Jalapeno Charlie’s, Atlanta GA

If we can afford a little leniency when a big festival draws gigantic crowds and puts a restaurant and all its servers under undue stress, we should probably give a little extra praise when a restaurant handles the spectacle with ease. This past weekend, downtown Atlanta was host to a pair of gigantic crowd-generators: the Dragon*Con convention and the Chic-fil-A “Kickoff Classic,” this year between LSU and North Carolina. Jalapeno Charlie’s, located on the corner of Peachtree and International and across the street from the Hard Rock Cafe, handled the crunch extremely well. We arrived during a comparatively slow period, so it wasn’t too wild, and we agreed that their food was not bad, and the service was excellent.

Dragon*Con brings buddies to town from all over the southeast, and Marie and I get the chance to say hello to friends and family who’ve come from Athens, Jacksonville, Memphis, Nashville and Starkville, among other places. The actual paid attendance of the con is something like 40,000. Unpaid attendance of people who’ve come to ogle the thousands of costumers is probably about the same. Our friends from Nashville are frequently among them. Tory, whom you may recall from our last trip to that awesome city leading us down an alleyway past dumpsters to a Greek place for lunch, had colored her hair Draco Malfoy-blonde but was wearing a different house’s colors. Looking like Draco is all the rage in Gryffindor this year, apparently. I’ve known her and Brooke (hair colored blue and purple) for ten years now and they’ve taken me to many good restaurants in Nashville, and were already nailing down some places for me to go when I head back that way later in the year. Fortunately, one of those trips should be on a Wednesday so I can enjoy the weekend-unfriendly Mas Tacos.

Anyway, Marie went down to get right in the thick of the Dragon*Con madness and, for Sunday night supper, rounded up her brother along with Brooke, Tory, Brooke’s boyfriend Matt, and their friend Holly from Kentucky. I got to the restaurant before them and snagged us a large table, although not, sadly, one on the balcony overlooking Peachtree.

Jalapeno Charlie’s is a chain-in-waiting. It’s a “concept” owned by the people behind Fire of Brazil, and while the only location, currently, is in downtown Atlanta – in the space just above Fire of Brazil, in fact – you can tell that the corporate minds are looking forward to open the new stores in other cities soon.

As for the food, it’s not at all bad, but the menu, which purports to offer “Mexican-Latin fusion,” kind of needs a kick in the backside. Really, this town is quite used to having complementary chips and salsa brought to the table; charging five bucks for it in a restaurant like this is just tacky.

And that’s a shame, because the food is quite good, with a number of neat dishes. Marie’s brother, Karl, really went for the interesting concoctions. He shared an appetizer of fried plantains topped with chicken and melted cheese that was quite good, and just enough of a tweak from the usual “cheese nachos” that you always see at these sorts of places. But his entree was the real surprise. Called a molcajete, this was a bubbling “soup” served in a thick black bowl shaped, for some reason, like a pig. It was a stew of chicken in a tomato-based sauce with carrots and celery and served so darn hot it needed to sit for a few minutes before Karl could dig in.

I had the fish tacos, tilapia with a mild ranchero sauce, and they were very good, even though they provided more evidence, as though more were needed, that I probably need to take a class on how to photograph food, because every time I try to shoot tacos, the picture looks awful. The only failing on my dish was the half-thought inclusion of a handful of blue corn chips. Not only were these tasteless and bland, but they drove home how nice it would have been to have a nice basket of fresh chips and salsa. Marie had a chicken quesadilla and was very satisfied with it. They really piled the ingredients high and didn’t scrimp on the fillings.

To be honest, I was enjoying the company so much that I’d have suffered a far worse meal with no complaints. It’s always wonderful to visit with out-of-town friends, and I think that the Jalapeno Charlie’s crew did a great job managing the weekend crush. If one ever opens in your town, it’s probably worth a visit. Just bring lots of friends and plan to talk about the latest Doctor Who rumors and Harry Potter costumes.

Metro Cafe Diner, Atlanta GA

This is Marie, returning to my usual specialty of sweet things. This entry is on the Metro Cafe Diner in downtown Atlanta. As we’ve mentioned previously, it’s really not terribly fair to judge a place based on its performance when there is a convention the size of Dragon*Con right around the corner. On both corners, actually; it’s a huge con. Nevertheless, the place did well. I actually had breakfast there twice in one day due to the sleep schedules of the folks I was meeting, and it was fine both times. The service was a little faster in the early morning before all the tables were full, but only very slightly. There was less amusing rushing around, though.

The place is something of a hybrid. There are black marble walls, and there is a bar on the ground floor where apparently karaoke is inflicted upon the diners. I can’t imagine the acoustics are all that great, but we were able to converse comfortably at the tables despite the music so I may be wrong. You walk up this odd triangular staircase past a display of cakes big enough to rival the Marietta Diner’s offerings, and then get packed into one of two little side passages filled with booths. It is not the most spacious of places.

The prices seemed a trifle high, and they didn’t even boost them for the crowds. However, presentation is pretty and the quality of the food was good. I enjoyed my French Toast with strawberries sans the usual Radioactive Red Stuff that comes with such fare. The slices of bread were thick and buttery and if they could possibly have done with a bit of my favorite cinnamon, that is only because I like my cinnamon just a little hotter than usual. My brother seriously got into his Eggs Benedict Florentine. The eggs were cooked perfectly.

Overall this is a place I would recommend, especially since my sister reported favorably on the cakes, but it is a little on the odd side.

Thompson Brothers Bar-B-Q, Smyrna GA

The Thompson Brothers moved here from Oklahoma quite a few years ago and I kept telling myself that I needed to get over to their little storefront on 41 and promptly forgot. They’re either in the space or next door to the space once occupied by one of a local chain of CD stores whose name I can never remember, Atlanta Disc Exchange or something. In the summer of 1991, I was supposed to be dropping off menus and coupons for a pizza place and I ended up here, buying a Maura O’Connell CD, after the apartment complex on the other side of Herodian, where Dan Barken used to live, caught me “soliciting” and told me to beat it. That, I remember.

Anyway, I was caught in unusually heavy traffic a couple of weeks ago and switched on the only station in town that gives traffic reports worth a damn. This means taking a deep breath and listening to some mule-lipped lying loudmouth talk about all that’s wrong with our country. This he does always, even when his party’s in the White House. So I was sitting still there on I-75, drumming the steering wheel and wondering, not for the first time, whether anybody would actually notice if this loudmouth stopped speaking and just barked like a dog, when one of the Thompson Brothers called in. They’d catered some event for him or something the day or the week before, and the loudmouth said something like “You and I may not see eye to eye politically, but I have got to tell you, those were some amazing ribs you cooked for us.” The next couple of minutes were almost pleasant, listening to the loudmouth shut the hell up about his politics and just tell his gigantic audience how wonderful the food here was and how much he appreciated the good job Thompson Brothers did for him.

So I told myself then that I really needed to quit forgetting about this place and get my butt in there. It was in part that the loudmouth, for the first time in perhaps ever, actually sounded genuine about something, and in part that his organization hired these guys and their little store instead of some much better-known brothers with a great big store about four miles up the road who’ve been supporting the loudmouth’s politics for decades. For anybody to shut this loudmouth up for two minutes to just tell the world about some good food was an act that demanded a visit, at last.

The other week, I was writing about Smyrna’s Old South Bar-B-Q and mentioned that there were some other ‘cue joints within a hop, skip and a jump that I had not tried. I was planning then to stop by as soon as it was convenient. This turned out to be Saturday evening; it was a fine little break between watching the UGA game at home and watching the LSU game with my dad at his place. I’m not sure whether the brothers watched either, as they seem to be Sooners fans.

The house specialty here is what they call “The Whole Nine.” This is a giant plate of beef sausage, bologna, ribs and chopped beef. I confess that I was very tempted, but after the previous night’s pizza, I was still, almost a day later, a little stuffed, so I settled on a sandwich. In deference to the Thompson Brothers’ Oklahoma origins, I ordered beef, which I almost never do in barbecue restaurants, with a side of baked beans. My daughter had a pork sandwich with stew. I sampled them and they were very good.

Interestingly, the beef is just wonderful on its own and doesn’t really go all that well with either of their sauces. They have two, a spicy-sweet one and a this-is-far-too-darn-sweet one, and they mix pretty well with the pork, but the beef is so nicely smoked that neither accompany it at all well. On the other hand, perhaps the sweet baked beans helped with the interference in flavor?

I’ve occasionally read that fans of western-style barbecue believe that their meat doesn’t need any sauce. If the Thompson Brothers’ beef, smoked out back in a cinder block smoker, is a good representation of what they have all over Texas and Oklahoma, then they’re right. I still prefer North Carolina-style, but this was a very nice change of pace.

Other blog posts about Thompson Brothers:

My BBQ Blog (Jan. 31 2008)
Smoked Pig and Sweet Tea (July 10 2011)
Foodie Buddha (July 15 2011)
The Georgia Barbecue Hunt (Oct. 7 2011)

Big Pie in the Sky, Kennesaw GA

I am sure that many fine pictures have been taken around Kennesaw Mountain and its battlefield, but I’m willing to wager that over the last eighteen months, Big Pie in the Sky has become the single most photographed place in that area. Marie and I risked the crowd last Friday night for a quiet little getaway – we didn’t get the “quiet” part – while our daughter went to a football game, and you’d think every single guest that night was a blogger snapping pictures of the building and their pies. At one point, Marie got up to help a family take a photo of a mother and her wide-smiling twelve year-old in front of the words “MAN V. FOOD” painted on the front window. The mother explained that her son saw this place on the infamous Travel Channel program and asked to come here for a birthday treat. From McDonough. I told her that boy’s all right by me.

Like most of us, I first heard of Big Pie in the Sky when the restaurant and its celebrated “Carnivore Challenge” appeared on Man vs. Food. The particulars of that business have already been detailed on plenty of other blogs and needn’t be repeated here. Our pal David recorded the Atlanta-set episode when it was first broadcast and sent me a copy with a note that this previously unknown place was something to see.

A few Saturdays after we watched the episode, we came out to Kennesaw for one of the biggest mobs we’ve seen at a suburban restaurant, and almost two hour wait. We figured we’d come back another time. Almost eighteen months later, the crowds are still enormous, the seating is still a nightmare, the wait’s still a good 45 minutes on an early Friday evening and lengthening as the night goes on, and I’m of the opinion that it’s worth it.

The problem, of course, is that the publicity brought on by the TV appearance has brought a much larger crowd than the small storefront can easily handle. It’s apparently not uncommon for guests, who place their orders and pay upon arrival, to stand around hovering with their order numbers waiting for a table to clear. In the evening, the three outdoor tables belonging to the coffee shop next door become available, but it doesn’t help the bottleneck very much.

Having said that, we’ve certainly visited other places that have made impressive appearances on popular TV programs, and the crowds eventually die off a little. But Big Pie in the Sky is so consistently popular that much of this weekend mob is repeat business. Everybody except for the kids – and there were a lot of children here – is pretty patient with the service. On that note, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t call this service good at all. However, you have to make exceptions when the restaurant is such a chaotic zoo. It is unbelievably loud and ridiculous here, and I realize that I might be describing what some might consider the least appealing night out ever devised. Between ordering up front, fighting for a table, waiting in a line to refill your drink and having kids chase each other around your chairs as overworked servers try desperately not to drop pies while bellowing out your table number, this is assuredly not a restaurant for everybody.

Having said that, if you like a good pizza as much as Marie and I do, you should be ready to deal with dining room chaos, no matter how wild. Or just take an outdoor table like we did, which minimizes the madness. We shared a supreme with olives only on half – Marie doesn’t loathe olives the way that she does bacon, but she’s still awfully funny about them – and I thought it quite good, with a soft, chewy crust and very tasty sauce and cheese. A sixteen-inch pie gets you eight big slices for under twenty bucks.

In our case, some of the leftovers were very much appreciated. Our daughter announced that there had been nothing to eat at the football game – she might possibly have been fibbing there – and that she was going to die of starvation. Thank heaven we had two slices set aside for her; we wouldn’t want anybody to starve to death.

Other blog posts about Big Pie in the Sky:

Atlanta Restaurant Blog (May 1 2009)
Amy on Food (Aug. 14 2010)

Evans Fine Foods, Decatur GA (CLOSED)

Located on North Decatur Road in front of a Publix strip mall, Evans Fine Foods seems to have been here forever. I don’t know whether this was their original location – they opened in 1946 – but they’ve certainly been here as long as I can remember. They’re so easy to overlook that while I’ve been telling myself for many years that I should try them out, it wasn’t until this past week that I finally made myself stop in.

I knew nothing at all about Evans apart from a lingering sense of them being a little timelost. It’s very much an older-styled pay-at-the-counter diner and meat-and-two. It is visibly more popular with older customers than young folk. When I arrived for lunch, shortly after 11, the dining room was about half-full. Until a lady arrived with her grandchild, I was the youngest there.

Evans has a pretty small menu, but my server suggested I consider the specials instead. These are detailed on boards above the large open window separating the dining room from the kitchen, where you can easily see the frantic activity of the cooks. I chose the smothered chicken with sides of pinto beans and tomatoes and okra. It turned out to be the ugliest and least photogenic meal you ever saw, so I have not included a picture of it here. Flatly, you would never believe me if I told you it tasted good.

Honestly, the food really isn’t anything remarkable, but I was nevertheless taken with the gravy on the smothered chicken. It was a thick, yellow cream sauce that I quite enjoyed. It really called for more bread to sop it up than the restaurant serves. I had the cornbread, but they offer this as simple three-bite muffins. I probably could have used a couple of big biscuits.

It’s more than just the decor and the basic layout that suggests “timelost” as a good descriptor for Evans. A lot of these older-styled meat-and-twos taste similar because they use considerably more canned vegetables than fresh. That’s why there’s nothing remarkable about them. Still, the service was attentive and the staff was polite and it proved itself a fine little place to kick back and read Rex Stout for half an hour before I needed to move on. I can’t swear that I’m in a huge rush to return, but it’s nice to know that this business has been thriving for more than sixty years.

Canyons Burger Company, Woodstock GA

(Grant here to start this one off. For a tragically short few months, the town of Woodstock was home to a really superb burger joint that I don’t think anybody else but us ever visited. It was called Bob-O’s Burgers and Chili and it was in that same little strip mall as the Play & Trade and the ’50s-style diner and the Summit Tavern, and it was amazing. They served up Vortex-quality hamburgers made from all sorts of meat, including a cajun burger made from beef mixed with andouille sausage quite unlike anything else in the area, and chili so good you’d slap your mother for another bowl. We then tried Canyons, found it quite good but nowhere close to the greatness of Bob-O’s, and didn’t return until our hearts were broken by the better joint’s closure. That’s not to take away from all that’s good and tasty about the justifiably popular Canyons, but it is evidence that once in a while, the foodie network in Atlanta really does get hold of the wrong stick. In a fair and just world, both restaurants would thrive.)

This is Marie, contributing an entry entirely devoid of desserts, for once. This time I am talking about Canyons, one of the places we occasionally visit instead of a quick trip to Cheeseburger Bobby’s. Canyons, which has two locations, one in Woodstock and one in Atlanta’s Brookhaven neighborhood, apparently used to be independent but was acquired by Baja Fresh something like a year ago. They’ve just started the franchising process and have opened a third Canyons, co-branded with the burrito place, out in Montana.

As you can tell, we’re rather fond of sandwich and burger joints. A place has to have a little something extra in order to bring us back on a regular basis, though, and what brings me back is the sweet potato fries. The burgers are definitely tasty, but this is one of the few places where I actually finish my portion of fries and wistfully think about ordering another. That is, if we are doing the very sensible 50/50 order, which is half regular and half sweet potato. This is the only place I’ve seen to offer that option and I wish more places would offer it because really, who needs a bucket of fries the size of your head as a single portion? These are clearly intended to be shared. They shamelessly put “great” next to the sweet potato fries on their online menu, and I can’t blame them a bit.

There is regrettably no photo of the burgers from this visit, but honestly there’s nothing to pick them out of a crowd visually. It’s all in the taste. The owners talk a good game about quality Angus beef and never freezing their meat and so forth, and we’ve heard those tales from other places that weren’t exactly thrilling, but so far Canyons has come through on every meal we’ve eaten there. They offer the usual toppings plus a few extra oddities like chipotle mayonnaise. Ivy got their chicken once and although it’s a tad pricier than usual, that seems to be because they have good quality meat there too. She really enjoyed dipping the strips into the house BBQ sauce.

The decor of the place is very much reminiscent of a sports bar, although they always seem to keep the volume muted. The place has a number of flat screens usually tuned to various sporting events, though there’s generally at least one screen devoted to some popular show or other. Occasionally they remember to put the captions on. Aside from that, the pictures on the wall are all good-quality poster-size photos of people doing active things like mountain climbing. (Grant adds: That seems to be an odd shtick, but they’re consistent with it. Canyons tries to sell itself as the treat you can enjoy after a hard day climbing up and down the Adirondacks or something. Suffice it to say that a fellow could get a little self-conscious looking at giant pictures of fit, smiling runners while trying to enjoy a juicy burger.)

We would probably eat here a little more often if it were more convenient to get to, and if the bar next door, Pure Taquiera, had a slightly better taste in music. The live band last Saturday night was particularly awful! Strangely, although they offer milkshakes we haven’t actually tried one. Probably on our next visit.

Barkers Red Hots, Marietta GA (CLOSED)

We learned a valuable lesson when we made our first visit to Barkers Red Hots about eighteen months ago: when a restaurant gets a glowing review and is featured in the pages of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wait a couple of weeks to swing by. That first trip to the venerable hot dog stand on Windy Hill saw us in a line an hour deep full of drooling weekenders savoring the smell of charcoal-cooked hot dogs. It wasn’t a wait I’d want to make regularly, but we were rewarded with some excellent dogs.

Everything on Barkers’ menu is fairly terrific, and they feature quite a few sausage options along with their original red hots and jumbo all-beef dogs, all “grilled to perfection” over charcoal. Marie and I each prefer ours grilled pretty lightly, but if you’re among the large crowd who enjoys a nicely charred skin, they’ll gladly accommodate you here. They really are among the best in the metro area; until I discovered Brandi’s, they were my favorite, hands-down. Usually, I like their signature red hot, served with onions, pickles and their not-lethal spicy sauce. My son and Marie prefer their Italian sausages; our daughter likes a simple dog covered with melted cheese and some fries.

It’s all the little extras that elevate Barkers into a place that everybody should visit. For starters, they serve what are arguably the best onion rings and the best French fries in the area. I particularly love the fries, which are precisely as vinegary and salty as I would wish them to be. They also offer an unexpected treat in a loganberry punch, which I’m pretty sure that nobody else in town sells. Add in the genuinely spectacular service of the staff, who are just about the best in the city, especially the fellow who’s often on the register and remembered my daughter’s name after just one visit, and you’ve got a restaurant worth many visits.

For many years, Barkers was a must-visit cart in downtown Atlanta’s Woodruff Park, but the owner, Glenn Robins, sold the business in 1995 rather than continue dealing with the city’s labyrinthine rules and regulations for street vendors. Those owners had to change the name once they found a new meat supplier, and Robins returned to the business in 2007, taking back his old name and painting a storefront on Windy Hill in bright blues and greens. The location is just about a stone’s throw from what I thought you’d still call Smyrna, but it’s apparently in the Marietta 30062 ZIP code. It’s very convenient to enter from the interstate exit, but an absolute bear to get back.

Unfortunately, shrinking summer hours have meant we weren’t able to get over there for a while. Our Saturdays were mostly booked and they’ve decided to close for dinner for the time being. This actually proved to be a real annoyance when Tom Maicon over at Atlanta Cuisine (recently relabeled Food & Beer Atlanta) raved about Barker’s beef on weck and I wanted to get over and try one, post haste.

This had been one of those sandwiches that had always gone in one eye and out the other. Apparently a regional specialty from Buffalo, a good beef on weck should serve up some sliced roast beef or flank steak on a thick and chewy “Hummerweck” bun that is topped with sea salt and caraway seeds, and given a dense enough smear of horseradish on the bun’s heel to almost soak straight through it. I’m sure this is a pretty tasty enough treat in any competent grill cook’s hands, but over the charcoal at Barkers, it’s a can’t miss.

We stopped there this past Saturday afternoon and while Marie and the girlchild enjoyed their usual hot dogs, I had the first of what I hope will be many beefs on weck. It’s a little pricy for a sandwich without a side when there are much less expensive dogs and sausages available, but I’m really keen to try one again with a smear of their signature red sauce. I bet that’s really good. And so getting one with rings and a loganberry punch will run me eleven bucks or so. I’ve been good; I can splurge every once in a while, right?