Tag: dessert

Starkville, Mississippi – part one

Not long after moving to Starkville, Mississippi, my brother-in-law Karl joined the local chapter of a fraternal organization. On our first evening there, we got to meet some of his friends from that group when we went to their usual Thursday evening post-meeting dinner retreat, the Central Station Grill. This is one of the city’s nicer, in the “clean and upscale” department, restaurants, the sort of place that most undergraduates at Mississippi State probably “take” their parents for a nice dinner in the hopes that Dad’ll get the tab. The food here was pretty good, but my children had better not try that scam with me. Wherever they go to college, and I hope that they will go far away and cultivate memories unencumbered by my own, they should know to “take” me to someplace with a lot more soul than this. Continue reading “Starkville, Mississippi – part one” →

The Sound Table and Café Intermezzo, Atlanta GA

Date night! Marie and I got a very pleasant surprise from her father when he came to visit last weekend. He gave us a big wad of money and told us to go enjoy each other’s company at a nice restaurant or two while he watched the children and read A.A. Milne to his new grandson. Unfortunately, I left it too late to make reservations at Two Urban Licks, so I went with a backup plan, The Sound Table. This is a popular new place, just starting its second year, at the intersection of Edgewood and Boulevard in the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood, and its chef and owners had previously collaborated on the popular Top FLR.

Marie and I enjoyed a very good meal here. We were early, before it apparently gets pretty loud, and got to enjoy some conversation without yelling across the table to each other. They have an amazing cocktail list here, for diners looking for something unusual. I was briefly tempted by a simple glass of Cointreau and orange juice – it really has been a while since I had one – but we just had water, as we almost always do.

Sound Table’s menu changes quarterly, and even then they make changes each evening based on what vegetables they can source, so guests will not have much luck reading blogs and getting ideas. That said, we did enjoy an appetizer of fried chickpeas salted with curry and a wonderful small serving of lamb meatballs with Roma tomatoes that got us ready for some excellent entrees. I ordered the hanger steak with a beet salad. This was very simple but so incredibly delicious. It was merely a small plate of arugula, beets, avocado slices and anchovies, but each complemented the other very well.

My meal was good enough that I did not quite get menu envy, but I came close. Happily, the perfectly seasoned steak was tasty enough to make it quite a standout. Marie enjoyed a grilled pork chop that was just heavenly, served over butter beans and greens. She also had a bowl – a huge one, as it turns out – of excellent cauliflower, cooked with red curry and peanuts. Everything was extremely tasty and appropriately portioned. This was a very good date night detination.

We passed on dessert, as I had planned to really give Marie’s sweet tooth a workout. Unfortunately, my desire to pick up some caramels from a reasonably new place called The Sugar-Coated Radical was foiled, as they closed earlier than I was planning. We will return some other time, now that we know to arrive before the dinner hour. We drove on instead to Café Intermezzo on Peachtree, near Collier, for some decadent cake, arriving just as the sun was going down.

One day, we might return to Café Intermezzo for a full meal; it certainly has an interesting menu. Speaking of which, the drinks menu here – or perhaps “beverage book” is more appropriate, as it’s a full fifty pages long – is just about the most overwhelming and mad thing that I’ve seen in ages. I’ve occasionally wondered whether there might be a place in town, other than the GSU dorms, that serves absinthe, and now I know. Since the days of me drinking myself stupid over some damn girl in French class are long gone, I’ll pass.

Café Intermezzo has a dessert showcase that rivals the ones we see in Cobb County at Marietta Diner and its sister places. A gigantic slice of cake here will run you about eight bucks and you know with every bite that you’re indulging in something sinful. I had choclate and Marie had cheesecake and, somewhere in the beverage book, we noticed that they sell bottles of Hank’s soda. I have been on a black cherry kick lately, although the cream soda that Marie enjoyed probably complmented her cake a little better. Although really, a tall glass of milk might have done just as well.

Eventually, we had to leave the patio and get back to the suburbs, and end our date night, as parents often do, swinging by the grocery store to pick up things for the kids. We’re just so romantic, you know.

Other blog posts about the Sound Table:

The Food Abides (May 20 2010)
Eat it, Atlanta (Sep. 3 2010)
Atlanta Restaurant Blog (Feb. 4 2011)

Hot Thomas Barbecue, Watkinsville GA

Many years ago, Hot Thomas ranked among my very favorite barbecue restaurants. When I lived in Athens, I would drive over to Watkinsville maybe once a month to get a chopped pork plate. Then I moved away and they hit a run of bad luck and closed for a while. Actually, I sort of found out the hard way, by driving over here on two or three occasions in the 2000s and finding only disappointment where there should have been great barbecue. Continue reading “Hot Thomas Barbecue, Watkinsville GA” →

Hambones BBQ and Chapman Drugs, Hapeville GA

This past Friday after work, I drove down to Hapeville, an inside-the-perimeter suburb best known for being that place in Atlanta where the airport is, and was very pleasantly surprised to find some genuinely amazing barbecue at Hambones, a restaurant that I hadn’t heard of before last month. Sadly, I don’t remember where I heard about it beyond “Facebook.” Nobody has (yet) stepped forward to let me know it was them, or one of their friends, who mentioned the place, so I don’t know whom I should thank, but man, somebody’s due a handshake.

Hambones has been open for several years on a side street off the main drag (Central Avenue) through town. In a really weird bit of real estate, it is within sight of another barbecue place called Pit Boss. I had considered just doing a sandwich and stew at each place, but it didn’t work out that way, because the amount of food that Hambones serves up is pretty ridiculously huge. I had the “Q and Stew” lunch special, which comes with a big sandwich, a bucket of stew, a shot glass of a second side and a Big Gulp-sized drink for under nine bucks, and so Pit Boss will have to wait for another visit.

On a side note, I have been totally lucking out lately in finding places with amazingly good Brunswick stew. It’s like the food gods are paying me back for that awful, wretched stew that I had at Georgia Pig down in Glynn County last month. In April, I’ve been knocked out by how good the stew has been at Speedi-Pig, Dave Poe’s and now at Hambones. The stew here is thick with chicken, pork, corn, tomatoes and lima beans and I really enjoyed it hugely.

Hambones nominally opens at 11, but in reality, the doors are unlocked a little early, because the lunch crowd this place gets is huge and in a hurry. The setup is a little unusual. They have a carry-out register at the bar, and a small register for dine-in orders. The register set-up, in any other business, would look like the place where you bring your check on the way out, rather than a “order first” window with a big menu board. The lunch line is long, and you pick up a menu on the way to the small register. The design of the place is no-frills, with mismatched chairs, large, dark interiors with a few scattered TVs tuned to ESPN, and a hideous overuse of the awful Comic Sans font on all the menus and labels. It is the polar opposite of a franchise chain, as it should be.

At any rate, when you order the lunch special, you get your choice of chopped pork, chicken or beef. They will serve it sliced or pulled for a fifty-cent fee. I also noticed that they charge fifty cents extra for fries, which is very unusual. Many places, including Dave Poe’s, will charge you an extra half dollar for the stew but call fries a regular side. I later learned that Hambones makes their fries in-house and they are very popular. Perhaps I should have tried those.

The pork is very tender and very smoky and doesn’t need sauce, but there are three on the table and they are all very good. The house sauce is a traditional red tomato-vinegar mix, and the house hot sauce is the same, only amped up with peppers. I liked this one best, but I was also quite taken with the rib sauce, a black mixture which tasted to me like there was less vinegar in it. In all, this was a quite good meal, with a lot of food served up with a lot of character for a very fair price.

I wasn’t quite done with Hapeville, because I heard about a soda fountain in town and so I went to go get some dessert. Central Avenue forms a main street through the small city. We’d driven through it some months back, during the short barbecue tour that the family took in January after the ice storm, to get from the I-75 corridor south of the city over to College Park. Driving through it, I could then feel the icy fingers of my past crawling along my spine. I think that this girl whom I inadvisedly dated for a few months way back when I was in high school lived around here.

There are just a few retail places along Central that are still open, with several restaurants keeping traffic coming through. Chapman Drugs is located next to the Freemason lodge, and there’s plenty of twenty minute street parking; just enough to grab something from the pharmacy and a milkshake or a limeade. I had two-scoop malt with peach and vanilla and it was just wonderful. Every milkshake should be that good.

Chapman Drugs is, inconveniently, not open on Saturdays. (Neither is Hambones, for that matter. I have to curl an eyebrow over barbecue joints where you can’t get a Saturday lunch.) This does raise the issue of when Marie will be able to come down here and enjoy a milkshake with me, but she’ll have a maternity leave in a month or so, and I think she will certainly be due an awesome milkshake. Maybe we can visit Pit Boss as well for lunch first and I can see which of the two barbecue places on Virginia Avenue I prefer.

Morelli’s Gourmet Ice Cream, Atlanta GA

Over the previous two chapters, I’ve related our wonderfully fun barbecue tour of some areas south of the city. We capped this off by getting some ice cream in East Atlanta. I read about Morelli’s on Urbanspoon and added it to my wishlist a couple of months ago. By a happy coincidence, our friends Victoria and James moved over to that neighborhood – just around the corner from it – a few months ago and have been raving about it. When we met them for lunch last month, we agreed that we needed to get together again and see whether all the fuss over this ice cream was warranted.

What happened here is that the owner, Donald Sargent, was looking for a new business opportunity, found a space that a Bruster’s was leaving, invested in all their equipment and started turning out some of the most decadent and wild flavors in the city. They go through 150 or more gallons of heavy cream each week making their ice cream. They have the expected chocolate and cookies and cream and other fun, traditional flavors, but they’ve also got some pretty wild ones. These include the very popular maple bacon and the possibly more popular salted caramel, and some that are way off in la-la land like olive oil, feta and sweet corn.

Two years ago, Bon Appetit named Morelli’s one of the five best ice cream parlors in the country, singling out their coconut jalapeño and ginger lavender. There’s been a line ever since.

Service here can be a little slow, in part because the terrific, friendly staff will let guests try one or two samples before making an order, but we got here between rushes around 3:30 and didn’t have a very long wait. My only quibble was that they didn’t assemble Marie’s chocolate sundae very well. It was delicious, but it was a challenge for Marie to eat it before it toppled over!

I had a cup of salted caramel, and, still stuffed from barbecue, could not finish it, but boy, I enjoyed what I had. Even more critical than the flavor was the texture of the ice cream. This just really tasted freshly mixed. It hadn’t been sitting in that freezer for very long at all. Oooh, and apparently, I have since learned, they’ll let you mix half-scoops in a single cup. I bet a half-vanilla half-caramel is just amazing.

Victoria’s just a couple of weeks from having her boy, and so she and Marie had a lot to talk about. We enjoyed kicking back on Morelli’s patio for probably a little longer than etiquette might have suggested, since there were plenty of people in line and looking for a table, but you know, we ate an awful lot last Saturday and I needed to sit down for a while. We’ll have to go visit our friends again very soon, once we have some babies to introduce to each other, and try another restaurant in the neighborhood… and then pop back for some dessert here.

Other blog posts about Morelli’s:

Amy on Food (Mar. 16 2009)
Foodie Buddha (May 20 2009)
Atlanta etc. (Jan. 7 2011)

The Chocolaterie, Cumming GA

Boy, howdy, is it ever a good thing we don’t live very close to this place. We don’t have an awful lot of money at the best of times and have a baby on the way. This place could very, very easily blow one heck of a hole in a fellow’s wallet. Hoo, boy.

So a couple of Sundays ago, Marie and I celebrated her birthday with an afternoon together. We had lunch at Sam’s and then drove north through Roswell and Crabapple and up Georgia-372, which is called Birmingham Highway for some reason. This is a very pretty drive, past million dollar homes and gorgeous trees and into Cherokee County. Eventually, this put us sort of east of Ball Ground, near a retirement community called Big Canoe, and that sent us into the southwest corner of Forsyth County and our destination, Poole’s Mill Bridge Park.

Marie and I both love covered bridges and waterfalls, and this has both. Well, it’s more of a cascade than a waterfall, I suppose. The bridge is no longer open to vehicles, but visitors can walk through it, and play in the shallow river as it hits the rapids. It’s a quiet and secluded spot, but popular enough to bring several couples, dog walkers and families. We stayed for quite some time, and left as a birthday party was arriving in the covered pavilion.

Around 2:30, we continued east, crossed Georgia-400 and wound our way behind an enormous, upscale development off exit 13. I’d been here three or four times when I worked in Alpharetta and we celebrated co-worker’s birthdays at either Ted’s Montana Grill or Red Robin. There’s a movie theatre and a Barnes & Noble here and, a few doors down from a Stride Rite shoe store, a place that sells some of the most decadent chocolates in the city.

The Chocolaterie’s specialty is truffles, and they don’t scrimp on these. Priced at between $1.75 and $2.50 apiece, guests are not going to gorge themselves here, but they are going to get incredibly high quality with every bite. We selected a half dozen from the forty or fifty available – one for me and five for Marie – and I’ve never tasted anything like them. I made my key lime truffle last for several very small nibbles, not willing for the experience to end. And I don’t have that much of a sweet tooth. I thought Marie was going to black out and fall over.

The shop is filled with other imported treats and snacks, and they also do fudge and other drool-worthy things. For guests looking for something a little cooler, there are little single-servings of Edy’s, Ben & Jerry’s and Itti-Bitz, priced right at just a dollar or a buck-fifty each.

Perhaps the most exciting thing in their case was one that I decided to save for later. They do a small number of really spicy truffles, too. I am incredibly curious about the ghost pepper one. It’s decorated to look like a little white-sheeted kiddie haunted house ghost. Or maybe I’ll work my way up the spicy truffles until I get to that one. Marie will definitely want to return more than once; I expect I’ll have many chances.

Other blog posts about the Chocolaterie:

Atlanta Food Critic (Feb. 28 2011)
Roots in Alpharetta (Sep. 16 2011)