Kelly’s BBQ, Walnut Grove GA

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, we’re attempting to visit as many of the Georgia restaurants that are featured at Roadfood.com as we can. Coming back I-20 from Madison, we had lunch at a second such restaurant in a day. Madison itself was as fun as ever, although planning to have an early breakfast there and an early lunch in another town doesn’t allow you a lot of opportunities when many of the stores don’t open ’til eleven. Well, we did a little window shopping at least, and enjoyed some of the pretty buildings and houses while taking a nice walk.

Now, it turns out that the roadfood list does have a small error in it. It suggests that Kelly’s BBQ is in Covington, and I don’t believe that’s true at all. It’s actually ten miles north of there in a small crossroads community called Walnut Grove, which is actually closer to Loganville than Covington. And Urbanspoon’s no better; it says the restaurant’s in Covington, too! It’s at the intersection of state highways 81 and 138 and, sensibly, when it first opened in the 1970s, it was a restaurant called Crossroads. The man who rechristened it Kelly’s took over in the mid-80s, and he sold it three years ago to new owners who have kept the menu, the recipes and, where possible, the low prices – Marie and our daughter and I ate for $15 – but have expanded the building to allow more indoor seating. It no longer looks quite the way it appears in the photos at Roadfood.com, so it’s missing a little bit of the quaint, roadside stand feel.

Also missing from Kelly’s these days is a giant pig. The restaurant used to have a really enormous sculpted pig next to the building that weighed several hundred pounds, but a couple of years ago, some fast-moving criminals came by in a truck in the dead of night and spirited it away. The Walton County sheriff’s department would appreciate any information.

A large plate of chopped pork here gives you plenty to share. There’s more than enough pork for one, along with bread, fries, slaw and Brunswick stew. There are three sauces available, mild, hot and sweet, and the pork already comes wet with the house’s mild sauce. I’d recommend you order it dry and sauce it up to your liking. The sauces are all vinegar-tomato blends and guests can buy them by the bottle.

The only disappointment that any of us had was with the slaw. Now me, I like any style, variety or recipe of slaw just fine. Mayo, vinegar, red, mustard, it’s all good to me. But the closer it gets to that really finely-diced, mayo-heavy Chick-fil-A style slaw, the less Marie likes it. She ordered a small cup with her chopped pork sandwich, and I knew as soon as they brought the tray to our table that she wasn’t going to enjoy it. So I gave her most of my stew, which was very good, and tasted heavily and delightfully of corn.

Kelly’s offers a lot more than just barbecue; they have burgers and steaks and plenty of other things which, if they’re as good as the tasty chopped pork, are probably worth a try. On the other hand, ever since I was old enough to understand what the heck one is supposed to order at a barbecue restaurant, I’ve kind of figured that burgers are there in lieu of a kid’s menu. Don’t get me wrong; I like burgers more than most, but chopped pork this wonderful, tender and moist is going to win out every time.

Old Hickory Bar-B-Q, Owensboro, KY

Of course, the problem with doing road trips and eating at new places the way that we enjoy is that we need to balance our traveling between the diametrically opposed points of my foolishly impulsive nature on one peak and common sense on the other. When I first read about barbecued mutton, a common dish in the northwestern Kentucky town of Owensboro, I was halfway out the door. Stark reality soon took hold, and it just made more sense to wait patiently, until I could find some genuine reason to actually be in Ownensboro. Continue reading “Old Hickory Bar-B-Q, Owensboro, KY” →

Luella’s Bar-B-Que, Asheville NC

We made our third 2010 trip to Asheville this past weekend, this time in part to show off the city to my daughter in the hope that she would love it like we do – mission accomplished, by the way – and in part to just soak up the mountain air, the wonderful people and the excellent food. I sort of cheated on the meal selections, however. I first suggested that Marie pick where we would eat, hoping that we’d try some new things and maybe revisit one of the places that we enjoyed on earlier visits, and then immediately started looking around myself, greedily and hungrily. Continue reading “Luella’s Bar-B-Que, Asheville NC” →

Oinkers, Clayton GA

The first time that we went up to hike at Tallulah Gorge a few years ago, we dragged our exhausted carcasses back to the visitors’ center and asked where we could get some good barbecue in the area. The nice lady at the gift shop didn’t skip a beat. “It’s about ten miles up the road,” she said. “Do you mind the drive?” Y’all have probably figured out that I certainly don’t object to a fifteen minute trip for good barbecue.

Going north from Tallulah Gorge, where we try to visit about twice a year, Oinkers is on the right a couple of miles after that new-looking overpass that they built for the Rabun County High School. It’s pretty easy to miss; if you make it into the morass of fast-food chain restaurants of downtown Clayton, you went too far. We’ve come to Oinkers three times now, and each time enjoyed a good Saturday lunch with an absolutely packed house and a parking lot where about half the cars sport Rabun plates and half are from out of town. US 23 runs from I-40 and the Great Smokey Mountains Expressway, near Asheville, through Atlanta and to points down south, so it’s a perfect artery for travelers looking to enjoy the fall colors. In fact, we’ll double-check the mileage later this month, but Oinkers seems to be right around the halfway point between our place in Marietta and the city of Asheville.

Locals and travelers alike have learned that this is a lunchtime destination, and arrive in bulk. There is always a wait, even when it rains, as it did on us about a year ago, and then you have to worry about them running out of food. Well, maybe you don’t have to worry, but I’ve never seen a place that posts quite so many notices about how they only prepare enough food as they think they might need on any given day, and might run out. Evidently, this was once a problem, and so they’ve tried to get the word out that it doesn’t matter how much people might want to eat here, the restaurant might well get overwhelmed.

Oinkers’ specialty is chopped pork with vinegar sauce, but this is definitely a sauce that novices to Carolina-style vinegar need to sample sparingly. Fortunately, for people like Marie who prefer their sauce tomato-based, they also offer a “sweet sauce,” thick and tasty with molasses. Me, I like the hot vinegar sauce, which packs a very nice, peppery punch.

After our most recent trip to Tallulah Gorge last week, we settled on having two small meals. I wanted to revisit the wonderful Hawg Wild down south in Clarkesville, but I also wanted to talk about Oinkers, so we resolved to do both. Oinkers was, as usual, completely packed, and so the staff kindly sat us at the servers’ table.

Between the three of us, we had a sandwich and a plate of chopped pork, along with some fries, stew, baked beans and applesauce, with a slice of peanut butter pie. My daughter and I agreed that the pie needed a tall glass of milk, but that was about the only complaint we could levy against the “snack.” Between authentic and interesting food and service which somehow finds a way to be attentive despite a madhouse of customers, Oinkers has carved out a niche as a local favorite, and if you’re planning to take US 23 up to Asheville from Atlanta, you will quickly find this a very agreeable halfway point.

Bill Spoon’s Barbecue, Charlotte NC

(Honeymoon flashback: In July 2009, Marie and I took a road trip up to Montreal and back, enjoying some really terrific meals over our ten-day expedition. I’ve selected some of those great restaurants, and, once per month, I’ll tell you about them.)

We no sooner pulled into Charlotte, North Carolina than Marie and I concluded that there was no reason why we shouldn’t come back regularly. It’s a really nice looking town, and only about three and a half hours away. Nevertheless, despite all the great sounding restaurants and bookstores and things to do, the road hasn’t taken us back that way since our honeymoon road trip. We agree that we have so much in the Carolinas to do and see, but there never seems to be time or money. Continue reading “Bill Spoon’s Barbecue, Charlotte NC” →

Harold’s Barbecue, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

There are so many barbecue restaurants in this state that I’ve never tried. Even the old ones, like Harold’s, which has been around since 1947, I’ve just never got around to before. Well, on Saturday, we had originally intended to take another short road trip, this time out to Augusta. Unfortunately, the bank balance is a little low, so we elected to save the gasoline and find a new meal intown instead. There are four restaurants in Atlanta that are reviewed on roadfood.com that we have not written up for our blog yet. A roll of the dice brought up Harold’s, so I rang my parents and asked if they’d like to join us.

Harold’s is a simply perfect destination for a Saturday lunch. It’s very easy to find, just a quick little hop off the downtown connector at exit 244 and south less than a mile. It is in a pretty rough-looking neighborhood about a stone’s throw up the street from the federal pen. If you’ve never seen this gigantic building, you should, as it’s an architectural masterpiece. Unfortunately, Harold’s itself is in a pretty basic and deeply ugly building, and the bars around the windows and the air conditioning units don’t inspire great confidence in the local residents’ rap sheets.

I apologize for repeating much of the online information about this restaurant, but some things are so blatant that I can’t avoid coming back to it.

I’m very glad we finally stopped into this Atlanta institution. Despite the “keep driving, and fast” exterior, the inside is cozy and relaxing, and also quite chilly, since one of the air conditioners seemed to be working overtime. There’s a glorious smell of thick smoke throughout the building, and interior walls in the kitchen that are blackened from more than sixty years of smoking. It’s a building with a lot of history; we were taken care of by Harold and Hugh’s granddaughter, who’s been here for forty years herself.

As for the food, the chopped pork is pretty good. It’s very soft and dry, almost incandescently white. Unfortunately, I didn’t like either of the sauces at all, and made the considerable mistake – the novice mistake – of just pouring the hot sauce all over my food before testing it. Theirs is a thick, red, tomato-and-pepper concoction that leaves a Tabasco-style aftertaste and overpowers the subtle, smoky taste of the soft pork. While I would certainly recommend Harold’s, I would caution anybody going to try a little on the side before indulging too much.

The main dish is pretty good, but the sides are just outstanding. The Brunswick stew is probably the best anywhere near Atlanta. It’s really thick, with a very heavy corn flavor, and lots of tomatoes and stringy shreds of meat. The corn taste reminded me of the wonderful Zeb’s in Danielsville. The plates are served with a generous helping of cracklin’ cornbread. Crumble just a little of that into your stew and scoop it right back out, and that’s perfect. If I have had cracklin’ cornbread – named for the little pork cracklings that Food Network describes as “little pieces of pork fat, fatty meats, or ham skin which are left crisp and brown after the lard or fat has been rendered from them” – before, I don’t recall it. Honestly, there’s not a great deal of meat in the bread, but it’s so tasty that didn’t feel that I was missing anything.

The slaw is also excellent; a perfect blend of mayo and vinegar that goes extremely well with the stew and pork. It’s simply a perfectly balanced meal, even if the sauce was disappointing.

Harold’s attempted to expand just a little from this neighborhood, but unfortunately it didn’t last. There were two outposts south of the city, in Jonesboro and in McDonough, and a third up near us in Kennesaw, but apparently all three have closed. Only the original remains, which, honestly, is kind of the way it should be. Older joints with this much history, well, visitors should go to them for the experience almost as much as the food. With stew this good, I hope to be back for both before too long.

Poole’s Bar-B-Q, East Ellijay GA

I had to track down Randy before I wrote up this chapter and let him know what I was going to say, for fear that he might think that I was making a passive-aggressive swipe at him when I say that Poole’s is probably the most improved restaurant that I have ever visited. They’ve gone from a regional curiosity to something downright amazing.

Last week, Marie and Ivy and I drove up I-575 to the mountain town of Ellijay to buy some apples. There’s a really great place on the right just after you enter Gilmer County called Panorama Orchards, and while you could very well load up with all sorts of jams and jellies and salsas, you can also spend late summer and early fall loading up on fresh apples. Marie got several pecks – Fujis, Mutsus, Arkansas Black – to share and to snack and to bake into pies. That’s a very agreeable way to spend an hour.

A little further north, and technically in the town of East Ellijay, there’s an intersection where, within spitting distance of each other, you used to be able to find a Pizza King, a Burger King, a Waffle King and a Mexican restaurant called El Rey. The Waffle King has gone now – I suspect this old chain might well have left Georgia entirely – but I still think of this place as “King’s Corner.” A zigzag right and a left from there brings you to the Pig Hill of Fame, and one of the state’s silliest and tackiest restaurants. Once upon a time, Colonel Oscar Poole fell afoul of some county sign ordinance or other and responded by turning his property into a glorious eyesore. The building is painted in vibrant, bright colors, and the land behind the restaurant is covered with small, flat, wooden pig signs which customers can buy for a small fee and have their names listed there until weather erodes them away.

Poole himself is quite a trip. I only saw him in person once, briefly, years back, but I can’t think of a restaurateur in the state who’s been photographed as often as him. He’s a little hard to miss. He’s kind of a cross between Grandpa Munster and Uncle Sam. He even drives a car that Grandpa might have found funny.

If you read between the lines of earlier chapters, you might have picked up that I don’t care for having politics inserted into my meals when I go out. You might have also have detected that the politics to which I object would be the Republican variety. But really, what makes a place unfriendly isn’t a discussion of ideas, it’s that grim, quiet, paranoia that unhappy people spend time seething about. It’s when loudmouths start parroting whatever hate radio talking point passes for discourse, and loudmouths have been doing this long before anybody heard of Barack Obama. I’ve been quietly declining to return to restaurants owned by such morons for many years.

Poole, on the other hand, may be as Republican as they get, but he is having the time of his life. He wants to tell everybody how fantastic a job he has, and how his faith and outlook and damn hard work and, yes, political views, have helped made him a success. He’s optimistic and wild and carefree, and basically everything good about people. If you don’t leave this place with a smile, something must be wrong with you, because his upbeat and fabulous attitude is evident in all the staff, the decor, the photographs and the building itself. You are guaranteed a very good time here.

For quite a few years, however, this didn’t translate into very good barbecue. Randy stayed up here in the mountains for a few years and we ate here a couple of times (maybe in 2003-04) and then ate again at the antacid counter of the local drug store. It was, then, a place to visit for the considerable spectacle, but the pork was just so greasy that it really disappointed.

I told a lot of people this. I used to have an old barbecue review page on Geocities and shared this disappointment with everyone who came to it. I don’t know whether Poole ever saw that page or whether he concluded on his own that his pork was too fatty and gross and his recipe needed changing, but I can tell you this: I once had two meals here, about a year apart, which were marred by the heavy, greasy aftertaste, and a meal this past week which was easily among the best plates of barbecue that I’ve had in the state of Georgia. Top ten, easy. I was prepared to sop up the pork with a paper towel before I started eating, but was very pleasantly surprised. The pork was dry and very smoky, and so incredibly flavorful. I can’t remember ever having a meal at a restaurant that much of a 180-degree turn towards the positive before, ever. It wasn’t just the pork, either. We also had onion rings, Brunswick stew, baked beans, green beans and mac and cheese as sides, and everything was incredibly tasty.

The restaurant was amazingly busy on this Saturday – they call in extra, volunteer help for Ellijay’s apple festival, which brings in thousands of tourists – and we arrived along with a huge tour group from a Baptist church in Louisiana, most of whom were wearing LSU shirts. Let’s see, they had this great barbecue for lunch and the Tigers beat Florida in The Swamp that evening. Sounds like everybody there had a fine Saturday.

(Of course, the small irony in comparing Oscar Poole to Grandpa Munster is that Grandpa Al Lewis was about as left-wing as they get, although equally bombastic and fun. No offense, Col. Poole.)