Jack in the Box, Nashville TN

I have readers in other states who no doubt are raising an eyebrow to see a junky fast food place like this show up in their RSS reader. Hear me out, though. In the Atlanta area, Jack in the Box is a complete novelty, because this chain has very oddly chosen a curious path in its coast-to-coast expansion. Somehow, and I’m not sure this was an accident, they’ve hopped right over the entire I-75 corridor. Ubiquitous in California and the southwest, they expanded as far east as Murfreesboro, and then there’s not a thing until you get to the Carolinas. Our friend Samantha suggests that the nearest to us is in Anderson. They haven’t touched anyplace in Virginia or points north, nor Florida. It’s very weird. Continue reading “Jack in the Box, Nashville TN” →

Pied Piper Eatery, Nashville TN

I am running a little bit behind in sharing stories from our most recent road trip; we just had so much going on and enjoyed so many small, fun meals that we developed a little backlog of entries. Anyway, the road took us to Owensboro and back, with an overnight stay in one of our favorite cities, Nashville. This town, of course, has no shortage of very, very good restaurants. Since I made some friends here more than a decade ago, I’ve had some really great meals in their company. In the summer of last year, some our friends introduced us to Pied Piper Eatery in the Inglewood neighborhood northeast of downtown. It’s the sister restaurant of the long-running, much-loved Pied Piper Creamery, and is owned by family members, though they try not to cannibalize ice cream sales at the Creamery too much by only offering one or two flavors at a time. Continue reading “Pied Piper Eatery, Nashville TN” →

Allen’s, Athens GA (CLOSED)

Last week, I went down to Allen’s for a twenty-five cent beer. I didn’t get one. Honestly, you’d think, having been immortalized in song thusly, a place would keep its drink specials. Even if the song was twenty years old and reflected on a scene that was a decade and change in the past already. Continue reading “Allen’s, Athens GA (CLOSED)” →

Cook Out, Asheville NC

We’ve mentioned in the previous chapters that Marie very graciously selected the restaurants that we visited on our most recent trip to Asheville, and, even more graciously, paid for them. However, I wasn’t entirely ready to leave town without one last stop. About two hours after lunch, time spent shopping, letting my daughter have the run of things, and the uncompromisable trip to The Chocolate Fetish on Haywood for Marie to load up on dark chocolate sea salt caramels, we drove to the east side of town to show my daughter Tunnel Road, one of Asheville’s more commercial strips, full of chain restaurants and hotels. Well, there’s more than that. There is a very, very good comic shop out here called Comic Envy, a reasonably good barbecue place called Fiddlin’ Pig that I’m sure we’ll revisit, an independently-owned toy store, and a Mexican restaurant called Papas & Beer that has a heck of a lot of fans, but mostly Tunnel Road is clogged with chains. Continue reading “Cook Out, Asheville NC” →

Boardwalk Fresh Burgers & Fries, Sandy Springs GA (CLOSED)

Here’s an example of a restaurant that just crept into town. I think that the manager has done everything that anyone in his position is meant to do to get the word out – there’s a whacking great billboard right above his shop – but it hasn’t taken and people aren’t talking about it. This is a huge shame, because Boardwalk Fresh Burgers & Fries really is worth a visit, and worth a lot of talk.

Admittedly, sometimes it takes a little while for word of mouth to build. Boardwalk has been building very slowly, with most of their business over thirty years confined to sports arenas and fry carts around the mid-Atlantic states. The conversion to a “fast casual” burger joint came in 2007, and they now claim nine restaurants in six states.

The french fries are definitely this place’s draw. Don’t get me wrong; they cook up some very good burgers, but Atlanta is, as we’ve established, more than awash in very good burgers and it is tough to stand out. But these fries, well, darned if I can think of any other burger joint in town to offer fries this good. There are better burgers in Atlanta, but I don’t believe that any of Boardwalk’s many competitors in the field have such good fries.

Last week, Marie and I met up with Samantha and with Neal, who had just returned from his California trip. We all drove separately, and Neal and Marie each mentioned something which might be blocking the restaurant’s hopes for success: nobody can find the place. Marie, using Google Maps and Neal, using GPS, each got bad directions to a place which should be incredibly easy to find. I just tried it myself on Google and it says, quite wrongly, “destination will be on the left” when coming from downtown Atlanta. That’s not true. Going north on Roswell Road from the perimeter, it is less than a mile on the right, just past the El Azteca in a strip mall in front of the Lowe’s.

Once you do find the place, you’ll find a menu board that’s not hugely different from the industry standard. Customers can order a basic burger with one or two patties and an assortment of toppings or one of a few different specialty items with the extra-priced toppings added. Honestly, I don’t see the need to pay for mushrooms or bacon when I have come to sample ground beef, unless I want something considerably different. Neal went with the chicken, but the rest of us just had single patties with basic lettuce and tomatoes. I had ketchup and their chipotle sauce on the side. This turned out to be the only disappointment of the meal; as a little bit on the bottom of my burger, the chipotle was unmemorable and brought out nothing, but as a fry dip, the sauce had no tang at all to it, and the flavor did not mix with the potato.

Five Guys is the obvious comparison point here. Despite the flashy design and colorful interior, Boardwalk feels like it is following in Five Guys’ shadow, but they excel in every way. I enjoy Five Guys, although I have not eaten at one in a very long time – they are big enough that they don’t miss me – and they provide a good baseline for acceptable quality in a good burger. Marie, Samantha and I all agreed that this was a better hamburger, and far less greasy than what Five Guys offers. It is certainly on a par with Cheeseburger Bobby’s.

But these fries, well, these are superior to Five Guys in every possible way, and miles better than the awful fries that the otherwise great Bobby’s makes. Unfortunately, I made the calamitously bad mistake of ordering chili cheese fries. These were not bad, but I assure you, these fries need neither chili nor cheese. The restaurant suggests that you eat them “Maryland style” with vinegar and Old Bay seasoning. Fortunately, Neal and Samantha each had more than enough fries to share for us to try those add-ons. I like Old Bay seasoning a lot – it’s basically celery salt with mustard, black and red pepper and pinches of another ten things – and if I’d ordered fries without chili and cheese, I’d have blanketed ’em in Old Bay.

Neal bought a dessert for us all to share, probably because he was still smarting from the funnel cakes that he didn’t get to try out in California. Boardwalk’s “funnel fries” are (and there’s no way to explain this without repeatedly using this word like a bad, novice journalist, hence this lengthy parenthetical comment to break them up) fried to come out in a fry shape and covered in powdered sugar. Because we’re all trying to find some compromise between watching our weight and eating the bejezus out of everything wonderful that comes our direction, one order of funnel anything is plenty for four people.

Besides, with the overeating planned for the weekend, nobody needed more than a quarter-order of funnel fries. More on that next time.

(Update 11/29/11: Sadly, the Sandy Springs store closed this month. Boardwalk is continuing to open stores in the New England states, and a second Atlanta location has opened in midtown’s Ansley Mall.)

(Update 3/25/12: But wait! Another franchisee has reopened this store! Better luck this time, fellows!)

(Update 10/15/12: Aaaaand, it has closed again.)

Googie Burger, Atlanta GA

If you’ve been reading since the beginning, you might recall that Marie and I used to enjoy having lunch together once a week. Unfortunately, her job packed up and left downtown to go outside the perimeter, but we used to try and meet up on Mondays in Centennial Olympic Park. Since she had a longer lunch than me, she would get our burgers from Just Around the Corner, and we would dig into those at the park’s dancing fountains.

Now that Marie’s job has taken her into Dunwoody, she is missing out on Googie Burger, which opened in August. It’s in the pavilion right next door to the fountains, which means that motorists can get all grouchy about having to find some parking and walk to get here. It also means that some of our fellow restaurant hobbyists can get all too-cool-for-school about Atlanta having yet another boutique burger place. I say, bring ’em on. I’m of the opinion that Atlanta’s burger “scene” is by far the best in the country, and we should encourage all these newcomer restaurants that are doing such a great job with hamburgers. It’s not like any of the better ones are visibly hurting for business.

I usually brown-bag it for lunch – not that, between leftovers of the amazing suppers that we cook and Boar’s Head deli meats, I am hurting in any way – but I wanted to give this place a try so I walked over to Googie Burger for lunch yesterday and really enjoyed it. Fortunately, I did not have a very long wait so that I could get back promptly. I’m told that the wait can get up to about half an hour between 12 and 1.

Unlike some of the city’s other hawt new burger joints, Googie has a very simple menu of just four sandwiches: classic patty with the usual fixings, a ramped-up version that adds smoked pork and bacon, a chicken sandwich, and a black bean veggie burger. I had the classic with fries and, for dessert, a peach milkshake. Googie has also embraced the “spiked shake” trend and offers some seven-dollar vodka or creme de menthe shakes that sounded tempting. My job, however, is awesomely laid back, but it’s not that laid back. I stuck with the peach shake and was very pleased to see a slice of peach buried in whipped cream. It was so good that I might have to get it again next time, instead of trying that fun-sounding PB & J shake.

The burger itself was very good. It reminded me in the best way possible of a Five Guys burger. It was really juicy and flavorful and didn’t need another topping, though I was slightly disappointed by the gigantic hunk of iceberg lettuce that they used. On the other hand, the red onions were sharp and tangy and absolutely divine. I didn’t have a long wait; just enough time to take some photos of the building. It was just cool enough yesterday for a pleasant patio meal in the shadow of the CNN Center, munching away on some peanut oil fries.

It’s a meal that I’d really love to share with Marie. What the heck can we do about downtown real estate prices to get her company to move back down here?

Canyons Burger Company, Woodstock GA

(Grant here to start this one off. For a tragically short few months, the town of Woodstock was home to a really superb burger joint that I don’t think anybody else but us ever visited. It was called Bob-O’s Burgers and Chili and it was in that same little strip mall as the Play & Trade and the ’50s-style diner and the Summit Tavern, and it was amazing. They served up Vortex-quality hamburgers made from all sorts of meat, including a cajun burger made from beef mixed with andouille sausage quite unlike anything else in the area, and chili so good you’d slap your mother for another bowl. We then tried Canyons, found it quite good but nowhere close to the greatness of Bob-O’s, and didn’t return until our hearts were broken by the better joint’s closure. That’s not to take away from all that’s good and tasty about the justifiably popular Canyons, but it is evidence that once in a while, the foodie network in Atlanta really does get hold of the wrong stick. In a fair and just world, both restaurants would thrive.)

This is Marie, contributing an entry entirely devoid of desserts, for once. This time I am talking about Canyons, one of the places we occasionally visit instead of a quick trip to Cheeseburger Bobby’s. Canyons, which has two locations, one in Woodstock and one in Atlanta’s Brookhaven neighborhood, apparently used to be independent but was acquired by Baja Fresh something like a year ago. They’ve just started the franchising process and have opened a third Canyons, co-branded with the burrito place, out in Montana.

As you can tell, we’re rather fond of sandwich and burger joints. A place has to have a little something extra in order to bring us back on a regular basis, though, and what brings me back is the sweet potato fries. The burgers are definitely tasty, but this is one of the few places where I actually finish my portion of fries and wistfully think about ordering another. That is, if we are doing the very sensible 50/50 order, which is half regular and half sweet potato. This is the only place I’ve seen to offer that option and I wish more places would offer it because really, who needs a bucket of fries the size of your head as a single portion? These are clearly intended to be shared. They shamelessly put “great” next to the sweet potato fries on their online menu, and I can’t blame them a bit.

There is regrettably no photo of the burgers from this visit, but honestly there’s nothing to pick them out of a crowd visually. It’s all in the taste. The owners talk a good game about quality Angus beef and never freezing their meat and so forth, and we’ve heard those tales from other places that weren’t exactly thrilling, but so far Canyons has come through on every meal we’ve eaten there. They offer the usual toppings plus a few extra oddities like chipotle mayonnaise. Ivy got their chicken once and although it’s a tad pricier than usual, that seems to be because they have good quality meat there too. She really enjoyed dipping the strips into the house BBQ sauce.

The decor of the place is very much reminiscent of a sports bar, although they always seem to keep the volume muted. The place has a number of flat screens usually tuned to various sporting events, though there’s generally at least one screen devoted to some popular show or other. Occasionally they remember to put the captions on. Aside from that, the pictures on the wall are all good-quality poster-size photos of people doing active things like mountain climbing. (Grant adds: That seems to be an odd shtick, but they’re consistent with it. Canyons tries to sell itself as the treat you can enjoy after a hard day climbing up and down the Adirondacks or something. Suffice it to say that a fellow could get a little self-conscious looking at giant pictures of fit, smiling runners while trying to enjoy a juicy burger.)

We would probably eat here a little more often if it were more convenient to get to, and if the bar next door, Pure Taquiera, had a slightly better taste in music. The live band last Saturday night was particularly awful! Strangely, although they offer milkshakes we haven’t actually tried one. Probably on our next visit.