Nam Phuong, Norcross GA

Nam Phuong is a good restaurant, and possibly an excellent one, but I’m certain that I did myself a disservice by lunching alone here. It’s been on my to-do list for quite a few months, just waiting for me to be in the mood to sample it. I figured that I needed to give it a try after reading Jennifer Zyman’s fascinating review of it. Zyman, who writes under the nom de blog The Blissful Glutton, is among this region’s best food writers, and one with a number of followers and fans. She could wax eloquent about a McDonald’s in Fairburn, and I’m pretty sure somebody would be trying to explain to his wife what the hell he’s doing stumbling home from south Fulton with Big Mac on his breath.

Anyway, I had not found reason to look around Jimmy Carter Boulevard in Norcross for simply ages, and I amused myself driving up and down. Once upon a time, a terrific store called Eat More Records was located here; they once bought quite a few bootleg CDs that I found myself possessing. It is a deeply ugly, sprawling mess of a road. I’ll never forget riding around with my good friends Dave, who now lives in Toronto, and Kevin, who now lives in Washington, spending miles of gridlock on that damn road trying to get back to I-85 and realizing, across fifty-eleven stupid jokes, just how very much like its namesake this road really is. “Jimmy Carter Boulevard means well,” Kevin said, “but it’s mostly ineffective in accomplishing its goals.”

In the early nineties, a good chunk of this corridor evolved into a Spanish-speaking neighborhood. Today, Asian families have started opening businesses and several strip malls are entirely Asian-owned, like a smaller version of much of the commerce along Buford Highway. There are still several Hispanic-focused businesses – one of the region’s two Pollo Campero restaurants is along here – but you can see the decline in the number that have shuttered. Perhaps most amusing is a former nightclub located right in front of the strip mall where Nam Phuong is found. It was called El Imperio, and its crumbling “castle” facade, with the front entrance built to look like guests entered through a dragon’s mouth, looks like something to excite eleven year-olds at a mini-golf.

This doesn’t look like a neighborhood where elegant, upscale dining can be found. Appearances are deceiving.

This is a really nice restaurant. Everything about it is classy and genuine. The servers were really nice and nothing felt artificial or phony. They did a great job making me feel welcome.

I had an order of bun chao tom, and that probably wasn’t what I wanted. It was ground shrimp with sugar cane served in a bowl over rice vermicelli with lettuce and carrots, sprinkled with crushed peanuts and with a small bowl of a fish sauce on the side. I never had sugar cane before, so I ordered this instead of the bun tau hu ki cuon tom, which is shrimp wrapped in bean curd. I’m certain that I would have enjoyed that more. Ordering sugar cane, I’ve since learned, is a polite way of eating scraps of wood in public.

I also had an appetizer order of bi cuon, which are shredded pork rolls. These do not come in those crispy, fried, golden brown shells that you see in all the sweet-n-sour Chinese places in the suburbs, but a slightly moist, white rice paper. These were quite tasty.

Everything was good, but I do think that I shot myself in the foot by trying this place by myself. Nam Phuong’s menu is huge, and jam packed with dishes that I’ve never heard of. My experience of Chinese, Korean or Vietnamese cooking is, sadly, still limited to the Golden-This-Happy-That school of red sweet-n-sour sauces. I’ve grown to loathe eating at those sorts of restaurants, and I just sing with the opportunity to try something so different and so interesting as this. While my meal was good, I would really like to return with a large group and sample many different things from everybody’s orders. Doesn’t that sound like a fun evening out?

Mountain Man BBQ & Grill, Dillard GA

Coming back from our trip up to Asheville, I had hoped that we might stop somewhere for a barbecue snack. We were disappointed, after all, to learn that Fiddlin Pig had closed, and a weekend is just incomplete without some barbecue. Of course, traveling on a Sunday through western North Carolina, it’s a little hard to actually find a barbecue restaurant that’s open. It’s not until you’re back in Georgia that you get a few options.

The towns of Dillard and Rabun Gap are much more traveler-friendly. Here, I count three barbecue joints within about four miles of each other, all serving up on Sundays. The first of these that travelers will meet on the way back to Atlanta will be Mountain Man. This might very well be the northernmost barbecue restaurant within Georgia’s boundaries. You can probably lob a tennis ball into North Carolina from here.

This restaurant originally opened, under different ownership, in the 1980s, but it has been run by the Fotopoulus family for almost fifteen years. When they moved down from Chicago, Mountain Man was just one storefront in a small strip mall, but they have grown the business so that various dining rooms line the entire length of the property. Architecturally, it’s a real mish-mash. The food that they serve is just terrific, and a real traveler’s delight.

We arrived around 2:30, and the dining room was about a third full. Not bad for a Sunday, I’d say. We kept our orders simple. Marie and I each had chopped pork sandwiches, served with excellent homemade potato chips and, sadly, not-at-all-excellent slaw. Our daughter had a bowl of Brunswick stew, thick with lots of chopped and ground meat. We thought it was pretty good stew, but it was improved by adding some barbecue sauce to the bowl. There are mild and hot varieties of the usual brown ketchup-vinegar mix. The mild was too sweet for my taste; the hot was really good. The pork was nicely smoked and just a little moist. I found it tastier than the justifiably popular stuff available down the road at Oinkers in Clayton.

I was interested to learn that the family started serving Chicago-styled pizza as well. Apparently, they started baking them for the friends that they made when they moved down here, and were persuaded that they should add the pizza to the menu and sell it in the restaurant. The growing success of the restaurant has resulted in a sprawling building with multiple dining rooms and a large menu. Honestly, though, the pizza would have to be pretty amazing to distract me from the barbecue. I can’t deny, however, that I’m awfully curious.

Pappy Red’s BBQ, Atlanta GA

Once upon a time, I wrote a letter to Pappy Red, though I am pretty sure he never saw it. No, I just left an open letter on a blog I once wrote, thanking him for the many good meals that I had enjoyed at the since-closed location up in Cumming, but sadly informing him that while I enjoyed the barbecue a good deal, my pipes were no longer processing it right. Something about it was giving me quite unbelievable heartburn. Oh, it was rough. Well, I’m in a little bit better shape than I was nine years ago. I eat better, drink less and walk more. Plus, I keep a small supply of antacids in the console of my car. Maybe I could try this barbecue again?

Of course, Pappy Red’s isn’t quite what it once was. A decade back, there were a few more locations, including the one in Cumming, one in Roswell, and one on Georgia-140 between Crabapple and Canton, each with the distinctive, lovely and ridiculous affectation of a “crashed” airplane protruding from the building’s roof. Those are all gone now, but last year, they opened their first location inside the perimeter, just north of Howell Mill Road on the ugly, industrial corridor of Chattahoochee Avenue. I double-checked my antacid supply and headed that way.

Incidentally, there is a little confusion about this restaurant’s name. Both the main sign and one of the two neon ones in the window call it “P.Red’s,” but the fellow with the sandwich board up at Howell Mill and the other neon sign read “Pappy Red’s.” I double-checked with the owner, whose grandfather was the “pappy” in question, and he confirms that the signs are only spelled that way to save space. It is still “Pappy Red’s.” Desperately glad we got that critical point cleared up, aren’t you?

While the stretch of Howell Mill just below it has a reputation for being one of Atlanta’s most celebrated food corridors, the roads that connect it with with Marietta Street are some ways off from being brought back up to code, as it were. Both Chattahoochee, and Huff, about a mile south, are old and ugly eyesores, full of direct-to-the-public warehouse distributors and moderately interesting old bridges above railroad tracks. The asphalt is worn down by heavy industrial traffic. Pappy Red’s moved into some old, long-unused restaurant space with bars on the windows and a celled box around the air conditioning unit.

The counter service here is sharp and friendly. I ordered the pulled pork sandwich on jalapeno bread, making sure to ask for it dry. They don’t cook in the sauce here, but they will drown your meat unless you specify otherwise. The pork is pretty good, and, arriving a few minutes before they opened and sitting outside with the windows down, I drank in the wonderful smoke from out back, proving a tasty appetizer.

The jalapeno bread was almost as much a treat as the pulled pork. Ordering barbecue on this bread is a must; it is chewy, spicy and delicious. While the pork is still a little greasier than I would prefer, the lower slice of bread seemed to soak up a little bit of it and made my meal taste that much better. There are two table sauces, mild and hot varieties of a brown ketchup-vinegar mix, and both are very good.

I had some Brunswick stew and was really pleased with it. It’s heavy with onions and pepper and comes out extremely hot, so guests may wish to dip saltines in it as it cools. It reminded me of the peppery concoction that I enjoyed at Lively’s Owens BBQ in Cedartown a couple of months earlier.

It is a shame that Pappy Red’s couldn’t find a space on Howell Mill itself, where it would be more likely to get more attention and notice, but honestly, whether you’re either working in the area or wanting to sample inside-the-perimeter Atlanta barbecue joints, it is definitely worth a visit. And wouldn’t you know, I didn’t have a drop of the old heartburn and didn’t need an antacid after all? Either they’re doing something better than they once did, or it’s a testament to better living and healthier eating that a meal here didn’t leave me gasping. Either way, I was very pleased.

Frankie & Johnny’s, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

Here’s an incredibly interesting restaurant. It’s not worth knocking over anybody to have breakfast here – in fact, if you go looking for good grits, it’s not worth visiting at all – but I swear, this place fell through a crack in time. It looks and feels like a place with no relationship whatsoever to the modern world. Social media? Twitter updates? Not this place. Nobody talks about it, least of all on that “internet” thing. Don’t believe me? Google it. You’ll see an Urbanspoon listing with votes from eight people, and me over at Roadfood.com asking whether anybody knew anything about it, and a bunch of Yellow Pages and Yelp listings with no user reviews at all.

The parking lot does to your car’s alignment only slightly less damage than falling off a cliff. The sign – a beautiful, rusted anachronism – has fallen apart and is no more. This weird, vintage thing is what caught my eye the first time that I drove past it. A little more than a year ago, I stopped by and photographed the sign just for my own sake. Had I known then that the silly picture of the nice young couple in the roadster was going to fall out and crash into the potholes beneath it, I would have taken more care not to capture part of a Taco Bell billboard behind it. Well, I never claimed to be a good photographer.

Inside, it is as quiet as the grave. It is a classic roadfood stop for truckers and utility company drivers. It’s where you can go to get a cheap, enormous breakfast. I had bacon – fantastic bacon – eggs, grits and toast for four bucks. Well, the grits weren’t worth eating. That bacon was amazing.

From 10:30 until 2, they serve lunch in a buffet line. Looks like they offer lasagna, meat loaf and the like, with all the trimmings. Then at two, this place shuts down and returns to the other side of 1967, to decay and rust and rot away further. It’s the most authentic – if that word means anything right now – breakfast experience I’ve had lately. I can imagine my late father eating here four times a week for years and never mentioning it to anybody, because it wouldn’t occur to him to do so. It is what it is, and does not aspire to more. But this isn’t destination food. The young crowd that “rediscovered” Pabst Blue Ribbon has not found this yet. This is for local workers, men who do not mind destroying the alignments of their company’s trucks.

I asked about it. I learned nothing. The owner, an older Asian man, said that he’d been open for seven years. I said that the business must be much older. He agreed. I suggested that the building must have been there a long time. He said that it had. I asked him what happened to his sign. He said the sign was still there. I laughed and said that once, there had been a picture in the middle, where there is only a hole now. Not laughing, he agreed that yes, once, there had been. And then he went to work setting up the lunch buffet.

I left, and time didn’t march on. It froze.

(Update, 7/25/12: Eleven months later, it was gone. Without a word or a peep or a notice anywhere, the building and the parking lot were completely gone. Logic tells us this happened after a bulldozer and a wrecking crew came in. I prefer to think it was because time folded over like a tesseract, and, just like that, the building left through a crack in time, back to where it came from, as though it had never met our troubled days.)

Gigi’s Cupcakes

When Grant was planning the itinerary for an afternoon together, he included Gigi’s because of my taste for sweets and our daughter’s more specific adoration of cupcakes. Sadly, neither of us showed much enthusiasm. The girlchild was under the weather and wanted to sit out this food trek, asking only for a comfort snack of Krystal to be borne home to her after we were done. In my case the problem was the memory of another dedicated cupcake store in Nashville. When I reminded him of that visit, Grant diplomatically replied that he understood I had been “underwhelmed” by that place. So I figured I would hold my enthusiasm until we went to his selection. More on that later. Continue reading “Gigi’s Cupcakes” →

Smokejack Blues & Barbecue, Alpharetta GA

I have a little goal here to visit and report upon one hundred barbecue restaurants before the end of 2011. I’m not sure whether we will make it – we’re almost three-quarters there – but any opportunity to grab one for the blog is one that we’ll try to take. Two Saturdays ago, I looked over the map and decided that we hadn’t trucked up GA-400 in a while, and I was curious what new restaurant developments could be seen on Windward Parkway. Alpharetta is the home of Smokejack Blues & Barbecue, a business seven years old which has expanded to a second location a little further north in the town of Cumming. Smokejack’s not getting quite all the press and attention among barbecue restaurants in that area right now – there’s a place called ‘Cue that everybody’s talking about – but I remembered having a pretty good, albeit pricy, meal there a few years ago.

When I worked in Alpharetta, there was one perk that certainly beat any that I have at my current job. To celebrate birthdays, our department would take all the staff out to eat once a month. She wasn’t with the company for really long, but I did have the pleasure of working with a girl named Kristi who was a completely fun trip, just overflowing with silliness, light, Southern slang and malapropisms. She chose Smokejack for her birthday and I remembered enjoying it greatly, even if the restaurant’s prices kept it out of my regular rotation of places to visit. Marie and I had lunch here for just under $30. That’s a heck of a lot to pay for barbecue for two, but in their defense, the restaurant tells guests up front that theirs is less a traditional BBQ place and more an upscale eatery that focuses on smoked meat.

Marie and I hoped to have our daughter and our good friend Samantha join us for lunch, but each of them asked for rain checks in the end, not feeling well. So Marie and I made it a quasi-date day, with the baby bundled in the back seat and spent a few hours enjoying each other’s company and eating pretty well.

Smokejack, located in Alpharetta’s small, but very cute, downtown, offers the usual assortment of pulled pork or chicken dishes. Most of them apparently are sauced just before they send them out of the kitchen, but they’ll serve them dry if you ask. I noted that they have a chicken sandwich with white, north Alabama-style sauce, and while normally I might be expected to give that a try, I was really in the mood for another order of burnt edges.

I had these for the first time a couple of weeks previously at Woodstock’s Bub-Ba-Q and was curious to try another restaurant’s take. I had the sauce, a delicious black, sticky-sweet Kansas City-styled goo, on the side. The beef was so good that no sauce was necessary, and I strongly advise anybody curious to order this dry. I had the burnt edges with baked beans, which were pretty ordinary, and a very tasty corn pudding that Marie and I shared. She ordered chicken thighs from the appetizer menu. These came with an orange habanero glaze and were served on a bed of pretty good slaw. She also had a side of wood-roasted vegetables that she mostly enjoyed. Brunswick stew is available, but, sadly, with a small additional charge as it is not technically a “side,” but rather a “soup.”

A little driving around town didn’t convince me that I was missing very much, foodwise, by leaving my job in Alpharetta. We got back on GA-400 and made one more stop in the area, though. Two days previously, I had visited one of the wonderful Taco Stands in Athens. They had opened a store in Alpharetta several months earlier. I had stopped in and was pretty disappointed, but chalked it up to opening week catastrophe. I was curious, now that they’ve hopefully got their act together, how they compare to one of the originals.

The honest answer is that they compare poorly, but are still pretty good. It’s a very different sort of restaurant to the Taco Stands of Athens, or even to the since-closed Buckhead watering hole. It tries to be a lot – upscale and family-friendly, even offering X-Box games for children – but it’s all so unnecessary. The prices are disagreeably higher than the originals. Seriously, a taco, $1.39 at Barnett Shoals, runs you $1.99 here. If I’m wanting Taco Stand, I don’t need an airlock and hostess station, I don’t need my tacos served in a little IKEA basket, and I don’t want to tip a server. I want my name called and I want my tacos on a tray.

That said…

There are certain realities of eating that trump fancy-shmancy considerations. Admittedly, the prime ingredient in the Taco Stand is nostalgia, but you can’t deny the awesomeness of the chicken enchilada and its wonderful dark sauce. On the other hand, while the tacos are good, they are nevertheless different, and in fact, inferior, to the tacos in Athens. They’re served on grilled flour shells rather than hard corn, and the beef is markedly different. The sauce tasted the same to me.

As much as I like the food, I really just don’t feel like the Taco Stand transfers well to this type of environment. I’ll forgive a lot for a good chicken enchilada like this, but in much the same way that a Burger King Whopper doesn’t gain anything from being served on a nice white plate, remaining, at it’s core, fast food, this “upscale” store doesn’t make the scruffy, tasty, wonderful food any better. It just makes it more expensive.

Harry’s Pig Shop (CLOSED) and The Taco Stand, Athens GA

Well, it took me a little while to get over to Harry’s Pig Shop. I had been wanting to visit for quite a while now, but I don’t just go to Athens every day, and when I do, I’d like to occasionally try something other than barbecue. There are quite a few good restaurants around that town, you know. Nevertheless, I moved it up my to-do list a couple of months ago after I read the good writeup at Buster’s BBQ Blog. Continue reading “Harry’s Pig Shop (CLOSED) and The Taco Stand, Athens GA” →