I have to tell you about this soup.

The best soup that there’s ever been, in the history of food, was the gazpacho at the late, dearly lamented Mean Bean in Athens. If you never had this soup, then you’ll never know what the best soup in the universe tasted like. Now about ten months ago, down in south Georgia, I did have a bowl of gazpacho which seemed to me to be in the same general hemisphere of coma-inducing wonder, but I was also a little distracted, what with being about five hours away from getting married, so I might have been exaggerating things just a little. I’ll have to try it again and see whether it holds up.

Assuming that it does, then it stands to follow that the third best soup in the world is the creamy tomato soup at Sweet Tomatoes, a national chain known on the west coast as Souplantation. And I can see disappointment in the eyes of a few readers through the screens of their laptops, as it’s just a month into this experiment and I’m already talking about a national chain. Tsk!

Obsession with the creamy tomato soup is widely known as writer Mark Evanier’s recurring joke, and I’m not trying to hem in on his well-worn territory, but I do have to thank him for cluing me in on the place. Depending on his mood, he’ll either casually mention it or go into full-bore rave when the soup returns to the restaurant’s rotating menu. This usually happens every March and for one week in the fall. I’ve never understood this. There are a few soups available here year-round. One of these is their signature deep kettle house chili, which is the blandest and most disappointingly ordinary chili I’ve ever had, and they serve that slop all the time?

Oh, and I’ll tell you what’s worse: they’ve also got some soups which are on an even sillier 15-day rotation. So if you go in the first half of March, you can alternate bowls of creamy tomato and their shrimp bisque, which is also outstanding, but in the second half of the month, they replace the shrimp bisque with clam chowder, which I can’t eat. Now what’s fair about that?

So anyway, about four years back, Mark was raving about this soup and I decided the kiddos needed some more vegetables, so we made an evening out of it and I was sold. I mean, this soup is really, really good. It doesn’t seem possible that anything made in such quantity can be so tasty, but I had something like six bowls of the stuff that first night. Then I remained sitting there for a very, very long time.

To be honest, Sweet Tomatoes is one of those places that flatly is not worth a visit unless you check the website beforehand and confirm that there’s a good soup on the menu. Now Marie likes the place regardless, because she enjoys making a nice salad to her specifications, but I never feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth unless I can enjoy several bowls of soup. The creamy tomato and the shrimp bisque are certainly deal-clinchers, and I also really like their El Paso chicken and lime. I’ll go to Sweet Tomatoes without a grumble if any one of the three are present. I mean, the day hasn’t come where I’ve dropped my fork in shock and raved about the lettuce and spinach I’ve just had, plus their pastas are uniformly disappointing, so there needs to be good soup.

Luckily, Marie’s birthday happens to come in March, so we can usually justify two or three visits during the month. I need to do a better job remembering to go at the start of March, however. Sunday night, we got a group of friends together to celebrate. We all arrived in the middle of a huge downpour, exactly the sort of weather that requires two or three bowls of soup.

Well, we were nine in total and an astonishing amount of soup was consumed. Neal had several bowls of their black bean chili, which surely must be superior to their regular deep-kettle-thing because it cannot possibly be worse, and was comatose for the next sixteen hours. Between us, my wife and I built a small fort of little red soup bowls. She didn’t have space on the table to set her gift cards down. That’s one of the advantages to having children; you can send them back to the line for more soup. Just keep it coming, with some of that cheesy bread to dunk in it. More tomato soup, and nobody gets hurt. Maybe we’ll go back Saturday afternoon, before they replace the creamy tomato with something inevitably inferior.

Other blog posts about Sweet Tomatoes in Atlanta:

Atlanta Foodies (Dec. 12 2008)
Food Near Snellville (July 30 2009)

The Real Chow Baby, Atlanta GA

There probably won’t be quite so many features in this column about restaurants as unabashedly corporate as this one, but since The Real Chow Baby is, at this stage, just a local chain with only two locations, I think it will be acceptable to write about it. I’m willing to overlook the small army of attractive young servers in matching black t-shirts and headsets, although they do reinforce the feeling that somebody’s investment in these restaurants is far more financial than emotional.

Real Chow Baby opened its first restaurant on Howell Mill some years ago, and a second in 2008 in the Cobb Galleria Center, giving area residents, at long last, a reason to actually set foot inside this misbegotten mall other than the annual Anime Weekend Atlanta convention. The Galleria’s been an embarrassment for a really long time now. When I was in middle school, it was opened with so much hoopla – an upscale mall! an AMC theater with eight screens! a video arcade with an airlock! – but it languished, a sad suburban wannabe that looked longingly at Phipps Plaza and just wished it could be that cool.

I guess about ten years ago, Cobb County finally took pity on the diseased beast, which had been coughing blood since the cinema closed, and gutted the upper floor of the mall, transforming it, quite impressively, into an extension of a mid-sized convention center that connected, above and across the shopping area, to the Waverly Hotel on the mall’s far side. There is still, nevertheless, a lot of vacant real estate inside. The excellent Sky City blog provided a terrific photoessay about the Galleria last October, which you can go read. The mall hasn’t changed a jot since those photos were taken, indeed since the top floor was converted to conference rooms and the Eckanakar people put in a reading room years ago, except that a gallery of horrible art across from Jock’s and Jill’s closed . And Sky City’s writer is quite right: unless a trade show’s in town, you’d think this mall had long been abandoned.

I overlooked the Real Chow Baby when we first noticed it during AWA 2008, but last year, Marie and I found ourselves free from children for a few hours on Friday and elected to have supper there, since it was so close to the con and looked reasonably nice. I was so taken with it that I asked whether she’d mind excusing ourselves and going back for lunch the next day. I never, never do that.

I’ve been so taken with The Real Chow Baby that I’ve eaten there probably twenty times since the con last September. They serve a stir-fry buffet, where you build a bowl from a huge array of ingredients. You can start with white or brown rice or four different pastas, work your way through dozens of veggies, add ladles of seventeen different sauces, about seven meats and then about a dozen spices. The potential for experimentation, while not mathematically endless, is pretty darn huge.

Fortunately, Marie likes this place almost as much as I do, and it didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to persuade her that bowls full of stir-fry were exactly what she wanted for her birthday dinner last week. (She had two birthday dinners, because she’s that awesome, and I’ll tell you about the second in a couple of days.) Our daughter and I met Marie after work on Friday, where there is usually a pretty good crowd of weekend revelers and families. We each sampled three bowls and enjoyed all but one of them.

Now, three bowls of stir fry sounds like a lot, and it would be, if you foolishly piled high with the food. You see, a one-trip dinner order at Real Chow Baby runs you $11.99 on the weekends – lunch is only eight – but for a buck more, you can have unlimited trips to the buffet. This is one of the city’s best-kept secrets. If you make yourself just a teeny bowl with no more than two ladles of sauce, then you can sample several different flavors, and mix and match sauce offerings without worrying about whether you’ve gorged yourself stupid. I like to start with a medium-sized bowl, very heavy on the hot spices, and then have two smaller bowls with milder taste.

Marie’s second concoction of the night mixed black bean sauce and hot mustard over white rice. None of us liked it very much, but it didn’t really matter, because you can abandon something you don’t enjoy and try something different. If you can exercise enough willpower to keep your portion sizes reasonable, then this is definitely a place to provide you with an excellent meal or twenty.

(Update: On July 19 2010, this location split off from the other and became known as “Big Chow Grill.”)

Blue Willow Inn, Social Circle GA

To help navigate around this blog, but also keep it simple, I decided that each restaurant entry should have just two tags, related to the type of food and the town that we’ve visited to eat it. Assuming this blog maintains my interest for a good while, eventually readers can get ideas and suggestions about where to eat by clicking a tag. I think that of all of them, the tag for Social Circle might end up being the least frequently troubled. Marie and I drove out here with our daughter Saturday and, other than nine hundred police cruisers maintaining order, we did not see anything whatsoever of interest other than the Blue Willow Inn.

Social Circle is about 45 minutes east of Atlanta out I-20. Louis and Billie van Dyke opened their restaurant in a gorgeous old home a couple of blocks north of Social Circle’s tiny downtown in November 1991. Among the framed articles on the walls of the main hallway, there’s a feature article from the inspirational magazine Guideposts that tells how their first few months were really tough, but a raving review by the late, great Lewis Grizzard turned things around almost overnight, and the restaurant has routinely served 200,000 visitors a year. They recommend that you make reservations, otherwise you might end up sitting in a rocking chair on their front porch for a while.

Blue Willow Inn serves up a really nice Southern-style buffet. The price is quite reasonable – just under $20 a head – and includes everything from ham and chicken livers to what might very well be the best fried green tomatoes that I’ve ever had. And I’m awfully particular to fried green tomatoes. The salad was pretty disappointing – uninspired iceberg lettuce in a concoction not unlike what you’d find at a Huddle House – but the rest of the vegetables more than made up for it.

Even though the restaurant is bustling with people, its layout is so nice that each room is comparatively quiet, allowing you to relax and take your time. Everybody there seemed to really be enjoying themselves, knowing that they were doing something particularly nice for lunch. We arrived a little bit before a birthday party started in one of the upstairs rooms. My daughter, who was making her way back from the buffet with seconds, put on a show of faux indignation and asked, of two people going upstairs with gift bags, why she had not been invited. The older ladies replied “Well, of course you’re invited, dear, come on up.” So my daughter put her plate on our table and ran skedaddling up to join them. Apparently she gave the birthday gal a big hug and wished her well before rejoining us, beaming. This is why, when my daughter feigns shyness to get out of something, we know she’s lying.

Desserts consist of a million billion calories in a series of decadent cakes, pies, brownies and forty pounds more banana pudding than I should have eaten. When we left, we made it as far as the porch before I had to commandeer a rocking chair for several minutes. Then we got as far as the koi pond and gift shop before having to stop again.

The parking lot is behind the restaurant, and behind it, there is a small, classy-designed strip mall. Actually, I was exaggerating earlier when I said there was nothing of interest other than the Blue Willow Inn around the area; there is also a small nostalgia-minded soda fountain in that strip mall which might have been worth a look had I not already consumed forty pounds of banana pudding and a slice of chocolate cake buried under whipped cream. How the dickens that place is meant to stay in business with the giant dessert buffet of the inn on the other side of a parking lot is anybody’s guess. Next door to the soda fountain, there’s one of those museums about Adam and Eve and the Jesus horses, for those of you who enjoy throwing up in public.

The Mad Italian, Chamblee GA

As longtime readers of my LiveJournal know, I am fascinated by local restaurant chains, especially the ones that never leave their home base. Atlanta has been home to several, and one that has sadly been hit like a freight train during the current recession is the Mad Italian. This wonderful restaurant opened in 1973 on Peachtree Road and claims to have been among the first to serve up New York and Philly-styled sandwiches in the city.

The original location is long gone, but for most of my life, there were two others, in Chamblee and in Smyrna. Around 2005, they opened one in Marietta where a short-lived barbecue restaurant had been (nobody seems to remember the name), and in 2006, a fourth location in Alpharetta moved into a site vacated by a McAlister’s Deli. The Marietta store quickly became my daughter’s favorite restaurant, and it somehow fooled my son into thinking that he liked alfredo sauce. Since everything else from Ragu to sauce packs to the offerings at other restaurants have failed to meet his requirements, he eventually gave up and concluded that what he actually likes is Mad Italian’s alfredo sauce and just quit trying to order it anywhere else.

Then again, who knows what extra ingredients are in Mad Italian’s alfredo recipe? I took a young lady out for supper there late one Saturday evening in 2006 and we had a blast with the staff, since everybody on duty that night was even more baked than my date’s lasagna.

So it didn’t come as a great surprise when the Marietta store closed in 2008, though it was a huge shock when the venerable Smyrna location, where high schoolers used to congregate after Wills High School football games in the eighties, shut down at the same time. Then again, there hasn’t been a Wills High School since 1989 either. Late last year, the Alpharetta store followed them, leaving the Chamblee location as the last man standing in what used to be a northside tradition.

For all my lovin’, Mad Italian’s had a curiously poor reputation among locals for years. Back when Atlanta Cuisine had a messageboard (come on, Tom!), the announcement that the Smyrna and Marietta stores had shuttered had met with really curious glee. Well, sure, any place where the staff can spend even one night visibly stoned stupid can’t say they didn’t have it coming, but I always liked everything on the menu, from the sandwiches (made on very light bread by Cassone Bakeries of New York) to the pasta fagioli soup (tomato-based, with shells, red and white beans) to the incredibly yummy meat sauce. I’m not savvy enough to say whether the pasta itself is any different from anybody else’s, but I really don’t believe I’ve ever had meat sauce as consistently good as Mad Italian’s, despite regular experimentation.

The sandwiches have always been terrific, too. I really have not ordered their cheesesteak often enough. There are better in the region, but any of their six-inch sandwiches, served with a small salad and a bowl of spaghetti, will give you a truly satisfying meal. How the Mad Italian has suffered while that Artuzzi’s chain is still around utterly baffles me.

My daughter has been pestering me for some time to revisit past triumphs, and since she’s been pretty good lately, I agreed to indulge her. This past Saturday, she and I took a long drive out for lunch here with our frequent dining partner David, whose restaurant choices are consistently good. I believe his family went to the Smyrna location many times in the past, but got out of the habit ages back. Marie wasn’t with us this trip; she and her brother went to Athens to raid that deli I was talking about the other day.

I don’t have a lot more to say about the trip. It’s a huge, aggravating shame that the Mad Italian’s fortunes have dipped so badly lately, and that a nearly forty years-old enterprise feels like it’s on its last legs, but it’s still a perfectly reliable place for a really decent sandwich or a big bowl of pasta with good sauce.

On the other hand, well, since Marie moved in, we’ve had her unbelievably good sauce recipes with a variety of meats and spices and, to be bluntly honest, as good as Mad Italian’s spaghetti with meat sauce is, I can’t swear that I’ve missed it. It’s a place that does everything pretty well, but there’s not one thing on the menu that I can’t get better someplace else. And honestly, when your nostalgia for a place’s fun history is louder than your present-day enthusiasm, and chuckling about stoned servers is more fun than the meal in front of you, it may be the ultimate sign that you’ve moved on.

Marietta Fish Market, Marietta GA

One of Marietta’s local heroes is Gus Tselios, a fellow whose group owns four restaurants in the area. The world-famous Marietta Diner is the flagship of his empire, and the others are Pasta Bella, the Cherokee Cattle Company and the Marietta Fish Market, which opened in December 2008. There’s absolutely no way that anybody in Atlanta can even be a quasi-serious foodie and not come to Cobb County to try out at least one of these places.

The basic gist of the restaurants is family dining, with an emphasis on freaking enormous portions. You can usually expect to spend $20 a head here, but your Jackson will buy you one supper and at least one leftover lunch. All four restaurants have menus so thick that they’ll probably stop a bullet, but the secret is simple: order from the specials. On the inside front cover of each menu, there’s an inserted page typed up that day. Unless you’re really in the mood for a standard, as I admittedly often am, you just want to focus on the one page. What Tselios and his chefs have concocted for that page will probably knock you on your backside.

All four restaurants are usually pretty packed – there’s a wait at the Diner 24/7 – but we decided to brave the Fish Market Friday night. Even at 8 pm there was a forty minute wait, but Marie’s brother was in town, and, observing Lent, wanted fish for supper. Frankly, Atlanta does not have very many seafood restaurants worth visiting, so our options were, flatly, accept a long wait or brave the drive-thru at Captain D’s. The Fish Market, happily, is just five minutes up the road and worth the wait.

Friday evening, I was in the mood for a standard – shrimp and scallops. The Fish Market has a “lighter appetite” section on their menu, where you get about half the food for two-thirds of the price. It’s not the most economically sensible policy unless you’re just trying to save a couple of bucks, and things admittedly are a little tight. Besides, they still give you so darn much as to provide leftovers for Saturday night. So I had fried baby shrimp and grilled scallops over dirty rice with cole slaw, following some pretty good fried green tomatoes and zucchini fries that we all shared and a Greek salad. Normally, we don’t splurge on appetizers, but Karl was in town, and it’s usually very difficult for Marie and I to resist any kind of fried vegetable. Fried green beans are her particular kryptonite. I don’t know that I’ve had zucchini prepared like this before. A basket is big enough for four, and those are darn tasty.

My plate would have been perfectly satisfactory had Marie not ordered from the specials. She had the red beans and rice with jumbo shrimp, and friends, you’ve never had it this good. The beans are cooked in this unbelievably good sauce, very tangy and sweet. I was pilfering beans and sausage all night just to let that sauce roll around on my tongue. Karl also ordered from the specials, and had a whole red snapper brought out on a huge platter and a bed of sauteed vegetables. He made out just fine, too.

The only member of our group not to be totally satisfied with supper was my daughter, who keeps claiming that she doesn’t actually like seafood despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, and, sighing, got an order of chicken strips from the kids’ menu. To be honest, these weren’t all that great, but they were the biggest chicken strips I’ve ever seen and could clobber your next door neighbor into unconsciousness, and frankly anybody who’d order chicken in the Fish Market probably could stand to be walloped upside the head with one herself. But that’s okay; the next good meal we’d share was one that she requested.

Other blog posts about Marietta Fish Market:

Atlanta Foodies (June 21 2009)
Atlanta Restaurant Blog (July 7 2009)
From My Table (Sep 13 2009)

Big Shanty Smokehouse, Kennesaw GA

For what seemed like many happy months, I was a devoted reader of the Atlanta Cuisine message boards, which no longer exist. Atlanta Cuisine’s still up and running, and a fine site it is, too, but I think that Tom has underestimated just how important those boards were to spreading the word about good restaurants. Articles do a fine job, but nothing will attract a visitor’s attention quite like a thirty-page forum thread. One article tells you that Tom’s excited about a place. Thirty pages of people raving about Fox Brothers or Varasano’s – that’s letting you know lots of people are excited about a place.

Big Shanty Smokehouse never quite managed a thirty-page thread there, but I probably would have never heard of the place if it wasn’t for that message board. I’ve never seen an ad for it, and nobody’s really raved about it at any other site that I see. It’s easily missed – I mean, who the heck wants to go west on Wade Green Road at the best of times, particularly into that ugly stretch of road where all the businesses are in repurposed houses with not a lot of parking out front, the way that side of Windy Hill near South Cobb Drive still looks? Also, you have to drive past a larger, inferior BBQ restaurant to get there. That business is large enough to give any traveler the mistaken impression that it is the cue joint they were looking for, especially when there’s nothing west of it but gas stations and repurposed houses.

I’m not sure why we got out of the habit of visiting Big Shanty Smokehouse, apart from being distracted by newer restaurants. We ate there several times in 2008 and then just slowly stopped. This was stupid of us; you get a lot of very good food for a reasonable price, along with some hot, tangy, Memphis-style sauce, and I believe that they serve up the best banana pudding in the region.

Marie’s going to have to work on Sunday, so she was able to take yesterday off. She treated herself to a no-stress day of cross-stitching and sunbeams, and I did a little pampering once I finished a short day downtown and we drove up here for lunch. Now, one thing about Marie that still baffles me is that she doesn’t like bacon. She likes ham and pork just fine, but something about the smell of bacon aggravates her, so I try not to order it around her. This makes breakfast time an occasionally disagreeable compromise, and she always has to double-check before she orders green beans. What this meant yesterday was she missed out on the skillet corn. Here, the green beans were bacon-free, but the corn wasn’t. It was a very tasty corn salsa with black beans, onion and bacon. She really missed out on that.

We shared a bowl of banana pudding. I considered sharing another four or five bowls, but I figured I’d approximate “reasonable portions” for the good of my girth and left it at one. We decided against letting any schoolage girls who might be living with us, and in class yesterday, know that we had some of that banana pudding. She’s eleven and complains that the whole damn planet is unfair enough as it is.

The Red Eyed Mule, Marietta GA

So Marie and I have been thinking for a good while about eating better, and enjoying what we eat more. Inspired by Calvin Trillin’s remarkably entertaining Tummy Trilogy (which I reviewed here and which I thunderously recommend you all purchase before the weekend’s out), I’ve decided to do a little better job documenting our travels and finds.

That said, we started today by having lunch at The Red Eyed Mule in Marietta. This is a little hole-in-the-wall with a small menu of breakfast and burgers that opened on January 19th. I heard about it from the report at Atlanta Cuisine and it’s really just a hop, skip and a jump from us, on the other side of I-75. It’s on the Church Street Extension, in a small building between Runaround Sue’s and Elizabeth Feed & Seed.

The really neat thing is that the building has been there for a really long time, and was most recently used as a storage shed by Runaround Sue’s. It was rebuilt in the 1930s after a tractor-trailer ran through it; at the time, it was… well, a “speakeasy” isn’t entirely accurate, but it was a place people could go to discreetly avail themselves of some liquor. The feed & seed next door is very old indeed; the business dates back to the Civil War although they’ve relocated several times. The current location is equidistant from Atlanta, Woodstock, Cartersville and Douglasville by old roads.

They have a small lunch menu of four different burgers on Texas toast, and we were very pleased with ours.

Marie also got a cup of white bean soup, which was served a little hotter than I prefer, but I really enjoyed it when it cooled enough. It’s served with two small cornbread muffins.

The burgers were very good, and I love that they’re served on Texas toast. We each just had the simple burger-with-garden option, but they have a couple of interesting varieties available as well. Any place that serves burgers with fried eggs gets thumbs-up from me. I like the burgers better than Cheeseburger Bobby’s, which we enjoy hugely, and where we usually go for a quick burger in the evening. That’s actually the only strike against Red Eyed Mule. Since they close at 2 and are not open Sundays, it really limits the opportunities we have to visit. But I hope one or both of us can get back there soon.

Other blog posts about The Red Eyed Mule:

A Hamburger Today (Mar 13 2012)
The Quest for the Perfect Burger (Mar 31 2012)