West Egg Cafe, Atlanta GA

A few Fridays back, I had not decided where I was going for lunch, and then I got peckish early and set out to find some breakfast instead. I actually work with two former employees of West Egg Cafe on Howell Mill, and they speak fondly of their time there. So I looked over the menu and was very interested by some of the things that they assemble there.

West Egg Cafe was once a Jake’s Ice Cream store. I’m not certain for how long, but the franchise owner elected to get out of ice cream and strike out on her own with coffees, breakfasts and sandwiches. They do offer a few desserts in the form of pastries and cupcakes. I took home one of their celebrated Coca-Cola cupcakes to share with Marie and, frankly, was not impressed, but that’s okay. The omelet that I had in the restaurant was so darn good that it didn’t matter.

I’ve never had pimento cheese in an omelet before! I was torn between this and the Georgia Benedict, which is turkey sausage, eggs and gravy over a biscuit. That sounds wonderful, but the omelet was just fine. It came with a delicious biscuit and potatoes grilled in a skillet.

This place can get really busy, so breakfast guests should expect a wait. Fortunately, the deck behind the restaurant appears to be free, so there’s plenty of space to park. The service was downright excellent, with a small army of servers stopping by to check on everybody. I don’t go out for breakfast all that often, but it’s always nice to add to my options with a place as fun as this.

Buckhead Barbecue Company, Smyrna GA

In recent months, I’ve visited some of the barbecue restaurants in and around Atlanta that can trace their lineage back to Sam’s BBQ-1 and the old – well, recent, but old in restaurant terms – alliance between Sam Huff and Dave Poe. Those two once employed several cooks and staff who have gone out and started their own restaurants, with results that, in my book, range from pretty good to what I would have called disappointing but I’ve since downgraded to “downright awful,” thanks to the online sockpuppeting antics of its supporter(s) ticking me off.

However, we have clearly saved the best – for now – for last. Despite the name, which I find pretty silly considering this place isn’t even in Vinings, much less Buckhead, the Buckhead Barbecue Company has surpassed the quite good work found at both Sam’s and Dave’s restaurants. Their chef, Kevin Fullerton, used to work with those fellas. This restaurant is serving up an exceptional product at a terrific price from a little strip mall shop in Smyrna, just a few doors down from the excellent Roy’s Cheesesteaks.

They’ve taken the bold move of opening in the shadow of an unaccountably popular location of Jim ‘n Nick’s, a mediocre chain whose local store has already claimed one barbecue fatality in a store called Atlanta Ribs. I certainly hope that Buckhead Barbecue Company can draw enough attention to their little shop one mile outside the perimeter to thrive. Hopefully, the praise and love that Roy’s has found here will keep bringing the curious into the ‘burbs to try this place out. This place deserves some attention, friends.

We had supper here a few Wednesdays ago, in the company of our good friends Dave and Amy, who live in Virginia and had come to town for Anime Weekend Atlanta and stayed to visit family. We commandeered a table on their patio for more than two hours, catching up and talking about barbecue. Actually, when Amy had requested that we meet somewhere for barbecue and told me that they were staying in Smyrna, my little “what can I blog about” senses started tingling and I knew just where I wanted to try.

All of the meats here are very good, with pulled pork smoked just perfectly and just moist enough to not need any sauce. That said, if you like drowning your meat and you like to try several different things, then Buckhead probably offers more sauces than any place that I know this side of Asheville’s Ed Boudreaux’s: a whopping nine varieties, and every one of them is lip-smacking tasty. If any one was the house sauce at a single-bottle joint, it would be a winner, which makes it a much better experience than Ed’s, where the phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” was never more true.

I was most impressed and intrigued by the different “Eastern NC Vinegar” and “Lexington NC Vinegar” varieties. I had heard that the distinctive sauce around Lexington was a vinegar-tomato blend, but, not really able to go up there and try it for myself, yet, I was left wondering what the difference is between that and the sauce common at so many restaurants around Atlanta and the I-20 corridor, which I would describe as red, and thick with a mild, vinegary kick. If what Buckhead Barbecue Company mixes is accurate, then Lexington sauce is much thinner – online recipes that I’ve since consulted suggest four parts water to one part each vinegar and ketchup, with sugar and lots of pepper – and has a different sort of kick, very much unlike what I have been finding and questioning. There is, it turns out, at least one other example of Lexington sauce in the area; Swallow at the Hollow’s vinegar sauce surprised me by splashing red all over the pink meat. Now I know why.

Apart from these, there is a very good mustard sauce, two examples of a traditional brown sweet sauce – a spicier “Kansas City” and a sweeter “Memphis” – and an Alabama white sauce, and every one of them is just wonderful. My daughter was so taken with the Kansas City sauce that, after she finished her meal, which included a fun little combo dish of Brunswick stew poured over very good mac-n-cheese, she started squeezing herself spoonfuls of sauce. Give her some saltines and she’ll look just like a starving undergraduate.

Dave had trouble deciding between two sandwiches. They offer one rather gloriously ridiculous Elvis tribute sandwich, with crunchy peanut butter, bananas and bacon, fried, and he was tempted, but he went with the Big Pig, which is a sliced pork loin beast topped with pulled pork, bacon, melted cheese and horseradish sauce. Dave was one of my groomsmen and I love the guy, so I seriously hope he had steamed vegetables for lunch the next day. On the other hand, with the bread puddings he and Amy took along with them, I’m not so sure eating healthy was on the agenda. Well, they were on vacation.

Goodbye to El Pollo Loco

I will always associate El Pollo Loco with death.

That’s hardly fair, of course, but that’s how these things happen. One of my earliest memories is the death of an uncle named Ruford, who married my father’s oldest sister before Dad was born. This is, in part, why I am convinced that there must have been some old family contract that made it illegal for anybody to marry into my family unless they had a name as silly as any of ours. My grandfather had a sensible name like Joseph, gave all five of his kids oddball names, and the oldest of them married somebody with a name like Ruford.

Anyway, Ruford died when I was five or so, and somebody, probably his daughter, my cousin Sandie, told all of us small ones who were at the hospital that somebody had brought some Mississippi mud cake for us and it was back at the house. Ever since then, Mississippi mud cake has been off my menu. Seeing its name in print reminds me of the first time that I ever encountered death, and my kindergarten-aged self shudders inside.

I was really pleased to hear that El Pollo Loco was entering the Atlanta market in 2007, because, of course, I am interested in smaller chains. One of the first of what would be perhaps nine – down from a planned and announced fifty – opened on Holcomb Bridge Road in Roswell. I would drive right past it on my way home from work. Now, at that job, on the last business day of each month, everybody had to stay late until everybody else had finished and the books were balanced, possibly because my boss was Bill Lumbergh. So on the last business day of the month, my mother would pick up the children from school for me, since heaven knew when I would leave, and I would get supper somewhere in Roswell and enjoy a good book.

So, I settled on trying out the new El Pollo Loco that November, left sometime after the sun went down and somebody’s financing was finally approved and a contract written, got in the car and my phone rang. It was the children’s mother, calling to say that her mother was in the hospital. This was a Friday; I asked whether she wanted me to bring the children to Knoxville the next day to see her, and she said, firmly, not to, to give it a week. She then took a sharp turn for the worse and died on Wednesday morning.

Not that I had any kind of love left for anybody in that family, but, for my children, I should have told her that I was coming anyway, and just gone home and packed. Instead, I spent Friday night wowing the avocado sauce on El Pollo Loco’s salsa bar. I ate at three of the city’s El Pollo Loco locations quite a few times in 2008 and 2009, before I cut fast food from the diet, and always enjoyed the meals here. But with every one of them, I heard that voice in the back of my head saying “You should have taken your kids to see their grandmother one last time.”

Which is a pretty unfair thing to do to myself; hell, earlier in 2007, I deliberately curtailed a plan to drive straight from Toronto home to Atlanta in one go, just to give these rotten kids a few hours with her. You’d think that’d give me a little pass on the guilt, but guilt’s a stupid, senseless thing, and that’s why El Pollo Loco never meant “the crazy chicken” to me. It meant death.

Tomorrow’s News Today, a good site about Atlanta retail that locals should certainly be reading, wrapped up the restaurant’s four-and-a-half-year run in the region with an obituary and recap and noted that three of the nine stores indeed formally changed their name to The Crazy Chicken, an act which surely must have been borne of desperation.

While they were with us, though, El Pollo Loco served up some pretty good meals for what it was. I always thought of it as a cross between a Mrs. Winners and a Del Taco. Sure, you could find better if you wanted to pay a little more, but when it was convenient for us to stop by the Smyrna, Marietta or Roswell stores for a cheap, reliable meal and load up on chicken burritos and chips and salsa, this was a little better than the average.

I’d been telling myself for months to stop back by the Smyrna store, because the sluggish halt to the franchise group’s expansion plans sounded like it would make a good story. I put it off too long; even after the Marietta “Crazy Chicken” had shuttered and become an IHOP, I just kept saying that I’d get around to Smyrna eventually, and never did. We’ll just have to see them on the west coast, if we ever make it out that way.

In the meantime, I continue to wait impatiently for that long-promised Del Taco to finally open in Snellville. The obituary linked above suggests that this location might finally open in February 2012. I’m starting to get impatient.

Jack’s New Yorker Deli, Vinings GA

Here is a restaurant that is just plain mixed up in my memory. I had this place completely backwards. I could have sworn that, as long as I could remember, there was a deli called “The New Yorker” in Vinings. Seriously, like, from the late 1970s, I remember a place in one of those white buildings across from the fountain on Paces Ferry. I am so accustomed to the memory that I did not think twice about whether or not it was ever there, or still there, or gone. It was just part of Vinings, like the New York Pizza Exchange and the Vinings Inn and the church where Howard McDowell used to preach, which has been a La Paz upstairs and a Mellow Mushroom downstairs for at least fifteen years, but it’s still the church where, as an elementary schooler, I would regularly be sent to Vacation Bible School in the summer and await visits from the old Atlanta Braves Bleacher Creature.

So a few weeks ago, we were thinking about having some supper with Neal, and were looking around for a place in Vinings that was open Sunday and where we had not been in a while. I thumped the table with excitement about stopping by this place for the first time in ages. So we made a beeline for Vinings and Neal wondered where on earth we were going; the New Yorker is on the other side of Vinings, on Atlanta Road near Log Cabin. Sure enough, the buildings that I swore housed this place were occupied by a Starbucks and by a Jimmy John’s.

I thought for a couple of days that one of the girls at the restaurant cleared up the confusion. She told me that the present space was actually the second store; the original was indeed in “proper” Vinings on Paces Ferry, but it had moved near the square in Marietta. Another couple of locations have since popped up in the area. That seemed to clear everything up until I visited the restaurant’s web site and read that the business opened in 2002, far too late for it to be part of my childhood memories. So what the heck was that sandwich shop in Vinings that I’m thinking of, I wonder?

I feel pretty strongly about where Vinings actually is. Despite what some real estate agents and some clusters of apartment homes in Mableton would have you believe, Vinings is a very small place, and it is entirely inside the perimeter. Its boundaries are a pair of Kroger grocery stores. There is one on 41 and Paces Mill Road, and there is one on the south end of the neighborhood between Log Cabin and Atlanta Road. Its eastern border is the Chattahoochee River, and the western border is actually not I-285, but Cumberland Parkway. That’s not complicated. If you live OTP, then you’re in Smyrna and a wannabe.

They claim here, in actual-Vinings, to not be an imitation New York deli, but to provide a neat southern twist on things. I don’t know how accurate any of this is, but it is certainly really tasty! Neal had a fried bologna sandwich and really liked it, but I’m sure my sandwich was better. It’s called a Ryan’s Wise Guy and comes with with prosciutto, cappicola, pepperoni, lettuce, tomato, black olives, banana peppers, fresh mozzarella and balsamic vinaigrette. Just a terrific, big little sandwich at a reasonable price.

Anyway, Jack’s New Yorker Deli is open until 9 on Sundays, which is probably a little later than it needs to stay open. We wrapped up our meals by 8 and spent time gossiping and catching up and the place was hardly hopping. It is a terrific spot to go and gab. It’s a little hidden from the road, and easy to drive right past, but certainly worth a visit.

(Edit…) In December, I stopped by the Marietta Square store for an Ellis Island sandwich and fries. It was delicious. I like the “Deli Dust,” a little mix of salt, pepper, garlic and onion powder, sprinkled over the fries.

Eating Good Food Badly During Anime Weekend Atlanta

One thing is inescapably true: it’s incredibly difficult to eat well during any kind of convention. I must have hit a new low during Anime Weekend Atlanta at the beginning of the month. Oh, I had some pretty good meals, to be sure, but I didn’t temper them with, you know, vegetables or exercise or anything esoteric like that. It was like Fried Food Fest or something. Anyway, here’s a report on what I did to my arteries during the con, and why I spent the next few days eating a little more sensibly.

Friday’s lunch was a trip to Big Chow Grill, a regular Anime Weekend destination, in the company of my baby and two other very small guests. I met up with my friends Laura, Elizabeth and Jessica, none of whom I ever see enough of, and Jessica’s two small children, one aged two and the other just three weeks. It was observed that, if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes four people to have lunch and take care of three younguns. Things got so chaotic with loud little ones that I phoned my daughter for backup and had her wheel my baby into the mall to calm him down for a little bit. Big Chow was as good as ever – I had one medium-sized bowl of spicy stir-fried chicken over rice and a second medium-sized bowl of spicier stir-fried chicken over egg noodles – and our service was exemplary.

Marie was able to get to the show a little after six, and while my daughter continued being wild and twelve, Marie and I took the baby out for supper. We made it over to Smyrna’s US Cafe, a favorite of some of our family that I’ve been putting off revisiting for far too long.

We’ve never eaten at US Cafe as much as I would like, because, unaccountably, my daughter does not like the place. Neither does my brother, and whenever we would be visiting my mom and dad, he would always veto going there, even though it was so close by. It’s a very family-friendly sports bar, full of screaming kids, pool tables and big games on the TVs. For some, I’m sure it must be hell on earth, but the burgers and wings are very good and, of all things, the salsa they serve with the chips is just heavenly.

I’ve always liked this place a good deal, and my dad was friendly with the owners. He liked coming here a lot, and really liked the milkshakes. I had been putting off a visit, knowing I’d get sad thinking about my father, particularly with him not around to talk about football this season. But I was in the mood for a burger, and I don’t know whether there’s one better in the Smyrna area, so I bit my lip and we had a good meal.

Saturday morning, I probably should have had a small bowl of melons and blueberries for breakfast, but, as recounted in the previous chapter, we went to Mountain Biscuits and I had one with country ham and one with lots of syrup. Then for lunch, I met up with Matt at another sports bar, the Galleria’s Jocks and Jills, to watch the Georgia game.

There used to be several more Jocks and Jills locations in town, but according to their website, there’s just the one left, in the Cobb Galleria, where, presumably, the ground rent is a little manageable. There’s also one in Macon and another in Charlotte. It’s a sprawling sports bar with several rooms, including a space upstairs that is occupied during game time by Atlanta’s Rutgers Club. I tend not to pay much attention to what goes on in conferences other than the SEC (and now I have one and maybe two more teams to follow, so thanks a million, Slive), but while we were there, it looked like Rutgers was having a rough time of it at the hands of Syracuse.

When I watch a game out, I typically have an appetizer over the course of the first half, and then order an entree towards the end of halftime, and then tip quite generously for hogging a table for so long. This time I had some nachos – in a rare concession to health this weekend, I asked them to go very, very light on the cheese – and, later, some hamburger sliders with homemade chips. The food was acceptable and the service fantastic, but I wouldn’t go here unless I wanted to watch a game.

I only got a little bit of con time on Saturday before going to my mother’s house, which is closer than my own to the con, to change. I went to go see Bryan Ferry with David and a couple of his friends from “back in the day,” Tom and Patt, with whom he was haunting clubs thirty years before. Bry was playing the same venue, Chastain Park, where I first saw him in 1988. Heck of a good show, if perhaps not his best, and enlivened by guitarist Chris Spedding ripping the absolute hell out of Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane.”

Afterwards, David said that he was in the mood for greasy burgers. I found myself not really feeling like arguing. So we ended up at a Steak ‘n Shake, where I ate the new Fritos Chili Cheeseburger, which is the absolute last thing anybody on the planet needs to eat at midnight. It’s two patties, a slice of pepperjack, shredded cheese, chili and jalapeno peppers. Evidently, I didn’t really feel like avoiding a heart attack, either, eating such a thing at midnight. There were several other late-evening revelers from the convention, all costumed up, all similarly damaging their arteries. It sure was good, though.

I ate better on Sunday. Promise.

Update, 4/5/12: Some months later, months which, I swear, I ate better, I stopped by US Cafe’s other Cobb County location. This smaller “express” outlet is a lot less noisy, but the burgers and shakes are just as good.

Mountain Biscuits, Marietta GA

Here is a first for our blog. We’ve never considered a restaurant for inclusion, dined, declined and then gave them another chance before. Mountain Biscuits, a very busy place on Old 41 between the Church Street Extension and Barrett Parkway, got back on our better side after a less-than-thrilling introduction suggested just enough promise to make me want to give them another try, and while the results still were not quite perfect, the second trip was certainly warranted.

A few Thursdays back, I was looking around for something new to eat or revisit, when Mountain Biscuits came up as a “nearby suggestion” to some place on the Marietta Square that I was considering. They allegedly made a very good chicken sandwich, and so I drove over there to try it. The drive wasn’t at all bad, and the lovely old building, very photogenic, was inspiring. It is no fault of the restaurant, but the illusion of a middle-of-nowhere roadside shack is sadly spoiled by the presence of some condos across the street.

While the service was impeccable and very friendly, I found this chicken sandwich to be completely overrated and overpriced. It wasn’t bad, and I was not offended, but it was incredibly ordinary. It just tasted like an interstate fast food chicken sandwich, and I couldn’t understand why on earth I was paying $5.75(!) for something that tasted like it came from a Wendy’s or something. The bun, in particular, set off the trucked-in alarm. I crossed this place off my “to-blog” list.

But I noticed something curious as I had my lunch. From 11 to 3, six days a week, they offer lunch, with the promise of burgers and barbecue and an overindulgent plate of loaded fries that I might have ordered had the awesome, super-friendly woman at the register not told me that they were frozen fries. While they were not completely packed while I was there, they were nevertheless busy, and despite the lunch hour, every single person who came in seemed to be ordering biscuits instead of typical lunch fare. Were these biscuits really so good that they made for better 1 pm lunches than this ordinary sandwich?

My return was assured when the woman at the register started passing around little sample cups of their potato salad. While I almost never order this anymore for diet reasons, I do certainly love it, and this stuff was incredibly curious and interesting. If you will, it’s baked potato salad, and it tastes a whole lot like a loaded baked potato, with bacon and sour cream. In point of fact, while I have had better, I have never had anything like this, and I believe in celebrating unique dining-out experiences. I also felt that I should be judging a restaurant based on what they make in-house, rather than what some truck brings. If the potato salad was any indication, they really can make some great stuff here.

So two mornings later, while my daughter embarked on a lengthy and detailed makeup job for her Anime Weekend Atlanta costume, Marie and the baby and I paid them a second visit for breakfast. We joined a very long line and were rewarded with some excellent biscuits. They are not, perhaps, quite in the same league as Stilesboro Biscuits a few miles up the road, who set the gold standard, but they’re nevertheless really good. The line’s length is testimony that they are doing something very right.

I think these treats are a little firmer than Stilesboro’s, and Mountain makes them memorable by putting this wonderful concoction called Farmer’s Biscuit Syrup on the tables. It’s sort of a thin molasses and it goes incredibly well with a hot, buttered biscuit of this consistency. Frankly, should we return for breakfast one day, I won’t even bother with any meat filling. As good as the country ham was, and it was quite good, I think drowning a plain biscuit in this delicious goo and eating it with a fork would really be something. Doesn’t that sound insanely indulgent? I’ll do that on a day when I’m planning to eat two ounces of steamed cauliflower for lunch.

I do, however, operate with a pretty strict three-strikes rule where Fox News is concerned. If I do go back for a third visit and the single TV there is still tuned to that propagandist garbage, it will be the last time. Maybe I’ll wait a good while, and see whether they’re giving their lunches the same homemade attention as their breakfast, and told that guy in the Flowers Bakery truck that he no longer needs to bring them those awful buns. The baked potato salad is clearly a step in the right direction and shows what they want to be doing. Hopefully, over time, they’ll refine their lunch recipes further and turn out a chicken sandwich that’s every bit as unique, and warrants the price. If they’ve turned that divisive dirt off the TV, it’ll show that they really mean business.

Falls View Restaurant, Forsyth GA

It’s a pretty bold claim to say that yours are the “best catfish this side of the Mississippi.” That’s an awful lot of land, you know. Fortunately, Marie and I visited a restaurant just a short hop from I-75 that might can honestly make that claim. Falls View Restaurant, which is near Forsyth and Jackson, and across from the gorgeous High Falls State Park, is one of the last places on our list of Roadfood.com-reviewed Georgia businesses to try. It’s an incredibly convenient place for interstate travelers to pull over and stretch their legs for a little while before enjoying a quite good fish supper. Incidentally, the restaurant itself claims to be in Forsyth, while both Urbanspoon and Roadfood.com call it Jackson. I’m not familiar enough with the area to judge, so I tossed a coin.

We came to the park from the east, having spent the afternoon eating and shopping around middle Georgia and just enjoying ourselves tremendously. We stopped at the park first, and spent more than an hour walking around. There’s a large pond dammed up by the parking area, but most people make their way across the state highway and onto one of the trails to go play in the waterfall.

Since I’m stating this boldly, in public, I should point out that, legally, you are not meant to swim here. There are signs all over the place telling you not to. Swimming is prohibited. But people were doing it anyway, by the dozens. There were between twenty and thirty people splashing around and cooling off in the wonderful swimming hole at the foot of the falls. Brave teen boys were on the falls themselves, sliding down into the deep water beneath them. It looked mighty dangerous, but I’d have done the same at their age. Marie and I were not dressed to get completely drenched, but we waded in up to our knees and had a terrific time.

After too-short a time in the swimming hole, we knew we had to make our way to the restaurant and get back on the road. My mother was watching the children and we did promise that we’d be home at a certain time. We found out that the climb back up to the parking area was a lot steeper than I had thought, and were pretty spent by the time we got back to the car. Turns out the restaurant was close enough that we could have just walked there instead.

Falls View was opened by John H. Wilson the week before Christmas in 1969. He sold the business to his son Tommy in 1988, and he, after a sixteen year run, sold it to the present owner, whose name is Almond, in 2004. She made some minor modifications, but otherwise has kept the place’s rustic charm and front porch rocking chairs. There’s a touch of gentle whimsy to the place; one table up front is given over to a great big catfish, “reading” a menu in some shock over its content. I told her that we found out about her restaurant from Roadfood.com, and she didn’t know what that was. I encouraged her to stop by.

This is a place that welcomes visitors of all ages, but their clientele is in the older brackets. I was reminded of Jim Stalvey’s in Covington; it is a restaurant that appealed to my parent’s generation and has never taken the time to reach out to a younger crowd. I don’t suggest that they should change anything, but, heck, that Ms. Almond had never Googled her place to see that the review at Roadfood.com was the top result suggests that they’re comfortable with their aging base. It all adds up, as it did at Stalvey’s, to a wonderfully timelost experience. They just don’t make restaurants like this anymore, where a server asks, when she takes your order, whether you want onions and pickles, and, indeed, brings you a small plate of white onions and dill and sweet pickles as an appetizer.

The catfish was indeed really good. Apparently, most of the time, they have an all you can eat special with them, but a sign on the door sadly reported that on this Saturday evening, they could not offer it, as their sources did not catch enough. But we made one of the best decisions that we made all day when Marie ordered the red snapper so that we could try a couple of different fish. It was completely wonderful, and totally outshined the celebrated catfish. Definitely try this yourselves, dear readers.

If you are traveling between Atlanta and Macon in the evening on a Wednesday through Saturday, then this is absolutely a place to consider. I’m aware that I have pointed our readers at some pretty out-of-the-way joints, but this isn’t even five minutes off the highway, and it will give you a wonderful experience celebrating a style of restaurant that is slowly fading to time, and enjoying some really terrific seafood and steak fries while you do. I’m very glad we were able to visit this place.