America’s Top Dog, Chamblee GA (CLOSED)

(I’ll apologize in advance for the darker-than-normal tone and sad nature of this and the following entry, but new readers and Google surfers might not be aware that the chapters of this blog are fragments of the story of our life based around memorable meals rather than a conventional series of restaurant reviews. I do wish that our very nice trip to the awesome America’s Top Dog could have come at a brighter point in our life, but it worked out that it didn’t. Life’s like that.)

We started the new year with my father in hospice. We didn’t know how long we would be there, and my mother held onto the hope that we would rally back home. Personally, I was telling myself that we would have a week – it turned out to be just over 36 hours – and that our work schedules would not be disrupted quite yet. I don’t know why; I knew that Dad was not coming home, and, as dark as this may seem, I concluded that we were simply going to move operations to the Emory / Oglethorpe University neighborhood for six or seven days. We were going to have to get food somewhere, and that would give us the opportunity to have some more meals in these communities than we normally enjoy. Going out to eat would also bring some welcome breaks into the children’s routines, and the sadness of the hospice and the farewell visits from longtime family friends.

In fact, the last bit of terrific news before my dad went into hospice on the 31st was that my son had decided to move back home and resume school down here with us. While the first couple of weeks of the year have been very sad and awful, I am very glad that we were able to get Dad that one last bit of welcome news before he lost coherence and consciousness. Having my son back has been at least three-quarters fantastic. He’s squabbling with his sister all the time and he’s having difficulty with the concept of keeping his bedroom clean – must have been fairly lax up in Kentucky, I figure – and the teenage stinker has figured that he’s shoehorning his way into a looping day trip through the Carolinas in a few weeks that Marie and I thought that we would be enjoying by ourselves, but my son’s home, and the boy likes to eat.

So giving the family breaks with distracting meals around or on the way to the North Druid Hills corridor were on the agenda. Unfortunately, the first of these, to a faux-Mexican sports bar, was too mediocre to pass muster here. So yes, our last meal of 2010 – otherwise such a good year – was one not worth the effort of recounting, and not merely because the Georgia Bulldogs looked like they wanted to get beat by a high school team playing its first game ever. We would have a much, much better experience at our first meal out in 2011.

In November, I noticed a writeup for a hot dog place in Chamblee that sounded very interesting. It might not have been the best business decision by America’s Top Dog’s owner to open on a very rainy New Year’s Day – for the forty or so minutes we were there, there were no other guests – but I am certainly glad that he did, because a very filling and wonderful meal was exactly what we needed to distract us from going back to the hospice for another day. And this place? Friends, it is a terrific and wonderful treat. It is perhaps not quite the same “local” experience as some of Atlanta’s other hot dog shops – Barker’s and Brandi’s in Cobb County set the standard in the region – but this place sets guests up with the amazing, authentic taste of hot dogs from around the country.

Just six days earlier, I tried onion sauce for the first time down at Orange Tree in Jacksonville. They serve onion sauce here at America’s Top Dogs, along with 39 other options on an unbelievable toppings bar. Incidentally, speaking of Orange Tree in the same sentence as onion sauce, proving that there’s no such thing as a recurring joke so lousy that it can’t recur in the real world, I found myself unwittingly ordering “orange rings” at America’s Top Dog. Hi-hat!

This topping bar will blow your mind. The goal here is to give guests the option of recreating any regional specialty here in Atlanta. If there’s something he’s missed, I can’t think what. The real humdinger, I say, is the presence of proper Cincinnati-style chili that is every bit the equal and equivalent of Gold Star and Skyline. I haven’t tried Gold Star since I was last in Lexington in the spring of 2008, and am no expert in the variation, but it tastes exactly as I remember and occasionally crave the stuff. They do Texas-styled chili as well, of course, but having the milder, cinnamon-and-chocolate-tinged Cincinnati take as well is a really unexpected treat. I’m not aware of any place anywhere around Atlanta that offers this. I had a small bowl of it, rather than dressing my dog with it. Honestly, I kind of missed the pasta that it is traditionally served over, but it was so nice to have another taste of it after more than two years.

As for my dog, I dressed it somewhat traditionally, with mustard – it looks like they have four different ones – and onions, slaw and pickled relish. My daughter surprised me by having two dogs with Texas chili, which she does not normally order on dogs, along with nacho cheese, pickles and, oddly, potato chip crumbs, which was new to me. My son had the most adventurous palate of the table, and made his with Cincy chili, pickled cucumber relish, cole slaw and shredded cheddar cheese. Both kids also had barbecue sauce on their dogs.

Poor Marie, still on a no-nitrate diet, was stuck again with a hamburger, but she didn’t mind as she says that the burger was fantastic. And we were very pleased with the sides. We ordered both a basket of rings and a large order of fries. This was far more than a table of four needed. Both were really excellent – these are surely among the best rings and fries in the Atlanta area – but we were stuck with an awful lot of excellent fries that didn’t keep well and should have been eaten. Bear that in mind as you consider an order for your own party.

We obviously came at an awful time, but it did allow us the chance to hear the owner brag about his hamburgers and his Cincinnati chili, which, he tells us, even Cincy residents proclaim both authentic and superior to some from back home. Eating out on New Year’s Day didn’t give us a feel for what the place should be like, and what the foot traffic should normally be. I kind of had to work to accept the reality that most people don’t go out in the rain on January 1 for a hot dog in a pedestrian-unfriendly location – it’s in the Big Lots strip mall on Chamblee-Tucker Road inside I-285 – and not just think that Saturday at 1 pm, there should be many more people eating lunch out. I choose to imagine that any other Saturday, this place is nice and busy. It certainly should be, and I look forward to seeing the place packed the next time we are back out that way.

(Update 11/17/11): Since writing the above entry, Marie and I went over to America’s Top Dog several times and enjoyed it greatly, especially the Washington, DC-styled half-smokes. Sadly, I went to their second store, in Duluth, earlier today and they no longer carry half-smokes, as their supplier changed their minimum monthly ordering requirements to a number too huge to store, much less sell in a month. Nevertheless, their basic dogs remain one of the city’s best treasures, especially paired with a small order of onion rings.

(Update 11/25/11): Strangely and sadly, just eight days after visiting the Duluth store, I can confirm that the original, in Chamblee, has shuttered. Duluth is still going and still awesome, so go check them out!

(Update 1/6/12): Even more sadly, it would now appear that Duluth has closed as well. That’s just awful news. I will miss these guys.

Other blog posts about America’s Top Dog:

Food Near Snellville (Feb. 16 2011)
The Blissful Glutton (Apr. 6 2011)

Ye Olde Colonial Restaurant, Madison GA (CLOSED)

Here’s a place that took me the better part of eternity to get around to visiting. I first spotted Ye Olde Colonial – and yeah, let’s go ahead and acknowledge just how silly that awful name is – about fifteen years ago, when I was living in Athens and occasionally visiting Madison every couple of months. There are some amazing antique stores in and around the town square, and I remember coveting some really neat walking sticks with silver wolf’s heads and things atop them. I’m still not completely convinced that I should not, when I hit age fifty, always go out in a very nice, old-fashioned suit and a walking cane with a silver wolf’s head. But, if we’re strictly honest, the coolest thing I found back then was my Dr. Shrinker jigsaw puzzle. Continue reading “Ye Olde Colonial Restaurant, Madison GA (CLOSED)” →

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)” →

Hollie Guacamole!, Marietta GA (CLOSED)

I certainly enjoy having the small audience that Marie and I have, but sometimes I think that I’ll do a lot better by y’all once we get a book deal, an expense account and a secretary. Okay, so I’m not really counting on these things, but I bet that if we did have a secretary, then they would have pointed out a remarkable oversight that I made long before now. Back in May, I happened to spot the sign for a new burrito place in downtown Marietta, and resolved to stop in as soon as possible. About a week later, I wandered over there, hungry for such a meal, and was surprised to learn they were still about a week away from opening. I ended up driving to the Chilito’s in Kennesaw instead to get my fix and wrote them up instead. I promptly forgot that the burrito place on the square ever existed until I remembered out of the blue more than five months later. I’m serious; the place fell into a black hole of memory.

My plans for this past Wednesday got juggled around, so, having only remembered that “that burrito place” existed about 48 hours previously, I took advantage of the chance to swing by and see whether they ever opened up. I had to drive to do it, because I couldn’t remember the name, and Google couldn’t help me find the place. Now that I know the name, Google’s still not much help, because the owners have not done much of anything to let the world that they’ve been here for five months. Not even the phone company can track these people down. I’m not sure whether this might be incompetence or somebody’s very clever plan to make customers really work to find the place. But they seriously are there. Look, photographic evidence:

Okay, so let’s get one thing out of the way: that’s a really terrible name for a restaurant. All I could remember about it, once I remembered that “a burrito place on the square” existed at all, was “I think that it had some wacky name.” Amusingly, the owner had his own take on it. I asked of the couple whether one of them was “Hollie,” and he admitted that just about everybody asks that. As for why it’s spelled that way, he said he wanted something memorable. Didn’t work with me, I’m afraid.

Much like the many “fast casual” burrito places in the city, this is a build-to-order place with the ingredients on the other side of the sneeze guard and assembled per your specifications. I had the daily lunch special, which is your choice of a burrito, chips and a canned soda for six bucks. The guacamole is an additional eighty cents, but I have to tell you, it’s easily worth that. All of the ingredients of my “bowl” burrito were very tasty, particularly the fresh jalapenos, but that guac was outstanding. I highly recommend everybody give this recipe a try. While thinner, and more like a dressing than a dip, it’s actually about as good as Bone Garden’s, which has my favorite in the city.

The restaurant seems to get a pretty good crush of business from government workers during the lunch hour. I arrived at 11.30 and had the small space to myself for a few minutes before the county clerks, attorneys and deputies filed in and took up all of the handful of tables. I took from the sort of noncommital way that the owner answered when I asked how business was that as of now, Hollie Guacamole! is dependent on doing a lot of noon to one business to stay afloat, and that they haven’t been able to turn their place into a big word of mouth destination. Places on the square have always seemed to me to have a lot of trouble turning themselves into something that the public wants to search for. I’m not sure what this place is doing wrong, but when a Google search for: “hollie guacamole” marietta turns up (today) exactly five entries and three of those are echoes from one gentleman’s Twitter feed, I can only conclude that there are a hell of a lot of people missing out on this very tasty guacamole and the friendly owners. And the Lime Crush, the soda that I’ve been enjoying the most for the last several weeks.

And this is after five months. I won’t swear that I’m incredibly optimistic that they’ll make it another five at this rate, and that’s a shame*.

*They did better than I expected, but not good enough, making it to June of 2012 before the “Now Leasing” sign appeared in the window. Better luck next time, guys.

Harold’s Barbecue, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

There are so many barbecue restaurants in this state that I’ve never tried. Even the old ones, like Harold’s, which has been around since 1947, I’ve just never got around to before. Well, on Saturday, we had originally intended to take another short road trip, this time out to Augusta. Unfortunately, the bank balance is a little low, so we elected to save the gasoline and find a new meal intown instead. There are four restaurants in Atlanta that are reviewed on roadfood.com that we have not written up for our blog yet. A roll of the dice brought up Harold’s, so I rang my parents and asked if they’d like to join us.

Harold’s is a simply perfect destination for a Saturday lunch. It’s very easy to find, just a quick little hop off the downtown connector at exit 244 and south less than a mile. It is in a pretty rough-looking neighborhood about a stone’s throw up the street from the federal pen. If you’ve never seen this gigantic building, you should, as it’s an architectural masterpiece. Unfortunately, Harold’s itself is in a pretty basic and deeply ugly building, and the bars around the windows and the air conditioning units don’t inspire great confidence in the local residents’ rap sheets.

I apologize for repeating much of the online information about this restaurant, but some things are so blatant that I can’t avoid coming back to it.

I’m very glad we finally stopped into this Atlanta institution. Despite the “keep driving, and fast” exterior, the inside is cozy and relaxing, and also quite chilly, since one of the air conditioners seemed to be working overtime. There’s a glorious smell of thick smoke throughout the building, and interior walls in the kitchen that are blackened from more than sixty years of smoking. It’s a building with a lot of history; we were taken care of by Harold and Hugh’s granddaughter, who’s been here for forty years herself.

As for the food, the chopped pork is pretty good. It’s very soft and dry, almost incandescently white. Unfortunately, I didn’t like either of the sauces at all, and made the considerable mistake – the novice mistake – of just pouring the hot sauce all over my food before testing it. Theirs is a thick, red, tomato-and-pepper concoction that leaves a Tabasco-style aftertaste and overpowers the subtle, smoky taste of the soft pork. While I would certainly recommend Harold’s, I would caution anybody going to try a little on the side before indulging too much.

The main dish is pretty good, but the sides are just outstanding. The Brunswick stew is probably the best anywhere near Atlanta. It’s really thick, with a very heavy corn flavor, and lots of tomatoes and stringy shreds of meat. The corn taste reminded me of the wonderful Zeb’s in Danielsville. The plates are served with a generous helping of cracklin’ cornbread. Crumble just a little of that into your stew and scoop it right back out, and that’s perfect. If I have had cracklin’ cornbread – named for the little pork cracklings that Food Network describes as “little pieces of pork fat, fatty meats, or ham skin which are left crisp and brown after the lard or fat has been rendered from them” – before, I don’t recall it. Honestly, there’s not a great deal of meat in the bread, but it’s so tasty that didn’t feel that I was missing anything.

The slaw is also excellent; a perfect blend of mayo and vinegar that goes extremely well with the stew and pork. It’s simply a perfectly balanced meal, even if the sauce was disappointing.

Harold’s attempted to expand just a little from this neighborhood, but unfortunately it didn’t last. There were two outposts south of the city, in Jonesboro and in McDonough, and a third up near us in Kennesaw, but apparently all three have closed. Only the original remains, which, honestly, is kind of the way it should be. Older joints with this much history, well, visitors should go to them for the experience almost as much as the food. With stew this good, I hope to be back for both before too long.

Folks Southern Kitchen, Marietta GA (CLOSED)

The story of Atlanta’s Folks Southern Kitchen is another one where the small chain’s heyday seems to be behind them. However, unlike a couple of the earlier stories I’ve told here about, say, The Mad Italian and Old Hickory House, where the last remaining outpost of a chain is struggling to remain relevant, Folks still seems to have a pretty good bit of life in it. I say this even though the chain, which once numbered twenty stores in north Georgia, is down to ten around I-285. Two more, in Cumming and McDonough, were recently converted to a new “concept,” Rusty Rooster Cafe, which apparently serve very similar food in a “fast casual” setting. That we’re talking about food in terms like “concepts” and “fast casual” is probably a warning flag to many food lovers that the food’s quality might have been a little lost under the weight of marketing.

Folks was originally called, and you’ll love this, Po Folks. The first store opened in 1978. I’m not sure which that was, but I recall that the one on 41 and Windy Hill must have opened around that time. It had a bright red roof and all of the signage and menus were written in a tacky font meant to represent the scrawlings of an illiterate hillbilly. My own folks got takeaway from them quite frequently – their sweet tea was said to be the best of any restaurant – but I don’t remember ever actually eating there.

In 1994, the chain converted all of its locations from Po Folks to Folks Southern Kitchen. The reds were changed to greens, the hillbilly scrawls were replaced with a more elegant script, and, since Folks weren’t po no mo, the prices went up. It was this incarnation that expanded to its peak in number of stores, but a few years ago, the contraction began. I recall that they shuttered the restaurants in Roswell and Smyrna right at the same time, and probably a few others as well. I rarely see any advertising for this chain anymore.

Without making too much hoopla about it, my daughter loves Folks, and when we gave her a turn to pick an activity for our weekly dinner-or-movie night, she suggested this place. So last week, Marie and I took her to supper, meeting up with Neal, Samantha, Randy and Kimberly. Circumstances forced us to have a pretty long dinner; our server was congenial and attentive, but also incredibly slow. I thought that we’d never get our checks at the end of the evening.

Marie ordered the rainbow trout and declared it very tasty. It came with some mixed vegetables and sweet potato waffle fries. Sweet potato fries seem to be quite trendy lately, but these are the first ones that I can recall that are done waffle-style. My daughter had a chicken pot pie that she enjoyed very much and a side of Brunswick stew. I almost always just have a veggie plate here, since everything they offer as a side is as good or better as their entrees. This time out, I had fried green tomatoes, calico beans and corn nuggets.

Everyone really enjoyed their meal, but special praise was reserved for the bread. Folks serves up these incredibly tasty peach muffins that everybody really enjoys; Randy and Kimberly ordered another half-dozen to take home. Marie bucked the trend by having a biscuit and everyone else asked whether she was feeling all right.

And that’s the story of Folks. They may be smaller than they once were, marketing-synergy-speaking gobbledygook may be vomited all over their web pages, and the place may be as quiet as the grave in the evenings, but the food remains quite good. They talk big about their recipes being made from scratch and prepared fresh daily, and while it may lack the individual attention and focus of something smaller, it’s still a reasonably good dinner out, for rich or po.

Pete’s Famous Hot Dogs, Birmingham AL (CLOSED)

So I was sketching out this trip and my daughter requested a hot dog while we were in Birmingham. That suited me just fine; I’m mercenary enough to want to add more chapters to this blog, and we had bypassed Pete’s Famous Hot Dogs, arguably the best-known restaurant in the city, in favor of one of its competitors the last time we visited. Having now tried both, I’m prepared to make an unusual claim: I prefer the dog that George makes at Gus’s to the one that Gus makes at Pete’s. Continue reading “Pete’s Famous Hot Dogs, Birmingham AL (CLOSED)” →