Bubba Garcia’s Mexican Cantina and Zuzu’s, Saint Simons Island GA

I was just saying last month that the presence of Jack Davis artwork is a sure sign of a restaurant’s quality, and here, for the third time this year, is a place with his wonderful and distinctive art emblazoned for all the world to see. Never mind the Zagat sticker in the window, does a place get a thumbs up from one of Mad Magazine’s Usual Gang of Idiots, that’s what I’d like to know. Bubba Garcia’s, a small cantina owned by the same group on Saint Simons Island behind the popular Gnat’s Landing, goes one better than even the good places this year with caricatures of the owners – Old Brick Pit and Mayflower Restaurant – by having the business’s mascot be a signed Jack Davis creation. Continue reading “Bubba Garcia’s Mexican Cantina and Zuzu’s, Saint Simons Island GA” →

Yoder’s Deitsch Haus, Montezuma GA

So Thursday of last week, I went by one of the cafeterias on our to-do list of Roadfood.com-reviewed restaurants, and on Friday, the four of us visited another one. We took a trip down to visit Marie’s mother and father on Saint Simons Island, a trip that puts us within striking distance of six of the remaining restaurants on that list – five in middle Georgia and one in Savannah. I decided that we’d take the furthest one from the highway, Yoder’s Deitsch Haus. If the rumblings that I’ve been hearing about gas prices are true, I figured we should probably visit the one farthest away now, while gas is only about $3.50 a gallon. Yoder’s is about thirty miles south of Macon and then fifteen miles west of the interstate, and it’s probably worth the trip with gasoline at twice the price.

Boy, this is beautiful country down here. Much of the land in this chunk of middle Georgia around Montezuma and Americus is owned and farmed by Mennonites, as is the restaurant, bakery and country store that we visited. It’s the greenest grass you’ve ever seen, and unusually dense with black and white cows clustering around streams and milling around twisted and gnarled trees. The presence of the extended Yoder family is apparent as you drive west out State Route 26, with some of the roads that feed into the main highway sharing their name as well as the businesses. The cafeteria is set up in a large, unassuming building with a small sign out front, and staffed by servers wearing the faith’s traditional, modest dress. There’s plenty of parking, and space for buses from churches all over the state to bring in groups to eat here.

In the previous chapter, I noted that at Matthews, I had a pretty good meal. That’s not a complaint; dozens of inferior restaurants serve far worse within walking distance of that business. At Yoder’s Deitsch Haus, however, we had a genuinely terrific meal with even lower prices. I’m really glad that I didn’t do these two restaurants in reverse; I’m much more pleased to have my family share such good food with me here.

Like most cafeterias – well, apparently, I think that, prior to Matthews, it had been about six years since I’ve been in one – guests can select a salad first, and then a dessert. At Yoder’s, this could be a tremendously dangerous choice, because you could probably just sit down to four slices of pie and call it the best meal of your life. I’ll come back to that. Should you go, try and restrain yourself and select your meat and two. Marie and I each had pot roast, which was very, very good. My son had fried chicken, which was even better, and my daughter had sausages, which were evidently amazing, but she gobbled the darn things up so quickly that nobody else got to try a nibble.

But as good as the meats here are, the vegetables are even better. I was a little discouraged by the dull iceberg lettuce in the salad, but all the other veggies were quite excellent, especially the beets. I could have just had a bowl of those and the dressing. Marie says that we shouldn’t call it thousand island dressing so much as “inspired by” it, so I’ll take her lead. We each had creamed corn, which was excellent, and various other treats. My son was not as taken with his mashed potatoes, which he thought were lumpy, but my daughter loved her cheesy potatoes and Marie quite liked her green beans.

Oh, but then, these desserts. Marie had a slice of cherry pie, which she said was amazing. My daughter had chocolate, which she insisted was better. My son had peanut butter, which he not only insisted was better than either of theirs’, but even better than the peanut butter pie that he had at Zarzour’s in Chattanooga three weeks previously. True to form, he then got out his phone and updated his Facebook so that all his friends stuck in fifth period could see that, once again, my boy was out on a family trip lording his awesome desserts over them. But then I allowed my children each a single small nibble of my slice of shoofly pie, which is a crazy, thick and sticky melange of molasses and brown sugar and both children wept. This is the best pie on the entire planet. Gas could get up to seven bucks a gallon, and if you come by I-75 exit 127 in Georgia, you’re still going to want to pull over and drive the thirty mile round trip for a slice of this. Marie said that it was all right, but she likes fruit pies better. Marie is, occasionally and rarely, hopelessly mistaken on points like this.

After lunch, I thanked the staff and we wandered over to the country store. My daughter and I were distracted by a goat named Martha, whom you may feed for fifty cents. Martha probably won’t allow you to pet her unless you shell out for some food first, I noticed. In the country store, we considered buying some licorice or horehound for the road, but settled on a jar of locally-made blueberry jam. Marie’s hoping to make pancakes one morning this weekend so we can try that out. The girl at the register was very amused by the two-dollar bills that we used to pay for it.

We then enjoyed the nice ride back to the interstate, bought some gasoline while it’s still only $3.50, and made our way across the state to the coast. It’s a straight shot down Georgia 26 to Hawkinsville, where you can pick up US 341, the old Golden Isles Parkway, and take the two and a bit hour last leg to Brunswick. This is probably worth discussing a little more should we actually stop along the way and eat on this road, but I find this a much more pleasant ride than the interstate, with only one mind-numbing segment, the twenty-odd miles just east of Jesup. Then Marie drove around Brunswick down every fool road in town for half an hour before she got to the causeway. Well, she lived here for years; nostalgia can do this to a driver. And she drove right past Willie’s Wee-Nee Wagon, which is on our to-do list for a later visit, so we can’t hold it against her.

Dutch Dreams, Toronto ON

(Honeymoon flashback: In July 2009, Marie and I took a road trip up to Montreal and back, enjoying some really terrific meals over our ten-day expedition. I’ve selected some of those great restaurants, and, once per month, I’ll tell you about them.)

So the second day of our road trip started out somewhere on the south side of Pittsburgh. I had hoped to actually make it into the city for the night, but we lingered too long down in Charleston and couldn’t quite stay awake long enough to get to our destination motel and so we stopped at a Super 8 somewhere south of town. For breakfast, we drove to an Eat n’ Park, possibly the one in the suburb of Bridgeville. This is a small chain based in the Ohio Valley with, according to Wikipedia, 75 stores in the area. While the restaurants started in 1949 as drive-ins with roller skating car hops, it is very similar to a Denny’s today.

The plan was to have lunch up the road in Buffalo with my friend Jennifer at the world-famous Anchor Bar, but we spent the whole day running earlier than planned and arrived in town about an hour and a half before they opened and opted against waiting. So we met up with Jennifer, whom I met a couple of years earlier when she lived in Savannah and would come up to Atlanta for concerts, instead at a coffee shop downtown and just had a small lunch with pastries. I briefly considered catching the Buffalo Bisons, who, as it turned out (I learned much later) were hosting my beloved Toledo Mud Hens, but instead we made our way over to Niagara Falls like six or seven million previous honeymooners. We spent a little while there and then drove over to Toronto to meet up with our good friends Dave and Shaindle. We did some shopping at some Toronto institutions like The Beguiling, Sonic Boom and the now sadly closed Pages, and had supper at Nataraj, an Indian place which has also since closed, and then made our way to the York neighborhood for dessert at Dutch Dreams.

Interestingly enough, throughout the trip, Marie and I ate at only one place where one of us had been previously. In Marie’s case, this would be a popular restaurant in her college town of Middlebury, and in mine, this completely wonderful ice cream parlor that Dave and Shaindle have taken me to visit on each of my three trips to Toronto. Dutch Dreams is a hugely popular place with a really long line almost all of the time, and that’s with only about half of its business wanting to stay and eat among the few, cramped tables in the back. The ice cream here is simply the definition of decadence. If I lived in York, I would weigh 400 pounds. They serve up giant scoops and somehow manage to put gigantic toppings in the cone with them, making it a challenge for anybody to chow one down before it melts all over the place.

Dutch Dreams is a family-owned business. Theo Aben’s father opened the place and put the young man to work serving customers at the age of 12. I don’t know whether Theo has been in the store on the occasions that I’ve visited, and so I did enjoy this interview with him over at Good Food Revolution. There, he describes his upbringing and the great difficulty in predicting what’s going to sell out before they place a reorder from the facility where they buy their ice cream. It’s also completely impossible to predict how the line for dessert is going to work. My personal take is that dozens of drivers who previously had no intention of stopping will pass through, occasionally see the line looking short, screech to a halt, desperately look around the side streets for someplace to park and rush in. The periodic absence of a long line artificially creates demand, but since they don’t close until one in the morning, there’s plenty of time to get your dessert.

I apologize for not having any photos of my own of Dutch Dreams, but it was dark when we went, and since we weren’t writing a food blog then anyway, it didn’t strike either of us as essential to try and shoot it. I also don’t feel right borrowing other folks’ photos for this blog. The store was probably much brighter when it was first cobbled together around 1980, and much of the paint is old and peeling now, but it is nevertheless a beautifully thrown-together collage of kitsch and color, with photos of Dutch royalty next to ancient statues of clowns. The shelves across from the ice cream counter are packed with imported candies and other foods, including homemade stroopwaffels, and there are cows on the ceiling. The whole thing is a feast for guests’ eyes, and you can see some examples of what it looks like with a quick Google search, or just visit Blog TO’s page on the place.

Toronto is really full of good restaurants. The next day, we had an early lunch at the George Street Diner, which was pretty good, before hitting the 401 and heading east. Some other places that I’ve enjoyed on previous visits are Shanghai Cowgirl, a rowdy and silly burger and sandwich place on Queen Street not too far from the Silver Snail comic shop, Fran’s, a classic-style diner right across the street from Massey Hall, and The Ben Wicks, a terrific pub in Cabbagetown opened by the late cartoonist. It’s a shame that baby expenses and other things will almost certainly keep us from Toronto this year, because we’d love to visit Shaindle and Dave again and enjoy all the good eating.

Blossom Deli, Charleston WV (CLOSED)

Well, here’s an interesting turn-up for our blog. This is the first time that I’ve written anything about a restaurant which has apparently changed dramatically since we actually visited it. In fact, when I decided back in October to do these honeymoon flashback chapters, I realized that I would unfortunately be writing a little obituary for Blossom Deli in Charleston, but that only lasted a couple of weeks before word got out that the place would be reopening under new ownership. In December, Blossom reopened to a lot of goodwill, best wishes and crossed fingers.

This is a restaurant with a very curious and fun history. Apparently, the original Blossom Dairy was started in the 1920s by one Samuel Sloman. He eventually branched out to old-fashioned lunch counters, and there were somewhere between six and ten of them in the region. It’s one of these stores, opened in 1938, that is still with us, although no longer in family hands and after several periods of closure and neglect. It’s in downtown Charleston on Quarrier Street, and the original version apparently stuck around for at least fifteen years – Mr. Sloman passed away in 1953 – but eventually shuttered and lay dormant for years. I’ve found conflicting reports as to exactly when the original Blossom Dairy closed, and for how long this period of closure lasted, so take what you hear with a grain of salt. I’ve even heard tell that at some point in the eighties, the building was an all-ages punk club.

I’ll tell you what’s really neat to think about. You know the Nero Wolfe adventure Too Many Cooks? Well, possibly not. Anyway, the action takes place at a fictionalized version of the exclusive West Virginia retreat Kanawha Spa. If we can imagine that Archie Goodwin would have been asked by the state’s attorney’s office to return to Charleston to give evidence in the capital murder case that would have followed the events of that story, then it stands to reason that Archie would have gone somewhere for a corned beef sandwich and two glasses of milk. I didn’t actually enjoy that particular novel, finding it dated and Wolfe’s views on race patronizing, but I liked it a lot more when I realized that, having never been to Manhattan, the Blossom Dairy is the first place I’ve visited that Archie Goodwin might have also been. And it looks much the same as it would have back then.

At any rate, after however long a period of closure, the Blossom reopened, now called Blossom Deli but retaining the original signage. Changing the sign would have been a crime against cuisine, fashion, design and history, anyway. Just look at that awesome art deco block lettering and all that red and the entryway’s beautiful curves. If that doesn’t make you want to put on a wartime-era suit and hat to go in for a milkshake, you probably need to put down the cell phone and quit texting teenagers, kid.

Under the more modern management, Blossom Deli turned into a restaurant so impressive that I described it as being what Marietta Diner wants to be when it grows up. It had evolved into what’s a said-to-be-awesome sandwich shop in the daytime, and then at night, they turn the lights down and pull out the tablecloths and have a very upscale supper menu in place. At all times, they serve fabulous desserts. Marie had a chocolate mousse that was so rich and amazing that even she couldn’t finish it, but she retired it with a big smile on her face. We stopped in about a half hour after finishing supper several blocks away at Bluegrass Kitchen. I don’t suppose there’s any tactful way to tell somebody that you’re going to pass on their dessert and go get a sweet treat someplace else, but when the goal is to visit several places in a community, that’s what you need to do.

Blossom is about a block-and-a-half from a really super independent bookstore called Taylor Books, which has been hanging on and serving its community during this tough recession and the general battering that indie sellers have taken over the last few years. We left town very impressed, and while our hearts would later be stolen by Asheville, we certainly saw downtown Charleston as a place where we could be very happy. When you add in the delightful conversation that we had at Bluegrass Kitchen, it looked like a really fantastic community, and that’s why I got genuinely upset, doing a little research into the restaurants that we visited, to find the team at Fork You writing, in September, about Blossom Deli’s impending demise.

Since then, I’ve been following the story as new links have emerged. Here are three news stories about Blossom – apparently, for legal reasons, no longer “Dairy” nor “Deli” – and its latest incarnation, which opened on December 2nd. (One, Two, and Three.) The new ownership team of Jay Cipoletti, Mark Hartling and James Nester, with chef Matthew Grover, have inherited a lot of goodwill and a lot of hope. They are presently open only for lunch, their upscale supper plans on hold until they find their feet a little better. We may be seven hours away and unlikely to return anytime soon, but I certainly wish them the best, and a long and successful career in that awesome building.

Donut King, Snellville GA

One of my favorite foodie blogs is the “increasingly-inaccurately named” (as Douglas Adams might have termed it) Food Near Snellville. I noticed his work several months ago – he and Jennifer Zyman’s Blissful Glutton have been in a war of attrition for the top spot on Urbanspoon for the Atlanta region – and even though he’s based in one of this region’s many traffic-clogged, sprawling messes, he gets out to plenty of good restaurants and writes with a sense of infectious fun. To celebrate his finally claiming the number one spot from Blissful Glutton, we headed over to his turf.

Okay, that’s a complete lie. To be perfectly honest, Snellville, nothing more to me than that oft-gridlocked, badly traffic-managed corridor between Stone Mountain and Loganville, just happened to be on the road back from Walnut Grove, which we visited a week ago for our roadfood tour. Well, since we’re never in that neck of the woods, I wondered whether there might be anything we could grab for a snack after lunch at Kelly’s, just to try something a little different. And as for finding a new thing to try, I did this little trick: I zoomed in really close on US 78 in Google Maps until the names of restaurants started showing up. Donut King stood out, so I figured we’d each grab a treat there.

Yeah, sometimes here, you get lovingly-told stories of our life spent eating well and the wonderful histories that we have with favorite restaurants, and sometimes you get this. Anyway, there’s some really good doughnuts in Snellville.

Honestly, other than food, I’m hard-pressed to come up with a single reason to visit Snellville. Well, fair’s fair, food is, you know, second to friends as the best reason to visit anywhere, but the town is seriously lacking in bookshops and record stores. Several years ago, the kids and I were coming back from Athens this way just to have something different to see and we stopped into this utter craphole of a CD store where my son bought a VHS copy of the awful film Space Jam and the idiot behind the register wouldn’t let my daughter use the restroom. Even that place is gone now.

Food-wise, Snellville looks to be a chain paradise, with only a few standouts. Sri Thai sounds very promising, and FNS gave that place a good review. Actually, doing a little research, the most interesting thing that I’ve learned is that the national chain Dickey’s Barbecue Pit has one of its three Georgia locations in Snellville*, only it’s not listed on the corporate website, while four forthcoming restaurants are shown as “coming soon.” That’s just lovely, I say sarcastically. There’s no such thing as a good nationwide chain of barbecue restaurants. (*note: a commenter has informed me that this store has already closed.)

As for Donut King itself, I’m glad we made it an early start for the day, because this place closes at the unfortunate hour of 1 in the afternoon. It’s in a strip mall with a Provino’s and a Philly Connection and sixty thousand cars. It’s not particularly easy to get into, and a downright pain in the neck to get out of. But the dougnuts, well, they’re wonderful. Marie puts on airs of not actually liking doughnuts very much, but she found her chocolate frosted to be incredibly yummy, and the girlchild in the back seat was making happy “mmmmm” sounds as she wolfed down her eclair.

Despite their early closing time being a little inconvenient for curious eaters, the business clearly does a good job anticipating demand and bakes and fries accordingly. As you see in the photograph above, I had Marie hold her doughnut out for me to shoot. The last few times we’ve gone into a dessert place, I’ve had good results from shooting the display case showing off all the treats. Here, we arrived so late that most of their food was gone, and while my food composition skills are still admittedly meager, there’s no way any photographer could bring that decimated display to life. Thus said, the community must clearly love this place to have cleaned it out so thoroughly by 12.30 that only slim pickings were left for us. They were really good slim pickings, but it left me curious what Donut King looks like at five in the morning.

Great American Donut Shop, Bowling Green KY

Marie and I enjoyed a nice weekend visiting friends after dropping the girlchild off for a week with her mother. It was a five and a half hour haul from our place in Marietta to Owensboro, where we had lunch, and then we made our way back down the William Natcher Parkway. This is an amazing seventy-mile stretch of absolutely nothing, through farmland and… well, nothing. There are exactly two exits on the whole road with gas stations, and they’re one right after the other, 25-odd miles northwest of Bowling Green. Make sure both you and your car are ready for this drive before you get on the parkway! Continue reading “Great American Donut Shop, Bowling Green KY” →

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” →