Johnny Rockets, Atlanta GA

So Johnny Rockets, a deeply 1980s concept restaurant which occasionally attempts to evoke the 1950s, invited some local media to come visit their newly reopened store at Phipps Plaza and learn about their company. The store in the Phipps Plaza mall had been there for many years, but the entire mall food court was gutted last year, along with several clothing stores on the upper floors, to make way for the Legoland Discovery Center. By all accounts, this attraction is doing very good business – there seems to be a ridiculous amount of things to do here – but the restaurant’s shindig was held at the time that Legoland closes each weekday, so we didn’t see any rampaging mobs of children, or gangs of obsessed grown-ups desperately digging through the bins in the gift shop looking for the last, elusive bricks that they need in order to replace the red half-height two-by-sixes that they lost when their Harry Potter Quidditch set fell off the mantle and some of the Legos fell into the fireplace.

Yeah, that’s right, I said LEGOS. I PLURALIZED your brand, Lego. And I might do it again. Continue reading “Johnny Rockets, Atlanta GA” →

Souper Jenny, Atlanta GA

My past is going down like dominoes. Two months ago, I found burritos at Bell Street that are almost as wonderful as the ones at the dearly missed Mean Bean, my all-time favorite restaurant. Two weeks ago, I stopped by Souper Jenny in Buckhead and had the best bowl of gazpacho that I have ever had, anywhere. This was even better than the Mean Bean’s gazpacho, against which all others are judged. Continue reading “Souper Jenny, Atlanta GA” →

Cafe Agora, Atlanta GA

Quite a few people have mentioned Cafe Agora in Buckhead to me over the years, most recently a commenter called Chef Helen, who recommended their awesome baba ghanoush. When I told the fellow working the register that I’d heard theirs was the best baba ghanoush in the city, he lowered his brow as though I’d belittled him. “Everything here is the best in the city,” he insisted. Big words for such a small restaurant! Continue reading “Cafe Agora, Atlanta GA” →

Bloggers Invade the Buckhead Diner

A couple of weeks ago, Marie and I finally got to put some faces to some names and meet a few of our fellow hobbyists. We were invited to join a little gang called the Atlanta Food Bloggers Society – you’ve probably seen the little “plate” icon on the sidebar to your right by now – and the launch party for the group was held at the venerable Buckhead Diner, in conjunction with some new menu items that they have rolled out. Well, there is one face that we knew ahead of time; we’ve known Rebecca Mendelsohn of Atlanta Foodies, who organized this group, for a few months in our “civilian” identities before we realized that we were each bloggers. Also present that afternoon: Amy on Food, Atlanta Restaurant Blog, The Blissful Glutton, Fiddlehead Foraging and The Food and Me. All we needed was for me to pretend to be dead and everybody else could have played an awesome game of How To Host a Murder.

We met at the Diner, which I recall opening with great hoopla in 1987, because its owners, the Buckhead Life Group, wanted a chance to show off some of its new menu offerings from the new executive chef, Charles Schwab. I confess that I felt a moment’s pause about offering a “review” of the goodies that we tried, as just about every chapter that we’ve written here has been written from the perspective of us, anonymously, enjoying, and paying for, a good meal at someplace that we would like to share with our readers. I trust that our readers will understand that on this occasion, we were invited under the purview of a small social media event to greet the chef and representatives of Buckhead Life Group for a complementary presentation of the new concoctions on their menu, specifically to get the word out to our readers. I can’t, therefore, “review” the restaurant, whose sterling reputation has been speaking for itself since I was in high school anyway, as the experience was not at all like what regular diners will experience.

With that in mind, they started us off with some white truffle deviled eggs before giving us some pimento cheese-filled hush puppies that they termed “fritters.” I really lucked out here, as Marie’s nursing-mandated avoidance of dairy meant that I got her fritters. They then brought out “day boats” of ceviche, made from rotating recipes, served with plantain and sweet potato chips. The ceviche that we enjoyed included shrimp, calamari and small scallops. It was followed by a plate of spicy tempura shrimp, and that was followed by a pizza, made with a very thin crust and pesto sauce, then a Cobb salad, pecan-encrusted Maine cod, an entree of turkey jardiniere, and finally a renowned and decadent – I am definitely using that word far too frequently to describe desserts, but I mean it here – white chocolate banana cream pie.

The tempura rock shrimp was my personal favorite of the selections.

The Cobb salad, however, was possibly the consensus favorite of the group.

The turkey jardiniere is served underneath a salad of its own, with tomatoes, arugula, radishes and potatoes, with a lemon vinaigrette drizzle.

I’ll tell you honestly, there was not one thing that I disliked. They have put together a splendid menu – it is a pricey one, mind – of some incredibly tasty things, and if they did so knowing that any misstep could be magnified and communicated to readers who might (in my experience) blow things further out of proportion, then so be it. They didn’t make any missteps. Possibly the least interesting thing among the treats they provided was the pizza, but it was still exponentially superior to plenty of other pizzas in town.

I enjoyed the tempura shrimp best, followed by the turkey dish, and then probably the pimento cheese fritters. They really balanced the spice of the shrimp quite perfectly. It had a kick without lingering, but was the most pleasant possible kick. The turkey was utterly unlike the dry meat that I typically dislike. It was moist and juicy and exciting, and served with a splendid complement of veggies that I would never have guessed would go so well with it. These little paper-thin radishes, of all things, just went perfectly with it.

The Cobb salad seemed to be the overall favorite of the table, and I wouldn’t say that anybody was wrong for loving it. This has to have been one of the freshest salads that I’ve ever had; every vegetable tasted like it was picked that morning, with the avocado in particular just electrifyingly vibrant. The blue cheese – apparently Point Reyes blue rather than the Diner’s popular and famous Maytag blue – was probably my favorite thing in it, though. I could have had a heaping spoonful of that cheese.

We thanked our hosts at the Diner for showing off their treats and enjoyed sharing a little shop talk with each other. The Blissful Glutton, whose blog has sadly been a little dormant while she has been working as the editor of Eater Atlanta, has probably been doing this longer than anybody else in town, but she still has a lot of passion for good meals. That’s reassuring; we have all seen some good food blogs dry up and blow away as their writers lose interest. This was a very positive afternoon. We all have blogs that we enjoy reading, and restaurants that we love to visit, and everybody wanted to talk about engaging writers and good places to eat, without dwelling on the bad. I suppose, when a hobby remains as, sensibly, unorganized as ours, there’s really no opportunity for drama unless you just want to be a diva and call other people out for daring to disagree with you about a restaurant. Life’s just better, though, when you’re pleasant.

We touched on the curious alchemy of Urbanspoon rankings, a subject near and dear to my heart, what with so many restaurants that I’ve visited proving so colossally unpopular, unhip and uncool that I’d have to post about two thousand trips to Frankie & Johnny’s to have the same statistical impact as a single visit to Fogo de Chao. On that note, I have tried, without much success, to invite some other writers whose blogs that I enjoy to join Urbanspoon and start enjoying the benefits of the spoonback linking. It brings a good deal more traffic to our blog, and I enjoy seeing how my chief peers and I move up and down the rankings. Of course, many of these sites that I enjoy most – Buster’s BBQ Blog, Chopped Onion, Where’s the Best BBQ? – detail older roadfood and rural places, and not on the more intown trendy joints – like Buckhead Diner – that get you higher up the big city rankings, but it sure would be easier to follow good blogs like them were they in my Urbanspoon news feed.

Leslie, of The Food and Me, hoped that the rest of us might offer suggestions about prompting more comments from her readers. Short of going negative, we were all stumped, noting that pretty much the only time that any of us can reliably expect comments of any sort is when we tick off a restaurant’s owner. Or his sockpuppets. I think that we would all like more interaction with our readers, though. Sometimes, I wonder how Marie and I managed to pick up so darn many of you. Drop us a line once in a while; let us know how we’re doing. All of us!

Pie Shop (CLOSED) and Smashburger, Atlanta GA

A few Fridays back, I took Marie and the children out for supper. Naturally, I’d heard talk about Denver’s Smashburger chain and their decision to invade our turf. I feel pretty confident in the quality of Atlanta’s home-grown burger joints; Smashburger must be pretty confident in their ability to show us up at our own game.

Other burger joints have tried; their store in the Lindbergh neighborhood has actually gone into the space that Fatburger vacated. So, is Smashburger good enough to play with the big boys?

The answer is emphatically yes. This is a much better meal than what Fatburger offered. It’s considerably better than Grindhouse, and it’s better than Cheeseburger Bobby’s, which is really good, but most of Atlanta’s never-cross-the-perimeter crowd still don’t know about. It’s a lot better than Five Guys. Your mileage may vary, but I enjoyed the heck out of this.

On our first visit, I had the Atlanta Burger. One of this chain’s really fun quirks is to tailor one menu item to go with each city where they open. So our town’s signature burger comes with pimento cheese, peach barbecue sauce, grilled jalapenos and cole slaw. It was terrific; I enjoyed it with a side of fried pickles and was ready for a second. Actually, I think that they’re missing one cute trick here. You know how everybody who writes about food on the internet talks with a wink about In-N-Out Burger and their “secret” menu? Smashburger should definitely have ingredients and recipes for all these signature burgers in the system, so that, even not on the menu, a guest in Atlanta can ask for a Denver burger, or whatever. Sadly, on a follow-up visit, where I had the “Ultimate Cheese” – excellent, but really more defined by the pile of fried onions than the cheese – the manager said that you’d have to order the signatures “manually,” using the “create your own” ingredients, and hope the local store has what you need.

On that first visit, Marie had a classic burger and really liked it, and did a “create your own” the next time out. On the first visit, she had the fries tossed in a little herb mixture of olive oil and rosemary, and sweet potato fries the next time. We agree that these are better burgers than most places in the city, and certainly in the top ten.

Now, while many of this city’s bloggers have been covering the burgers quite well (Amy on Food, as always, has some terrific photos in her short report), I don’t see where anybody has mentioned the salads. My daughter, who loves good burgers, decided to get a salad this evening, and none of us were prepared for its size. While the basic burger, available in three sizes, is quite sensibly proportioned, the salad comes in a bucket only slightly smaller than your head. Don’t order one of these unless you’d like to share. In all, it is really good food and quite nicely priced. The three of us ate well for under $20.

Electing to continue visiting places that are all the rage this summer, after we finished, we passed on a Smashburger milkshake – made from Häagen-Dazs ice cream – and drove over to Pie Shop in Buckhead to see what they had to offer. I think that I broke Marie. Sometimes, food makes her so happy that strange things happen. We went back to my mother’s house to pick up her car and she fell asleep on the couch, dreaming of blueberries.

Now, one thing that I really didn’t like about Pie Shop was having to pay to park, but that’s the suburbanite in me talking. I’ve got old-fashioned ideas about parking in strip malls. This place is located around the back of an old strip center, above and behind a nail place, on Roswell Road, between the Shane’s Rib Shack and the Roxy, and parking costs five bucks*. If you were going to just hop in to buy a pie to go – they run between $30 and $40, or $4.60 a slice – you could probably get away with it, but if you’re going to stay for your dessert and a glass of milk, you’d probably better cough up the money.

Okay, the other thing that I really didn’t like was that I read The Food Abides’ glowing review of the place earlier that afternoon and was roaring ready to try their ganache pie. They didn’t have any. I had to make do with chocolate cream, which is just about my favorite kind of pie anyway, other than shoofly. It was amazing. I had a scoop of whipped cream along with it. You’ve never had whipped cream so good. I washed it down with a glass of milk. It took quite a long time to finish. If I hadn’t paid my five bucks, they could’ve towed my car twice over. It was just so rich and wonderful that I had to eat it very slowly.

The pie that ended up knocking Marie out was the blueberry. After some debate, my daughter went for the key lime, which was fresh out of the oven. It’s fun to watch her at work. My daughter does not often praise business owners or thank them for meals, unless she’s so bowled over that a fuss must be made. She ended up telling one of the girls that work there that she loved the food, and, in answer to their sign, as a pie lover, she should work there and asked would they hire her. Never mind that she’s twelve.

There isn’t really enough room at Pie Shop to linger. Most of the interior is given over to the baking area, with cooking tables and ovens, with just two tables for guests to sit. I thought the place was completely charming and the food was just remarkable, but we might do better to pick up some slices to take back to my mother’s place next time. For one, we won’t have to pay to park (but see below), and for another, we can more safely enjoy a food coma with a sofa upon which to collapse.

*Update: An unfortunate mistake here; Pie Shop’s owner, Mims, wrote to let us know that the parking is enforced only during the later evening, when the clubs are open! Nothing is stopping you. Go!

Update: In early December, Smashburger moved into our neighborhood with a store on Barrett Parkway in front of Town Center. It’s very nice to have such a quality meal available so close to us, especially with the yummy pimento cheeseburger as an option.