Morelli’s Gourmet Ice Cream, Atlanta GA

Over the previous two chapters, I’ve related our wonderfully fun barbecue tour of some areas south of the city. We capped this off by getting some ice cream in East Atlanta. I read about Morelli’s on Urbanspoon and added it to my wishlist a couple of months ago. By a happy coincidence, our friends Victoria and James moved over to that neighborhood – just around the corner from it – a few months ago and have been raving about it. When we met them for lunch last month, we agreed that we needed to get together again and see whether all the fuss over this ice cream was warranted.

What happened here is that the owner, Donald Sargent, was looking for a new business opportunity, found a space that a Bruster’s was leaving, invested in all their equipment and started turning out some of the most decadent and wild flavors in the city. They go through 150 or more gallons of heavy cream each week making their ice cream. They have the expected chocolate and cookies and cream and other fun, traditional flavors, but they’ve also got some pretty wild ones. These include the very popular maple bacon and the possibly more popular salted caramel, and some that are way off in la-la land like olive oil, feta and sweet corn.

Two years ago, Bon Appetit named Morelli’s one of the five best ice cream parlors in the country, singling out their coconut jalapeño and ginger lavender. There’s been a line ever since.

Service here can be a little slow, in part because the terrific, friendly staff will let guests try one or two samples before making an order, but we got here between rushes around 3:30 and didn’t have a very long wait. My only quibble was that they didn’t assemble Marie’s chocolate sundae very well. It was delicious, but it was a challenge for Marie to eat it before it toppled over!

I had a cup of salted caramel, and, still stuffed from barbecue, could not finish it, but boy, I enjoyed what I had. Even more critical than the flavor was the texture of the ice cream. This just really tasted freshly mixed. It hadn’t been sitting in that freezer for very long at all. Oooh, and apparently, I have since learned, they’ll let you mix half-scoops in a single cup. I bet a half-vanilla half-caramel is just amazing.

Victoria’s just a couple of weeks from having her boy, and so she and Marie had a lot to talk about. We enjoyed kicking back on Morelli’s patio for probably a little longer than etiquette might have suggested, since there were plenty of people in line and looking for a table, but you know, we ate an awful lot last Saturday and I needed to sit down for a while. We’ll have to go visit our friends again very soon, once we have some babies to introduce to each other, and try another restaurant in the neighborhood… and then pop back for some dessert here.

Sprayberry’s Barbecue, Newnan GA

I stand by something not entirely professional that I said once that got started on that old Geocities barbecue page that I used to maintain. John Kessler is the restaurant writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and many years ago, he sparked an e-mail issue that went on for several months with my readers and Google-surfers. He’d given a rave review to a barbecue place that I then visited with stars in my eyes, ready for the best meal of my life, only to find wet crock pot bilge on my plate. So I related my displeasure on that page – this would have been sometime in 2002 – and enjoyed correspondence with barbecue fans on the subject for months. One older gentleman compared the restaurant in question to the Iraqi army, a point that still tickles me. Everybody hated this place.

I figure that if I was getting that much positive feedback for a crappy “hey, I learned HTML from a book in 1997” Geocities page for disagreeing with the food critic, then Mr. Kessler must have been buried in hate mail. So a few months later, he had a fantastic new column up, wherein he and some buddies took an awesome barbecue tour around the region to try out all the restaurants that all his feedback told him was better than this place in question. It was a really good column, and I say that even though they went to Old MacDonald in Buford, which I love absolutely and am long past due to revisit, and didn’t like it. (Having said that, I looked up Old MacDonald on Urbanspoon and was really stunned by its low rating and poor reviews. Apparently there has been a change of ownership and it has plummeted downhill…? Well, that’s not encouraging.)

Anyway, what absolutely baffled and upset me was this: these Atlanta Journal-Constitution writers went down to Newnan to eat at Sprayberry’s Barbecue and did not like it. This place was Lewis Grizzard’s favorite restaurant. He ate there once a month. When the beloved writer passed, the restaurant memorialized him by bundling his favorite meal together on the menu as The Lewis Grizzard Special. And here was a negative, dismissive review of Grizzard’s favorite meal in the pages of the AJC. I never thought I’d live to see the day.

Once upon a time, when Atlanta was newly called “Hotlanta,” Maynard Jackson was mayor and the most amazing event on the area’s calendar was an inner tube race -slash – bacchanalia down the Chattahoochee past the old swingers’ apartments that drowned three drunks annually, Lewis Grizzard and Ron Hudspeth ruled that newspaper. Those were awesome days. You want to see some fun newspaper writing, go dig up some evening papers from the late seventies, where those two would drink their weight in bourbon, show up sauced after the staff had gone home and crank out some incredibly funny tale of some crackpot kinfolk in a one-horse town who once had a recipe for black-eyed peas that would cure cancer, when applied, in a poulice, to the back of your knee before your dog died and your pigtailed cousin’s skirts got too short. The AJC was a freaking wonderful paper then, with these two redneck drunks ranting about whatever the hell misty-eyed nostalgic Southern weirdness crossed their minds, and then Celestine Sibley saying much the same thing, only sober, the next section over.

To see this same newspaper then dismiss this great drunk’s favorite restaurant, well, it just made a fellow utter something a little unprofessional.

Sprayberry’s was the last stop on the little barbecue tour that Marie and I took a week ago, but it is a place that I’ve visited every couple of years for ages. They have two locations, including a large, interstate-friendly one right off the I-85 Newnan exit, but the one to see is the building further into town. Sprayberry’s opened in 1926 and has been attracting the attention of food writers for decades. Apart from Grizzard, whose love of the place was legendary, and spilled out into a good dozen of his columns, Roadfood’s Jane and Michael Stern wrote about the restaurant in 1990 for their syndicated Taste of America feature. Strangely, however, Sprayberry’s is not currently included among the Georgia places reviewed on their current site. I wonder why.

Now it does have a reputation as being a pretty expensive place for barbecue, especially when compared with Speedi-Pig over in Fayetteville. Here, Grizzard’s regular meal of a pulled pork sandwich, onion rings and stew will run you ten bucks before a drink and tip. Yikes! It’s all very good, but the sticker shock can be rough.

I really enjoyed eating here with my dad once. In 2006, I was out of work for a few months when the insurance company that I was with closed. Dad was beginning to have to slow down and not drive long distances, but he had a new potential customer down in Newnan, so, since I wasn’t doing anything, he asked me to drive him here to meet him. My daughter and I dropped him off with his client that morning and picked him up two hours later and we had lunch at the exit ramp location. I remember confusing my daughter with the unusual drinks on the menu. A holdover from the days before fountain fruit sodas were very common, you can get an “orange special,” which I believe is two parts orange soda to one part grape, and a “grape special,” which is two parts grape soda to one part orange. Of course, you could make this or ask for this anywhere, but only Sprayberry’s puts it on the menu.

That was a good day. I especially liked the part where Dad picked up the check.

On our own dimes, Marie and I split a Grizzard special. The pulled pork – a little smoky and very moist – is served without sauce. That comes in a bowl, like they serve it at Wallace Barbecue in Austell. The sauce is not quite the usual tomato-vinegar mix you get in the region. It is a little sweeter than you would expect from a vinegar sauce, and thinner. Guests can either spoon the sauce over the meat, or dip chunks of it in the bowl. The onion rings are also very sweet, and made with a buttermilk batter. They are among my very favorites. The stew, more “Virginia Brunswick” than “Georgia Brunswick,” is thick enough to be eaten with a fork. It’s quite different from the amazing stuff they offer at Speedi-Pig, but very agreeable all the same. Oh, and they serve it with a bowl of really amazing sweet pickles. Mention how much you like them and they might just bring you another bowl of ’em.

I’ve always really liked Sprayberry’s. True, not all of the food here is drop-dead amazing, but it’s all presented with so much care and love, and considering that most of the staff seems to be high school kids, I remain very pleasantly surprised by just how well they coach and train their employees. I get a kick out of the throwback feel of the menu, which, apart from the silly sodas, includes such things as congealed salad and an “aristocratic” hamburger, which has a salad and French dressing atop the patty. You can also get that very old Southern Saturday night classic, a hamburger steak smothered in onions. In fact, the old-fashioned, upscale feel to the menu here puts Sprayberry’s more in line with, say, Atlanta’s Colonnade than most of the barbecue shacks that I like the most. It adds up to a very unique experience at a place that’s been doing it right for 85 years.

Don’t worry, Lewis. Pay your old newspaper no never mind; Sprayberry’s is still in good shape.

Classic Que in Griffin and Fayetteville GA

I remember our first trip to Southern Pit very well. It was May 28, 2009, and while we weren’t blogging yet, I was nevertheless using Roadfood.com to find new and fun places to eat on our way on our trips down to Saint Simons Island and back. On that trip, Marie and the kids and I stopped in for lunch on our way to go get married, which is why it’s fairly easy to remember the date. I’m good about remembering the day we got hitched (the 30th); Marie’s birthday, slightly less so, on account of her decision to never enter that date anyplace like Facebook where I get a ~~cheat~~ friendly reminder. We had a huge lunch that day, and Marie capped things off with some delicious blackberry cobbler. I later waxed hyperbolic about how awesome this place was, and returned a few months later with Matt and our friend Kevin, shortly before he flew back out to California to resume work in academia.

As we’re entering the last few weeks of pregnancy, I struck a compromise between our twin desires to get out and drive and yet not stray too far from home. I’ve worked up a pair of short afternoon barbecue tours for Marie and I to enjoy small road trips without exhausting her. The first one is what I termed the “West Central Georgia Tour,” and was originally intended to bring us to two of the remaining stops on our goal of all the Roadfood.com-reviewed sites in the state: Southern Pit and Melear’s Barbecue in Fayetteville. Unfortunately, or not, considering its low reputation of late, Melear’s closed in January. So the revised plan saw us driving down I-75 to Griffin, then going north and west to Fayetteville for Speedi-Pig, and then further west to Sprayberry’s in Newnan before returning north on I-85. By chance, and not design, all three of the places we visited are reviewed on the wonderfully fun Chopped Onion, one of my favorite sites for finding barbecue joints and hot dog stands.

Should any of my Atlanta-based readers be interested in retracing our (planned) steps and doing their own simple tour as a day trip, I’d like to point out that you can also sample a McDonough barbecue restaurant called O.B.’s very easily on this path; it’s on the same exit (218) off I-75 that you take to go to Griffin. The same plan we took, with minor detours, should also take you near Uncle Frank’s in Fayetteville, Cafe Pig in Peachtree City, and Westside in Newnan. We haven’t visited any of these places yet, but you might could make a really full day of it if you’d like. Let me know how it goes for you!

By chance, the road that we ended up taking sped us past yet another place that I’d like to try one day: Dean’s Barbecue in Jonesboro. See, we had planned to drive down to exit 218 and shoot across 20 to Southern Pit, but after having dealt with insane construction traffic in north Atlanta on I-75, we were in no mood to sit and wait for all the spring break congestion that started building at exit 230. We could have sat bumper-to-bumper crawling for twelve miles, but I trusted our navigation instincts and we got off at 228 and found US 41 that way, which took us right past Dean’s. Some other day, perhaps.

We finally got to Southern Pit about forty minutes behind schedule. The place is not really easy to find; it isn’t signed very well, but if you are driving south, keep looking to your left and you should see it through the trees, its small sign dwarfed by the ones for Georgia Lawn Equipment and Toro brand mowers. Then make a U-turn across the divided highway when you get a chance.

The chopped pork here is not very dry and not especially smoky, but it is nice and pink and packed with flavor. Readers who have been following my recent series of memory issues will be pleased to hear that I ordered my sandwiches without any sauce at each business we visited, so that I could get a better taste for the meat before smothering it. They have a single sauce at Southern Pit: it’s a nice, brown tomato and vinegar mix, and is very sour and tangy.

I thought the Brunswick stew was pretty good, but was extremely pleased with the cracklin’ cornbread. I had been a little disappointed last year when I went to Harold’s and could hardly find a crackle anywhere in the bread, but this was just popping with them and it complemented the stew very well.

Sadly, I have to take a little issue with the desserts on offer. We were surprised to see blackberry cobbler available this early in the season. Marie asked about it and our server – points for truth – confirmed that they get the blackberries from Sysco. (“He said the S Word,” I whispered later.) The strawberry cream pie, he assured us, was made fresh in house, and this turned out to be quite good. Marie had a slice of that in lieu of a side for her chopped pork sandwich, and we were happy and pleased as we got on the road for stop number two.

The second visit was in Fayetteville, a town that neither of us had ever visited before. If it wasn’t painfully obvious from earlier chapters, when I’ve lived in the Atlanta area (which would be all but twelve years of my life) I’ve always been a resident of the northern ‘burbs: Smyrna, Alpharetta and Marietta. I just never got down this way very much.

A manager at Southern Pit had given us better directions to get over to Georgia-92 – just take Birdie Road west and cut off a huge corner, enjoying some very pretty land and houses along the way – but he could not have prepared us for an unexpected detour. An accident or fire shut down this highway completely, and a Fayette County sheriff sent us on a left turn. We shrugged and hoped for the best and eventually joined Georgia 85, which, happily, not only hooks up with 92 just outside the Fayetteville city limits, it is the very road – Glynn Street – that we were looking for. Unfortunately, it is marked amazingly poorly, and we did not know that it was Glynn Street until we drove right past Speedi-Pig and had to turn around.

My buddy Rex had told me that his girlfriend swears by Speedi-Pig’s Brunswick stew. It is similarly singled out by both Chopped Onion and another of my favorite barbecue blogs, the frustratingly-on-hiatus 3rd Degree Berns. None of these good people come close to telling you the real truth: this stew is amazing, easily just about the best in Georgia. It’s a toss-up between this and Harold’s, flatly. You will definitely want a large order of this stuff.

The chopped pork is diced pretty finely and, while it has a nice smoky taste to it, I did not like it nearly as much as I did Southern Pit’s meat. On the other hand, the price is just amazing. For 99 cents, you get a really good portion of meat on a “piglet” sandwich. I ordered two, but really only needed one. They have two sauces on the table, mild and hot varieties of a vinegar-tomato-pepper mix, and apparently they keep a much more potent hot sauce behind the counter, but I did not think to try it. The hot sauce wasn’t that much different from the mild, honestly. The barbecue is not at all bad here, and neither is the slaw – mayo-based and easy on the dressing – but the stew is the selling point. Run, don’t walk, to Fayetteville, friends.

I noticed that a party of four was asking one of the servers what had become of Melear’s. I expect that’s going to be a question the staff will be answering for months to come. It’s always a shame to see a much-loved, very old restaurant close its doors, even if its reviews had been pretty awful lately, and especially before I was able to try it.

We didn’t linger at either restaurant, but were still a little behind schedule as we got back on the road and headed west. More about that in the next chapter.

Willie Rae’s, Marietta GA (CLOSED)

Here’s another long overdue visit to a very popular destination in Marietta, this one right on the square. I added Willie Rae’s, which is about to celebrate its eleventh anniversary, to my to-do list many months ago after seeing a good writeup of it somewhere. This is a place that tries, with some success, to mix up a menu of southwestern, southern, and Creole-styled dishes in an upscale environment surrounded by lovely, folksy artwork on the walls.

They don’t always pull it off. One black hole on the menu is the inclusion of Lay’s potato chips as a side to some of their dishes. Try as I might, I just don’t see the point of lavishing attention on a burger in the kitchen and then serving it with plain Lay’s. But when they get it right, the results are magnificent.

Location is everything in the world of restaurants, deciding what is hip and cool. If Willie Rae’s was inside the perimeter, people would have been raving about it for ages. Sitting quietly on the Marietta Square, it’s easily ignored by the ITP crowd. Interestingly, walking around the square, you can see quite a few very good restaurants, none of which attract much commentary or blogging. Hollie Guacamole! and Tommy’s Sandwich Shop are both pretty good, as are Johnnie McCracken’s and the Marietta Pizza Company. There are four or more very nice, upscale restaurants, at least three places to get desserts, including a cupcake place – one of the latest trends – and Traveling Fare, which sells wonderful pot pies at the weekly farmer’s market, but despite ample free parking, nobody wants to venture up here except office workers and people with court business.

Well, if you do feel like braving the mean streets of Cobb County, you’re certain to get a pretty good meal at Willie Rae’s. I arrived early and looked around in a cute toy store two doors down while waiting for them to open. Within twenty minutes, there was a pretty good crowd in the place, proving that just because us weirdos with blogs aren’t yammering about it, business is still pretty good.

I was a little disappointed that I would have to pay a bit more than I wanted for some chips and salsa – apparently you can only get some by paying six bucks for a really big appetizer with cheese dip and an avocado sauce as well – so I had a small cup of very good jambalaya instead. It was served piping hot in a coffee mug on a little saucer and they didn’t scrimp on any of the meats. This was really tasty, although I don’t know that I’d like a full-sized serving of it with so many other interesting things on the menu.

I had the chicken burrito, served with a very good Caesar salad. The burrito was absolutely packed with really tasty chicken and just a few peppers. I was so pleased to pay a good price for a meal here and really get my money’s worth in very good, seasoned meat, not a big pile of rice or other fillers. The burrito was covered in a wonderful cheese sauce. I think I might have asked for a very small cup of salsa for the chicken, but it was just fine without it. It’s really a good feeling when a place meets your expectations so fully, you know?

I’d love to see some of my peers with larger audiences come up to the square and give these places a try. If Willie Rae’s was on Howell Mill, or in Asheville, people would be raving about the food and the atmosphere. The food certainly warrants it, and you’re guaranteed to get a kick out of all the fun artwork. Well, people are raving, just not people with blogs.

Stilesboro Biscuits, Kennesaw GA

Ooooh. Our otherwise impeccable timing was off a couple of Saturdays ago and we missed some live bluegrass!

Marie had been looking around for breakfast places in our area and found rave reviews for Stilesboro Biscuits, a tiny little place on Stilesboro Road. This is a long suburban corridor that runs parallel to US-41 north of Barrett Parkway and is mostly residential. How on earth they squeeze a bluegrass band in here when there’s barely room for a dozen guests, I have no idea. We did luck out in having a table open up just after we entered and got in line, otherwise we’d have been eating in the car. I love the ramshackle feel of this place, with all the mismatched furniture and constant, busy energy of people bustling around in such a small place.

Anyway, it was a very lazy, drizzly Saturday and I graciously allowed the children to come with us for some really excellent biscuits. The four of us each had a different filling – chicken, steak, bacon and country ham – but you know, these biscuits don’t need any meat. They’re just amazing. You’ve probably guessed that I’m given to occasional fits of hyperbole, but even Marie, the level-headed one, was saying that these were the best biscuits she’s had in ages.

This place is possibly just a bit out of the way for just going out for breakfast and then coming home, but it is certainly on our radar for any times that we’re heading in that direction. Grabbing a bag of biscuits and a bowl of grits to enjoy before hiking Kennesaw Mountain sounds like a really nice morning. We might need to do that some Saturday soon. Well, maybe a couple of months after the baby’s born, anyway. I wish they weren’t so far out of the way; I would love to swing by on my way to work. Heaven knows you don’t get biscuits this good from anybody’s drive-thru window.

Bocado, Atlanta GA

So I finally took the plunge! Bocado is one of Atlanta’s best-known newer restaurants, and if I’m not mistaken, every blogger in the region has already visited the place. It’s been on my to-do list for ages, but other things and other meals kept coming up. They have a really convenient location on Howell Mill right where it meets Marietta Street, and I’ve been known, occasionally, to drive right past it in the early evenings, when Williams Street is really blocked up and I need an alternate way over to the interstate. I’ve just never had the opportunity to stop in before.
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The Chocolaterie, Cumming GA

Boy, howdy, is it ever a good thing we don’t live very close to this place. We don’t have an awful lot of money at the best of times and have a baby on the way. This place could very, very easily blow one heck of a hole in a fellow’s wallet. Hoo, boy.

So a couple of Sundays ago, Marie and I celebrated her birthday with an afternoon together. We had lunch at Sam’s and then drove north through Roswell and Crabapple and up Georgia-372, which is called Birmingham Highway for some reason. This is a very pretty drive, past million dollar homes and gorgeous trees and into Cherokee County. Eventually, this put us sort of east of Ball Ground, near a retirement community called Big Canoe, and that sent us into the southwest corner of Forsyth County and our destination, Poole’s Mill Bridge Park.

Marie and I both love covered bridges and waterfalls, and this has both. Well, it’s more of a cascade than a waterfall, I suppose. The bridge is no longer open to vehicles, but visitors can walk through it, and play in the shallow river as it hits the rapids. It’s a quiet and secluded spot, but popular enough to bring several couples, dog walkers and families. We stayed for quite some time, and left as a birthday party was arriving in the covered pavilion.

Around 2:30, we continued east, crossed Georgia-400 and wound our way behind an enormous, upscale development off exit 13. I’d been here three or four times when I worked in Alpharetta and we celebrated co-worker’s birthdays at either Ted’s Montana Grill or Red Robin. There’s a movie theatre and a Barnes & Noble here and, a few doors down from a Stride Rite shoe store, a place that sells some of the most decadent chocolates in the city.

The Chocolaterie’s specialty is truffles, and they don’t scrimp on these. Priced at between $1.75 and $2.50 apiece, guests are not going to gorge themselves here, but they are going to get incredibly high quality with every bite. We selected a half dozen from the forty or fifty available – one for me and five for Marie – and I’ve never tasted anything like them. I made my key lime truffle last for several very small nibbles, not willing for the experience to end. And I don’t have that much of a sweet tooth. I thought Marie was going to black out and fall over.

The shop is filled with other imported treats and snacks, and they also do fudge and other drool-worthy things. For guests looking for something a little cooler, there are little single-servings of Edy’s, Ben & Jerry’s and Itti-Bitz, priced right at just a dollar or a buck-fifty each.

Perhaps the most exciting thing in their case was one that I decided to save for later. They do a small number of really spicy truffles, too. I am incredibly curious about the ghost pepper one. It’s decorated to look like a little white-sheeted kiddie haunted house ghost. Or maybe I’ll work my way up the spicy truffles until I get to that one. Marie will definitely want to return more than once; I expect I’ll have many chances.

Other blog posts about the Chocolaterie:

Atlanta Food Critic (Feb. 28 2011)
Roots in Alpharetta (Sep. 16 2011)