Village Burger, Dunwoody GA

Sometimes, a restaurant will show up featured on the much-loved Roadfood.com and I will have no idea why. So it is with this fairly new little place in Dunwoody, Village Burger, that opened about a year and a half ago. It is quite good and just a fantastic place to kick back and enjoy the weather and the company of a wonderful family like the one I’m lucky to have, but it’s far too new to have become a legend and it’s much more of a neighborhood hangout than a place to hunt down from miles away. Continue reading “Village Burger, Dunwoody GA” →

Alon’s Bakery & Market, Atlanta GA

Three Fridays ago – that is how far we are backed up right now! – I had my first solo lunch with the baby. Typically, I picked a place that’s really not as baby-seat friendly as would have been ideal for one parent, but I did not know that when I picked it! This was Marie’s first week back at work, and so, on one of my short days, the baby and I stopped by for a flying visit and a few hugs to give Mommy a nice little break from her crazy day, and then we set about finding someplace in Dunwoody to get something to eat when she had to get back to work.

I picked Alon’s based on its Urbanspoon ranking. I don’t know that I had ever heard of it before. It’s the second location for this small market that serves up some terrific sandwiches. The original is in Virginia-Highlands, and Neal tells me that the dessert display that I passed tastes every bit as decadent and wonderful as it looks. Between that and the very impressive cheese counter, I was certain to tell Marie that there was a pretty stunning selection of treats just around the corner from her office.

I think that Alon’s moved in to the space that had been occupied by Eatzi’s for many years. It’s a pretty cavernous room, and it is completely packed with counter space. If a guest is looking for lunch, they will enter through a patio, the blistering heat regulated by several ceiling fans, navigate an unavoidable logjam of people entering and trying to pay at the same place, and then work towards the back, where the sandwiches are made. I will agree with my fellow blogger Evan Mah, aka The Toothfish, who observed that the prices are a little lower than most high-end delis while serving up considerably superior food.

I ordered a hot pastrami sandwich, and I don’t know whether I’ve ever had one this good. The bread was just amazing; the crust was chewy and the rest was moist and so delicate that it seemed likely to disintegrate. The meat was served at the perfect temperature and just hinted at the sweetness that too much pastrami rolls about, lazily, in. The red onions tasted fresh and it was garnished with something called cannonball mustard. Googling this brings up Alon’s as one of the most common results. It’s nice little BBs of mustard seed in a very thin little sauce, and it goes incredibly well with the meat.

I enjoyed this wonderful sandwich with a bowl of pretty delightful gazpacho. It was not, perhaps, among the best bowls I’ve ever had, but it was quite good and it was just hot enough outside for this to be a perfectly considered treat. Normally, I just have a glass of ice water with my lunch, but I didn’t think any would be available at this market, so I enjoyed a bottle of Boylan’s cream soda. This all added up to be a pretty pricy lunch for one, but I daresay it was better than anything I could have attempted in my own kitchen.

Seating is, sadly, a real challenge here, so I would advise going outside of the peak lunch rush. The tables are jammed in a little close together, leading several people to act as though they were threading the fat man’s squeeze at Rock City as they tried to get between the table nearest me and a pillar holding up the patio’s roof. The staff member who said he would try to find a highchair for me promptly vanished without trace, so I ate with the baby seat on my table. My son got several compliments from people passing through, which is as it should be. He’s an awfully cute kid.

Seriously! You have to try this soup!

This won’t be a very long entry. I just felt it important to remind my readers in the Atlanta and Jacksonville areas – we haven’t visited any other towns with a Sweet Tomatoes – that, for the next two weeks, you can try one of the very best soups that any restaurant, anywhere, serves up. It’s the creamy tomato soup at Sweet Tomatoes, known as Souplantation on the west coast, and for many years, they have, criminally and haughtily, only offered this wonderful treat in the month of March and for one week in October. They serve the most mediocre chili every day of the year here, but only offer the tomato soup for just one month.

We hadn’t actually been back to a Sweet Tomatoes since we celebrated Neal’s and Marie’s birthdays a year ago. I said, then, that I’ve found the overall experience agreeable if unexciting, except where the soups are concerned. They have a few very notable ones apart from the creamy tomato, such as a shrimp bisque and a chicken lime thing, but our desire to visit many different restaurants rather than just stick with favorites over the last several months has meant that Sweet Tomatoes has been off our radar, and I never even checked to see what soups they might have offered anytime lately. But at the beginning of the month, the writer Mark Evanier, who brought this wonderful soup to the world’s notice, rang the dinner bell to tell his bajillions of readers, “Soup’s on!” So it was back to Sweet Tomatoes we went.

This past Saturday, Marie and I met up at the Dunwoody Sweet Tomatoes with our friends Victoria and James, who just moved to a new place in the East Atlanta neighborhood. Victoria suggested that we meet up for a meal again sometime, and I told her that it was creamy tomato soup month again, but she’d never heard of it, meaning that this restaurant still needs to work on getting the word out. Marie and Victoria are each in the later stages of their first pregnancies, and have a lot to share and talk about, although not necessarily soup.

Meals here are very reasonable. For nine bucks – seven if you join the “Club Veg” club for email coupons – you get all you can eat salads, pastas, freshly-baked breads and about nine different soups from which to choose. I typically have a medium-sized salad and three bowls of soup. This time, I had two bowls of the amazingly delicious creamy tomato and one of the almost as amazingly delicious shrimp bisque.

Creamy tomato is on the menu for just two more weeks. If you’re in a town with a Sweet Tomatoes, you should definitely make plans to get over to one as soon as possible. In Atlanta, there are four stores, all on the north side, outside the perimeter. With pollen ravaging the area and our sinuses, wouldn’t a nice bowl of delicious soup do you good?

OU for U Cafe, Dunwoody GA (CLOSED)

I first heard about OU for U Cafe several weeks ago, and was excited about having such a neat-sounding place available just a traffic light away from Marie’s job. Since I have a couple of short days each week, then, assuming she’s not trapped all day in meetings, I could take her to lunch somewhere in Dunwoody and get her back before her employer falls apart without her.

That might just happen when she takes maternity leave.

Despite a glowing review from Food Near Snellville, it was several weeks before Marie and I could get our schedules synched enough to have lunch together. It was certainly worth the wait; if there’s a better lunch place in this neighborhood, it’s news to me. There’s a Rising Roll Gourmet about a stone’s throw from OU for U, and it’s not a tenth as good as the delicious, kosher food in this deli.

(If, unlike me, you actually have a brain, the “OU” pun might have clued you into this being a kosher business. Me, I read that it was kosher, and I saw the name, but was somehow unable to connect the dots. Then again, it took me more than a decade to figure out why comics writer Pat Mills named a squabbling double-act “Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein.” Being married to a punster like Marie has not helped; it’s just made me close my eyes.)

Considering the suggestions made by other writers, I told Marie that both the egg salad and the falafel came recommended. That worked for her; she ordered the egg salad and a small cup of cream of mushroom soup. I thought the egg salad was pretty good but not extraordinary, but the soup was really excellent. My own lunch was sort of the inverse of hers; I had a tomato-and-stuff soup that was okay, and not nearly enough bread along with it. I should have gone with the lentil soup; everybody seems to be raving about it.

Now, that falafel on the other hand… let me tell you about this. For many years, I have told and retold the story of these unbelievable falafels that I used to get in Athens.

In the mid-nineties, there was a gentleman – I used to think he was from Turkey, but a part of me is saying that’s wrong – who came to Athens to clean house for his daughter while she was in a doctoral program at UGA. During the day, he rented a cart and started serving the sort of grub that he used to have back home from a little space on whatchacallit street, beneath Park and Leconte Halls and across from the P-J plaza, a discreet distance from the guy with the hot dog cart. I had a couple of pretty good sandwiches from him and then I tried his falafel and that was that. I had another falafel for lunch from this guy every single day for the rest of the quarter. Then the term ended, my work and class schedule became stupid, his daughter got her doctorate, and that was the end of the falafel cart.

OU for U didn’t serve me a falafel that good, but it was the first time in fifteen years that I’ve had a falafel come close enough to remind me of what I’ve missed. Alternating between a little extra chilled tahini from a squeeze bottle and some punch-packed hot sauce, this was a remarkable little sandwich. I would not mind another trip out that way at all.

In July 2012, OU’s owners, while still keeping kosher, elected to change their name and also changed the menu quite considerably. Now called Cafe Noga, they are no longer vegetarian.

Guthrie’s, Dunwoody GA (CLOSED)

Now here’s a restaurant with an uphill battle. Guthrie’s has been around since 1965, and the formula that we know them by – limited menu, incredibly tasty sauce – was finalized in 1982. They have a strong claim to being the place that invented and perfected the chicken finger restaurant formula, yet somehow they’ve been completely passed in the market by one of their imitators, Zaxby’s. Now, Zaxby’s isn’t bad, and we’ve been known to stop in many times over the years, but when I first discovered a Zaxby’s in the nearby town of Watkinsville, I described it to all my Athens friends as “kind of like Guthrie’s, but with more stuff.”

Guthrie’s couldn’t have had much less stuff at all. The menu consists of really incredibly amazing chicken fingers, Texas toast, fries and slaw, served in a handful of ways. I recall that if you stopped at the Guthrie’s on Baxter Hill, you could get them in a plate, in a box, in a smaller size without slaw or between two slices of bread. Those were your only options. They were absolutely essential to the dorm dining experience. Everybody who lived in the high-rise dorms had Guthrie’s all the time and those of us by the stadium regularly; so did thousands of tailgaters and high school students. The line out the door whenever Clarke Central was playing at home in the fall was every bit as insane on a Friday as on a UGA game day.

That Guthrie’s was the third in the chain, which is quite successful today in its home state of Alabama, with scattered outposts in other Southern states. In the early nineties, Guthrie’s opened a second Athens store, over by Cedar Shoals High School, so their students could enjoy the same Friday night craziness. This was a hugely important Athens tradition in the 1980s and 1990s, and its simplicity fueled wonderful urban legends. Some said there was a secret menu, and some said that if you left a penny in the sauce – a sort of peppery brown mayo, totally delicious – overnight, you could retrieve it polished and glittering.

Then one day in the late ’90s, the Athens locations were gone. It was very abrupt and their departure fueled a whole new raft of urban legends, which I’ll decline to repeat in these pages. Some stories are best left unreported, if unconfirmed. Talk radio should try that sometime.

Several years later, Guthrie’s returned ever-so-briefly to the Athens region, opening a store twenty-ish miles north in Danielsville. It’s gone now, but there are two stores in the Atlanta area along with the twenty-ish restaurants in Alabama and six in other states. I was working in the Ravinia building when the Dunwoody store opened in 2004 and a co-worker mentioned it. She thought, wrongly, that it was a Zaxby’s knockoff. I let her know it was the other way around, but you can bet that Guthrie’s glacier-like speed at expanding is going to run into that everywhere. If they try moving into Louisiana, they’ll be called a Raising Cane’s clone.

Guthrie’s is an occasional destination for us, whenever we need a quick meal on the top end of I-285 while going out of town through Spaghetti Junction. On Friday, Marie and I had hoped to get lunch further up the road as we started an anniversary getaway, but trouble leaving work early meant that we didn’t get on the perimeter until after the lunch rush had already ended, and the Spaghetti Junction backup already showing signs of starting. (You’ll notice I don’t say who had trouble leaving early. Maybe I’m polite, or maybe I just don’t want you to think ill of me.) This store has expanded their menu just a little, adding wings and breakfast to their offerings, but what they need to do is hire somebody to straighten that place up some. Nobody ever stopped at Guthrie’s wanting cleanliness – that Baxter Hill store looked like a war zone from sunup to sundown – but I’m starting to get at the age where I want somebody to get out from behind the counter and wipe down dirty tables.

Then again, it’s not like this is haute cuisine; it’s finger-gooping greasy fried chicken fingers, done right. You remember how one day you went through a Zaxby’s drive-thru and didn’t have to wait for your food and the sauce came prepackaged in a factory-made plastic cube with the ingredients on the label? Guthrie’s reminds you of the days before Zaxby’s got corporate enough to change into that. Or, if you will, the days before there was a Zaxby’s. I hope that they’re always around, somewhere, and that there will always be people who will spread the word that theirs was the better restaurant, first.

Now if only I could convince Guthrie’s to serve up those fried mushrooms and Fanta Cherry that their imitator has. Don’t you judge me.

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)