West Egg Cafe, Atlanta GA

A few Fridays back, I had not decided where I was going for lunch, and then I got peckish early and set out to find some breakfast instead. I actually work with two former employees of West Egg Cafe on Howell Mill, and they speak fondly of their time there. So I looked over the menu and was very interested by some of the things that they assemble there.

West Egg Cafe was once a Jake’s Ice Cream store. I’m not certain for how long, but the franchise owner elected to get out of ice cream and strike out on her own with coffees, breakfasts and sandwiches. They do offer a few desserts in the form of pastries and cupcakes. I took home one of their celebrated Coca-Cola cupcakes to share with Marie and, frankly, was not impressed, but that’s okay. The omelet that I had in the restaurant was so darn good that it didn’t matter.

I’ve never had pimento cheese in an omelet before! I was torn between this and the Georgia Benedict, which is turkey sausage, eggs and gravy over a biscuit. That sounds wonderful, but the omelet was just fine. It came with a delicious biscuit and potatoes grilled in a skillet.

This place can get really busy, so breakfast guests should expect a wait. Fortunately, the deck behind the restaurant appears to be free, so there’s plenty of space to park. The service was downright excellent, with a small army of servers stopping by to check on everybody. I don’t go out for breakfast all that often, but it’s always nice to add to my options with a place as fun as this.

Mountain Biscuits, Marietta GA

Here is a first for our blog. We’ve never considered a restaurant for inclusion, dined, declined and then gave them another chance before. Mountain Biscuits, a very busy place on Old 41 between the Church Street Extension and Barrett Parkway, got back on our better side after a less-than-thrilling introduction suggested just enough promise to make me want to give them another try, and while the results still were not quite perfect, the second trip was certainly warranted.

A few Thursdays back, I was looking around for something new to eat or revisit, when Mountain Biscuits came up as a “nearby suggestion” to some place on the Marietta Square that I was considering. They allegedly made a very good chicken sandwich, and so I drove over there to try it. The drive wasn’t at all bad, and the lovely old building, very photogenic, was inspiring. It is no fault of the restaurant, but the illusion of a middle-of-nowhere roadside shack is sadly spoiled by the presence of some condos across the street.

While the service was impeccable and very friendly, I found this chicken sandwich to be completely overrated and overpriced. It wasn’t bad, and I was not offended, but it was incredibly ordinary. It just tasted like an interstate fast food chicken sandwich, and I couldn’t understand why on earth I was paying $5.75(!) for something that tasted like it came from a Wendy’s or something. The bun, in particular, set off the trucked-in alarm. I crossed this place off my “to-blog” list.

But I noticed something curious as I had my lunch. From 11 to 3, six days a week, they offer lunch, with the promise of burgers and barbecue and an overindulgent plate of loaded fries that I might have ordered had the awesome, super-friendly woman at the register not told me that they were frozen fries. While they were not completely packed while I was there, they were nevertheless busy, and despite the lunch hour, every single person who came in seemed to be ordering biscuits instead of typical lunch fare. Were these biscuits really so good that they made for better 1 pm lunches than this ordinary sandwich?

My return was assured when the woman at the register started passing around little sample cups of their potato salad. While I almost never order this anymore for diet reasons, I do certainly love it, and this stuff was incredibly curious and interesting. If you will, it’s baked potato salad, and it tastes a whole lot like a loaded baked potato, with bacon and sour cream. In point of fact, while I have had better, I have never had anything like this, and I believe in celebrating unique dining-out experiences. I also felt that I should be judging a restaurant based on what they make in-house, rather than what some truck brings. If the potato salad was any indication, they really can make some great stuff here.

So two mornings later, while my daughter embarked on a lengthy and detailed makeup job for her Anime Weekend Atlanta costume, Marie and the baby and I paid them a second visit for breakfast. We joined a very long line and were rewarded with some excellent biscuits. They are not, perhaps, quite in the same league as Stilesboro Biscuits a few miles up the road, who set the gold standard, but they’re nevertheless really good. The line’s length is testimony that they are doing something very right.

I think these treats are a little firmer than Stilesboro’s, and Mountain makes them memorable by putting this wonderful concoction called Farmer’s Biscuit Syrup on the tables. It’s sort of a thin molasses and it goes incredibly well with a hot, buttered biscuit of this consistency. Frankly, should we return for breakfast one day, I won’t even bother with any meat filling. As good as the country ham was, and it was quite good, I think drowning a plain biscuit in this delicious goo and eating it with a fork would really be something. Doesn’t that sound insanely indulgent? I’ll do that on a day when I’m planning to eat two ounces of steamed cauliflower for lunch.

I do, however, operate with a pretty strict three-strikes rule where Fox News is concerned. If I do go back for a third visit and the single TV there is still tuned to that propagandist garbage, it will be the last time. Maybe I’ll wait a good while, and see whether they’re giving their lunches the same homemade attention as their breakfast, and told that guy in the Flowers Bakery truck that he no longer needs to bring them those awful buns. The baked potato salad is clearly a step in the right direction and shows what they want to be doing. Hopefully, over time, they’ll refine their lunch recipes further and turn out a chicken sandwich that’s every bit as unique, and warrants the price. If they’ve turned that divisive dirt off the TV, it’ll show that they really mean business.

Blue Moon Café, Baltimore MD

(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, we’ll tell you about them.)

Have you ever noticed that the best of families just don’t want to risk anybody going hungry? We had stayed on the Thursday night with Marie’s Aunt Bertie and Uncle Bruce in Philadelphia, and we made certain they knew that we had breakfast plans in Baltimore, but Bertie just didn’t like the thought of us leaving town without something to eat. We woke a little before seven and there was an amazing spread of cheese and fruit waiting for us. We settled in and relaxed for a while. We wouldn’t be getting out on the road for a little bit yet.

Again following a recommendation from Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, we made our way down I-95 to the Fells Point neighborhood of Baltimore, and had our second breakfast of the day at Blue Moon Café. This place is, again, completely wonderful and completely justified the attention. Obviously, that show’s researchers do their work and pick great places, so nobody looks stupid when tourists show up to try restaurants out.

It was packed; we had about a twenty-minute wait and it almost immediately turned into an hour wait behind us, but the staff works their socks off and are downright excellent at their jobs. Wonderfully, we were seated at the counter and could see the cook singing and dancing to every single song played on that Jack-FM station while we were there, prepping and stirring and slicing with abandon and flourish. We had a great time. And the food…?

Decadent as hell. That’s an order of Cap’n Crunch French Toast and while all the walking we did mostly counteracted the food we ate, the pound that I did gain from all this eatin’ came from this thing. AND I WOULD DO IT AGAIN.

Unfortunately, Blue Moon seems to be just as well known for their line as their food. Reading what other bloggers have said, I’m incredibly grateful for only having to wait twenty minutes. Close to two hours seems to be the norm! I think that if you’re visiting Baltimore, I’d plan to go on a Wednesday or Thursday. Go on the weekend and you’re probably giving up a huge chunk of your day.

This stop turned out to be one of the most personally satisfying little chunks of the road trip, because the restaurant was literally three blocks’ walk from the stretch of road and the great old building on the waterfront where Homicide: Life on the Street, the best program ever made for American television, was filmed. It was so wonderful to walk around that place, where all those amazing actors had worked, and catch a little of the harbor breeze. It was a really nice day for it.

Frankie & Johnny’s, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

Here’s an incredibly interesting restaurant. It’s not worth knocking over anybody to have breakfast here – in fact, if you go looking for good grits, it’s not worth visiting at all – but I swear, this place fell through a crack in time. It looks and feels like a place with no relationship whatsoever to the modern world. Social media? Twitter updates? Not this place. Nobody talks about it, least of all on that “internet” thing. Don’t believe me? Google it. You’ll see an Urbanspoon listing with votes from eight people, and me over at Roadfood.com asking whether anybody knew anything about it, and a bunch of Yellow Pages and Yelp listings with no user reviews at all.

The parking lot does to your car’s alignment only slightly less damage than falling off a cliff. The sign – a beautiful, rusted anachronism – has fallen apart and is no more. This weird, vintage thing is what caught my eye the first time that I drove past it. A little more than a year ago, I stopped by and photographed the sign just for my own sake. Had I known then that the silly picture of the nice young couple in the roadster was going to fall out and crash into the potholes beneath it, I would have taken more care not to capture part of a Taco Bell billboard behind it. Well, I never claimed to be a good photographer.

Inside, it is as quiet as the grave. It is a classic roadfood stop for truckers and utility company drivers. It’s where you can go to get a cheap, enormous breakfast. I had bacon – fantastic bacon – eggs, grits and toast for four bucks. Well, the grits weren’t worth eating. That bacon was amazing.

From 10:30 until 2, they serve lunch in a buffet line. Looks like they offer lasagna, meat loaf and the like, with all the trimmings. Then at two, this place shuts down and returns to the other side of 1967, to decay and rust and rot away further. It’s the most authentic – if that word means anything right now – breakfast experience I’ve had lately. I can imagine my late father eating here four times a week for years and never mentioning it to anybody, because it wouldn’t occur to him to do so. It is what it is, and does not aspire to more. But this isn’t destination food. The young crowd that “rediscovered” Pabst Blue Ribbon has not found this yet. This is for local workers, men who do not mind destroying the alignments of their company’s trucks.

I asked about it. I learned nothing. The owner, an older Asian man, said that he’d been open for seven years. I said that the business must be much older. He agreed. I suggested that the building must have been there a long time. He said that it had. I asked him what happened to his sign. He said the sign was still there. I laughed and said that once, there had been a picture in the middle, where there is only a hole now. Not laughing, he agreed that yes, once, there had been. And then he went to work setting up the lunch buffet.

I left, and time didn’t march on. It froze.

(Update, 7/25/12: Eleven months later, it was gone. Without a word or a peep or a notice anywhere, the building and the parking lot were completely gone. Logic tells us this happened after a bulldozer and a wrecking crew came in. I prefer to think it was because time folded over like a tesseract, and, just like that, the building left through a crack in time, back to where it came from, as though it had never met our troubled days.)

Palmer’s Village Cafe, Saint Simons Island GA

I find a lot of things frustrating about writing, and one of them is communicating that something is enjoyable, and sometimes very enjoyable, without being the number one absolute favorite thing that I’ve ever eaten. Part of me chalks this up to poor expression on my part, but I think that the reality is that it’s really poor reading comprehension on the part of one or two people who get the wrong end of the tail. I have been blogging or journalling for more than a decade now, and I’ve seen it happen quite a lot, even from close friends who glance over something that I’ve written and completely misunderstand it. I would much rather say that I must have been unclear than blame them for being numbskulls. Well, I guess it depends who is reading. I know one or two numbskulls. Continue reading “Palmer’s Village Cafe, Saint Simons Island GA” →

Starkville, Mississippi – part two

So I’ve been talking about our trip into the Deep South and finding some pretty good food along the way. Nothing in Mississippi had really completely knocked me for a loop, but Starkville might just not be the right place in the state. All the evidence points towards the Delta region, or Hattiesburg, being full of interesting places to eat.

But that’s not to say that Starkville is completely without charms. We certainly didn’t have any bad meals here, although the stunning number of crummy national fast food joints on Highway 12 will make anybody slowly shake their head. The first full day was pretty good, but the discoveries of the second day were even better. Continue reading “Starkville, Mississippi – part two” →

Starkville, Mississippi – part one

Not long after moving to Starkville, Mississippi, my brother-in-law Karl joined the local chapter of a fraternal organization. On our first evening there, we got to meet some of his friends from that group when we went to their usual Thursday evening post-meeting dinner retreat, the Central Station Grill. This is one of the city’s nicer, in the “clean and upscale” department, restaurants, the sort of place that most undergraduates at Mississippi State probably “take” their parents for a nice dinner in the hopes that Dad’ll get the tab. The food here was pretty good, but my children had better not try that scam with me. Wherever they go to college, and I hope that they will go far away and cultivate memories unencumbered by my own, they should know to “take” me to someplace with a lot more soul than this. Continue reading “Starkville, Mississippi – part one” →