Bill’s Bar-B-Q, Hull GA

I have totally done Bill’s an awful disservice. I ate there once, maybe twice, back in 1993 or 1994, and I decided that I liked other, nearby, places better. It’s about a fifteen or twenty minute drive from Athens, depending whereabouts you are, north of the town of Hull and south of the somewhat larger town of Danielsville. This past Saturday, I decided it was long overdue for a return trip. Continue reading “Bill’s Bar-B-Q, Hull GA” →

Hambones BBQ and Chapman Drugs, Hapeville GA

This past Friday after work, I drove down to Hapeville, an inside-the-perimeter suburb best known for being that place in Atlanta where the airport is, and was very pleasantly surprised to find some genuinely amazing barbecue at Hambones, a restaurant that I hadn’t heard of before last month. Sadly, I don’t remember where I heard about it beyond “Facebook.” Nobody has (yet) stepped forward to let me know it was them, or one of their friends, who mentioned the place, so I don’t know whom I should thank, but man, somebody’s due a handshake.

Hambones has been open for several years on a side street off the main drag (Central Avenue) through town. In a really weird bit of real estate, it is within sight of another barbecue place called Pit Boss. I had considered just doing a sandwich and stew at each place, but it didn’t work out that way, because the amount of food that Hambones serves up is pretty ridiculously huge. I had the “Q and Stew” lunch special, which comes with a big sandwich, a bucket of stew, a shot glass of a second side and a Big Gulp-sized drink for under nine bucks, and so Pit Boss will have to wait for another visit.

On a side note, I have been totally lucking out lately in finding places with amazingly good Brunswick stew. It’s like the food gods are paying me back for that awful, wretched stew that I had at Georgia Pig down in Glynn County last month. In April, I’ve been knocked out by how good the stew has been at Speedi-Pig, Dave Poe’s and now at Hambones. The stew here is thick with chicken, pork, corn, tomatoes and lima beans and I really enjoyed it hugely.

Hambones nominally opens at 11, but in reality, the doors are unlocked a little early, because the lunch crowd this place gets is huge and in a hurry. The setup is a little unusual. They have a carry-out register at the bar, and a small register for dine-in orders. The register set-up, in any other business, would look like the place where you bring your check on the way out, rather than a “order first” window with a big menu board. The lunch line is long, and you pick up a menu on the way to the small register. The design of the place is no-frills, with mismatched chairs, large, dark interiors with a few scattered TVs tuned to ESPN, and a hideous overuse of the awful Comic Sans font on all the menus and labels. It is the polar opposite of a franchise chain, as it should be.

At any rate, when you order the lunch special, you get your choice of chopped pork, chicken or beef. They will serve it sliced or pulled for a fifty-cent fee. I also noticed that they charge fifty cents extra for fries, which is very unusual. Many places, including Dave Poe’s, will charge you an extra half dollar for the stew but call fries a regular side. I later learned that Hambones makes their fries in-house and they are very popular. Perhaps I should have tried those.

The pork is very tender and very smoky and doesn’t need sauce, but there are three on the table and they are all very good. The house sauce is a traditional red tomato-vinegar mix, and the house hot sauce is the same, only amped up with peppers. I liked this one best, but I was also quite taken with the rib sauce, a black mixture which tasted to me like there was less vinegar in it. In all, this was a quite good meal, with a lot of food served up with a lot of character for a very fair price.

I wasn’t quite done with Hapeville, because I heard about a soda fountain in town and so I went to go get some dessert. Central Avenue forms a main street through the small city. We’d driven through it some months back, during the short barbecue tour that the family took in January after the ice storm, to get from the I-75 corridor south of the city over to College Park. Driving through it, I could then feel the icy fingers of my past crawling along my spine. I think that this girl whom I inadvisedly dated for a few months way back when I was in high school lived around here.

There are just a few retail places along Central that are still open, with several restaurants keeping traffic coming through. Chapman Drugs is located next to the Freemason lodge, and there’s plenty of twenty minute street parking; just enough to grab something from the pharmacy and a milkshake or a limeade. I had two-scoop malt with peach and vanilla and it was just wonderful. Every milkshake should be that good.

Chapman Drugs is, inconveniently, not open on Saturdays. (Neither is Hambones, for that matter. I have to curl an eyebrow over barbecue joints where you can’t get a Saturday lunch.) This does raise the issue of when Marie will be able to come down here and enjoy a milkshake with me, but she’ll have a maternity leave in a month or so, and I think she will certainly be due an awesome milkshake. Maybe we can visit Pit Boss as well for lunch first and I can see which of the two barbecue places on Virginia Avenue I prefer.

Dave Poe’s BBQ, Marietta GA

For Marie’s birthday in March, she and I enjoyed a nice lunch at Sam’s BBQ1. When I wrote it up, I noted that not too long ago, Sam was in business with a fellow named Dave Poe, and they had opened a second location on the other side of Marietta, on Whitlock. We’d actually eaten at this one before, in 2007 or 2008, around the time Marie was thinking about moving in, but to be honest, I wasn’t paying any attention whatsoever to that meal at the time, as I was aggravated with one kid or the other over something. Never do this. Never eat when you’re annoyed. You won’t enjoy the meal and you’ll forget almost immediately that you ever had it. If you must eat when you’re annoyed, make it something you won’t enjoy anyway.

So Sam & Dave split up shortly after the release of their single “Knock it Out the Park,” which failed to chart. Or maybe that was a different Sam & Dave. Sam got BBQ1 and Dave got this place on Whitlock and, because Cobb County might as well be Antarctica as far as the Atlanta foodie community is concerned, both restaurants slipped completely off my radar, even though I live here, and it took me ages to even remember that either place was around. Well, on Friday last week, I finally got back over to Dave Poe’s place for lunch, and, I promise, this time I’ll remember the experience. I even wrote it down in a blog and everything.

There’s a lot to like about Dave Poe’s, and one of the standouts is the slogan “traditional 19th century pit-cooked.” They use lots of classical imagery on their website advertising, not merely “old Americana” and Coca-Cola nicknacks, but stylish museum pieces with garish, amusing copy atop them speaking longingly about the restaurant, tongue firmly in cheek. The fun and very original design totally belies the restaurant’s location in a nearly-dead strip mall, with a parking lot that’s been used for mortar practice.

Early last month, Jon Watson, writing for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s “Food and More” blog, compiled his list of the metro area’s five best examples of pulled pork. Dave Poe’s and Sam’s BBQ1 ranked joint fourth on the list, as Watson could not determine any difference between the meat at the two places. Granted, I tried them a month apart and not on the same afternoon, but I have to agree that they tasted the same, and there’s no crime in that. This is extremely good pulled pork. (Watson’s is a very interesting list, by the way. You should have a look at it; two of the other four restaurants there are on my to-do list as well.)

I drove over there with Randy and Kimberly, and we enjoyed very similar lunches. They had some fried okra that they said was quite good, but we each had pulled pork, fries and Brunswick stew. Now here, I see that I can’t make a comparison between this place and Sam’s, as Marie and I did not get any stew there last month. This stew is really terrific and I enjoyed the daylights out of it. To have found stew this good at this place and at Speedi-Pig in the same month is a very pleasant surprise! That said, Kimberly said that she preferred the stew at Bub-Ba-Q in Woodstock, which is certainly quite good, but I really like this even better. I liked it so much that, two days later, Marie and my son and I had business in east Cobb, so we had supper at Sam’s BBQ1. I conspired this just so I could try Sam’s stew and confirm that, yes, it is just as good.

Unfortunately, Sam’s does have it all over Dave’s in one regard: the sauces. The ones here are fine – there’s a more-tomato-than-vinegar sauce and a more-vinegar-than-tomato one, and they are each pretty good, but Sam’s has that amazingly delicious mustard sauce that I completely loved. Mind you, the pork is so moist and smoky that it would be fine without any sauce at all, but Sam’s is one of the best mustard sauces that I’ve ever had. Perhaps the next time that Sam and Dave meet up to talk about royalties owed by Atlantic Records, Dave should ask Sam about the mustard sauce, and Sam should ask Dave the name of his graphic designer. And each of them should ask their realtors to suggest a location that’s not in such a blighted, dead chunk of retail failure.

Couch’s Barbecue, Ooltewah TN

So last week, I convinced David to leave the state. This has not happened in a while, as David doesn’t travel nearly as often as he should. It’s good for the soul, travel. My kids were on spring break and getting cabin fever and doing that really dumb thing that immature people do with money, which is to realize that they have some of it and must exchange it for something else immediately before they spontaneously combust. Continue reading “Couch’s Barbecue, Ooltewah TN” →

Sprayberry’s Barbecue, Newnan GA

I stand by something not entirely professional that I said once that got started on that old Geocities barbecue page that I used to maintain. John Kessler is the restaurant writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and many years ago, he sparked an e-mail issue that went on for several months with my readers and Google-surfers. He’d given a rave review to a barbecue place that I then visited with stars in my eyes, ready for the best meal of my life, only to find wet crock pot bilge on my plate. So I related my displeasure on that page – this would have been sometime in 2002 – and enjoyed correspondence with barbecue fans on the subject for months. One older gentleman compared the restaurant in question to the Iraqi army, a point that still tickles me. Everybody hated this place.

I figure that if I was getting that much positive feedback for a crappy “hey, I learned HTML from a book in 1997” Geocities page for disagreeing with the food critic, then Mr. Kessler must have been buried in hate mail. So a few months later, he had a fantastic new column up, wherein he and some buddies took an awesome barbecue tour around the region to try out all the restaurants that all his feedback told him was better than this place in question. It was a really good column, and I say that even though they went to Old MacDonald in Buford, which I love absolutely and am long past due to revisit, and didn’t like it. (Having said that, I looked up Old MacDonald on Urbanspoon and was really stunned by its low rating and poor reviews. Apparently there has been a change of ownership and it has plummeted downhill…? Well, that’s not encouraging.)

Anyway, what absolutely baffled and upset me was this: these Atlanta Journal-Constitution writers went down to Newnan to eat at Sprayberry’s Barbecue and did not like it. This place was Lewis Grizzard’s favorite restaurant. He ate there once a month. When the beloved writer passed, the restaurant memorialized him by bundling his favorite meal together on the menu as The Lewis Grizzard Special. And here was a negative, dismissive review of Grizzard’s favorite meal in the pages of the AJC. I never thought I’d live to see the day.

Once upon a time, when Atlanta was newly called “Hotlanta,” Maynard Jackson was mayor and the most amazing event on the area’s calendar was an inner tube race -slash – bacchanalia down the Chattahoochee past the old swingers’ apartments that drowned three drunks annually, Lewis Grizzard and Ron Hudspeth ruled that newspaper. Those were awesome days. You want to see some fun newspaper writing, go dig up some evening papers from the late seventies, where those two would drink their weight in bourbon, show up sauced after the staff had gone home and crank out some incredibly funny tale of some crackpot kinfolk in a one-horse town who once had a recipe for black-eyed peas that would cure cancer, when applied, in a poulice, to the back of your knee before your dog died and your pigtailed cousin’s skirts got too short. The AJC was a freaking wonderful paper then, with these two redneck drunks ranting about whatever the hell misty-eyed nostalgic Southern weirdness crossed their minds, and then Celestine Sibley saying much the same thing, only sober, the next section over.

To see this same newspaper then dismiss this great drunk’s favorite restaurant, well, it just made a fellow utter something a little unprofessional.

Sprayberry’s was the last stop on the little barbecue tour that Marie and I took a week ago, but it is a place that I’ve visited every couple of years for ages. They have two locations, including a large, interstate-friendly one right off the I-85 Newnan exit, but the one to see is the building further into town. Sprayberry’s opened in 1926 and has been attracting the attention of food writers for decades. Apart from Grizzard, whose love of the place was legendary, and spilled out into a good dozen of his columns, Roadfood’s Jane and Michael Stern wrote about the restaurant in 1990 for their syndicated Taste of America feature. Strangely, however, Sprayberry’s is not currently included among the Georgia places reviewed on their current site. I wonder why.

Now it does have a reputation as being a pretty expensive place for barbecue, especially when compared with Speedi-Pig over in Fayetteville. Here, Grizzard’s regular meal of a pulled pork sandwich, onion rings and stew will run you ten bucks before a drink and tip. Yikes! It’s all very good, but the sticker shock can be rough.

I really enjoyed eating here with my dad once. In 2006, I was out of work for a few months when the insurance company that I was with closed. Dad was beginning to have to slow down and not drive long distances, but he had a new potential customer down in Newnan, so, since I wasn’t doing anything, he asked me to drive him here to meet him. My daughter and I dropped him off with his client that morning and picked him up two hours later and we had lunch at the exit ramp location. I remember confusing my daughter with the unusual drinks on the menu. A holdover from the days before fountain fruit sodas were very common, you can get an “orange special,” which I believe is two parts orange soda to one part grape, and a “grape special,” which is two parts grape soda to one part orange. Of course, you could make this or ask for this anywhere, but only Sprayberry’s puts it on the menu.

That was a good day. I especially liked the part where Dad picked up the check.

On our own dimes, Marie and I split a Grizzard special. The pulled pork – a little smoky and very moist – is served without sauce. That comes in a bowl, like they serve it at Wallace Barbecue in Austell. The sauce is not quite the usual tomato-vinegar mix you get in the region. It is a little sweeter than you would expect from a vinegar sauce, and thinner. Guests can either spoon the sauce over the meat, or dip chunks of it in the bowl. The onion rings are also very sweet, and made with a buttermilk batter. They are among my very favorites. The stew, more “Virginia Brunswick” than “Georgia Brunswick,” is thick enough to be eaten with a fork. It’s quite different from the amazing stuff they offer at Speedi-Pig, but very agreeable all the same. Oh, and they serve it with a bowl of really amazing sweet pickles. Mention how much you like them and they might just bring you another bowl of ’em.

I’ve always really liked Sprayberry’s. True, not all of the food here is drop-dead amazing, but it’s all presented with so much care and love, and considering that most of the staff seems to be high school kids, I remain very pleasantly surprised by just how well they coach and train their employees. I get a kick out of the throwback feel of the menu, which, apart from the silly sodas, includes such things as congealed salad and an “aristocratic” hamburger, which has a salad and French dressing atop the patty. You can also get that very old Southern Saturday night classic, a hamburger steak smothered in onions. In fact, the old-fashioned, upscale feel to the menu here puts Sprayberry’s more in line with, say, Atlanta’s Colonnade than most of the barbecue shacks that I like the most. It adds up to a very unique experience at a place that’s been doing it right for 85 years.

Don’t worry, Lewis. Pay your old newspaper no never mind; Sprayberry’s is still in good shape.

Classic Que in Griffin and Fayetteville GA

I remember our first trip to Southern Pit very well. It was May 28, 2009, and while we weren’t blogging yet, I was nevertheless using Roadfood.com to find new and fun places to eat on our way on our trips down to Saint Simons Island and back. On that trip, Marie and the kids and I stopped in for lunch on our way to go get married, which is why it’s fairly easy to remember the date. I’m good about remembering the day we got hitched (the 30th); Marie’s birthday, slightly less so, on account of her decision to never enter that date anyplace like Facebook where I get a ~~cheat~~ friendly reminder. We had a huge lunch that day, and Marie capped things off with some delicious blackberry cobbler. I later waxed hyperbolic about how awesome this place was, and returned a few months later with Matt and our friend Kevin, shortly before he flew back out to California to resume work in academia.

As we’re entering the last few weeks of pregnancy, I struck a compromise between our twin desires to get out and drive and yet not stray too far from home. I’ve worked up a pair of short afternoon barbecue tours for Marie and I to enjoy small road trips without exhausting her. The first one is what I termed the “West Central Georgia Tour,” and was originally intended to bring us to two of the remaining stops on our goal of all the Roadfood.com-reviewed sites in the state: Southern Pit and Melear’s Barbecue in Fayetteville. Unfortunately, or not, considering its low reputation of late, Melear’s closed in January. So the revised plan saw us driving down I-75 to Griffin, then going north and west to Fayetteville for Speedi-Pig, and then further west to Sprayberry’s in Newnan before returning north on I-85. By chance, and not design, all three of the places we visited are reviewed on the wonderfully fun Chopped Onion, one of my favorite sites for finding barbecue joints and hot dog stands.

Should any of my Atlanta-based readers be interested in retracing our (planned) steps and doing their own simple tour as a day trip, I’d like to point out that you can also sample a McDonough barbecue restaurant called O.B.’s very easily on this path; it’s on the same exit (218) off I-75 that you take to go to Griffin. The same plan we took, with minor detours, should also take you near Uncle Frank’s in Fayetteville, Cafe Pig in Peachtree City, and Westside in Newnan. We haven’t visited any of these places yet, but you might could make a really full day of it if you’d like. Let me know how it goes for you!

By chance, the road that we ended up taking sped us past yet another place that I’d like to try one day: Dean’s Barbecue in Jonesboro. See, we had planned to drive down to exit 218 and shoot across 20 to Southern Pit, but after having dealt with insane construction traffic in north Atlanta on I-75, we were in no mood to sit and wait for all the spring break congestion that started building at exit 230. We could have sat bumper-to-bumper crawling for twelve miles, but I trusted our navigation instincts and we got off at 228 and found US 41 that way, which took us right past Dean’s. Some other day, perhaps.

We finally got to Southern Pit about forty minutes behind schedule. The place is not really easy to find; it isn’t signed very well, but if you are driving south, keep looking to your left and you should see it through the trees, its small sign dwarfed by the ones for Georgia Lawn Equipment and Toro brand mowers. Then make a U-turn across the divided highway when you get a chance.

The chopped pork here is not very dry and not especially smoky, but it is nice and pink and packed with flavor. Readers who have been following my recent series of memory issues will be pleased to hear that I ordered my sandwiches without any sauce at each business we visited, so that I could get a better taste for the meat before smothering it. They have a single sauce at Southern Pit: it’s a nice, brown tomato and vinegar mix, and is very sour and tangy.

I thought the Brunswick stew was pretty good, but was extremely pleased with the cracklin’ cornbread. I had been a little disappointed last year when I went to Harold’s and could hardly find a crackle anywhere in the bread, but this was just popping with them and it complemented the stew very well.

Sadly, I have to take a little issue with the desserts on offer. We were surprised to see blackberry cobbler available this early in the season. Marie asked about it and our server – points for truth – confirmed that they get the blackberries from Sysco. (“He said the S Word,” I whispered later.) The strawberry cream pie, he assured us, was made fresh in house, and this turned out to be quite good. Marie had a slice of that in lieu of a side for her chopped pork sandwich, and we were happy and pleased as we got on the road for stop number two.

The second visit was in Fayetteville, a town that neither of us had ever visited before. If it wasn’t painfully obvious from earlier chapters, when I’ve lived in the Atlanta area (which would be all but twelve years of my life) I’ve always been a resident of the northern ‘burbs: Smyrna, Alpharetta and Marietta. I just never got down this way very much.

A manager at Southern Pit had given us better directions to get over to Georgia-92 – just take Birdie Road west and cut off a huge corner, enjoying some very pretty land and houses along the way – but he could not have prepared us for an unexpected detour. An accident or fire shut down this highway completely, and a Fayette County sheriff sent us on a left turn. We shrugged and hoped for the best and eventually joined Georgia 85, which, happily, not only hooks up with 92 just outside the Fayetteville city limits, it is the very road – Glynn Street – that we were looking for. Unfortunately, it is marked amazingly poorly, and we did not know that it was Glynn Street until we drove right past Speedi-Pig and had to turn around.

My buddy Rex had told me that his girlfriend swears by Speedi-Pig’s Brunswick stew. It is similarly singled out by both Chopped Onion and another of my favorite barbecue blogs, the frustratingly-on-hiatus 3rd Degree Berns. None of these good people come close to telling you the real truth: this stew is amazing, easily just about the best in Georgia. It’s a toss-up between this and Harold’s, flatly. You will definitely want a large order of this stuff.

The chopped pork is diced pretty finely and, while it has a nice smoky taste to it, I did not like it nearly as much as I did Southern Pit’s meat. On the other hand, the price is just amazing. For 99 cents, you get a really good portion of meat on a “piglet” sandwich. I ordered two, but really only needed one. They have two sauces on the table, mild and hot varieties of a vinegar-tomato-pepper mix, and apparently they keep a much more potent hot sauce behind the counter, but I did not think to try it. The hot sauce wasn’t that much different from the mild, honestly. The barbecue is not at all bad here, and neither is the slaw – mayo-based and easy on the dressing – but the stew is the selling point. Run, don’t walk, to Fayetteville, friends.

I noticed that a party of four was asking one of the servers what had become of Melear’s. I expect that’s going to be a question the staff will be answering for months to come. It’s always a shame to see a much-loved, very old restaurant close its doors, even if its reviews had been pretty awful lately, and especially before I was able to try it.

We didn’t linger at either restaurant, but were still a little behind schedule as we got back on the road and headed west. More about that in the next chapter.

Sam’s BBQ1, Marietta GA

I’ve been telling myself for at least five years that I needed to get over to Lower Roswell Road and check this place out. Friends, if you live in Cobb County, don’t make the mistake that I did and put this off any longer. Sam Huff has been cooking up some amazing pulled pork that you seriously need to try. He apparently lives out in West Cobb, in that Lost Mountain community that I had driven through just two days previously, and was a regular on the competition circuit for years, winning all kinds of awards for his pulled pork, ribs and brisket. Six or seven years ago, he partnered up with Dave Poe and they opened what would become two restaurants in Marietta. They’ve since gone their separate ways, and Poe got the other place on Whitlock. I drove past it two days previously as well. That was an odd weekend.

Two Sundays ago, Marie and I were going to do something to celebrate her birthday. She just wanted a day together, away from kids, with a few general ideas about what she’d like to do. As I assembled a battle plan and a road trip that would take us via back roads up through Roswell and Alpharetta, I looked for lunch in the area and realized we could get some barbecue at Sam’s place. Even better, Sam’s wasn’t one of those irritating closed-on-Sunday joints that have been complicating my life. We drove right past a place that I wanted to try, Amos’s, which is near Ball Ground, on our trip. Closed.

Sam’s occupies two storefronts in a beat-up old strip mall near Johnson Ferry Road. One of these is the takeout store and the other is the restaurant. Sam’s has been answering the same questions about their food for so long that it’s led to some playfully exasperated T-shirts and signs explaining how many people can be fed with a pound of pork, that their meat is pulled and never chopped, that take-out orders are two doors down, and other rules. This has led to playful teasing from the regulars about supposedly misunderstanding the policies. During our visit, I saw two groups come in to enjoy lunch who ribbed the kid at the register that they wanted carry out. Poor kid.

The pulled pork here really isn’t very smoky, but it’s very moist and flavor-packed. It’s served dry, and guests can help themselves to three sauces at a pump station next to the drinks. The most popular, unsurprisingly, is a sweet Kansas City-styled tomato-based sauce, but, while good, I found this the least of the three. The vinegar and the mustard sauces were both outstanding. I don’t know which I prefer; both really complemented the meat really well and I haven’t enjoyed the combination of great pork and great sauce so much in weeks.

The sides were very good, too. I ordered the lunch special with a sandwich, baked beans and a glass of sweet tea, and Marie enjoyed a plate of pulled pork with green beans and potato salad.

I definitely plan to go back soon for another meal. This is absolutely among the better barbecue joints in the Atlanta area.