Zeb’s Bar-B-Q, Danielsville GA

At some point in the early ’90s, I drove from Athens to Greenville, South Carolina up US 29 and passed by Zeb’s Bar-B-Q, a little roadside restaurant in the oddest location. It’s about seven miles north of Danielsville, about halfway between that town and Franklin Springs, in between nothing whatsoever and a field. I thought that delightful, hand-painted sign out front was laugh-out-loud charming and quaint and wished Zeb well indeed as I sped on by. I don’t know what I thought I would be doing in Greenville, but I’m reasonably positive that I wasn’t going to eat as well there as I could have, had I stopped here instead. Continue reading “Zeb’s Bar-B-Q, Danielsville GA” →

Paul’s Bar-B-Q, Lexington GA (CLOSED)

At some point in the mid-90s, I started taking an interest in what I know today is classified as “roadfood,” and decided to cast my net wide and learn about some fascinating restaurants in the small towns that surround Athens in and around northeast Georgia. I sat down with the Flagpole Guide to Athens and, for the first time in my six years in town, read the darn thing cover to cover. The restaurant listings just amazed me. There were dozens more places to eat than I ever knew about. Most intriguing, in the barbecue section, was Paul’s Bar-B-Q in Lexington, which, the listing promised, was only open on Saturdays and on the Fourth of July. Continue reading “Paul’s Bar-B-Q, Lexington GA (CLOSED)” →

Miss Myra’s Pit Bar-B-Q, Birmingham AL

A few chapters previously, I mentioned how the discovery of mayonnaise-based white barbecue sauce in Clarkesville, Georgia had changed everything. “Oh, yes,” some people say, “that’s what they have in northern Alabama,” but that isn’t true. White sauce is still extremely obscure and not at all common. One of my co-workers was born and raised in Tuscaloosa and he’d never heard of it until I asked him about it. Heck, the girl we spoke with at a fair trade importer right in the heart of downtown Birmingham had only a vague idea what we were talking about. I don’t know that it’s as accurate to call it a regional delicacy as it is some weird thing that only a scattered few oddballs know about. Continue reading “Miss Myra’s Pit Bar-B-Q, Birmingham AL” →

Hawg Wild BBQ & Catfish House, Clarkesville GA

Suddenly, as the Flaming Lips once put it, everything has changed.

We got back from the coast with a slightly depleted bank balance, so we ate at home for a week. The following Saturday, we drove up to Tallulah Falls. The gorge, where we enjoy a couple of hours hiking, is one of my favorite places in the world, and an absolutely perfect getaway. Over the course of our visits, we’ve discovered a favorite roadside market and some good barbecue in the nearby town of Clayton, but this time, I wanted to find something new. Continue reading “Hawg Wild BBQ & Catfish House, Clarkesville GA” →

Two Brothers Barbecue, Ball Ground GA

I was out of town yesterday on business, hoping-to-earn-a-little-extra-money-business, with Randy, who, apart from an unfortunate willingness to eat at those gawdawful Chinese buffets, isn’t at all a bad egg. The road took us north through Ball Ground, a town, they say, which was mostly owned by a miser named Oscar Robinson who died in 2005 with an incredibly complicated estate. Robinson owned most of the buildings in the small town and filled them with rocks. He’d sell them, of course, but that’s what the buildings housed: rock stores. Apparently there are still millions of dollars left unaccounted for, and some of it’s probably holed up in one downtown building or another. The current owners are in no rush to tear down anything or let somebody clear it out, for fear that a big sack of money might be under a staircase or in a wall or something. On the one hand, Robinson didn’t seem to do very much for bringing economic development to Ball Ground, but on the other, he kept the Wal-Marts out of town. Frankly, we all owe that man a beer in heaven.

The road took us to Two Brothers, a place I left in a fit of completely unjustified pique about eight years previously. The interior of the place is done up like a whacking huge tool shed, full of rusty old farm equipment, those glass insulators for power lines that you always see in places like this, and old soda bottles lining the walls. Eight years ago, I had my eye on a bottle of Kickapoo Joy Juice from the late sixties. This was a Ski / Mountain Dew clone made to cash in on the Li’l Abner comic strip, and sold at the (now abandoned) Dogpatch USA theme park, along with shops throughout the region. These days, it’s bottled with a paper label and sold in specialty stores for nerds like me, some of whom like to pretend that they can tell the difference between it and Mountain Dew. Anyway, I like the original bottle, and they wouldn’t sell it to me, and so I walked off in a supposed huff and didn’t come back because they were so “mean.” Plus, they’re in Ball Ground.

Well, I’m willing to let bygones be bygones after eight years, especially when I’m the one who lost out by not eating this great food.

Lunch and supper are served here Thursday through Sunday. You go through cafeteria-style and usually have seven or eight sides to choose, with pickles, onions and chow-chow available by the register. The stew – I’m not picky about stew, I just want to see it available as a side – is a thick one you can eat with a fork, similar to the hash you get in Athens and the Carolinas. They have a mild and a hot tomato-based sauce and they’re pretty conservative with it.

This is a good little place, ready to fill you up for about ten bucks. Admittedly, every time I look at the paper-labeled bottle of Kickapoo on my mantle, it sticks in my craw a little, but I think I can justify stopping by more often than once every eight years. You never know; I might need some rocks.

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.