Southern Soul Barbeque, St. Simons Island GA

“Oooh, there’s a barbecue place,” I said. Four years ago. Well, you might have thought that I teased Marie enough two chapters previously. But this place, good grief. It took something like a dozen trips down here for Marie to finally add Southern Soul Barbeque to our island to-do list. She then began kicking herself for waiting so darn long. I just had to shake my head a little as she made happy faces and happy noises over the excellent pulled pork here. My silly, silly wife, waiting so long for a trip here. Continue reading “Southern Soul Barbeque, St. Simons Island GA” →

The Red Arrow Diner, Manchester NH

(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, we’ll tell you about them.)

We spent our fourth evening of the trip at a Super 8 in White Plains Junction, Vermont. The goal, as we left that state, had been to get as close as we could to Manchester, the largest city in the northernmost three New England states, and have breakfast at the Red Arrow Diner. It took this long on the trip to turn up some of the restaurants featured in the first bookshelf collection of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. I read about this place and knew that I wanted to visit.

The Red Arrow Diner originally opened in 1922 but it has changed hands quite a few times over the years. Currently owned by Carol Sheehan, the joint has a huge following of traveling foodies and late night guests, all of whom are looking for some awesome greasy spoon atmosphere and some really interesting items on the menu. Marie had pie for breakfast and I had a plate of what they call American chop suey, a big, heavy dish of pasta in a tomato sauce that probably wasn’t screaming out for me to eat it at 8 in the morning.

Somehow, I got the insane idea that, because it was breakfast time, I really needed to have a glass of orange juice with that. You know what would have been better? Any beverage. Anything.

Another specialty at Red Arrow are the Dinah Fingers, which are homemade Twinkies. If you’ve tried to eat a Twinkie in the last decade, you might have noticed that they don’t taste like Twinkies anymore, but some noxious concoction of chemical sludge. Dinah Fingers taste like you remember Twinkies tasting when you were a kid. We took a couple for the road, and they were really yummy.

We also got to overhear the most amazing conversation next to us, when the two locals with whom we were talking about Georgia greeted an old friend they’d not seen since he went to prison for killing a guy. So the three of them talked about life in “the joint” – they genuinely called it that – and the buck an hour he’d been earning in the prison library. Eventually I had to interrupt them to say that this was surely the finest conversation I’d ever overheard strangers having.

Thoroughly stuffed and pleased, we went outside to take some more pictures, and the Red Arrow’s owner, Ms. Sheehan, who was backing out on her way to some meeting, stopped to say hello and take one of us. That’s one thing we picked up from this trip: the restaurants featured on Guy Fieri’s show and tie-in book have had a tremendous, carry-on boom in business, and they certainly repay that with some fantastic hospitality.

Marietta Diner, Marietta GA

So the day after our new baby boy was born, I wasn’t going to rest on my laurels and have any more lousy hospital or chain food like I did on the day he arrived. I still had two other kids to take care of while Marie recuperated in the hospital, and so I came back to Marietta to give them some more attention and some supper.

My daughter chose to go out with friends, so my older son and I went over to Marietta Diner for the first time in ages. I have mentioned this place a couple of times before; this is the flagship location for a group that runs some of Cobb County’s most well-known restaurants. We’ve covered their sister locations Marietta Fish Market and Cherokee Cattle Company in this blog before. While each of the other stores pick one style of cuisine and does an efficient, if sometimes larger-than-sense job of it, the Marietta Diner elects to do everything, and do it pretty well.

One thing that potential guests need to know is that there is always a crowd here. I’ve never had to wait for more than a few minutes, and occasionally, like last Wednesday, not at all, but I’ve never seen the place without plenty of people and an almost full lot. That’s any hour of the day. The Atlanta area is home to quite a few neon-and-chrome diners, but this place is easily the most popular and beloved of them all. Somehow, the army of staffers employed here manage to provide quite excellent hands-on attention to detail, fixing errors instantly and providing really prompt service while being pulled in many directions. The difference in customer service here and at any equally busy place – say, last month’s trip to La Fonda Latina – is like night and day.

I told my son up front that I’d allow him a gigantic treat from the gigantic dessert menu if he would keep his dinner selection on the cheap side. That’s never easy to do here. With a menu the size of a small phone book, and with a list of daily specials longer than many other places’ entire offering, it’s hard to narrow down what you want and find the right price. Reveling in humongous portions, some of the offerings are somewhat pricier than I might like.

We came, incidentally, because for some reason a few hours before, I found myself having the oddest craving for a gigantic deli sandwich, the likes of which are best found at The Square Bagel. That place is not open for supper, but I found a reasonable facsimile of what I wanted at the Marietta Diner. Called a Sloppy John, it’s a huge stack of corned beef, melted cheese and cole slaw served with Russian dressing and fries. Already satisfied by the spanikopita and the bread they bring to each table, and the salad that I enjoyed, I ended up having half this sandwich for breakfast the next morning.

The salad was a good example of the staff proving how on the ball they are. I had asked for the Greek-styled side salad, but they brought me this unbelievable thing that was assuredly priced higher than the $4-odd on the menu. It was served in a bowl the size of a basketball, featured a towering leaf of lettuce positioned like the feather of a garish headdress, and included several grape leaves and anchovies. It looked terrific, but far more than I could eat! I pointed out the error and it was corrected almost instantly.

My son had a burger, served with fries, a side of slaw and a couple of onion rings, and for dessert, he went up to the showcase and wasn’t seen again for several minutes. Slices of cake here are priced around seven dollars each and are just tremendous. He finally decided on Butterfinger flavor and could not finish it. We ended up taking three boxes home for leftovers the next day.

This place isn’t really for people who are looking for something inexpensive, or sensible portion sizes. It’s all about conspicuous consumption here, and the restaurant’s enormous popularity proves they’re doing right by their crowd. It’s genuinely good stuff, and while I’m hardly a regular here, I’ve certainly never had a bad meal.

Matthews Cafeteria, Tucker GA

Marie and I made it our rule to not give a negative review to any restaurant that either of us visit. It goes against the grain of this being the story of a good life spent eating well. If we have a bad experience at a restaurant, it just doesn’t make it to these pages. That doesn’t mean, however, that I can’t express a little disappointment when an otherwise good meal just plain lets me down.

I first heard of Matthews Cafeteria when the second volume of the Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives tie-in books was released. I was really looking forward to the second book, because I feel that Georgia was badly underrepresented in the first one, with only the Marietta Diner making its pages. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a pretty good restaurant, but it’s still a little overrated. I wasn’t sure, then, which Georgia restaurants had made it onto the show. You can check out the full list yourself, thanks to the excellent Flavortown USA fan site.

So the book was released – this has been a year and a half – and Georgia got two more restaurants in the print archives of Triple-D. Neither of which I’d ever heard of. It felt like Fieri got together with the ghost of Douglas Adams to upgrade Georgia from “harmless” to “mostly harmless.”

Well, Matthews stayed off my radar until it got added to the list of restaurants reviewed at Roadfood.com late last year. When we started Marie, Let’s Eat!, we agreed to visit and feature all of the 29 restaurants there, barring two for reasons I’ll mention when we finish the goal. Last year, two more were added – Barbecue Kitchen in College Park, and Matthews Cafeteria, meaning there was no getting around it, I was going to have to go to Tucker and try this mostly harmless restaurant. (One of the Roadfood.com restaurants, Melears in Fayetteville, has since closed, leaving a total of 30 on the site. At the time of writing, we are ten away from the goal of 28. Two of those ten will be appearing in this blog over the next week.) So I grumbled and complained and looked around and actually read Fieri’s team’s writeup in the book, and watched the segment on YouTube. I also asked around a couple of months ago to see whether any of my friends knew anything about the Roadfood.com restaurants on our agenda. My friend Laura, whom I have known since high school, when I listened to too much Smiths and she listened to too much Duran Duran, said that theirs is the “most awesome home cooking ever” and that she used to brunch there every week.

And then there are the reports of their Brunswick stew. Now, if you look up the Triple-D segment on YouTube, you’ll get the very curious sight of Fieri acting like he’s never heard of Brunswick stew at all, which is really weird and not especially believable, but you’ll also see this amazing concoction of chicken, creamed corn, potatoes, Worcestershire sauce and a whole mess of other stuff that looks like the most fantastic stew ever. Suffice it to say that when Thursday rolled around, I was licking my chops in anticipation of getting to Matthews as soon as they turned the metaphorical “lunch” sign on to get ahold of that stew.

Would you believe they didn’t have any? Or that the girl at the register said that they only have it on Wednesdays?!

Stymied and not a little crushed, I enjoyed what was nevertheless a pretty good meal. I went for a traditional meat and three, with a pork chop, mashed potatoes, green beans and dirty rice. Everything was quite tasty, especially the dirty rice, which was seasoned just perfectly. I think that if I actually lived in this section of Dekalb, I’d be ready to eat here most of the time. It’s a proper southern meat and three, every bit as good as, say, Vittles or Folks Southern Kitchen. In fact, there’s a Folks just a hop, skip and a jump away, down Lavista near I-285, and you can get food of the same or better quality, for better prices, at a locally-owned place here at Matthews, so there’s no reason to frequent that particular outpost of that chain. No, the vegetables are not of the same quality as the region’s highest points – Mary Mac’s and Doug’s Place – but they’re just fine for a meat and three.

I was, nevertheless, a little disappointed, not merely in the lack of Brunswick stew, but in the lack of attention from the wait staff. They seemed to employ an army of ladies in white with red aprons, but the only ones who spoke with me at all were the lady working the line serving my food and the one at the register, who told me the bad news about Brunswick stew only being served on a day I’m working downtown. I was there for the better part of forty minutes and helped myself to a couple of top-off refills of the very good sweet tea, and not one person asked after me. It’s probably just as well; I might have asked an impertinent question about why the heck there was a microwave oven against the far wall next to the bottles of A-1 and Red Rooster. Don’t know that I’ve seen that in a dining room before.

The meal, as I keep saying, was pretty good, but whatever disappointment I had with the service was more than made up for with the strawberry shortcake. This was amazingly decadent and wonderful, and almost as good as the lovely pound cake treat that Marie made a few days before. I’m sorry that my better, sweeter half wasn’t around to try it. Hers is better, but she appreciates other people’s excellent desserts even more than I do.

But while I’m registering disappointments along with the good food, let me raise one other. The previous Saturday, Marie had to work some overtime hours. I picked her up afterward and we had a little cheap date night, just the two of us, at the wonderful America’s Top Dog. The previous visit proved to be really good, but this second trip saw me trying one of their half-smokes with chili and man, oh, man, was that ever amazing. It wasn’t until I was back on 285 after lunching at Matthews that I realized what I should have done once I realized I wasn’t going to get to try this Brunswick stew was just had two veggies and a dessert, and then stopped by America’s Top Dog one exit north for another half-smoke. I had a perfectly good meal, but I was completely stuffed, and what I should have done was thought it through a little more. For somebody who looks forward to regularly visiting a fast food joint two years in the future, I sure do let my impulsive side mess me up when it comes to getting something to eat, don’t I?

The Beacon, Spartanburg SC

The high point of our trip through the Carolinas came with the seventh stop. We’d enjoyed some pretty good eating experiences along the way, but the most fun and most different pleasure of the tour came at a very famous restaurant in Spartanburg called The Beacon. I had heard this place referred to as similar to Atlanta’s legendary Varsity, but that doesn’t really begin to explain how wild and awesome it is. This is absolutely a place that everybody in the southeast should try at least once. Continue reading “The Beacon, Spartanburg SC” →

Bar-B-Q King, Charlotte NC

A couple of weeks ago, the great city of Charlotte found itself at the center of a really dumb political debate centered around the quality of its barbecue. The 2012 Democratic National Convention will be held in Charlotte, and Michelle Obama was quoted as saying that, among other reasons she was looking forward to the event, she hoped to enjoy the city’s “great barbecue.” Cue The Charlotte Observer, who issued an editorial skeptical of Mrs. Obama’s quote, as everybody knows that their city has no great barbecue. To get the best stuff, you have to drive an hour north to Lexington. Continue reading “Bar-B-Q King, Charlotte NC” →

Pawley’s Front Porch, Columbia SC

This is Marie, doing my bit towards handling the backlog due to the 8-restaurant day that Grant and I took together. Grant and I don’t get to spent a whole lot of just-us-together time so this was something we had been looking forward to for a while. The kids got to spend the day getting rid of their clothing allowance with their grandmother, so a good day was had by all. Continue reading “Pawley’s Front Porch, Columbia SC” →