Farm Burger, Decatur GA

This is Marie, whose usual contribution to the blog is to order something my husband didn’t so he can get menu envy, or to describe some experiment that made it to the dinner table and turned out well. This time I am departing from tradition to describe our pre-anniversary dinner at Farm Burger, a locally owned burger joint that uses meat from animals that didn’t spend their lives in a box or being force-fed things they probably wouldn’t eat otherwise. We found out about the place from an AJC review, and from David, who gave us a glowing recommendation.

Now, regarding how animals were treated before coming to the table, I am quite willing to spend three times as much on animal products from humane sources. Farmer’s market eggs are a particularly good example, because they taste so much better than the plastic they sell in egg cartons at the grocery store. In this case, however, this good quality stuff is fairly comparable in price to the midrange ordinary. It was about $16 for the two of us to have a burger each and a nice-sized bucket of fries to share. How great is that?

The place was busy when we got there Saturday night around 8. All the tables full and only a couple of seats free along the side bar. We only waited about ten minutes to get to the counter and entertained ourselves by inspecting the menu, which contained topping options such as arugula and bone marrow along with the usual suspects–except ketchup. You can get that at the table, but it is not something they appear to believe ought to be on a burger. The ladies ahead of us in line asked the cashier if it was always this busy, and were told that this was slow.

After admitting this was our first time, we were asked about our doneness preferences and medium was suggested. This is something I’d read in comments before about grass-fed burgers–that you can’t let them get too done or they lose the special something that makes them so great. There was a table outside sitting empty when we carried our drinks and order number away to find a seat, and it was lovely weather so we braved the risk of smokers to enjoy the fresh air.

The food arrived quite promptly in little wire baskets lined with brown paper, and the fries were in a little tin bucket of the type that usually contains a mosquito repellent candle, also lined with brown paper. My burger had cheese and tomato, and Grant got one with tomatoes, red onions, chipotle mayo and mustard which he says was wonderful. (The general consensus is that despite the full menu of wild toppings, it is very easy to overwhelm the flavor of this beef, and keeping it simple is probably the ideal way to do it.)

They’re lower in fat than feedlot beef, although you’d never know it, as they were also incredibly juicy. That first bite was just wonderful. The rest were, too, but we’d had a steak recently that was pretty decent, and it didn’t have as much flavor as this burger did. And they were more filling, too.

We have a favored local burger joint whose meat patties are as large and whose buns are more substantial, and who have much bigger fries portions, but the meals we eat there aren’t as filling as these Farm Burger selections. Maybe it was that we’d had a substantial lunch that day, but I like to think that the food tasted so good it slowed us down, made us savor it more, and was as a result just more intrinsically satisfying. We’ll definitely be going back.

(Update): In 2011, Farm Burger opened a second location in Buckhead. With our baby in tow, we stopped by this location a week before Christmas, confirming that these are among the best burgers in the city. They are certainly Marie’s favorite. They’re in the strip mall across from the Disco Kroger, downstairs from a Ru San’s.

Pictured is a daily special, a beef burger with pepper jack cheese, mustard greens, tomatoes, fried onions and FB sauce, along with a pile of very good fries buried under garlic and parmesan. Marie had her burger with beets, goat cheese and arugula. The food, the service and even the music were all excellent. Marie really enjoyed being introduced to a singer named Mike Snow. We really do like this place a heck of a lot.

Other blog posts, among many, about Farm Burger:

The Blissful Glutton (May 14 2010)
Food Near Snellville (May 18 2010)
The Food and Me (Aug. 22 2010)
A Hamburger Today (Aug. 26 2010)
Some Foodie Asshole (Jan. 13 2011)
Eat it, Atlanta (Feb. 15 2012)

Chilito’s, Kennesaw GA (CLOSED)

Wednesday was one of those rotten days full of delays and lane closures and slow drivers. Contrary to what you might suspect from this food blog, Marie and I do eat in more often than we go out, although in my case, since she’s the wizard in the kitchen, it often means sandwiches and leftovers. However, I do allow myself one lunch out a week, and I was looking forward to it that morning. My destination was, typically, closed. Then it was every student driver and testing failure in Cobb County getting in my way as I headed home to reconsider my options.

I was listening to Contra, the new album by Vampire Weekend, and it cycled back around to the opening song, “Horchata.” That reminded me that I hadn’t been by Chilito’s in an incredibly long time. They brew up some really good horchata, but I was in the mood for sweet tea. I mention it just because I wouldn’t have even thought about the place were it not for that song.

You don’t see many restaurants like this one opening anymore. It’s a remnant of the “gourmet burrito” craze that started in the late ’90s and lasted for about a decade. There are certainly a few regional chains that I don’t mind at all – Barberito’s, Qdoba and Willy’s all serve reasonably tasty food – but the better examples of single-store ideas didn’t last long. Raging Burrito in midtown was very good, and I also quite liked Extreme Burrito, which lasted for maybe nine months on Baxter Street in Athens. I’ll always remember an incident there in the spring of 2000 when a friend of mine who would probably prefer to remain nameless started flirting with the waitress there and I suddenly understood why that reporter bellowed “Oh, the humanity!” when the Hindenburg caught fire.

I think that Chilito’s tried to become a similar regional chain, but it didn’t get very far. Its first store was on Bells Ferry Road near I-575, perhaps in 2005, and closed two years later. This one opened in 2006 in some unnecessary identikit development on Chastain Road and has been hanging in there for a while, mainly serving the Kennesaw State University community with promotions and student-targeted discounts. I’m not aware of any other expansion, and the restaurant’s website is, shall we say, unhelpful.

At any rate, Chilito’s is kind of like Moe’s, only not terrible. (“Always remember, kids, you can’t spell mediocre without m – o – e!”) You walk down a line having somebody on the other side of a sneeze guard slap various ingredients onto your tortilla or shell. You hope that the tortilla has not been steamed so long that it’s trapped water, and that the cilantro has been diced finely enough so that you won’t be picking a stem out from between your teeth, and you bristle that you have to pay an extra forty cents for corn. You go get salsa, some of it quite good and some of it blandly inoffensive, from another little bar with a sneeze guard with little plastic cups that are too darn tiny to be much good. There is nothing remarkable about this place, and you leave equally grateful for a low-priced meal with a “buy ten get one free” bribe card as you do for the quality of the food.

It’s a long way from outstanding, but I’ve always found it perfectly serviceable, even if I don’t go there with any regularity. The bribe card that I mentioned is finally, after Wednesday’s trip, full. It has taken me four years to get it there. This trip, I had a chicken taco salad, because that was their daily special for $5.99. The fellow on the other side of the sneeze guard filled it with black beans, not-especially-spicy chicken, queso dip, lettuce, pico de gallo, cheese and costs-forty-cents-extra corn. Not at all a bad price, especially coming with chips and a drink. (Sweet tea, and, surprisingly, awful. I had half a cup of Mr. Pibb to wash the taste away.)

Chilito’s offers fish tacos and these are, honestly, very good. I should probably get away with eating these more often. Honestly, though, the reason I haven’t eaten at Chilito’s often enough to fill up a bribe card in under four years is simple: my kids can’t stand the place. I don’t know what it is they find objectionable, beyond just a general thought that it’s “yucky,” but the psychologists tell us that children’s minds are still cooking and not fully formed yet. I try to remember that when they occasionally protest that they’d really prefer mediocre Moe’s to a nice Chilito’s fish taco.

Old Hickory House, Dunwoody GA (CLOSED)

When I was a kid, before I knew better, I always ate cheeseburgers at barbecue restaurants. My parents frequently went with friends to one of two places in Smyrna, Old South Bar-B-Q on what’s now Windy Hill Road, but what Neal reminds me was then called Cherokee Street, and the Old Hickory House that, if I remember correctly, used to be on 41 near I-285. It was one of those restaurants across the street from the Steak & Shake and the Lexus dealership – which itself used to be a Service Merchandise – and I think that my parents started having occasional Friday night suppers there after the Red Sirloin closed. You probably don’t remember Red Sirloin. We ate there almost every Friday at 6 pm for years, and I agonized every single sortie for two of those years that we were going to miss Wonder Woman on CBS at 8.

But I’m not talking about Red Sirloin, I’m talking about Old Hickory House. In the late 70s and early 80s, this was something close to an Atlanta tradition. I believe that there were at least ten of these dotted around the suburbs, and they regularly advertised on TV and radio. Everybody who grew up here remembers their old jingle, “Put some south in your mouth, at Old Hickory House…”

The chain of restaurants even had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the national spotlight. The scene in Smokey & the Bandit where Burt Reynolds first gets the better of Jackie Gleason while he’s waiting impatiently for a “Diablo sandwich and a Dr. Pepper” was filmed at an Old Hickory House in Forest Park. I believe that Bandit hides his Trans Am behind the restaurant’s sign shortly afterward. That location is long gone, as are most of the others. For the longest time, only three remained. One of those was in the lobby of a Days Inn just off Roswell Road in Sandy Springs, but it was replaced by a Chinese restaurant in the late 90s. The last two holdouts of this old tradition are in Dunwoody and Tucker.

This past Saturday, Marie and I went out to the Old Hickory House with our daughter and with David, who’s dieting and had to think long and hard about imbibing too much in the way of sweet barbecue sauce and ruining his blood sugar. What we found feels very much like a restaurant that is still serving up some pretty good food, but also on its last legs. The restaurant looks a lot like like it was built in the 1970s and hasn’t changed or been renovated at all in close to forty years; it’s just aged and seems dim. Dim and grim.

It was very quiet and slow on this Saturday evening. Not many customers were dining, and we were the youngest. Considering how I spent the first three paragraphs of this chapter reminiscing about the good ole days, that might tell you something. One week previously, we had been at Zeb Dean’s in Danielsville for Saturday night supper, where there were only a few seats free and the joint sparked with electricity and loud conversation. Here, most of what joie de vivre there was came from our server, an agreeable fellow named Junior, who made us feel very much at home.

It just didn’t feel much like a home where we wanted to stay for long. The food was not bad, although the sauce was far too sweet and mild for my liking, and the fries, which were just terrific, really reminded me of my misspent youth, foolishly eating cheeseburgers when I could have been trying barbecue, except that “it looked weird” or some other childlike excuse for not eating what you came to a restaurant to eat. The Brunswick stew here is quite good. One neat standout on the restaurant’s menu is their dressed dog, where they smother a dog with Brunswick stew. I haven’t had one of those in a really long time.

The experience somewhat reminded me of what we felt after lunch at the Mad Italian a couple of months ago; the memories of a restaurant’s glory days were more pleasing than the meal itself. Maybe the next time we ask David to join us for something to eat, we should make sure it’s a restaurant too new to be compared to its more interesting past.

Other blog posts about Old Hickory House:

3rd Degree Berns Barbecue Sabbatical (Feb. 8 2010)
Eat Buford Highway (Mar. 30 2010)
All the Single Girlfriends (May 27 2011)

Zeb’s Bar-B-Q, Danielsville GA

At some point in the early ’90s, I drove from Athens to Greenville, South Carolina up US 29 and passed by Zeb’s Bar-B-Q, a little roadside restaurant in the oddest location. It’s about seven miles north of Danielsville, about halfway between that town and Franklin Springs, in between nothing whatsoever and a field. I thought that delightful, hand-painted sign out front was laugh-out-loud charming and quaint and wished Zeb well indeed as I sped on by. I don’t know what I thought I would be doing in Greenville, but I’m reasonably positive that I wasn’t going to eat as well there as I could have, had I stopped here instead. Continue reading “Zeb’s Bar-B-Q, Danielsville GA” →

Paul’s Bar-B-Q, Lexington GA (CLOSED)

At some point in the mid-90s, I started taking an interest in what I know today is classified as “roadfood,” and decided to cast my net wide and learn about some fascinating restaurants in the small towns that surround Athens in and around northeast Georgia. I sat down with the Flagpole Guide to Athens and, for the first time in my six years in town, read the darn thing cover to cover. The restaurant listings just amazed me. There were dozens more places to eat than I ever knew about. Most intriguing, in the barbecue section, was Paul’s Bar-B-Q in Lexington, which, the listing promised, was only open on Saturdays and on the Fourth of July. Continue reading “Paul’s Bar-B-Q, Lexington GA (CLOSED)” →

Roy’s Cheesesteaks, Smyrna GA

Here’s another restaurant that I’d never have known about were it not for the old Atlanta Cuisine message boards. I thought that I liked a good cheesesteak as much as the next guy, but it turns out that I had not really enjoyed the real thing yet. I’d enjoyed some pretty good cheesesteaks in my time – The Mad Italian serves up a splendid one, and I’ve heard for years that Woody’s, on Monroe, should be a destination – but now that I know what the real thing should be, I’ve reconsidered what we’d had in the past.

I feel good about calling this the real thing because Roy grew up in Cherry Hill in South Jersey and knows what a good cheesesteak should taste like. He gets his bread in from a Philadelphia bakery called Amoroso and offers a variety of cheeses for his sandwiches. Most people probably just get it with white American, but if you want Cheese Whiz, like some folk from up there prefer, they will gladly do that for you, too. I tried a sandwich wit’ Whiz once and wasn’t completely sold, myself.

For those of us who enjoy hard-to-find sodas, there’s an even better reason to go: Roy’s may well be the only restaurant in the Atlanta region to still serve Fanta birch beer, which I believe is the best soda that Coca-Cola has ever concocted. Once upon a time, Roy started up the regional chain of Philly Connection restaurants, but franchising and overexpanding turned those into a regular disappointment. Back when Roy still ran some of those, you could get Fanta birch beer from them, but the last few times that I’ve popped my head in a Philly Connection’s door hoping for some birch beer, it was a Pepsi soda fountain that greeted me. So if you want a birch beer, and believe me, you do, make your way to Smyrna.

We’ve only been to Roy’s about six or seven times. They don’t keep extremely friendly hours, although I can’t blame them for taking an early supper and closing on Sundays, considering their location. This really is, unfortunately, a place you have to know about to find. It’s off South Cobb Drive, very near I-285, up a little road called Highlands Parkway in an easily-missed strip mall with a gas station and a nail place. The interior is very franchise-friendly — you can easily imagine some sign company retaining the schematics of everything inside, from menus to giant photos of the streets of Philly and the Liberty Bell, to refit any similar-sized space in the city — but, as of this writing, the Smyrna location is the only one.

This past Friday, my dad took me to lunch here. It turned out he wasn’t very hungry himself, so he just had some pizza bread, an Amoroso roll baked with darn good sauce and parmesan cheese, while I got a small loaded cheesesteak, as I always do. A small is more than enough to suit me, especially packed as this is with onions, peppers and pepperoni, with a bag of Zapp’s chips and a short rest before returning to the register to buy a small pack of Tastykakes. The experience just wouldn’t be the same without three peanut butter Tastykakes for dessert.

I still haven’t got around to trying Roy’s hoagies and other sandwiches, because I like the cheesesteaks so darn much. As a final point of emphasis on how tasty these are, and how authentic, last summer, I visited Philadelphia for the first time. On the recommendation of our buddy Chris in Jacksonville, Marie and I stopped by the Little Hut, a tiny takeout place in Ridley Park that his family has sworn by for many years. Roy’s and Little Hut are so similar, and so wonderful, that I can’t pick one over the other, and are absolutely a match in terms of quality. This does do Chris a small service in that Roy’s is something like 512 miles closer to him, the next time he needs an authentic Philly experience. If the Tastykakes people only sent their pies down to this market, we’d probably see him up here twice as often.

Baldinos Giant Jersey Subs, Marietta GA

One of the most amusing feats of eating that I’ve ever seen attempted came at a Baldino’s Giant Jersey Subs about four years ago. This is among my favorite sandwich shops, and it’s hidden so that just about nobody knows that it’s there. It’s in one of the little outparcel strips in front of the Harry’s Farmer’s Market on Powers Ferry and 120, just a couple of doors down from a big Yoga center. Between that place’s packed classes and the restaurant’s constant overflow of officers and airmen from the nearby Dobbins ARB, parking here is often a challenge.

Baldino’s is a small chain with only eighteen stores. Eleven of them are in Georgia (seven of which are in and around Savannah) and the other seven are in North Carolina, dotted around Fayetteville. Unless I’m mistaken, the owners have found their success in targeting their ads, specials and word-of-mouth marketing at the troops stationed at nearby military bases. The Savannah stores serve Fort Stewart, the North Carolina stores Fort Bragg, and the Marietta store is set up for a constant flow of uniformed men from Dobbins.

At least one of those men has a ravenous appetite.

I was there one evening as the store was getting ready to close. They’ve always kept very odd hours. These days they’re shut on Sunday and close every other day at seven, making a living on a huge lunch rush and a trickle of take-out orders for supper. One evening, the kids and I got in about twenty minutes before they wanted to lock the door and sat down to our usual meals. I almost always get a half Sicilian, a sub thick with delicious bread and stuffed with ham, pepperoni and capicola, and a small side cup of pasta salad. My son likes the turkey and cheese and my daughter, forever forgetting why we’ve come to any given establishment, usually gets a plate of spaghetti. Happily, it’s made with pretty darn good sauce and it’s quite cheap, so I’ve never made a fuss.

Satisfied that we were going to be the last customers, the two fellows behind the counter quickly put together their own dinners and sat down at a table a few feet away and synchronized their watches.

“You fellows going to eat all that food?” I asked, because they each had two absolutely enormous sandwiches in front of them.

“There’s this guy,” I was told. “He comes in three times a week and orders two whole number 25s. He sits down and eats both of them in twenty minutes.”

“Three times a week, he does this,” his buddy emphasized. “We’re going to try to do it.”

“I can barely finish a half seventeen. This I have to see.” Marie can barely finish a half of a half herself.

Oh, they tried. They gave it as good a go as any two championship eaters with a huge prize at stake. I think that you have to straddle a deeply uncomfortable line between speed and pace, because if you eat slowly, your brain will start listening to your belly’s “full” notice before you’re ready to stop, yet you have to keep a steady pace, because too long a pause and it’s goodnight, Vienna. Too late a pause and it’s hello, men’s room.

They each finished their first subs in good time, but nevertheless behind schedule. About two bites into the second, they started tapering off and slowing down. Time was called, their twenty minutes were up, and each of them left behind more than what I’d call a meal’s worth. They were as done as I’d ever seen a man. They had much to say about the constitution of this regular champion eater.

“How big is this guy?” I asked. “Fit. He’s in good shape. Tall.”

I’m not sure who I have to kill to get that man’s metabolism. My doctor won’t give me any more than 150 micrograms of Synthroid. I figure if only he’d up me to 600, I could eat two whole subs like that fit, tall mystery man.