Gators Dockside, Jacksonville FL

Today’s chapter is going to be one of those entries that is more about us and more about life than about a restaurant. Call it an anti-review, if you will, because while I have nothing bad to say about Gators Dockside, a chain of nineteen restaurants in Florida with a location in Jacksonville’s southern suburban sprawl, I don’t have much that is exceptional to say, either. It is a sports bar, pure and simple, and not at all as interesting as our original destination promised. Continue reading “Gators Dockside, Jacksonville FL” →

Evans Fine Foods, Decatur GA (CLOSED)

Located on North Decatur Road in front of a Publix strip mall, Evans Fine Foods seems to have been here forever. I don’t know whether this was their original location – they opened in 1946 – but they’ve certainly been here as long as I can remember. They’re so easy to overlook that while I’ve been telling myself for many years that I should try them out, it wasn’t until this past week that I finally made myself stop in.

I knew nothing at all about Evans apart from a lingering sense of them being a little timelost. It’s very much an older-styled pay-at-the-counter diner and meat-and-two. It is visibly more popular with older customers than young folk. When I arrived for lunch, shortly after 11, the dining room was about half-full. Until a lady arrived with her grandchild, I was the youngest there.

Evans has a pretty small menu, but my server suggested I consider the specials instead. These are detailed on boards above the large open window separating the dining room from the kitchen, where you can easily see the frantic activity of the cooks. I chose the smothered chicken with sides of pinto beans and tomatoes and okra. It turned out to be the ugliest and least photogenic meal you ever saw, so I have not included a picture of it here. Flatly, you would never believe me if I told you it tasted good.

Honestly, the food really isn’t anything remarkable, but I was nevertheless taken with the gravy on the smothered chicken. It was a thick, yellow cream sauce that I quite enjoyed. It really called for more bread to sop it up than the restaurant serves. I had the cornbread, but they offer this as simple three-bite muffins. I probably could have used a couple of big biscuits.

It’s more than just the decor and the basic layout that suggests “timelost” as a good descriptor for Evans. A lot of these older-styled meat-and-twos taste similar because they use considerably more canned vegetables than fresh. That’s why there’s nothing remarkable about them. Still, the service was attentive and the staff was polite and it proved itself a fine little place to kick back and read Rex Stout for half an hour before I needed to move on. I can’t swear that I’m in a huge rush to return, but it’s nice to know that this business has been thriving for more than sixty years.

Alpha Soda, Alpharetta GA

Alpha Soda is the oldest surviving restaurant still doing business in the northern suburb of Alpharetta, and is celebrating its ninetieth birthday this year. That’s pretty amazing, and it’s a good place to eat, but I somehow wonder whether the place’s glory days are many years behind it, back before they moved to their current location and changed their format somewhat.

When it opened, it was what we’d call today an olde-fashioned soda counter and sandwich shop, although in 1920, such things were hip and modern. It has moved at least five times over the years. I heard that the original location on Main Street was later the site of another long-lived restaurant, the Dixie Diner, which closed in 2002 after several decades, but I wouldn’t swear to it. After all, the first I heard of Alpha Soda was that it wasn’t worth visiting, and that proved not to be true at all.

Well, I should have known better than to take the word of a teenager. Ten years ago, I was tutoring high school kids prepping for the SAT and considering moving to their community in north Fulton County. I once asked one of my students where to get something to eat and he replied “Anywhere but Alpha Soda” and went on to describe everything that the wrong-headed fellow didn’t like about the place. He was mistaken on every front; years later, I gave it a try, enjoyed it thoroughly, and longed to give that kid a kick in the hindquarters for costing me several decent meals here.

When Alpha Soda moved to their present location in 1995, the latest owners elected to spruce it up a bit and transform it into a somewhat upscale family restaurant, with an inspired interior design that evokes the fashionable Art Deco style of the 1920s. The menu apparently more than tripled in size, with several additions from the Greek-American school of dining that serves many of the region’s large family diners well. A meal here is quite similar to what you can receive at the famous Marietta Diner, only I find Alpha Soda much quieter and laid-back.

This past week, it was our friend Matt’s turn to pick some socializin’ activity for us to enjoy, and he suggested we get a small group together here, as it’s a little closer to his place in Gainesville than the rest of us in Cobb County. Illness and work prevented a very large crowd, but Kimberly came by to eat before heading back into Atlanta to teach a class at Oglethorpe, and Marie came straight up 400 from work, and my daughter and I made the fun overland trek across Post Oak Tritt Road.

Everybody seemed to enjoy their meals, although I was left with a little menu envy yet again. I had the pecan-encrusted tilapia, which was okay. The beets and the cucumber and tomato salad that I had as side dishes were more tasty, and the great big order of homemade potato chips sprinkled with Old Bay seasoning were even better. Matt had a terrific-looking London broil and Marie enjoyed an ugly-but-delicious meatloaf sandwich served with a very good, thick marinara sauce. Heck, even Kimberly’s big chicken caesar salad was better than my tilapia. Now what’s fair about that?

Fortunately, my comparatively disappointing meal was more than made up for by the dessert. We don’t often have a dessert when we go out, but, in deference to Alpha Soda’s fountain origins, I felt it appropriate to have some ice cream. They don’t mess around with these treats.

This was one heck of a good banana split. Marie and Ivy and I, combined, couldn’t quite finish it, but we enjoyed every second of the trying. It makes me wonder what the original, olde-timey 1920s version of Alpha Soda was like, and whether it wasn’t a more consistently fun and delightful experience.

Cherokee Cattle Company, Marietta GA

This is Marie, weighing in on the visit we made recently to The Cherokee Cattle Company. Admittedly, my contribution on this one is in large part because there are desserts involved, though the food itself was quite tasty.

My father-in-law picked this location for his birthday dinner. It is one of a small group of four local restaurants, each of them with a different name and arranged around a different theme, owned by “friend-of-Food-Network” Gus Tselios. Marietta Fish Market, Pasta Bella, and the original Marietta Diner are the other three locations. The Cherokee Cattle Company is a steak house and actually predates the other stores. For years, it was independently owned and proudly fought off regional competition from the likes of Longhorn and Outback, but joined the “Diner Family” in 2008. The menu was changed somewhat to fall in line with the others, and to bring the somewhat outsize dinner portions and ridiculously outsize desserts to Canton Road.

One of the best things about this particular location is that of the four, it’s the only one where you don’t usually have to wait for a year and a half to get a table. Mainly it’s just that it’s the biggest of the places, and the parking isn’t quite up to the capacity of the interior (an interior, I should mention, filled with things like antler chandeliers, but if you can ignore that sort of thing you’ll be fine). One of the worst things (for me–it won’t be a problem for anyone but the other four people in the universe who dislike the stuff) is that this place has an unnatural fondness for bacon. Having it appear on my salad was a little discouraging, if for no other reason than that I honestly ought to have remembered from last time that a vegetarian salad needs a special request. However, there were folks at the table willing to take the contaminated salad off my hands, and give every appearance of enjoying the favor they did to me.

Steaks don’t make it onto my plate very often. Most of the time they’re too big for my appetite. Also, since a bad steak is worse than no steak at all, they only get ordered when there’s plenty of money in the budget, or when there is a special occasion. I chose a rib eye because Grant doesn’t like that cut much and I’m disinclined to get a bunch of different slabs of meat for home cooking when it’s so hard to keep track of what is finished when. Which is, of course, one of the benefits of going to a steak house–timing the cooking is someone else’s problem. Actually, the best steak on our table was my father-in-law’s, which came with a bucket containing enough horseradish to clean out the sinuses of Napoleon’s army on the way back from Moscow.

The sweet potato fries are almost thick enough to reach towards home fry status, which as I understand it is a little hard for sweet potatoes as the sugars caramelize rather quickly. Generally fry portions defeat me well before half-way, but these were worth munching a bit longer, in no small part because the thicker fries held their heat better.

Grant got the salmon. Just because we were down the street from the place that specializes in fish doesn’t mean he got second-best; it was very well made, quite simply (as is best for fish) and with a little bit of crispiness around the edges. However, as has been said before, he likes fish rather more than I do, so we were not in danger of menu envy this time.

We closed the meal with some of the death-defying desserts. The selections of the table included cheesecake with and without strawberries, tiramisu cake, and some kind of death by chocolate concoction. Please note that there were seven of us, my piece of cheesecake was bought separately as a take-home item, and we still managed to bring home samples of every one of the cakes along with our other leftovers. Do not come to any of the four locations without a really good appetite, or an awful lot of time, unless you plan to leave with enough for tomorrow’s lunch box and maybe a snack after work, too. But do take home some dessert even if you can’t choke it down immediately after eating yourself silly. Just because the pieces are bigger than your head doesn’t mean they skimp on the quality.

The Majestic Diner, Atlanta GA

One of Atlanta’s signature restaurants, the Majestic has been sobering up drunken twentysomethings for about eighty years now. It seems like exactly the sort of place that, if I was traveling, I would wish to visit in some other town. In point of fact, it is reminiscent of the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, New Hampshire, and I can imagine food lovers in other cities putting the Majestic on their to-do list just as Marie and I did when we drove through New England last year.

Surprisingly, though, it just never occurs to me to eat at the Majestic. I’ve driven past the place hundreds of times on my way to somewhere else. I’m pretty certain that the first time that I ever stopped in was in late 2007, when Neal and I went down to the Landmark to see The Life of Reilly, a terrific film that recorded the great Charles Nelson Reilly’s final performance in his one-man play.

The Majestic, I realized then, is an absolutely perfect place to sit with an old friend late in the evening and talk about the film you’ve just seen. Its presence in the strip mall that houses the Plaza, Atlanta’s oldest running movie house and last independent cinema standing, is just the most wonderful bit of planning anybody could ask for. Whether you’re looking for a quiet sitdown and a cup of coffee after something impenetrable and foreign, or you’re needing to come down after watching the Lips Down on Dixie crew perform Rocky Horror, the Majestic’s doors are always open. It’s real estate like this that brings a brief twinge of envy into my suburban situation. When you live this far out and have to arrange evening plans around PTA meetings and band practice, it’s not quite so easy to enjoy a movie and a late meal without some advance planning.

After far too many years of not visiting the Plaza – the kids and I did go to an exhibition of rarely-seen wartime cartoons there a few years back, but as I recall, we ate at the Zesto in Little Five Points beforehand – last weekend, I got a hankering to see the Silver Scream Spook Show’s presentation of Godzilla on Monster Island. My son and I had a terrific time, completely unprepared as we were for the low-budget lunacy of the costumes and craziness before the film. I did guess, however, that expecting Marie and our daughter to sit through a Godzilla movie – especially a 1970s Jun Fukuda Godzilla movie – was a little much. I suggested that we all have lunch at the Majestic and then they could go shopping while my son and I enjoyed the movie.

We’ll all argue until doomsday who had the better afternoon, but we all agree that lunch was pretty great. My son had woken late and so had breakfast after everybody else, and so he just enjoyed a “Ponce de le Orange” milkshake which was fantastically tasty. Marie had a great chili dog and I had a Majestic Special, two patties with cheese. Oddly, Marie and I ended up ordering an unplanned reversal of the lunch we’d had the week before at Green Acres in Carnesville.

The Silver Scream Spook Show is performing again in October. Maybe I can convince the ladies they need to see that, and maybe I’ll have one of those orange milkshakes when we go. I had a sip of my son’s, you see, and it was really good.

The Grit, Athens GA

I used to work with a girl in Athens named Alexia who was militantly, albeit comedically, vegetarian. She took her comedic militant vegetarianism to extremes, even suggesting that with a little conditioning, lions could be taught to enjoy a healthy salad instead of a nice gazelle. Well, maybe I suggested that and she just agreed with it; it’s not the sort of thing that rational people propose. Anyway, she ate at the Grit almost exclusively for ages. As the city’s pre-eminent vegetarian restaurant for years, the Grit has had many proponents and champions, but none, perhaps, louder than Alexia. So, to me, the restaurant’s sort of intrinsically linked with her. And to lions and gazelles. Continue reading “The Grit, Athens GA” →

Green Acres Restaurant, Carnesville GA (CLOSED)

Marie had one of those bad feelings that work often gives you. We were supposed to get out of town around ten Friday morning, and suddenly there was a one-hour meeting scheduled at ten. I suggested we just leave half an hour early, my son and I would drop her off for the meeting and play some mumbledy-peg while she made sure the corporate world survived another week. Then she concluded she should probably go in at seven and get some work done. Before she knew it, she’d be talking like that fellow in Clerks about how she wasn’t even supposed to be here, and we didn’t even leave Atlanta until most folk were coming back from their lunch hours. Continue reading “Green Acres Restaurant, Carnesville GA (CLOSED)” →