorite eatery. I still remain absolutely astonished that any of us lived to see the day that Grizzard’s own paper printed something negative about Sprayberry’s Barbecue in Newnan. Dogs and cats started living together the very next afternoon.

Here’s what I mean by word of mouth trumping even an informed opinion: Varasano’s serves the best pizza that I have ever had by some considerable margin. It is flatly and frankly unbelievable. I could name you some really fantastic pizzerias in this city and defend them with vigor and a smile, and, while willing to stand corrected, swap cities with anybody in America for a Monday through Friday challenge of our respective top fives. Well, if somebody was floating my expenses anyway. If you say Manhattan or Chicago have a top five that could beat Fellini’s, LaBella’s, Everybody’s, Fritti and Varasano’s, then that sounds like it must be the greatest week of meals on the planet. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I am saying that you’d better say a prayer of thanks before bedtime this evening that you’re lucky enough to live in such a town, and do you have a guest room?

I’ve been meaning to stop by Antico to see whether the rumors are true and it’s good enough to knock Fellini’s out of my top five. Unfortunately, Varasano’s is so damn good that I just can’t seem to get over to Hemphill to try it out. And I never would have known of Varasano’s had Maicon’s old forum not featured one of the most remarkable message board threads I’ve ever seen anywhere online. You think I’ve made a fool of myself with some of the drivel I’ve babbled online? Even the drivel in 2004, he said, citing what might be a recurring gag? You should have seen these people drooling about Varasano’s and its char. Once you told me what the heck char was, I still wouldn’t have thought it was a virtue until I’d seen forty-eleven people risk their reputations telling the internet about the orgasms induced by the juuuust burnt patches of pizza crust.

Somehow, there was a heck of a lot more to this pie than any single article could get across. All this hype required investigation.

Marie and I first went to Varasano’s last summer on a day that my son spent with Neal, whom you may recall overindulging on the black bean chili at Sweet Tomatoes. Clearly I need to find a new recurring gag for Neal, because that’s not as funny as, say, having a fondness for all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets.

This was during Varasano’s early, experimental phase as they worked through some issues with the center of their pizzas being a little soggy. Anybody who remembers that message board thread remembers this; new reports came in daily, bloating an already hype-filled thread to gargantuan as nobody wanted to be left out anymore. There was already a cool kids’ clique at work; Jeff Varasano had been perfecting his recipes with some invitation-only parties before opening. Everybody wanted to join the in crowd by being the one to announce they were there the night Jeff turned his pizza from damned amazing to sheer perfection by eliminating the soggy center.

Personally, I never understood the complaint. If the worst you can say about a slice of pizza is that there’s a hair more of the best sauce in the city on the tip, and that the best dough in the city had absorbed a little more of it, then it sounds to me like you’ve still got a pretty good slice of pie.

Over several visits, I’ve worked my way down the menu, skipping only the New Haven Clam, which sounds amazing but also, sadly, lethal. My son had, over all this time, been missing out, so I let him pick one of the two pies we had on Saturday night when we went with Marie. He chose a Salumi, piled high with salted imported meats, and Marie and I agreed on a Nucci, with fresh arugula and prosciutto.

He had to agree that Louisville, where he’s been staying with his mother, doesn’t have any pizza anything remotely like that. Very few places do. Although, ironically, Louisville is the home of the Papa John’s Pizza empire. You’ve probably seen Papa John on television, espousing their motto, “Better ingredients, better pizza.” I think, more than the preparation, even cooking it to give those lovely patches of char, that’s true with any pizza, and nobody uses better ingredients than Varasano’s. I mean, if the cheese is coming from water buffaloes instead of cows, it’s something quite different than what Papa John’s can offer you on a five buck carryout special. If Sweet Tomatoes would bring in some of that arugula, their salads would instantly rise above “unmemorable,” but, heck, the last two times we were there for the creamy tomato soup, they didn’t even have spinach. We’ll be asking for gold-plated forks next.

And with that, I’ll shut up about Maicon closing his site’s forums. The joke was never funny, and now it’s old, and so I’ll hush. Until Maicon comes to his senses or I next go eat at Fox Brothers, anyway.

(Benefit of hindsight update: The ongoing joke of these early chapters was on me, as the forum was already reopened and running as 285foodies.com and I had no idea. Also, it would be more than 18 months before I made that next trip to Fox Brothers, which had been similarly hyped beyond belief by the regulars of the old forum.)

The Square Bagel, Marietta GA (CLOSED)

For me, the simplest way to distinguish between a deli and a sandwich shop is just this: a deli serves Dr. Brown’s soda. If your business claims to be a deli and does not actually serve it, then you are fibbing. Consequently, the European Deli in Athens is not a deli. The Square Bagel in Marietta is. There’s probably another level of authenticity that depends on whether the restaurant serves Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray. Frankly, I think that’s just about the nastiest beverage ever concocted outside of a Jones holiday weirdo pack, but any deli that serves Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray is a proper New York deli.

Marie and I invited Kimberly to go to lunch with us here this past Saturday. We like Kimberly a lot, even if we’re not entirely sure why she’s marrying our friend Randy. “Don’t get me wrong,” I told her once, “if I was trapped in a foxhole behind enemy lines, I’d hope to have somebody as good as him feeding me ammo. But…” and here I paused, “…you do know that he sometimes goes to those all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets, don’t you?”

The Square Bagel seems to have been around forever. I ate here once while I was wasting a day waiting to be dismissed from jury service something like the fifth time I’d been called, and it’s not like I didn’t enjoy it; it’s just that during my years as a single dad, I often got in the habit of picking places all the time based on whether they were open for supper. Delis that rely on breakfast and freshly-made bagels for as much of their business as this place does often close before I could get to them back then, and so it slid off my radar for a while, but in considering places to visit for this blog, I figured I was overdue for a return visit and Marie needed to give it a try.

Like the best delis, Square Bagel has one of those absurdly dense menus that take you forever to read through. If you’re going at lunch, it’s obvious you want a sandwich, but unless you know up front that what you want is pastrami, turkey, cheese, slaw and Russian dressing on rye, and that’s not the sort of thing I ever know, you have to dig through a long list of sandwiches with funny names until you find the ingredient list you were looking for.

I don’t know who came up with putting Russian dressing on sandwiches, but that man deserves a beer. One of the little cafes in the Ravinia complex where I used to work served sandwiches like the one I got at Square Bagel and I think I had one for lunch every day for two weeks. Saturday’s was a delicious, nostalgic little treat, really.

Marie had egg salad on a bagel, and she and I both had potato pancakes as our side. She didn’t enjoy her side as much as I did mine, but I’m always happy to have a latke, especially one with such a slight taste of onion as this had. I’ve been trying to wean myself off potato salad, and it’s hard, especially when I wandered over to the counter and saw all the really decadent trays of twelve thousand-calorie dishes cooling there.

Kimberly had some sort of roast beef sandwich with horseradish on the side. We had to debate that point a little. My feeling is that if you’re ordering a sandwich with horseradish, you’re intending for it to be a sinus-clearing hurricane of a meal. Horseradish shows you’re serious, while mayo shows you just want to clog your arteries with fat. Kimberly said that it’s possible for horseradish to be too strong. I call shenanigans on that. The default state of horseradish should be only-just-tolerable; the problem with today’s youth is that they’ve grown up accustomed to that wimpy stuff they serve at Arby’s.

Kimberly’s horseradish came on the side. She took a little smear on her knife and said “Yeah, that’s strong.” I dipped one of her French fries in it and had a big swallow. Nostril hairs I never knew I had stood to attention. “No, that’s just right,” I said.

The Burger Club, Vinings GA (CLOSED)

Perhaps unjustly absent from the ongoing tales I tell on this blog is a sense of history and place. We live in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, a town with many very good restaurants but few claims to culinary originality and superiority. Atlanta in fact has almost no claims to a solid tradition in any one style of dining. The city is a jack of all trades, but a master of none.

Except hamburgers. There is not a population center anywhere in this country with as many excellent burger joints as Atlanta. I could write about nothing but burgers here for months and not scratch the surface. The Wall Street Journal agrees that, between Ann’s Snack Bar and The Vortex, we’re untouchable. That’s not to say that better individual burgers might not be out there in your own town – in point of fact, take thirty bucks to a little place I know in Vermont in the summer and you will be served a burger so many times superior to any you’ve ever had that you will weep, knowing the game is over – but shack for shack and joint for joint, the batting average of Atlanta beats the hell out of any other city in America.

We’ve come up with some pretty crazy concoctions to enhance the beauty of burgers in this town. It’s certainly enough to grill or fry a perfect patty, but only in Atlanta would somebody come up with the Luther Burger, which dispenses with the bun and serves the patty between two halves of a Krispy Kreme doughnut, and named for crooner Luther Vandross. Mulligan’s, the joint that came up with the recipe, closed a few years ago, but not before giving their seal of approval to Turner Field to continue the tradition at Braves games.

Over the last decade, while perfecting their recipes for perfect burgers and debating the merits of angus versus kobe beef, a few places have also tinkered with oddball experiments like the Luther. Over in Vinings, the Burger Club, a family restaurant run by the team behind the upscale Paul’s and Social Vinings, has a dozen or so weird and wonderful house specialties on the menu. Among them, their own take on the Luther. Called the Artery Annihilator, this doughnutty mess also includes bacon and cheese. No, I didn’t order one; I’m in rotten enough shape as it is and don’t want my arteries annihilated.

Fortunately for us all, my son was in town this week.

So the Burger Club moved into a space vacated by an Atlanta Bread Company that had been there forever. It’s on Paces Ferry Road, right in the heart of Vinings, next door to the fire station. It’s slightly separate from the Vinings Jubilee open-air mini-mall, where my bored crowd of high school punks would often go on Friday evenings in the late ’80s after we’d been kicked out of Cumberland. The parking lot has space for about two dozen Smart cars, or two Cadillacs. Since my parents wanted to take their precious grandson to supper, but drive nothing but Cadillacs, parking was a challenge.

Me, I had the Gastro Pub Burger, which is served with bacon and a blend of red onion marmalade and Roquefort cheese, with tater tots on the side. The burger was indeed a good one, but heaven only knows why I can’t resist these darn tots. Perhaps because I just had onion rings the day before, I passed on those, but surely any of their sides would have a little more oomph to them than a bag of frozen Ore-Ida brand tots, no matter whether I sprinkle a little salt on them or not.

In fact, my dad, who, like my mother and Marie, just had a basic beef burger without any of the specialty trimmings, said that his onion rings were among the best he’s ever had. Then again, he always eats his onion rings with Heinz 57 sauce. Nobody has a lot of sympathy for that.

But my son, well, he had his arteries annihilated. He was last heard muttering something about a “perfect blend of savory and sweet” before lapsing into a coma. Normally I’d have a bite, but I’m trying to cut down on the life-ending things. Back when I was making mistakes in 2004, though, I’d probably have had a dozen a day. It was that kind of year.

(Sadly, The Burger Club closed in December, 2010.)

Brandi’s World Famous Hot Dogs, Marietta GA

For a few weeks in 2004, I had a brief little obsession with hot dog joints. Since Atlanta is a burger town, and not a dog one, this didn’t last very long. Just about everywhere I went was exactly the same: a half-hearted sigh of a business with identical $5 Polish sausages and various photos of Chicago on the walls, trying to kid the locals into thinking that businessmen and Cubs fans in the Windy City enjoyed these. I’ve never been to Chicago, but after trying four or five of these joints, I’m convinced that there’s just no possible way that anybody in Illinois would think these to be the real thing.

Well, it’s not like that was the worst mistake I made in 2004. That was something of a stupid year.

The problem, of course, was that I was trying to experience something that, if it exists in Atlanta at all, can’t be found all over the place. If I wanted proper hot dogs in this region, I needed something that’s nothing like what they serve in Chicago. Local dogs have much more in common with The Varsity, about which, I’m certain, more another day, than any pretend Windy City concoction.

That said, I do cherish a memory of Marie trying to eat a Chicago dog at a ballpark in Nashville two years ago and getting ketchup all over her nose, and spending a spectacularly funny beat in paralyzed mortification as she had both hands full and no way to clean up until I rescued her. I’ll thank Chicago for that until the day I die.

But I digress. What I should have been doing in 2004, of course, was eating at Brandi’s. This is the real thing. A few years ago, the Marietta Daily Journal, in one of their rare moments of lucidity, named her chili dogs among the Seven Wonders of Cobb County. You’ve probably never, ever had chili dogs this good, and, unless you’re in the area during a criminally small weekday lunchtime window, you might not get the chance.

Brandi’s opened in 1979 as Betty’s, in a teeny little building near Kennestone Hospital on the Church Street Extension, right next to the railroad track. It was an immediate success. In 2002, Betty Jo Garrett retired and sold the business and the recipes to Brandi. Locals – they are legion, mostly older folk – swear it has not changed a smidgen, save for the opening of a second location thirty miles up the road in Cartersville.

As you might expect from a restaurant built into a very old service station, this is a cramped little place full of color and energy. There’s a menu above the register, but it’s not particularly extensive, so you needn’t waste anybody’s time making up your mind. There’s no time to waste here; Brandi’s is open Monday through Friday from 10-3, and the lunch window of 11.30 to about 1.30 is completely packed. I’m sure you’ll want to linger over the taste of this chili, but lingering over a book is a breach of etiquette.

This chili is something else. I’ve had a lot of good hot dog chili before, but never is it anywhere near as spicy as this. Brandi’s gives you an incredibly satisfying mouth-burn, and it gives it to you pretty cheaply. I had two dogs and an order of rings for under six bucks. Both of my kids are in town – my son’s currently residing in Kentucky with his mom and is here for spring break – and we’re going to lunch here Tuesday. I wonder how they’ll feel about the chili. It’s very difficult to judge how they feel about spicy food.

Interestingly, the understood default is that dogs here come with chili. Not knowing any different, I ordered one chili dog and one slaw dog, and got two chili dogs, one with slaw atop it. I figured the error was mine and enjoyed them both quite thoroughly.

Shame about Marie, though. Since she’s never in Cobb County between 10 and 3 on a weekday, I’ll just have to eat here without her!

Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppe, Kennesaw GA (CLOSED)

It won’t be long, I fear, before blogs like this will be the only proof that this small chain ever existed. The little Dagwood’s empire has already crumbled and collapsed, leaving just a scattered handful of franchises available. One of them is nearby in Kennesaw and serves up one of the most amazing sandwiches you can find, but nobody confidently predicts that a new generation will enjoy it.

Like many of you, I first heard of the chain thanks to some targeted Google keyword sponsored links in my gmail. For a while in 2006, it seemed like every time I received an email with the word “comics” in it, Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppe popped up on the side. Eventually I got curious enough to check it out, and was delighted by the incredible cuteness of what I saw. Apparently, Dean Young, the current writer of the King Features comic strip Blondie, which was created by his father in 1930, decided to fulfill a lifetime dream of a chain of sandwich shoppes making wild meals just like the ones that Dagwood Bumstead would concoct.

I stress that “incredible cuteness” only goes so far. I do not believe that I have looked forward to reading a new installment of Blondie since I was ten, and don’t expect to again until I’m in a retirement home. I admit some archaeological curiosity about what the strip might have been like in 1930, when Blondie was a carefree, rich flapper girl with daddy issues. What I’ve heard sounds preferable to the suburban mediocrity that King Features has been inflicting upon us for more than forty years.

In 2006, the chain had not left Florida. Throughout 2007, they started popping up in the midwest, South Carolina and Texas, and one arrived in Suwanee, Georgia. Surprisingly, in the spring of 2008, one opened near us, at the intersection of Barrett Parkway and Ridenour. I would never have known this had I not, by chance, chosen to come back that way from the far end of Whitlock, just to have something different to look at on my way. This amazing little secret has somehow, despite the ridiculously awful location, unbelievably awful hours (they usually close at 7) and occasionally awful teenage staff in place when we’ve visited, managed to stay open for two years.

How much longer is anybody’s guess. If you try looking up simply Dagwood’s on Google, you’ll first get a half-dozen unrelated restaurants from all across the country who have appropriated the name from the comic strip. If you search for Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppe, you’ll find a completely different story: tales of franchisees suing the owners, closed stores, and websites, once geared to franchises’ regions, which have defaulted to Go Daddy placeholder pages. It would appear that the Florida stores are gone, leaving the one here in Kennesaw and a handful in Indiana and Kentucky. Possibly one in Springfield, Missouri. In fact, when I first visited the local store in May of 2008, I was unaware that things were already falling apart. That very month in the magazine Franchise Times, there appeared a quite remarkable article by Jonathan Maze about how the many investors and franchises were lining up their lawyers. That Dagwood’s exists anywhere at all right now is frankly amazing.

So Marie and our daughter and I went to supper here last week and the stink of failure was so heavy that I felt I needed to order their trademark Dagwood sandwich, suspecting that I won’t have many more chances. The bad vibe was so heavy that when we left, I forgot and neglected to snap a picture of the building for the blog, necessitating this photo from our first visit, two years previously.

Over those two years, the quality of the food has not altered a jot. These are, despite everything else in this entry, leagues superior to any other sandwich chain, except Jersey Mike’s, which I completely love. Why anybody would stop at a Jimmy John’s, a Subway or a Quizno’s over Dagwood’s I couldn’t tell you. Food-wise, Dagwood’s is genuinely terrific, and the Dagwood itself is, as pictured, a giant jawbreaker of a meal, a real treat that you can barely finish. The restaurants offer Zapp’s brand chips on the side, and even have packs of their cracked pepper and sea salt flavor repackaged as Dagwood’s Zesty Pepper, so I suppose that the good people at Zapp’s, at least, were sold on this chain’s solvency.

But everything else about this place is increasingly underwhelming. At least the teens who were blaring their music at maximum volume a few months ago have gone, but the ones who replaced them were in a real hurry to get out of there as quickly as possible, and had stacked the chairs in the window shortly after six so they could clean the floors. While we were eating, two different parties drove up, saw the stacked chairs, backed out and drove away, concluding that they were closed.

One of Dagwood’s greatest follies is that about a quarter of its counter space is given over to Blondie merchandise, despite the indisputable fact that nobody between the ages of ten and seventy can be said to be a Blondie collector. Bafflingly, there is a single collected edition of the comic strip in print, but they didn’t sell that in the restaurant, just glasses and tchotchkes. Well, the merchandise shelf is, as expected, collecting dust, and the flat-screen TV which was set up to show Blondie comics, panel-by-panel, on a loop has been switched off for months.

The food’s still good. It’s excellent. But nobody seriously expects it to still be available this time next year. If you’d like to go, phone first.

(Update 8/24/11: They lasted longer than I thought, but we confirmed today that they closed earlier this month. Not a surprise, but a shame nonetheless.)

Just Around the Corner, Atlanta GA

I’m going to be so depressed when Marie’s job moves out to the Perimeter Mall area in the next month or so. Once a week, we meet for lunch downtown. The original idea had been to meet in Centennial Olympic Park and enjoy a nice picnic outside, but she has a longer lunch than me, and, honestly, I got a little tired of rushing back to work with a belly full of lunch and spending the next two hours feeling like I was going to lose it. So now she picks up our grub and we eat here at my job and it’s much more pleasant. Maybe this week, we can enjoy a nice meal on the tables outside.

More often than not, Marie picks up a burger and fries from Just Around the Corner, a teeny little place at the intersection of Spring and Marietta. I’ve actually only set foot in the place once, so I really can’t tell you much about it. It’s got just the sort of look to it that let you know, correctly, that they’re doing something right. It’s like one step up from a hot dog cart, with only room inside for perhaps five people. And in much the same way that some of the best meals come from street vendors – I don’t know that there have ever been falafels anywhere as good as the ones that this one Turkish fellow used to serve from a little cart just below Leconte and Park Halls on the UGA campus in the mid-90s – the burgers at Just Around the Corner are just dripping with character and style.

Over the last decade or so, Atlanta has really nicened up the area around the park, trying to make the place much more attractive to tourists. The whole area’s so much cleaner and family-friendly than its reputation holds. Nearby parking is usually under $10, and with so many museums and activities to check out, I imagine that you can easily find plenty of things to do, and have a really nice, juicy burger to top it off. And if you’re coming into town for an afternoon Hawks or Thrashers game, it’s certainly better than your options inside Philips Arena, and a lot cheaper, too.

Looks like the dogwoods are blooming in the park today. Yeah, maybe we can sit outside and enjoy our burgers with nature before it starts erupting with pollen too terribly. I’ve probably only got about 72 or fewer hours left before I will want to dig my eyeballs out with spoons, so I might try and enjoy the weather while I can, you know?