Tag: closed!

Chilito’s, Kennesaw GA (CLOSED)

Wednesday was one of those rotten days full of delays and lane closures and slow drivers. Contrary to what you might suspect from this food blog, Marie and I do eat in more often than we go out, although in my case, since she’s the wizard in the kitchen, it often means sandwiches and leftovers. However, I do allow myself one lunch out a week, and I was looking forward to it that morning. My destination was, typically, closed. Then it was every student driver and testing failure in Cobb County getting in my way as I headed home to reconsider my options.

I was listening to Contra, the new album by Vampire Weekend, and it cycled back around to the opening song, “Horchata.” That reminded me that I hadn’t been by Chilito’s in an incredibly long time. They brew up some really good horchata, but I was in the mood for sweet tea. I mention it just because I wouldn’t have even thought about the place were it not for that song.

You don’t see many restaurants like this one opening anymore. It’s a remnant of the “gourmet burrito” craze that started in the late ’90s and lasted for about a decade. There are certainly a few regional chains that I don’t mind at all – Barberito’s, Qdoba and Willy’s all serve reasonably tasty food – but the better examples of single-store ideas didn’t last long. Raging Burrito in midtown was very good, and I also quite liked Extreme Burrito, which lasted for maybe nine months on Baxter Street in Athens. I’ll always remember an incident there in the spring of 2000 when a friend of mine who would probably prefer to remain nameless started flirting with the waitress there and I suddenly understood why that reporter bellowed “Oh, the humanity!” when the Hindenburg caught fire.

I think that Chilito’s tried to become a similar regional chain, but it didn’t get very far. Its first store was on Bells Ferry Road near I-575, perhaps in 2005, and closed two years later. This one opened in 2006 in some unnecessary identikit development on Chastain Road and has been hanging in there for a while, mainly serving the Kennesaw State University community with promotions and student-targeted discounts. I’m not aware of any other expansion, and the restaurant’s website is, shall we say, unhelpful.

At any rate, Chilito’s is kind of like Moe’s, only not terrible. (“Always remember, kids, you can’t spell mediocre without m – o – e!”) You walk down a line having somebody on the other side of a sneeze guard slap various ingredients onto your tortilla or shell. You hope that the tortilla has not been steamed so long that it’s trapped water, and that the cilantro has been diced finely enough so that you won’t be picking a stem out from between your teeth, and you bristle that you have to pay an extra forty cents for corn. You go get salsa, some of it quite good and some of it blandly inoffensive, from another little bar with a sneeze guard with little plastic cups that are too darn tiny to be much good. There is nothing remarkable about this place, and you leave equally grateful for a low-priced meal with a “buy ten get one free” bribe card as you do for the quality of the food.

It’s a long way from outstanding, but I’ve always found it perfectly serviceable, even if I don’t go there with any regularity. The bribe card that I mentioned is finally, after Wednesday’s trip, full. It has taken me four years to get it there. This trip, I had a chicken taco salad, because that was their daily special for $5.99. The fellow on the other side of the sneeze guard filled it with black beans, not-especially-spicy chicken, queso dip, lettuce, pico de gallo, cheese and costs-forty-cents-extra corn. Not at all a bad price, especially coming with chips and a drink. (Sweet tea, and, surprisingly, awful. I had half a cup of Mr. Pibb to wash the taste away.)

Chilito’s offers fish tacos and these are, honestly, very good. I should probably get away with eating these more often. Honestly, though, the reason I haven’t eaten at Chilito’s often enough to fill up a bribe card in under four years is simple: my kids can’t stand the place. I don’t know what it is they find objectionable, beyond just a general thought that it’s “yucky,” but the psychologists tell us that children’s minds are still cooking and not fully formed yet. I try to remember that when they occasionally protest that they’d really prefer mediocre Moe’s to a nice Chilito’s fish taco.

Old Hickory House, Dunwoody GA (CLOSED)

When I was a kid, before I knew better, I always ate cheeseburgers at barbecue restaurants. My parents frequently went with friends to one of two places in Smyrna, Old South Bar-B-Q on what’s now Windy Hill Road, but what Neal reminds me was then called Cherokee Street, and the Old Hickory House that, if I remember correctly, used to be on 41 near I-285. It was one of those restaurants across the street from the Steak & Shake and the Lexus dealership – which itself used to be a Service Merchandise – and I think that my parents started having occasional Friday night suppers there after the Red Sirloin closed. You probably don’t remember Red Sirloin. We ate there almost every Friday at 6 pm for years, and I agonized every single sortie for two of those years that we were going to miss Wonder Woman on CBS at 8.

But I’m not talking about Red Sirloin, I’m talking about Old Hickory House. In the late 70s and early 80s, this was something close to an Atlanta tradition. I believe that there were at least ten of these dotted around the suburbs, and they regularly advertised on TV and radio. Everybody who grew up here remembers their old jingle, “Put some south in your mouth, at Old Hickory House…”

The chain of restaurants even had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the national spotlight. The scene in Smokey & the Bandit where Burt Reynolds first gets the better of Jackie Gleason while he’s waiting impatiently for a “Diablo sandwich and a Dr. Pepper” was filmed at an Old Hickory House in Forest Park. I believe that Bandit hides his Trans Am behind the restaurant’s sign shortly afterward. That location is long gone, as are most of the others. For the longest time, only three remained. One of those was in the lobby of a Days Inn just off Roswell Road in Sandy Springs, but it was replaced by a Chinese restaurant in the late 90s. The last two holdouts of this old tradition are in Dunwoody and Tucker.

This past Saturday, Marie and I went out to the Old Hickory House with our daughter and with David, who’s dieting and had to think long and hard about imbibing too much in the way of sweet barbecue sauce and ruining his blood sugar. What we found feels very much like a restaurant that is still serving up some pretty good food, but also on its last legs. The restaurant looks a lot like like it was built in the 1970s and hasn’t changed or been renovated at all in close to forty years; it’s just aged and seems dim. Dim and grim.

It was very quiet and slow on this Saturday evening. Not many customers were dining, and we were the youngest. Considering how I spent the first three paragraphs of this chapter reminiscing about the good ole days, that might tell you something. One week previously, we had been at Zeb Dean’s in Danielsville for Saturday night supper, where there were only a few seats free and the joint sparked with electricity and loud conversation. Here, most of what joie de vivre there was came from our server, an agreeable fellow named Junior, who made us feel very much at home.

It just didn’t feel much like a home where we wanted to stay for long. The food was not bad, although the sauce was far too sweet and mild for my liking, and the fries, which were just terrific, really reminded me of my misspent youth, foolishly eating cheeseburgers when I could have been trying barbecue, except that “it looked weird” or some other childlike excuse for not eating what you came to a restaurant to eat. The Brunswick stew here is quite good. One neat standout on the restaurant’s menu is their dressed dog, where they smother a dog with Brunswick stew. I haven’t had one of those in a really long time.

The experience somewhat reminded me of what we felt after lunch at the Mad Italian a couple of months ago; the memories of a restaurant’s glory days were more pleasing than the meal itself. Maybe the next time we ask David to join us for something to eat, we should make sure it’s a restaurant too new to be compared to its more interesting past.

Other blog posts about Old Hickory House:

3rd Degree Berns Barbecue Sabbatical (Feb. 8 2010)
Eat Buford Highway (Mar. 30 2010)
All the Single Girlfriends (May 27 2011)

Moksha Restaurant and Bar, Roswell GA (CLOSED)

“I found this amazing Indian restaurant,” Randy told me. I was skeptical. “They have an amazing lunch buffet,” he added. I was doubly so.

I have a tolerate-hate relationship with Indian food, because I’ve found so little of it that rises above a very low batting average. I think I like the idea of it more than the reality, at least locally. Here, quite a few Indian restaurants, more than most of them, go for the fine dining experience, and I almost never feel that the quality of the food warrants the price tag. Since I emphatically do not need to be served by tuxedoed waiters nor eat from fine china and fancy tablecloths, eventually I started to resent paying for it.

Now there was once a lovely little place in Smyrna which did it right: a no-frills presentation of extremely tasty food in styrofoam containers, and you could get out of there, extremely satisfied, for under seven bucks. I got to eat there only twice before I arrived once to see an “under new management” banner out front, fancy tablecloths masking the rickety and unbalanced tables, and a buffet. I don’t know that anything good had ever come from an Indian buffet in Atlanta prior to about a year ago. That was the first time I’ve ever chewed the manager of a restaurant out. I gave him an earful, telling him that raising the prices and making his restaurant exactly like the four restaurants that I drove past to get to his was amazingly stupid. I don’t know whether it was worth it or not, but I seem to recall they shut down within a year.

I’ve tried lots of places in Atlanta. It seems that what passes for Indian cuisine in this town is, regardless of the trimmings and the tablecloths, pretty similar to the El-This-Los-That faux-Mexican meals that we used to get everywhere before enough of a Hispanic population developed for the owners to stop worrying about courting the Anglos and focused on people who knew the food from back home. That’s a topic for another chapter, I think, but it was a very similar experience: the restaurant would be called “Calcutta” or “Bombay” and claim to serve “authentic north Indian cuisine,” and have the same menu and the same flavor as another restaurant twenty miles away called “Taj Mahal” or “Sitar” which claimed to serve “authentic eastern Indian cuisine.” The sole, lone exception was a place in Chamblee called Himalayas, which was a little higher than the average, and where I had rogan josh for the first time.

I’m not claiming that any of it’s really bad, but rather that I knew that my periodic cravings for sopping up a really hot vindaloo with fresh naan would be no different anywhere I went, much in the same way that I could indulge a really intense desire for chips, salsa, rice, beans and some kind of meat at any one of three hundred identikit Mexican places. Thank heaven I found Maizetos brand chips and Garden Fresh Gourmet salsa, otherwise I’d still be wasting money at some “El Sombrero” place once a week.

And the buffet. Don’t get me started. It wasn’t just that I know about Randy and his all-no-fool-would-ever-eat Chinese buffets; one right after another, for years, everything on every Indian buffet in Atlanta came from the same damn kitchen.

I give you this backstory to explain why it was, with a heavy heart and healthy skepticism, I agreed to accompany Randy to this buffet.

Holy bajole. This place is amazing.

Randy discovered Moksha because a buddy of his married into the owner’s family. That meant that Randy joined nine hundred and twenty people for a gigantic meal catered by them. He went to the restaurant, concluded that among Roswell’s many very good restaurants, this was a standout, and insisted that I join him.

Now I must say that the city of Roswell clearly does not care how amazing a treasure their city has. They have made finding this place a complete headache via an ongoing, ages-long road construction project that has worked its way up Old Roswell Road all the way back to its intersection with Warsaw and has left one lamebrained detour after another in its wake. Old Roswell has, in fact, been shifted away from the restaurant, which now sits quietly at the end of where the street used to be, hidden well away from traffic and any potential impulse eaters. Moksha is now a place you have to search out; you cannot find it by accident.

Despite the fact that its location cannot be good for business, it’s excellent for a quiet getaway. The restaurant is in an old farmhouse in the woods, with an event hall behind it. Randy remembers that the property used to belong to a fancy Southern cooking joint called Lickskillet, and it has a polite, isolated charm to it that lets you forget that you’re just a thicket of trees away from a bank and a dozen car dealers on Mansell.

Inside, there are tablecloths and a buffet. I tried to remain strong, and was rewarded by a simply terrific meal. It is, by leagues, more flavorful and tasty than any other Indian cuisine that I have found anywhere in metro Atlanta.

I don’t even pretend expertise, or even knowledge, of what I should be looking for in Indian food, but I’ll tell you this: the buffet is considerably smaller than most. The lettuce they use in the tossed salad is quite disappointing. Everything else is amazing. They have about four wonderful sauces for the salad which overcome the lettuce’s deficiency, and another little mix of chickpeas, onions and tomatoes in a light sauce which is incredible.

For my main meal, I usually get some fried vegetable pakodas along with a big spoonful of rice, and then fill up with ladles of curry. They’ve had chicken tikka marsala each of the three times we’ve gone, and occasionally rogan josh. This time, it was lamb korma, cooked in a thick, spicy cardamom sauce with onions. The flavor is so strong, with a hint of mint.

Desserts vary; often they have rice pudding, but not this time. Actually, I did really well this time and didn’t overdo it. The last time, Randy and I went late and they were ready to take away whatever we weren’t going to eat, so we ate everything. We got as far as the little airlock lobby and sat down again for about as long as we’d spent eating the meal. We were just about ready to call Marie to come get us, because neither of us could face driving home for quite some time. On Friday, I was much more sensible. I was still so stuffed at supper that I had about four bites of chicken and a forkful of rice and called it a night, but I didn’t have to undo my belt after lunch, either.

I’m sure we’ll go back again. Maybe one day we can even go with Marie. We just need to time it right and not feel compelled to finish off every drop of the chicken tikka marsala’s creamy tomato curry. Temptation like that, I just don’t need.

Sadly, Moksha closed at the end of August, 2010.

Dressner’s Village Cafe, St. Simons Island GA (CLOSED)

Marie volunteered to write one of the entries about a restaurant we visited down on the coast last weekend, and settled on doing a writeup for one of her dad’s favorite haunts.

Dressner’s is a tradition of sorts with the Hendersons. Well, actually there was a little place that isn’t there any more that really sold my dad on moving to St. Simons, but aside from that there’s no place more likely to get our business for breakfast. The other two options are the Sandcastle, reviewed earlier, and the 4th of May, about which more later. Maybe next trip. It’s been rising in the ratings. Continue reading “Dressner’s Village Cafe, St. Simons Island GA (CLOSED)” →

The Square Bagel, Marietta GA (CLOSED)

For me, the simplest way to distinguish between a deli and a sandwich shop is just this: a deli serves Dr. Brown’s soda. If your business claims to be a deli and does not actually serve it, then you are fibbing. Consequently, the European Deli in Athens is not a deli. The Square Bagel in Marietta is. There’s probably another level of authenticity that depends on whether the restaurant serves Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray. Frankly, I think that’s just about the nastiest beverage ever concocted outside of a Jones holiday weirdo pack, but any deli that serves Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray is a proper New York deli.

Marie and I invited Kimberly to go to lunch with us here this past Saturday. We like Kimberly a lot, even if we’re not entirely sure why she’s marrying our friend Randy. “Don’t get me wrong,” I told her once, “if I was trapped in a foxhole behind enemy lines, I’d hope to have somebody as good as him feeding me ammo. But…” and here I paused, “…you do know that he sometimes goes to those all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets, don’t you?”

The Square Bagel seems to have been around forever. I ate here once while I was wasting a day waiting to be dismissed from jury service something like the fifth time I’d been called, and it’s not like I didn’t enjoy it; it’s just that during my years as a single dad, I often got in the habit of picking places all the time based on whether they were open for supper. Delis that rely on breakfast and freshly-made bagels for as much of their business as this place does often close before I could get to them back then, and so it slid off my radar for a while, but in considering places to visit for this blog, I figured I was overdue for a return visit and Marie needed to give it a try.

Like the best delis, Square Bagel has one of those absurdly dense menus that take you forever to read through. If you’re going at lunch, it’s obvious you want a sandwich, but unless you know up front that what you want is pastrami, turkey, cheese, slaw and Russian dressing on rye, and that’s not the sort of thing I ever know, you have to dig through a long list of sandwiches with funny names until you find the ingredient list you were looking for.

I don’t know who came up with putting Russian dressing on sandwiches, but that man deserves a beer. One of the little cafes in the Ravinia complex where I used to work served sandwiches like the one I got at Square Bagel and I think I had one for lunch every day for two weeks. Saturday’s was a delicious, nostalgic little treat, really.

Marie had egg salad on a bagel, and she and I both had potato pancakes as our side. She didn’t enjoy her side as much as I did mine, but I’m always happy to have a latke, especially one with such a slight taste of onion as this had. I’ve been trying to wean myself off potato salad, and it’s hard, especially when I wandered over to the counter and saw all the really decadent trays of twelve thousand-calorie dishes cooling there.

Kimberly had some sort of roast beef sandwich with horseradish on the side. We had to debate that point a little. My feeling is that if you’re ordering a sandwich with horseradish, you’re intending for it to be a sinus-clearing hurricane of a meal. Horseradish shows you’re serious, while mayo shows you just want to clog your arteries with fat. Kimberly said that it’s possible for horseradish to be too strong. I call shenanigans on that. The default state of horseradish should be only-just-tolerable; the problem with today’s youth is that they’ve grown up accustomed to that wimpy stuff they serve at Arby’s.

Kimberly’s horseradish came on the side. She took a little smear on her knife and said “Yeah, that’s strong.” I dipped one of her French fries in it and had a big swallow. Nostril hairs I never knew I had stood to attention. “No, that’s just right,” I said.

The Burger Club, Vinings GA (CLOSED)

Perhaps unjustly absent from the ongoing tales I tell on this blog is a sense of history and place. We live in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, a town with many very good restaurants but few claims to culinary originality and superiority. Atlanta in fact has almost no claims to a solid tradition in any one style of dining. The city is a jack of all trades, but a master of none.

Except hamburgers. There is not a population center anywhere in this country with as many excellent burger joints as Atlanta. I could write about nothing but burgers here for months and not scratch the surface. The Wall Street Journal agrees that, between Ann’s Snack Bar and The Vortex, we’re untouchable. That’s not to say that better individual burgers might not be out there in your own town – in point of fact, take thirty bucks to a little place I know in Vermont in the summer and you will be served a burger so many times superior to any you’ve ever had that you will weep, knowing the game is over – but shack for shack and joint for joint, the batting average of Atlanta beats the hell out of any other city in America.

We’ve come up with some pretty crazy concoctions to enhance the beauty of burgers in this town. It’s certainly enough to grill or fry a perfect patty, but only in Atlanta would somebody come up with the Luther Burger, which dispenses with the bun and serves the patty between two halves of a Krispy Kreme doughnut, and named for crooner Luther Vandross. Mulligan’s, the joint that came up with the recipe, closed a few years ago, but not before giving their seal of approval to Turner Field to continue the tradition at Braves games.

Over the last decade, while perfecting their recipes for perfect burgers and debating the merits of angus versus kobe beef, a few places have also tinkered with oddball experiments like the Luther. Over in Vinings, the Burger Club, a family restaurant run by the team behind the upscale Paul’s and Social Vinings, has a dozen or so weird and wonderful house specialties on the menu. Among them, their own take on the Luther. Called the Artery Annihilator, this doughnutty mess also includes bacon and cheese. No, I didn’t order one; I’m in rotten enough shape as it is and don’t want my arteries annihilated.

Fortunately for us all, my son was in town this week.

So the Burger Club moved into a space vacated by an Atlanta Bread Company that had been there forever. It’s on Paces Ferry Road, right in the heart of Vinings, next door to the fire station. It’s slightly separate from the Vinings Jubilee open-air mini-mall, where my bored crowd of high school punks would often go on Friday evenings in the late ’80s after we’d been kicked out of Cumberland. The parking lot has space for about two dozen Smart cars, or two Cadillacs. Since my parents wanted to take their precious grandson to supper, but drive nothing but Cadillacs, parking was a challenge.

Me, I had the Gastro Pub Burger, which is served with bacon and a blend of red onion marmalade and Roquefort cheese, with tater tots on the side. The burger was indeed a good one, but heaven only knows why I can’t resist these darn tots. Perhaps because I just had onion rings the day before, I passed on those, but surely any of their sides would have a little more oomph to them than a bag of frozen Ore-Ida brand tots, no matter whether I sprinkle a little salt on them or not.

In fact, my dad, who, like my mother and Marie, just had a basic beef burger without any of the specialty trimmings, said that his onion rings were among the best he’s ever had. Then again, he always eats his onion rings with Heinz 57 sauce. Nobody has a lot of sympathy for that.

But my son, well, he had his arteries annihilated. He was last heard muttering something about a “perfect blend of savory and sweet” before lapsing into a coma. Normally I’d have a bite, but I’m trying to cut down on the life-ending things. Back when I was making mistakes in 2004, though, I’d probably have had a dozen a day. It was that kind of year.

(Sadly, The Burger Club closed in December, 2010.)