Vingenzo’s, Woodstock GA

Well, here’s a surprise. This pizza restaurant in Woodstock completely blindsided me. A couple of years ago, when everybody was going nuts – and rightly so – about the mighty and wonderful Varasano’s, this place calmly opened and casually revealed a product every bit as good, only with a wider menu and a much more laid-back and relaxed atmosphere, with no pretension or artifice. Seriously, I’ve had several truly great pies at Varasano’s, and one visit which was a little disappointing, but Vingenzo’s is every bit as wonderful as Varasano’s at their best and, honestly, surpasses them in an area or two. I think that I might have found a new favorite pizza place in the Atlanta area.

Neopolitan pies are the order of the day here. Just about everything is handmade, down to the cheeses, and served up on eleven-inch pies. I think that two of these should feed three people.

On Wednesday, the four of us came up here, meeting our friends Neal, Donna and Eric for supper. My daughter was under orders not to protest or make any hints; she was on my list for overindulging at breakfast. My son, getting over a cold, had lost his voice, and so he, literally, pointed out several interesting pies from their menu that he’d like to try. I recommend that everybody try this out themselves one day soon. It’s so much nicer and more pleasant selecting pizza when one child cannot protest and the other has been strongly warned not to.

We had an awesome server who went over everything and made some suggestions, encouraging us to try their mozzarella pairings. These appetizers, priced between $7-10 each, give you a good portion of cheese along with something else to complement the taste. I tried the very soft mozzarella di bufala with a little pepper, served with a few leaves of mixed greens and two white anchovies. It was completely delicious. Neal had a different, creamier cheese, Stracciatella di Burrata, that came with greens, cherry tomatoes and capers. If you’re sharing, then for $18 you can get the “Grand Tasting,” which gives you each of Vingenzo’s three cheeses along with the small salad, peppers, capers and two types of olives. You don’t get the delicious anchovies this way, but I expect that many of my readers probably don’t care for those anyway.

Marie was not feeling especially hungry, so she enjoyed a bowl of pasta e fagioli soup for dinner along with a good bit of bread. You’ll definitely want to try this; it’s a pizza crust, basically, with olive oil and a little parmesan. The children and I, meanwhile, split two pizzas and I think that we chose well. The Regina comes with sausage and wild mushrooms and that was pretty knockdown good on its own, but the other pie, Bianca con Prosciutto e Fontina, was the master stroke. It came with prosciutto and a heap of arugula atop more of this amazing cheese. It is very similar to the excellent Nucci pizza at Varasano’s, but heaven help me, I liked this even better. I don’t know where the notion of mixing arugula and salty meats together originated, but I sure am glad that somebody figured it out.

Vingenzo’s also makes fresh pasta – Neal said that his was wonderful and Donna and Eric also enjoyed their linguine – with a variety of sauces and toppings that all sound amazing. With an introductory meal this good and a menu this dense, this is absolutely a place that needs revisiting, and without delay. Heck, one of these days, I’d like to start working on the wine list here, too. I am really glad that we found this place, and look forward to another visit soon.

Tin Can Fish House and Oyster Bar, Sandy Springs GA

I’d been hoping for several weeks to get a chance to visit Tin Can Fish House and Oyster Bar, as several of the region’s food writers have been raving about it. This past Saturday, Marie wanted to visit a maternity consignment shop in Buckhead. It was a really gorgeous and warm day – far too warm for it to really be February! – and so the two of us left the children to their own devices and drove over to Sandy Springs for an early lunch. We arrived a little too early, as it turned out – they do not open until 11.30 – and so that gave us twenty minutes to walk around the curious strip mall where the restaurant is located. The development is centered around a Kroger, but rather than a conventional strip, it’s four or five short two-story buildings, all hidden above and behind Roswell Road and Hammond. It’s really not that easy to find; basically, if you are standing at the entrance to Kroger, then Tin Can is ahead of you and to the right, next door to their older sister restaurant, Teela Taquiera.

Interestingly, it appears that the spot was previously taken by the same brother and sister ownership team’s Italian restaurant, but back in September, they elected to convert it to a seafood place. They had previously run a seafood restaurant called Fishmonger in the same area of town. I never tried it, but it was said to be pretty good. I read an article over at the Atlanta Business Chronicle where co-owner Arte Antoniades said that our area was lacking in casual, relaxed places to get good seafood. I’d agree with that. It’s all big-roomed family places full of long waits and screaming kids or high-end joints.

The closest that I can recall of a simple, no-wait place for great, reasonably-priced seafood was Blue Ocean in Alpharetta. Unfortunately, they chose to build on Windward Parkway and were part of that gigantic and regular restaurant turnover that I mentioned in this blog earlier in the month.

Tin Can certainly has the casual and relaxed part down pat. Despite the trappings of the very nice strip mall, this is a really laid-back and friendly place. Marie picked a table by the window – we missed a trick not going outside, but then again it was awfully bright – with a wobbly bit on the floor that no chair would evenly sit. She ordered grilled grouper with a salad and saffron rice. The salad was excellent – mixed greens with tomatoes, figs and walnuts in a light balsamic dressing, although the rice was a little saltier than she liked.

The grouper itself was really tasty, but I preferred my selection. I had the standard cod and fries with slaw, and if there’s a better seafood meal around town for nine bucks, I never heard of it. The cod was flaky and delicate and just wonderful. The shoestring fries were almost just right; they could have used a hair of the salt from Marie’s rice. The slaw was really good, with just the right blend of vinegar and thin mayo. I also ordered a side of fried green tomatoes, unsurprisingly. A side order comes with three slices and a small cup of spicy remoulade.

Honestly, the cod and grouper were as good as any I’ve had, and for a little bit less than I’m used to spending. It’s a hair more of a drive from our neighborhood than would be ideal, but it’s certainly worth another visit the next time we are in the area. And relaxing with some good food like this put me in a much better mood than I had been, just in time to spend the next hour or so thumbing through baby clothes. See, told you I’d be diverting some of our disposable income and dining money on clothes for the kid. I’m not a complete beast.

Thumbs Up Diner, Atlanta GA

The problem with mile-long to-do lists, like mine, is that I cannot remember how on earth some of the things that have been on there the longest got there in the first place. Take Thumbs Up Diner, for instance. I haven’t been in Decatur in months, but one time I was there, I pointed out the Thumbs Up location there – it is one of five in the Atlanta area – to Marie and told her that I had heard you can get a really good breakfast here and that we need to stop in one of these days. Not long afterward, our friend David, who’s always looking out for a good place to eat, forwarded me a link to the restaurant’s web site. “Yep,” I said. “It’s on the list!” So are, if we’re honest, something like fifty other places. I have really got to get up to Cincinnati to take care of the three or four places up there I want to try.

The problem, as ever, is finding the free time and the pennies to make it to any place at the same time that my enthusiasm and curiosity push a place up to the top of the wishlist. It helps that Thumbs Up has a location about a mile from where I work, and so, with a short day last week, I decided to drive over to the Marietta Street location for a late breakfast. It has a beautiful view of the midtown skyline, except some guy at Georgia Tech decided to stick the backside of some big athletic facility in the way.

I spent what seemed like a lot of time trying to figure out what I wanted. I hear that their pancakes and waffles are really good, and thought about trying one, but I went with one of the house specialties, The Heap, instead. This is a skillet filled with cheesy potatoes, scrambled eggs, onions and peppers, and I added chicken. I’m very glad that I resisted the temptation to get a waffle with it, because the Heap alone was considerably more food than any one person needs, and I was not able to finish it. It wasn’t at all bad, but it needed some salt and pepper and Texas Pete hot sauce to bring things to life. It came with a very tasty biscuit. That, I did finish.

My little breakfast was a very pleasant getaway. I didn’t learn anything much about the diner; even if the waitresses weren’t busy refilling coffee throughout their near-full house, I really just felt like relaxing in a nice, reasonably quiet place and watching the world pass by. Sadly, there’s not a lot of pedestrian traffic on this stretch of Marietta Street, so I couldn’t do much in the way of people watching. But for sitting back with a good book and watching the world go by, this is a fine place to do it. Might have to do it again sometime soon, now that it’s no longer collecting dust on a to-do list.

OU for U Cafe, Dunwoody GA (CLOSED)

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

That might just happen when she takes maternity leave.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stonewall’s BBQ, Braselton GA

When I planned our eight-meal, 600-mile trip through South Carolina, I also divided up the driving chores, optimistic that Marie and I would each handle about half of the load. However, I noticed that she was really getting tired while I was driving back down I-85 from Charlotte. She passed on a snack at Spartanburg’s Del Taco, was so beat by the time we arrived at The Beacon that she wasn’t sure whether she wanted lettuce on her hamburger, and, taking the wheel for what was planned to be the 120-mile leg from Spartanburg to our final restaurant destination in Braselton, Georgia, she took a deep, deep breath and gave it her best, but still pulled over before we left the state, completely exhausted and unable to stay awake. She did a terrific job, but this road trip took an awful lot out of her. I took over the driving and she closed her very patient eyes for another well-deserved nap. She missed a really pretty sunset. Continue reading “Stonewall’s BBQ, Braselton GA” →

Sconyers Bar-B-Que, Augusta GA

So this past weekend, Marie and I went out on what will most likely be the last big road trip that we will take until the baby is born in May. We started with a small breakfast at Mamie’s Kitchen in Conyers, and then drove east out I-20 towards Augusta.

The journey took us through Taliaferro County, one of Georgia’s smallest, and the least populated. It is notable, in one circuit where I travel, as being the most difficult county in Georgia to obtain a hit on Where’s George, the currency tracking project that I enjoy playing. Even though there is never a guarantee or even a serious hope that spending money at a specific point will get you a hit from it, I could not resist pulling off the interstate at exit 148 and buying a little gas at the only filling station there – for a criminal $3.30 a gallon! – in the hopes that somebody local will hit one of my bills. I have hits from 61 of Georgia’s 159 counties, and I sure do hope that Taliaferro will be the 62nd. If not, I might have to go back out this way and get lunch at Heavy’s BBQ in Crawfordville one day. That’s where some scenes in the film Sweet Home Alabama were shot.

About three-quarters of an hour later, we were on the outskirts of Augusta, the state’s second largest city and home to the Greenjackets minor league baseball team. Oh, and the Masters, I suppose. Our destination was Sconyers, an old and very popular destination restaurant that, agreeably, opens at 10 am, allowing us to plan a de facto second breakfast. I’d heard an awful lot of tourist scuttlebutt about this place over the years, including its presence on a People magazine list of the nation’s ten best barbecue restaurants, and wondered whether it could live up to the hype. Part of it really did, I’m glad to say.

When Claude and Adeline Sconyers opened in 1956, it was in a little storefront with one of those cute wooden signs with Coca-Cola logos. Their son, Larry, has run the place since the late 1970s. He moved the restaurant into its current digs. It’s now a huge house with a gigantic gravel parking lot. Inside, the decor is understated and classic western, like an old log cabin. Or, if you prefer, like one of those pancake restaurants in the Smokey Mountains that look like they want to make you think that you’re in a log cabin. Attempting to enhance the western feel and failing quite spectacularly, the wait staff and servers all wear quite grotesque costumes. They’re these hideous blue and white faux-milkmaid things that would look tragic in a third-rate rep company’s production of Heidi. Never have I had such excellent and professional service from somebody dressed so garishly.

For our second breakfast of the day, we elected to split a small plate of chopped pork with hash and potato salad, along with an extra side of cole slaw. Strangely, the restaurant just crams all three of the different foods onto a single, small plate, serving that atop a slightly larger plate to catch your crumbs and spills. Trying to cut calories, I actually removed potato salad from my diet almost two years ago, but I succumb every so often for a few bites. I had heard, correctly, that Sconyers has excellent potato salad and so the couple of bites that I had were well spent.

The pork, however, was really quite disappointing, just sort of limp and moist with no smoky flavor at all, but it is served with a really excellent sauce that goes very well with it, and turns an ordinary meat into something quite memorable. The sauce is available in three degrees of heat, and it is a mixture of vinegar and mustard with a little tomato and a secret blend of spices that Mr. Sconyers still adds daily. This kind of sauce is absolutely not to Marie’s liking, and I suggested she might want to pass on it, but I thought it was super.

The cole slaw was also really something – a light mayo-based blend served with sweet pickles – but the standout was the hash. Now, several of my favorite places in northeast Georgia serve up a really thick, not-Brunswick stew that is a lot like Carolina hash, but only a few, like the dearly missed Carrithers in Athens, actually called it hash. Sconyers serves the real deal, a thick blend of leftover pork and sauce over rice and it is just amazing. Even if you’re just passing through with lunch or dinner plans somewhere else, you need to stop in here for a four buck bowl of hash and rice. There’s a reason that Jimmy Carter had Sconyers cater a big White House event; this hash is something special.

This is the sort of restaurant where you can understand why locals have started grumbling that it isn’t as good as it used to be. People turn on success and even in cities like Augusta, which seems to have an aging population and not one so interested in a vibrant foodie community, people do tend to look for the next new thing. Is it possible for a restaurant with a parking lot the size of a small stadium to maintain quality for better than fifty years? Well, I don’t know whether it is as good as it used to be, but it’s still okay at some things and downright excellent in others. This is definitely worth a visit, I’d say. Just get ready to giggle at those silly costumes.

Mamie’s Kitchen, Conyers GA

A few months ago, when we learned that Marie was pregnant, we knew that our long road trips would have to be curtailed at some point. Sitting in a car for hours and hours and then taking a long hike through some state park’s nature trail is a bit much in the third trimester, even for somebody as enthusiastic as Marie. I suggested that we take the spring off from road tripping, but before we do that, we’d have two last long drives. We’d do one day this month, and then go back to Saint Simons Island to visit her parents in March before raising the drawbridge. I started charting out our February trip before Christmas, because I’m impatient that way. What I came up with was pretty eyebrow-raising: I estimated that the 613 mile trip would take us just over fourteen hours and see us stopping by eight different restaurants in three states. So for the next couple of weeks, we’ll be recounting those stops.

At least we were by ourselves. We had the whole day to just be together, talk, hold hands, and enjoy some occasional “companionable silence,” as P.D. James terms it, with the rowdy children spending the day with my mother. The kids missed some very good meals and one or two that did not completely thrill me, but even the least of the stops was interesting and curious, and I’m pretty sure that we’ll be returning to one place in South Carolina many more times in the years to come, especially if we can make a move to Asheville in a couple of years and find this place about a seven-minute detour on a trip from there back to the Georgia coast to see her family.

First up was one of the remaining destinations on our list of Georgia restaurants reviewed on Roadfood.com. We had thirteen to go for a full set, and one of these is a breakfast joint, Mamie’s Kitchen in the suburban town of Conyers. I always hate driving out I-20 this way. I used to know this guy in high school who lived off Evans Mill Road and pretended he was the nephew of Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Jim Shooter in order to con gullible chumps like us into thinking we could start a comic book company. He called me on the phone once, irate that “some Christians” were misunderstanding the lyric of a song by a popular eighties group called Mr. Mister, and making it all about God and stuff. Turns out he was the one who misunderstood them, and that the line really is not “Kyrie lays upon the roads that I must travel.” I mention this because, for the umpteenth damn time driving east on I-20, I got that stupid song stuck in my head. This time it was particularly awful and all the time we were looking for Mamie’s Kitchen, I was singing that blasted chorus to myself.

Mamie’s Kitchen has been around for decades, selling really inexpensive breakfasts, and it seems that most of them go out the drive-through window. They do offer a breakfast buffet, but it seems that many people just enjoy stopping in for a biscuit or two and relaxing in what must surely be one of the most comfortable and relaxed little getaways that I have seen recently. Here, a small early morning meal in the company of friends is just a perfect way to get the day started.

We had the good fortune to visit at the same time as a table of regulars were enjoying what appeared to be a usual Saturday morning ritual for them. Four men, one about our age and the others a good deal older, were enjoying their umpeenth cups of coffee and talking in happy voices about anything and everything. On a first-name basis with all the ladies who work there, they playfully bantered back and forth about refills and harmless flirtation and foolishness. Maybe I am an eavesdropping jerk, but I just love people-watching. It does me good to know that I’m in the company of happy people.

Marie and I each had a biscuit, hers with chicken and mine with deliciously salty country ham. The biscuits were warm from the oven and so delicately fresh that they’d have liked to disintegrate with a touch. I would have gladly had another, but we really couldn’t linger and really should not have indulged in more, for we had a second breakfast awaiting us two and a half hours down the road. So we left the table to its conversation about the Holy Land and whether one of them was going to whup their waitress or whether she would be whupping him first – my odds were on that outcome – and made our way. The sun was even good enough to rise while we were inside, allowing me to photograph the building. The morning was off to a remarkably good start.