Pizza Palace, Knoxville TN

So I was reading the tie-in book for Guy Fieri’s Food Network TV series Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives and I told myself, “Self, you totally need to eat at some of these places.” A few months after that, in the summer of ’09, Marie and I started talking about where we’d like to go for our honeymoon and we settled on a big old road trip. As I’m recounting in my first-of-each-month honeymoon flashbacks, this trip started in Charlotte, wound its way up to Montreal and finished, ten days later, in one of our favorite towns, Knoxville, where we met up with the children after they spent two weeks’ summer vacation with their mom. There, we settled in for supper at one of three Triple-D restaurants that were featured on Fieri’s show and book which we were able to visit on our trip. Continue reading “Pizza Palace, Knoxville TN” →

The Silver Skillet, Atlanta GA

Let me tell you how to get one of the most decadent breakfasts that you’ve ever had. Go on down to the Silver Skillet. It’s an old-fashioned greasy spoon in Atlanta’s midtown, on 14th Street just west of the downtown connector. That’s what we call the stretch of Interstates 75 and 85 when they merge. The building has barely changed in fifty years, with faded prints of show horses on the walls and the old hand-painted signs with the daily specials behind the bar. You’ll want country ham with red-eye gravy, and two biscuits with white gravy, and a couple of eggs, preferably scrambled. And you’re probably going to want some sweet tea with it. If you’re the sort who likes coffee with your breakfast, trust me this once, you’ll want to pass this time around.

Red-eye gravy is most often made from mixing the drippings of the fried country ham with coffee. To hear my mother tell it, that’s why in northern Alabama, where she grew up, this was called, not very appetizingly, “grease gravy.” At the Silver Skillet, they apparently let their country ham, which is center-sliced and bone-in, marinate for several hours in a stew that includes – if you’re ready for this – soy sauce, brown sugar, paprika and Coca-Cola before they fry it. So it’s the grease from that marinate that gets mixed with coffee. I think that it works best as a dip. Have a small piece of ham dipped in gravy, followed by a small piece of biscuit dipped in the white gravy. Somehow manage to keep the current week’s Creative Loafing balanced in your lap under the formica table.

This ham is, by leagues, the best country ham that I’ve ever had. It is tender but chewy, and incredibly salty. You’re then dipping this salty meat into a gravy that’s at least one part soy sauce. You are going to need sweet tea, and not coffee. Probably about three glasses. And you’re still going to be licking your lips and smacking from salt overload about ninety minutes later.

At any rate, the Silver Skillet has been family-owned since 1967. The late George Decker bought the restaurant from its original owner and his daughter has run it since his passing in 1988. Open from 6 until 2 in the afternoon, there is usually a short wait during the week and a much longer one on weekends or during big events in the city that bring in the tourists. For my birthday last week, I treated myself to breakfast here. I got there just in time to claim one of two available tables, kicked back with my paper, had a very nice server call me “sweetie” and “hon” as she refilled my tea enough times for me to float away when I was finished.

Much later, after I had gassed up and stopped by someplace in the ‘burbs for some Christmas shopping, I went by a grocery store where my bank has a branch. I was still smacking my lips. It was that tasty and that salty. Clearly that’s not a meal for everybody, nor a meal for every day, but when the opportunity strikes to indulge just a little, how can anyone resist?

The Colonnade, Atlanta GA

If you grew up in a southern household, you simply must visit The Colonnade to have your mind blown by this menu. They serve things here that your mother or your grandmother regularly prepared and which you had completely forgotten. Last week, Marie and our daughter and I joined David and Neal for supper here. All three of us fellows had the same eye-popping reaction to the same thing. “Pears and cheese?! My mom used to make that!” With grated sharp cheddar cheese and mayo. It must have been in the secret handbook assigned by Betty Crocker to all housewives in Georgia and neighboring states between 1964 and 1975.

One of the other amazing things on the menu is tomato aspic. This savory gelatin was apparently a somewhat common dish in postwar America, until the Jell-O company turned families onto the idea of gelatin as a sweet dessert instead. “Oh, Lord,” said Neal, sampling a half-spoonful of my order. “It tastes like V-8 Jell-O.” Turns out he’s exactly right. I found a recipe for tomato aspic which calls for tomato juice, Tabasco and bay leaf along with two envelopes of unflavored gelatin. The curiosity and novelty didn’t overwhelm the reality that it wasn’t very good, but as I told Neal as I encouraged him to give it a taste, when the heck else are you going to have the chance to try tomato aspic in a restaurant?

Naturally, I had to try both of these at the Colonnade, as they’re both missing from the menus of darn near every other restaurant around. So is calf’s liver, among others, but I had to draw the line somewhere. No, I just had your common-or-garden chicken livers. Nothing adventurous here.

The Colonnade is one of Atlanta’s oldest surviving restaurants. Only the Atkins Park Tavern is older. It opened in 1927 at the intersection of Piedmont and Lindbergh, in a house that was torn down before I was born. In 1962, the Colonnade moved to its present location on Cheshire Bridge Road in front of that unbelievably skeevy motel. I know this must come as a shock to Atlantans to hear a motel on Cheshire Bridge described as skeevy, but I calls ’em as I sees ’em.

We were mistaken on one point about the Colonnade. Looking over all these old-fashioned, timelost dishes on the menu along with the fried chicken and collard greens, we all assumed, quite wrongly, that the only things to have changed here over the decades are the prices. However, in the lobby, there is a collection of old menus from earlier days, and it would appear that curiosities like the aspic and the pear and cheese are actually relatively new. Along with the menus, there are also some newspaper and magazine reviews. One of these features the ridiculous headline “PATRONS PRAISE GOOD PLACE TO EAT.” When I wrote for a newspaper in Athens, I occasionally wanted to smack the copy editors around with a baseball bat for all the awful headlines they wrote for my articles, but lordy, I never had one that bad.

There has been one very unfortunate change at the restaurant, but it’s not one that I knew about for a couple of days. We noticed in the lobby the requisite framed, autographed poster of Guy Fieri spotlighting the Colonnade’s appearance on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. I tracked down the clip – they’re on YouTube – and was surprised to see that the Food Network series visited the Colonnade during a period where they were experimenting with some really fascinating concoctions no longer available. So if you’re a Triple-D fan making your way around the country hitting the featured restaurants – and a fine use of your time that would be – it looks like you cannot currently get the redneck sushi, the lobster knuckle sandwich or, tragically, the kangaroo sirloin. Look, I like chicken livers all right, but if I’d seen kangaroo steak on the menu, that’s what I would have ordered. The Colonnade’s brief flirtation with new, wild and a little weird has ended, and they’re back to the basics, serving up fine dining the way that your grandmother knew it.

I did find one note about the fine dining experience a little unusual, however. All of the service was very good, and we enjoyed our server’s choosing to answer Marie’s request for a recommendation in reverse. Rather than telling her what he liked best, he told her the two dishes that he did not enjoy, suggesting that she’d like anything else that she ordered, and she did. But I was a little surprised at the register. The Colonnade does not accept credit cards. That’s just fine by me; I don’t like to use credit cards. (I also play Where’s George?, so it’s important that I keep ones in circulation!) I tried not to be confrontational about it, but I was curious about the policy. “I think that’s so neat that y’all don’t take credit cards. I don’t use them either, but I was wondering why you don’t.” I guess the lady at the register gets that a lot, only rudely. “We just don’t. We never have.” That’s all the answer that she wanted to give.

So much for curiosity, but then again, I think the Colonnade is older than credit cards, and they can make that choice. The rest of you, swing by your bank’s ATM first.