Sam’s BBQ1, Marietta GA

I’ve been telling myself for at least five years that I needed to get over to Lower Roswell Road and check this place out. Friends, if you live in Cobb County, don’t make the mistake that I did and put this off any longer. Sam Huff has been cooking up some amazing pulled pork that you seriously need to try. He apparently lives out in West Cobb, in that Lost Mountain community that I had driven through just two days previously, and was a regular on the competition circuit for years, winning all kinds of awards for his pulled pork, ribs and brisket. Six or seven years ago, he partnered up with Dave Poe and they opened what would become two restaurants in Marietta. They’ve since gone their separate ways, and Poe got the other place on Whitlock. I drove past it two days previously as well. That was an odd weekend.

Two Sundays ago, Marie and I were going to do something to celebrate her birthday. She just wanted a day together, away from kids, with a few general ideas about what she’d like to do. As I assembled a battle plan and a road trip that would take us via back roads up through Roswell and Alpharetta, I looked for lunch in the area and realized we could get some barbecue at Sam’s place. Even better, Sam’s wasn’t one of those irritating closed-on-Sunday joints that have been complicating my life. We drove right past a place that I wanted to try, Amos’s, which is near Ball Ground, on our trip. Closed.

Sam’s occupies two storefronts in a beat-up old strip mall near Johnson Ferry Road. One of these is the takeout store and the other is the restaurant. Sam’s has been answering the same questions about their food for so long that it’s led to some playfully exasperated T-shirts and signs explaining how many people can be fed with a pound of pork, that their meat is pulled and never chopped, that take-out orders are two doors down, and other rules. This has led to playful teasing from the regulars about supposedly misunderstanding the policies. During our visit, I saw two groups come in to enjoy lunch who ribbed the kid at the register that they wanted carry out. Poor kid.

The pulled pork here really isn’t very smoky, but it’s very moist and flavor-packed. It’s served dry, and guests can help themselves to three sauces at a pump station next to the drinks. The most popular, unsurprisingly, is a sweet Kansas City-styled tomato-based sauce, but, while good, I found this the least of the three. The vinegar and the mustard sauces were both outstanding. I don’t know which I prefer; both really complemented the meat really well and I haven’t enjoyed the combination of great pork and great sauce so much in weeks.

The sides were very good, too. I ordered the lunch special with a sandwich, baked beans and a glass of sweet tea, and Marie enjoyed a plate of pulled pork with green beans and potato salad.

I definitely plan to go back soon for another meal. This is absolutely among the better barbecue joints in the Atlanta area.

Ok Sun, Columbus GA

Ages back, when I first went down to Columbus with Matt to meet his pals and see the town, we stopped by a diner called Gabby’s. It was a pretty filthy place. It was sort of a Waffle House crossed with one of those dumb joints that tries conning you into thinking it’s a “1950s” diner by way of a bad airbrushed picture of James Dean with his arm around Marilyn Monroe, but they served up a quite remarkable plate of hash browns via the kitchen sink, and they seemed to be the only place in the city that served Royal Crown Cola from a fountain. Quite apart from the inescapable truth that RC is just plain better than Coke, you’d think that more places in town would want to shine the local spotlight on a nationally-known beverage headquartered in the city. Of course, you’d also think that everybody in Chattanooga would want to serve Double Cola, and they don’t, either. At least several places in the Carolinas seem to be proud of Cheerwine. Continue reading “Ok Sun, Columbus GA” →

Briar Patch Restaurant, Hiram GA

Next week sometime, I’ll get around to telling you about why I ended up here, instead of at Bocado like I intended on this past Friday. Briefly, I found myself suddenly desiring a nice, comforting plate of chopped barbecue pork instead of the sandwich that I had been thinking about all week. There are a pile of barbecue joints around Atlanta on my to-do list, but the one that spoke to me the most was this old place way out Georgia 120, long past the point the road changes its name from Whitlock to Dallas Highway. From the Marietta Square, it’s about twenty minutes’ drive. I had only been to Briar Patch once before; when I had the Geocities barbecue page up, a reader in the area recommended that I come out this way and give the place a try.

It had been a really long time since I drove out this way at all – long enough to miss an unfortunate change. The El Pollo Loco where we used to eat is now an IHOP. That California-based chain made a big production out of moving into the Atlanta market about five years ago, but it kind of did a half-assed job, if you ask me. Not bad burritos, mind. They’ve a few stores left, I believe.

Anyway, the road takes you past Cheatam Hill Cemetery, where my father was laid to rest in his amazing, see-it-to-believe-it plain pine box, past the IHOP, past the gigantic, upscale Avenue at West Cobb, sister development to the nice shopping center between Marietta and Roswell on the same road, through a charming community called Lost Mountain, and to the Paulding County town of Hiram. Weirdly, I realized too late that I was out in this general direction just four days previously. My son’s middle school had a band competition at McEachern High and this place is only seven miles from that school. Let’s do a better job watching that odometer with gas prices like these, okay?

Not visible in the above photo: Seven hundred trillion ragweed pollen particles. Per hundred. It was a rough day.

This place is a big and definitely popular destination in the area. I got there at twenty past eleven and parking was already at a premium. Briar Patch employs a huge staff to keep things moving efficiently. The service line gets you to a couple of registers underneath three big video screens that show off the menu. It’s a big, full service restaurant with burgers and steaks as well as hickory-smoked pork, beef and chicken. I went with a “little” pork sandwich basket, which comes with fries and slaw, and asked for an extra cup of stew.

Weirdly, and I’m not sure what to make of this, they offer bottled water for free, but charge ninety-five cents for a cup of ice. I’m pretty sure that I’ve never run into this before.

I made the mistake (again!) of not asking for my sauce on the side. The sandwich, nicely priced at $6 with slaw and fries, comes drowned in their red tomato-based sauce. The chopped pork was very tasty, but I think that the amount of sauce really overwhelmed the meat. I was able to fork out a couple of nibbles that tasted much better on their own, or dipped in a really good spicy hot mustard sauce. I got a little cup of this for my fries. My doctor had, just an hour earlier, told me to lay off the spicy food for a week while my allergy-devastated throat heals, but the mustard sauce is just so good that I couldn’t resist a few contraband bites.

The slaw was really nice and creamy. I recall, from my first visit many years ago, not really enjoying it, but it was a pleasant surprise this time out. The stew was very mild, thick and chewy, and quite honestly the highlight of the meal. It tastes terrific, and it felt so good going down my gullet. I will say that the portions are really reasonable, but will probably feel small to people used to overeating with a plate of barbecue like I used to do. Since I’m trying to whittle down my portion sizes, I was pleased, but I can imagine some eaters might want to pay the extra dollar for a large sandwich.

I brought some Gregory McDonald to read, but was distracted a little by the decor. Apart from the mounted deer and game heads throughout the store, the top tier of the walls show off some painted artwork depicting Confederate soldiers fighting in Paulding County. (A drive from Marietta will take guests through a tiny sliver of Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park.) On the wall above the exit door, there’s a big depiction of a not-entirely Disney-styled Br’er Fox threatening Br’er Rabbit with a trip to the briar patch.

I’ve lived in Georgia all my life and consider Joel Chandler Harris a whimsical part of our common folklore, but was surprised to learn that neither of my kids has any idea who the heck Uncle Remus was. I know the tale in this painting from my third grade teacher reading it to us. I suppose that you can’t do that in school any longer.

Zucca, Smyrna GA

Every year, our friend Neal turns his birthday into a week-long celebration called The Festival of Neal. We asked him, a couple of weeks in advance, before he got completely booked, whether we could schedule some time to take him to supper somewhere. He selected a place near him in Smyrna called Zucca. This was one of those places that I’d been figuring that I’d get around to for many, many years.

Zucca opened its first of four Atlanta locations in 2003. There’s the one in Smyrna, which we visited, one near us in Kennesaw, one a little further up the road in Woodstock on Towne Lake Parkway, and one in Decatur. I’m of the opinion that Atlanta is completely packed with amazing pizza restaurants. Does Zucca have a chance at breaking into my personal top five of Vingenzo’s, Varasano’s, Fritti, Everybody’s and Labella’s?

Marie wasn’t able to join us Wednesday night. She needed more sleep than I do back before the pregnancy, and even more today. This past week has been lousy with allergies and pollen and it’s hit me worse than any spring of the past six years and I’ve been an absolute nightmare to sleep with, since I can barely breathe. A couple of nights previously, I banished myself to the couch for fear of waking her with nose-clogged snoring. I proceeded to wake everybody in the house, even the boy who sleeps in the basement. I mention this because the plan was for me to pick up the children and drive down to Smyrna and meet Marie at the restaurant, and instead we nearly collided at the foot of the driveway. She came home, completely exhausted and spent and full of stress and frustration and asked me to deliver apologies, but she needed to sleep. And did she ever. It was fitful and interrupted, but she got to lay down for about twelve hours, and she deserved every second of it.

Like a complete lout, the pizza slices that I brought home were covered in bacon, which she doesn’t like. Well, that’s another one in the failure column for me!

Well, the children and I stopped in to visit my mother for a few minutes, and got to the restaurant just before seven. It’s a family-friendly sports bar, with a big sign in the airlock advertising franchise opportunities. At various points during the week they have trivia and games, and on the weekends, they have loud music and DJs who evidently can’t spell their own names. Or maybe she’s called Sue Spence. Who knows? It was, unusually, a time to discuss spelling and pronounciation. Like many middle schoolers, my daughter is incapable of speaking for more than four minutes without announcing that something has been “pwned.” This is evidently pronounced “powned” in twelve year-old-ese. Our friend Todd was able to join us, and he saw the reunited British band OMD earlier in the week at The Loft. In twelve year-old-ese, that’s pronounced “owmed.”

I started with a bowl of minestrone to sooth my allergy-ravaged throat, and it was excellent. I might have saved a penny or two by ordering just a small pizza and a second bowl of that wonderful soup. The pizza that the kids and I got was my son’s choice. He wanted to try the Buffalo pizza, which skips tomato sauce in favor of blue cheese and ranch, topped with chicken, bacon and tomatoes with wing sauce and blue cheese crumbles. It was very good and there was a heck of a lot of it. A large pie here will easily feed three.

The birthday boy ordered Zucca’s Victory pie, which, they boast, earned them the 2008 prize in an International Expo of some renown. It’s a ramped up Margherita – mozzerella, basil, olive oil and parmesan – adding sausage and mushrooms. Neal substituted onions for the mushrooms. Todd also ordered a large pie – more than enough to take several slices back home to Samantha, who also could not join us – with sausage and peppers. I had a slice of this and thought it was pretty good, but certainly elevated by the quality of the sausage, which was just excellent. Sometimes, better ingredients make an enormous, palpable difference.

David was also able to meet us after bowing out of work a little early. Pizza’s not really part of his diet, but he did enjoy a bowl of the terrific minestrone, and a large Greek salad. Well, to the naked eye it was a Greek salad; according to the menu it was a Tuscany salad. I’m really not certain what the difference would be!

Overall, it was a good meal. They do good work here, and the service was fantastic. The pies are probably not as good as Antico, but the service was leagues better than what you find there, so I’d put the two on about equal footing as far as the overall experience. Just like Antico wasn’t qute able to knock its way into my personal top five, nor was this place. Not at all bad, but not quite transcendent, either.

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?

Taco Cabana, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

You can’t miss this restaurant at the intersection of Piedmont and Monroe. It’s the place that looks like the two fellows from Miami Vice are about to beat up on the guy bringing in all the cocaine in his DeLorean. Taco Cabana has always been this garish, and that’s part of why they spent about six years in court defending their look.

In the late eighties and early nineties, this spot was occupied by a nearly-identical restaurant called Two Pesos. This was the only Atlanta location of a chain that had started in Houston in 1985. I ate here several times when I was in high school and when I came home during my first year of college. In fact, my very first car – and here’s an odd memory – died for good one night after a meal here. It was a wonderful, gigantic 1979 Oldsmobile Delta 88 and that great beauty would have driven me to Europe and back, had I asked. I was having car trouble all day, and fretted with two friends at Two Pesos what I would do if it couldn’t be repaired. Well, it couldn’t. It cranked twice more, once when I left the restaurant after a horrible, grinding shriek of metal, and once, for the final time, after it conked out again at a traffic light down the road. So Two Pesos was my last meal with that Oldsmobile.

What I didn’t know then was that Two Pesos was already years into a losing battle defending their business. Two Pesos had been started by some businessmen, allied with a former manager of one of San Antonio’s Taco Cabana stores, in 1985. Within a couple of years, Two Pesos had blanketed Texas with locations, and the much slower-growing Taco Cabana found themselves facing competition from a lookalike copycat which had established themselves in cities like Houston and Dallas, flinging locations as far afield as Colorado and Georgia to establish themselves ahead of where Taco Cabana could go.

So Taco Cabana sued Two Pesos for ripping off their look, feel, design, store layout and menu to such a degree that customers were left confused as to which came first. The Supreme Court eventually weighed in Taco Cabana’s favor. Left with a lower court order to completely reconstruct every one of their existing stores, Two Pesos elected instead to sell out to Taco Cabana. The Atlanta store was remade and remodeled into a Taco Cabana over the course of about an afternoon.

I’m not sure why I never popped back by the business, whatever its name, after that fateful evening when my car cranked for the last time. I remember they always had decent food at great prices, but the road just never took me by again. Well, not when I was ready for a meal there, anyway. Years and years passed and I read about the slugfest that the two restaurants had in court and figured that I should stop by again. It might make a readable story, if nothing else. Or something weird might happen.

Now, one thing that I didn’t like about my trip to Taco Cabana is that they don’t have chips, although they offer them. For ninety-nine cents, you get a pair of flour tortillas that you can rip into small pieces and eat with their tasty salsas. Somebody should tell that guy behind the register that those aren’t chips. So I had two tortillas along with a platter of two chicken tacos, rice and beans. I asked for one hard shell and one soft in order to sample some different flavors, and thought that chicken was very good for this sort of food. There was nothing very unusual or weird in my meal, but it was a step or two up from what you’d get at a similar place, and priced right. I liked the layout and the big patio space, which is probably quite fun and relaxing in warmer weather.

So then I went to my car and it would not start. I turned the key and nothing happened. The whole electrical system was not responding.

I know this must be impossible to believe, but twenty-one years after my Oldsmobile sputtered and died after I had a meal in this building, I came here for the first time and the hotdamned restaurant killed my Camry. You want to tell me the odds of that?

Turned out I had one of those very rare car problems that I can actually solve. One of the battery terminals had a loose connection. I avoided a freakout, shook my head in disbelief, popped the hood, jiggled it, bit my lip, tried again, thanked God and drove, nerves wracked, to my brother, who spent a few minutes replacing bits and tightening things and making sure I was roadworthy again.

I figure Taco Cabana is surely the safest restaurant in the city now. My car’s had problems there twice. It’s like Garp buying that house in John Irving’s novel after an airplane crashes into it. There’s just no way in the universe I could possibly have car problems there three times, right?

The Georgia Pig, Brunswick GA (CLOSED)

With a heavy heart, we woke on Saint Simons for what we plan to be the last time in Marie’s pregnancy. This was the last long, overnight trip on the calendar until the summer. I slept horribly, and she not much better, and we ended up getting a later start out of town than planned, as she was not feeling at all well that Sunday morning. So we kicked back for an extra couple of hours to let her rest before giving our goodbye hugs and getting back on the road. Continue reading “The Georgia Pig, Brunswick GA (CLOSED)” →