Sconyers Bar-B-Que, Augusta GA

So this past weekend, Marie and I went out on what will most likely be the last big road trip that we will take until the baby is born in May. We started with a small breakfast at Mamie’s Kitchen in Conyers, and then drove east out I-20 towards Augusta.

The journey took us through Taliaferro County, one of Georgia’s smallest, and the least populated. It is notable, in one circuit where I travel, as being the most difficult county in Georgia to obtain a hit on Where’s George, the currency tracking project that I enjoy playing. Even though there is never a guarantee or even a serious hope that spending money at a specific point will get you a hit from it, I could not resist pulling off the interstate at exit 148 and buying a little gas at the only filling station there – for a criminal $3.30 a gallon! – in the hopes that somebody local will hit one of my bills. I have hits from 61 of Georgia’s 159 counties, and I sure do hope that Taliaferro will be the 62nd. If not, I might have to go back out this way and get lunch at Heavy’s BBQ in Crawfordville one day. That’s where some scenes in the film Sweet Home Alabama were shot.

About three-quarters of an hour later, we were on the outskirts of Augusta, the state’s second largest city and home to the Greenjackets minor league baseball team. Oh, and the Masters, I suppose. Our destination was Sconyers, an old and very popular destination restaurant that, agreeably, opens at 10 am, allowing us to plan a de facto second breakfast. I’d heard an awful lot of tourist scuttlebutt about this place over the years, including its presence on a People magazine list of the nation’s ten best barbecue restaurants, and wondered whether it could live up to the hype. Part of it really did, I’m glad to say.

When Claude and Adeline Sconyers opened in 1956, it was in a little storefront with one of those cute wooden signs with Coca-Cola logos. Their son, Larry, has run the place since the late 1970s. He moved the restaurant into its current digs. It’s now a huge house with a gigantic gravel parking lot. Inside, the decor is understated and classic western, like an old log cabin. Or, if you prefer, like one of those pancake restaurants in the Smokey Mountains that look like they want to make you think that you’re in a log cabin. Attempting to enhance the western feel and failing quite spectacularly, the wait staff and servers all wear quite grotesque costumes. They’re these hideous blue and white faux-milkmaid things that would look tragic in a third-rate rep company’s production of Heidi. Never have I had such excellent and professional service from somebody dressed so garishly.

For our second breakfast of the day, we elected to split a small plate of chopped pork with hash and potato salad, along with an extra side of cole slaw. Strangely, the restaurant just crams all three of the different foods onto a single, small plate, serving that atop a slightly larger plate to catch your crumbs and spills. Trying to cut calories, I actually removed potato salad from my diet almost two years ago, but I succumb every so often for a few bites. I had heard, correctly, that Sconyers has excellent potato salad and so the couple of bites that I had were well spent.

The pork, however, was really quite disappointing, just sort of limp and moist with no smoky flavor at all, but it is served with a really excellent sauce that goes very well with it, and turns an ordinary meat into something quite memorable. The sauce is available in three degrees of heat, and it is a mixture of vinegar and mustard with a little tomato and a secret blend of spices that Mr. Sconyers still adds daily. This kind of sauce is absolutely not to Marie’s liking, and I suggested she might want to pass on it, but I thought it was super.

The cole slaw was also really something – a light mayo-based blend served with sweet pickles – but the standout was the hash. Now, several of my favorite places in northeast Georgia serve up a really thick, not-Brunswick stew that is a lot like Carolina hash, but only a few, like the dearly missed Carrithers in Athens, actually called it hash. Sconyers serves the real deal, a thick blend of leftover pork and sauce over rice and it is just amazing. Even if you’re just passing through with lunch or dinner plans somewhere else, you need to stop in here for a four buck bowl of hash and rice. There’s a reason that Jimmy Carter had Sconyers cater a big White House event; this hash is something special.

This is the sort of restaurant where you can understand why locals have started grumbling that it isn’t as good as it used to be. People turn on success and even in cities like Augusta, which seems to have an aging population and not one so interested in a vibrant foodie community, people do tend to look for the next new thing. Is it possible for a restaurant with a parking lot the size of a small stadium to maintain quality for better than fifty years? Well, I don’t know whether it is as good as it used to be, but it’s still okay at some things and downright excellent in others. This is definitely worth a visit, I’d say. Just get ready to giggle at those silly costumes.

Barbecue Kitchen, College Park GA

We finished up what I termed as our barbecue road trip two Saturdays ago at a little place in College Park hidden just off the interstate. It’s a very old little joint called Barbecue Kitchen, and I had never heard of it until the good folk at Roadfood.com added it to their small list of reviewed restaurants here in Georgia. It’s very easy to find, just off I-85 going south after the Downtown Connector has split, and I am surprised, now that I have been here, that I never heard of it before. In all the many conversations and lists about barbecue in the Atlanta area, this place has remained one of the city’s best-kept secrets.

It must be said that, however, that my kids didn’t enjoy it at all, and rather wished that it had remained a secret. On the other hand, happily, I had a simple, good meal here and quite enjoyed the experience. Several months ago, I wrote a chapter about The Old Hickory House in Dunwoody, reflecting how this fading restaurant is not at all what it used to be. Barbecue Kitchen is exactly how the Old Hickory House used to be. It was like stepping back in time thirty years to when that place was packed, loud and vibrant.

While my meal was indeed very good, I really was not able to finish it. We tried sharing plates and small portions at our earlier destinations, but Barbecue Kitchen absolutely leveled us with the amount of food that they pile in front of guests. I coined the phrase “insane metric buttload of food” to describe how much was put in front of me. Even if I was not already satisfied by our small meals in middle Georgia, this would have been too much for me to finish. This place gives you free refills on your vegetables, probably with the understanding that nobody’s going to be hungry enough after a first course to still be wanting more.

So this time out, we decided that I would order a barbecue plate, and Marie would get three veggies, and the kids would each get a single side and a dessert. Now, maybe I was stymied by pork-goggles or something, but that looks like a really gigantic pile of food that our server, a delightful lady who, saucily, would not divulge how long she’d been with the restaurant, but conceded that her husband would often bring her to supper here when they were dating, laid down in front of me. I wouldn’t really call any of it exceptional, but very good comfort food. I enjoyed the stew best of all. The sauce, very thick and amazingly sweet, got Marie’s seal of approval. She also enjoyed her green beans and creamed corn.

For their desserts, the kids each had a slice of cake. My son had coconut and my daughter had red velvet. They had been very good on this road trip and deserved them, I thought. Normally, the cliche is that you can get dessert only if you clean your plate. On this trip, nobody cleaned their plates. We were all completely stuffed. The lesson learned, perhaps, is that the next time we do a little eating tour, we need to space the restaurants out a little bit more. Two small meals and one gigantic one in such a short afternoon simply does not work!

The Oink Joint, Zebulon GA

In the previous chapter, I explained that the four of us went off on a middle Georgia jaunt to get away from the snow and ice in Atlanta. The road to Thomaston’s Piggie Park, our destination, took us right through Zebulon, a sleepy little community about sixteen miles north of where we were going. We had been through Zebulon once before, last summer. When we went down to Warm Springs back in July to eat at the Bulloch House, we came back this way to visit A Novel Experience, a shop which I had seen listed on Huffington Post as one of America’s best bookstores. I don’t remember whether I actually noticed the Oink Joint at that time or if I heard about it shortly afterward and recalled it as another reason to go back to Zebulon, but it’s in an ideal location just a stone’s throw from the book shop.

While I understand that some of my readers might not be particularly interested in bookstores, I’ve always thought that they are terrific places to spend your time, especially while on eating tours and waiting for a meal to settle. It helps when the store in question is one as simply wonderful as A Novel Experience, which, flatly, is a superior store to any in Atlanta. Certainly, we have a couple of pretty darn good ones – A Capella Books in Little Five Points is probably the best – but the atmosphere of peace and simplicity, backed up by a fantastic selection of very well-chosen new titles and a surprising number of used books that I actually wanted to get around to reading anyway, makes A Novel Experience an absolutely wonderful destination for book lovers. To be fair, you probably won’t find the sort of wild, unexpected treasures of a really old store, packed densely with antiquarian weirdness, but for a good break from the world in the company of a really well-thought and sensibly planned bookstore with an awesome, friendly staff, the quiet little town of Zebulon is definitely worth a drive.

Plus, there’s a pretty darn good barbecue joint just a block or so away, and Zebulon is still so sleepy that they don’t charge for parking. Good for them; it gives you plenty of time to enjoy a good bookstore and then have a fine meal. Or vice versa, whatever you need.

The Oink Joint is one of the newer barbecue restaurants in the state, only opening early in 2010, but its owners, Craig and Deeanna Cardell, have been cooking on the festival circuit for a few years. Their space is pretty tiny, but decorated with several trophies and medals from their outings at several southeastern barbecue cookoffs like the Lake Oconee Barbecue & Blues Festival, where the Cardells took grand champion in 2009. I believe that, prior to opening the store, they competed under the name Right Stuff BBQ.

They have a small space, and it fills quickly. We arrived just as the lunch rush was ending and there was a small logjam at the door as people tried to fill out past my impatient and manner-free children. Everybody else’s kids do that, right? It’s not just mine? Please say yes. Anyway, once we wrestled them back and let everybody inside exit, my daughter decided that she wanted some ice cream instead of another meal, and my son passed on barbecue and had a big grilled cheese sandwich. So Marie and I each got a pulled pork sandwich. She got Brunswick stew as a side and I ordered baked beans, The pork here is pulled and extremely moist. They have two sauces, both of which were very tasty.

Now, even trying to share food and think in terms of sensible portions, we still had enjoyed a fair amount of barbecue between our two stops in Pike and Upson Counties. Nevertheless, I was – somehow – still a little bit peckish after my sandwich, and very curious to try something unusual on the menu. Oink Joint offers smaller portions of their pork, chicken and beef brisket in taco form, and one of these really struck my eye. A kogi taco mixes pulled pork with diced “fire and ice” cucumbers and a Korean barbecue sauce. This was so unusual and tasty that I found myself wishing I had just had one of these instead of the sandwich, which was pretty good on its own. The next time we feel like coming to Zebulon, I think two tacos and a side of stew would be exactly what’s needed.

Of course, the down side to trying the taco was that now I really was full, and we had one more stop on the road, back inside the Atlanta perimeter in College Park. Could this family stuff any more food before popping? Stay tuned.

Piggie Park, Thomaston GA

Two Saturdays ago, I was about as sick of snow as it is possible to be. I’m sure I was not the only one. The winter storm that walloped Atlanta earlier this month was the biggest in eighteen years. We spent three days trapped in our house, and I didn’t get back to work at all until the Friday, and then I had to climb over a danged fence just to get to where I needed to be, because the employee parking lot was inaccessible. Long story. Anyway, if you’re a local, you have your own tale of woe and boredom and board games, and if you’re not, here’s the confirmation that Atlantans just don’t handle snow well at all.

So by Saturday, I was screaming to be outdoors somewhere without any white stuff anywhere, so I charted out a day trip down to middle Georgia, where Marie and the kids and I could stretch our legs and enjoy some sun. So naturally, then, because we’re contrary, the first place we went didn’t require us to get out of the car and actually do any leg-stretching, as it was a drive-in. I planned this day trip to hit two more of the Georgia restaurants featured at Roadfood.com, and the first of these was down in what some of the sillier locals and billboards call “T-Town,” a little place called Thomaston.

Thomaston’s a bit of a drive from Cobb County. We took I-75 through the city and exited on Tara Boulevard, just a few exits beyond the southside perimeter, and continued down US 19 for about fifty miles. With the exception of a single bookstore which I’ll mention in the next chapter and the impressive edifice of Atlanta Motor Speedway near Griffin, there’s not a heck of a lot of anything other than food on this road these days, but not a lot of traffic or backup, either. (There is, incidentally, a magnificent barbecue shack called Southern Pit which we really love, and will revisit for this blog on a visit later this year.) It was a very nice day for a drive in the country, especially after being cooped up indoors for so long, although I sort of wish it was a degree or three warmer so we could have had the windows down.

Piggie Park first opened about sixty years ago, and while they serve burgers and milkshakes, this place is, with good reason, best known for its sliced barbecue pork. This was absolutely exceptional, and the best of the three barbecue joints that we visited that afternoon. The pork was so moist, yet not at all greasy, and with a lovely smoky taste. The sauce was the traditionally dark ketchup and vinegar combo of middle Georgia.

Since we would be visiting three restaurants in a (barely) four-hour block, we broke up the orders so that we could all sample the goodies at each place without, in theory, getting completely stuffed. At Piggie Park, the four of us split a barbecue plate with fries and slaw, one sandwich with a side of fries and two bowls of Brunswick stew. Everything was extremely good, and we all loved the fries, which, unlike the pork, really were delightfully greasy and full of flavor.

I think the restaurant is definitely worth an hour and a bit’s drive; I just wish there was some more to do there. I’m not sure what else there is to do in Upson County. Maybe sometime when the weather is nicer, we can justify a trip out this way to a nice state park or something and do a little hiking. Since a trip to this drive-in won’t even give us the exercise of going from the car to the building’s front door, we’ll need to do something else.

Our next stop was a few miles back up the road, at a place we drove past on our way to Piggie Park. More about that in the next chapter…

Bar-B-Que Shack, Athens GA

Here’s a restaurant that’s never really received a fair shake from me. The Bar-B-Que Shack, which opened in 1993, has been around long enough to reasonably qualify as the oldest surviving joint of its kind in Athens. There are older – much older – places in nearby Danielsville, Watkinsville and Lexington, but unless I’m forgetting about one, all of its peers – Carrithers, Spring House, J.R.’s, Peanut’s Redneck – have long since gone. The two Fresh Air outlets might claim to have been around since the 1920s, but that’s when the original store down in Jackson opened. The ones in Athens didn’t open until 1996 or so. The one on the west side of town, between the Pepsi plant and Bogart was the site of Peanut’s Redneck – and yes, that really was its name, Peanut’s Redneck Bar-B-Q – when I moved to town in ’89. J.R.’s opened sometime in the mid-90s, in the building that once housed Walter’s. That was a mid-eighties favorite of R.E.M., who recorded a “theme” to the restaurant that appears on their odds-n-sods 1986 LP Dead Letter Office. That building is now home to Hollis’s Ribs. The turnover in barbecue places in Athens has always seemed just a little brutal. Continue reading “Bar-B-Que Shack, Athens GA” →

Old Brick Pit Bar-B-Q, Chamblee GA

Here’s proof that time really does march on in the restaurant business. Once upon a time, the Old Brick Pit was one of the Atlanta region’s most well-known and popular barbecue joints. It opened in 1976 and the original owner, whose name was Newton, was immortalized in caricature by the great Jack Davis. Within a couple of years, it was among a handful of Georgia restaurants featured in one of those writeups in The New York Times that you used to see in books and newspapers in the 1970s, marveling at this peculiar Southern delicacy called barbecue. A yellowing copy of that lengthy road trip article is still framed on the wall of this fine old smokehouse, where few seem to see it.

Once upon a time, in other words, the Old Brick Pit was, along with Harold’s and Fat Matt’s, one of the city’s best-known and beloved places. But time has unfairly left this place behind. You never see it talked about or shared among younger foodies or lovers of great barbecue or roadfood. Despite a pretty good location on Peachtree, just north of and across the street from Oglethorpe University, it has slipped so far off everybody’s radar that I just flat out forget about the place unless I just happen to be nearby.

I’ve eaten here only twice. The first time was many years back when I was maintaining that old Geocities page about barbecue places in Georgia. I’m pretty sure that we were the only guests on that Saturday afternoon. Marie and the kids and I stopped by a couple of Saturday evenings ago and we were, again, apart from some take-out orders, the only guests. That’s certainly not the way that it should be.

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, we spent New Year’s Day with my father in the hospice, where he would pass away the following morning. Now, our lunchtime visit to America’s Top Dog had been a little more upbeat and enthusiastic. We still had some optimism that Dad would improve somewhat and enjoy one last bowl game with his beloved Alabama Crimson Tide. Spending the day with him, seeing that he wasn’t improving at all and had no ability to focus on or stay awake for the game stopped that optimism in its tracks. So when we went out for supper, we were in a much quieter mood, and the slow pace of the restaurant fit my state of mind.

Sepulchral. That’s a word I’ve often wanted to use but never found the right occasion.

The building is built around the old brick pit of the name, and man, it smells fantastic. You’ll definitely wish you could go around the counter and check out that beauty . The food was mostly very good. Old Brick Pit uses a thin tomato and vinegar mix with their sauce. We all had chopped pork as we often do, but their ribs come pretty highly recommended as well. The slaw and the Brunswick stew were both very tasty. None of us really cared for the peach cobbler, however. Marie’s order just got passed around for each of us to see who would want to finish it.

Marie and the children were ready to return to the hospice after we finished. I chose to linger for a little while, enjoying my delicious sweet tea, reading the little touchstones of the past mounted on the walls and enjoying that gorgeous Jack Davis artwork. Part of me didn’t want to leave.

That was the last meal that we had while my father was still alive. He passed the following morning at 6:23. I wish he was able to enjoy it with us. Dad probably wouldn’t have liked it quite as much as he did our trip to Harold’s a couple of months ago, but Dad certainly liked barbecue. Dad’s probably tracked down Bear Bryant in heaven by now, and they’ve bonded over a nice plate of sliced pork and onion rings, which was his favorite variation. I like mine chopped, and with stew myself, but my old man would agree that when it comes to barbecue, it’s all good.

Jomax Bar-B-Q, Metter GA

When I was about twelve, Neal and I were sent on a trip to a summer camp on Jekyll Island – it’s where we met Samantha, surprisingly – that included a glamorous stop in the town of Metter, where we were allowed to get off the bus, pick up a brown bag lunch, and return to the bus to eat it. There are, certainly, far smaller towns than Metter out there, but at the age of twelve I was unable to name a one of them. Besides, I was miserable and unhappy and didn’t want to be there, wherever “there” was. I doubt that had I known Jomax Bar-B-Q was right across the street from us that it would have improved things.

Metter is a long, long way from anywhere. There’s an interstate, I-16, that connects Macon and Savannah, and Metter is 2/3 of the way down it. I’m sure there are much more desolate stretches of nothing in Nebraska and the Dakotas, but this drive is inarguably one of the worst in the southeast. Middle Georgia, outside of the cities of Columbus, Macon and Savannah, is sometimes pretty to look at, but there’s certainly not a lot besides trees. 104 miles after leaving Macon, travelers on their way to the coast have been known to pull over and run around their cars screaming, so I figure Metter’s the best place for a small town to grow and take advantage of people’s desperation for anything to do.

It’s the perfect place, in other words, for one of the three or four best barbecue restaurants in Georgia to spring up. It may be 200 miles from my house, give or take, but it’s in the right place to keep drivers from losing their marbles. It is also notable as being, and I’m not kidding, the only restaurant for the 150-mile stretch of I-16 worth visiting. You can certainly exit from that highway and travel to, say, Vidalia or Statesboro and maybe find something to eat, but as far as restaurants by the exit ramp, it is, almost literally, Jomax or nothing. Most of the trip, you can’t even find chain fast food drive-thru places, but you can certainly find plenty of state patrol cars encouraging you to watch your speed.

I first discovered Jomax around 1998, coming back to Athens from a trip to Tybee Island. I was very much in favor of finding new barbecue restaurants for my old Geocities page on the subject. I recall that I found a good entry or two in Savannah, Tybee and Thunderbolt for the page, and just pulled off the highway for a break in the hopes of finding something else. Jomax is seriously worth the stop, and I believe that I did each of the three times I drove to the coast from Athens during those days. Frustratingly, they are closed on Sundays. Since I started accompanying Marie to visit her folks on Saint Simons – about ninety minutes south of Savannah – I’ve been arranging our travel times and route to make sure we get a chance to stop at Jomax frequently. If we must motor down I-16, then the least we can do is stop along the way for some of the state’s best barbecue!

Last month, Jomax’s original owners bought back the restaurant. They opened it in… heck, I am not sure, but they sold it in 2006. I never noticed any change in the food’s quality while the other owners were there, although I believe they did have a more extensive menu, one of those full of ads for area businesses in Candler County. When we got the chance to stop by this past Friday, one of the first things I noticed was a news clipping announcing the return of Joe and Maxine to their old business, effective November 1. I suppose I should have been forward and welcomed them back and told them how much I’ve always loved their place, but three and a bit hours of driving with Marie’s car packed tight with luggage, Christmas presents and restless kids can make a fellow a little antisocial.

Jomax doesn’t do anything really abnormal or odd with their presentation. It’s basic chopped pork, very tasty and smoky, served with a single house sauce. This is a spectacular tomato and vinegar mix which is surely one of the best in the state. The secret here is simply to do the basics and do them really, really well. Their potato-packed Brunswick stew is one of my favorites, and their baked beans a match for Boston’s best. With everybody ordering different sides, we also enjoyed very good sweet potato fries and lima beans this trip.

The simplicity of Jomax’s approach has worked very well for them over the years. I think that my first visit, the place was a little quiet and slow, but every subsequent trip, they’ve had a fairly packed house and a staff of excellent servers positively hopping from table to table. I can’t imagine anybody traveling from Macon to Savannah not knowing about Jomax. It’s just where you get lunch on this road, simple as that.

Also, I’d be remiss if I did not mention that it’s an open secret that most weeks during the football season, Sonny Seiler is known to stop in on his way from Savannah to Athens, with the University of Georgia’s mascot, Uga, in tow. Joe and Maxine are big Bulldog fans and decorate their place accordingly, and while I’ve never been here at the right time for a meeting myself, I hear the Georgia faithful will often see off our puppy with a cheer and a wave. I figure, I got to talk with Coach Richt a couple of times at my favorite restaurant before it closed, so I’ve had my brush with Bulldog greatness. I also once got to confirm a confused tailback’s suspicion that Thanksgiving might be in November, but we won’t talk about that; it’s a bit embarrassing.