CJ’s Italian Restaurant, St. Simons Island GA

Marie’s father has patiently explained the long, strange story of CJ’s to me at least twice and there are still parts that I just can’t recall. Maybe the delightfully eccentric decor and bohemian chic of its owner, Terry Gironda, creates such a casual atmosphere that facts, details and history just become unimportant. It’s one of Dr. Henderson’s favorite places to eat, just a short walk from his house. He’s been a regular since he moved to the island in the late 80s and has seen the restaurant come and go. Continue reading “CJ’s Italian Restaurant, St. Simons Island GA” →

Our First Blog Trip to the Golden Isles

The interesting thing about Jekyll Island is how little of anything is there. I spent a week there at summer camp when I was my son’s age, but I don’t remember it being so barren and isolated. By state law, two-thirds of the land can never be developed, so it sits in sharp contrast to the dense St. Simons Island just north of it. There are miles more public beach on Jekyll, and far fewer people. There are a few hotels, and an small village of hundred year-old laborer’s houses that has been converted to an avenue of tourist shops that sell inessential nicknacks, a small water park and perhaps a dozen restaurants. Continue reading “Our First Blog Trip to the Golden Isles” →

The Bear’s Den, Macon GA

What I don’t know about Macon would fill a book. I read this week that the state’s considering cutting funding to the Music and Sports Halls of Fame, which would be very sad. Macon, located in central Georgia, has really been hit by the recession. It’s never struck me as a particularly carefree or thriving town, and even though neither museum is the most thrilling of tourist attractions, every body it attracts is providing some critically needed dollars to the local economy. I visited the Georgia Music Hall with a friend down there several years ago and enjoyed it a good deal. Maybe you should take a trip through there and learn a little something about the great music in this state. Before it closes. Continue reading “The Bear’s Den, Macon GA” →

The Taco Stand, Athens GA

Long ago, I worked out a theory about living in Athens. To do it right, you had to do one of three things: play in a band (or, at the very least, design sleeves for their records), work at DialAmerica, or work at The Taco Stand. If you lived there for any length of time and didn’t manage one of these, I suppose it could be all right, because I was once acquainted with a splendid fellow named Bob who played in one of those beat combos all the kids rave about called The Possibilities while simultaneously holding down jobs at the Dial and one of the Taco Stand’s locations. His overachieving moxie made it okay for two of you, but no more, to slip through the net. Continue reading “The Taco Stand, Athens GA” →

Weaver D’s Delicious Fine Foods, Athens GA

I thought that I should probably strike a balance in this blog between writing about my favorite restaurants and those which, while very notable, aren’t really the ones that I want to go to on a crazy basis. That way, I’ll never get hate mail demanding that I explain how I could possibly stop by scenic, downtown Frostbite Falls and not eat at the writer’s all-time favorite restaurant, when everybody on the planet knows it’s superior to the one I did stop at for a snack. That lasted about three seconds until I remembered that I’m writing on the internet, and have been ignoring hate mail about irrelevant crap for a decade. Well, that’s not true. I spent much of 2004 answering it. It wasn’t ‘til about the third time a particularly poor, deceased comic artist’s insane troll-like kid sent me a nastygram for saying I liked other inkers better than his dad that I started ignoring hate mail. Continue reading “Weaver D’s Delicious Fine Foods, Athens GA” →

Varasano’s Pizzeria, Atlanta GA

Here’s a little article that’s less about a restaurant and more about how individuals judge the value of an item. I’ve made a couple of references in earlier entries to how much I miss the message boards at atlantacusine.com. Perhaps because those references strike an “order of business” tone rather than a playful one, they probably come across as strident and bossy, and less like a fun recurring joke. Since I’m openly taking inspiration from, and paying homage to, the great Calvin Trillin in this blog, I’d like more recurring characters and gags like his buddy Fats and his daughter’s insistence on plain bagels, and less order of business in this venture. Trillin, after all, never wasted space in his stories complaining about the editorial board of The New Yorker or whatever. Perhaps this could be a deficiency in this blog; after all, I sincerely hope that it eventually finds enough of a flow and a voice to be entertaining for readers across the country, even the ones who will never visit this region.

And yet, before I close the subject and quit bellyaching about Tom Maicon closing the forums, I think I should expand upon something I mentioned in the first chapter. Word of mouth absolutely trumps even the most enthusiastic review. This is something I have certainly noticed from all of the dozens of short book and comic reviews that I have written. Maicon may tell the world about what he’s certain is the finest restaurant he’s ever come across just as emphatically as I’d like to tell the world that Robo-Hunter is my favorite comic serial, but people above the age of, say, eleven really do filter critical praise, knowing the writer is all-too human.

After all, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has employed a food critic of remarkably good taste and a vibrant writing style, but John Kessler will always be known to me as the man who strongly recommended the worst barbecue restaurant in the city, and, within six months, also gave a dismissive shrug to the late, great Lewis Grizzard’s favorite eatery. I still remain absolutely astonished that any of us lived to see the day that Grizzard’s own paper printed something negative about Sprayberry’s Barbecue in Newnan. Dogs and cats started living together the very next afternoon.

Here’s what I mean by word of mouth trumping even an informed opinion: Varasano’s serves the best pizza that I have ever had by some considerable margin. It is flatly and frankly unbelievable. I could name you some really fantastic pizzerias in this city and defend them with vigor and a smile, and, while willing to stand corrected, swap cities with anybody in America for a Monday through Friday challenge of our respective top fives. Well, if somebody was floating my expenses anyway. If you say Manhattan or Chicago have a top five that could beat Fellini’s, LaBella’s, Everybody’s, Fritti and Varasano’s, then that sounds like it must be the greatest week of meals on the planet. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I am saying that you’d better say a prayer of thanks before bedtime this evening that you’re lucky enough to live in such a town, and do you have a guest room?

I’ve been meaning to stop by Antico to see whether the rumors are true and it’s good enough to knock Fellini’s out of my top five. Unfortunately, Varasano’s is so damn good that I just can’t seem to get over to Hemphill to try it out. And I never would have known of Varasano’s had Maicon’s old forum not featured one of the most remarkable message board threads I’ve ever seen anywhere online. You think I’ve made a fool of myself with some of the drivel I’ve babbled online? Even the drivel in 2004, he said, citing what might be a recurring gag? You should have seen these people drooling about Varasano’s and its char. Once you told me what the heck char was, I still wouldn’t have thought it was a virtue until I’d seen forty-eleven people risk their reputations telling the internet about the orgasms induced by the juuuust burnt patches of pizza crust.

Somehow, there was a heck of a lot more to this pie than any single article could get across. All this hype required investigation.

Marie and I first went to Varasano’s last summer on a day that my son spent with Neal, whom you may recall overindulging on the black bean chili at Sweet Tomatoes. Clearly I need to find a new recurring gag for Neal, because that’s not as funny as, say, having a fondness for all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets.

This was during Varasano’s early, experimental phase as they worked through some issues with the center of their pizzas being a little soggy. Anybody who remembers that message board thread remembers this; new reports came in daily, bloating an already hype-filled thread to gargantuan as nobody wanted to be left out anymore. There was already a cool kids’ clique at work; Jeff Varasano had been perfecting his recipes with some invitation-only parties before opening. Everybody wanted to join the in crowd by being the one to announce they were there the night Jeff turned his pizza from damned amazing to sheer perfection by eliminating the soggy center.

Personally, I never understood the complaint. If the worst you can say about a slice of pizza is that there’s a hair more of the best sauce in the city on the tip, and that the best dough in the city had absorbed a little more of it, then it sounds to me like you’ve still got a pretty good slice of pie.

Over several visits, I’ve worked my way down the menu, skipping only the New Haven Clam, which sounds amazing but also, sadly, lethal. My son had, over all this time, been missing out, so I let him pick one of the two pies we had on Saturday night when we went with Marie. He chose a Salumi, piled high with salted imported meats, and Marie and I agreed on a Nucci, with fresh arugula and prosciutto.

He had to agree that Louisville, where he’s been staying with his mother, doesn’t have any pizza anything remotely like that. Very few places do. Although, ironically, Louisville is the home of the Papa John’s Pizza empire. You’ve probably seen Papa John on television, espousing their motto, “Better ingredients, better pizza.” I think, more than the preparation, even cooking it to give those lovely patches of char, that’s true with any pizza, and nobody uses better ingredients than Varasano’s. I mean, if the cheese is coming from water buffaloes instead of cows, it’s something quite different than what Papa John’s can offer you on a five buck carryout special. If Sweet Tomatoes would bring in some of that arugula, their salads would instantly rise above “unmemorable,” but, heck, the last two times we were there for the creamy tomato soup, they didn’t even have spinach. We’ll be asking for gold-plated forks next.

And with that, I’ll shut up about Maicon closing his site’s forums. The joke was never funny, and now it’s old, and so I’ll hush. Until Maicon comes to his senses or I next go eat at Fox Brothers, anyway.

(Benefit of hindsight update: The ongoing joke of these early chapters was on me, as the forum was already reopened and running as 285foodies.com and I had no idea. Also, it would be more than 18 months before I made that next trip to Fox Brothers, which had been similarly hyped beyond belief by the regulars of the old forum.)

The Square Bagel, Marietta GA (CLOSED)

For me, the simplest way to distinguish between a deli and a sandwich shop is just this: a deli serves Dr. Brown’s soda. If your business claims to be a deli and does not actually serve it, then you are fibbing. Consequently, the European Deli in Athens is not a deli. The Square Bagel in Marietta is. There’s probably another level of authenticity that depends on whether the restaurant serves Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray. Frankly, I think that’s just about the nastiest beverage ever concocted outside of a Jones holiday weirdo pack, but any deli that serves Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray is a proper New York deli.

Marie and I invited Kimberly to go to lunch with us here this past Saturday. We like Kimberly a lot, even if we’re not entirely sure why she’s marrying our friend Randy. “Don’t get me wrong,” I told her once, “if I was trapped in a foxhole behind enemy lines, I’d hope to have somebody as good as him feeding me ammo. But…” and here I paused, “…you do know that he sometimes goes to those all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets, don’t you?”

The Square Bagel seems to have been around forever. I ate here once while I was wasting a day waiting to be dismissed from jury service something like the fifth time I’d been called, and it’s not like I didn’t enjoy it; it’s just that during my years as a single dad, I often got in the habit of picking places all the time based on whether they were open for supper. Delis that rely on breakfast and freshly-made bagels for as much of their business as this place does often close before I could get to them back then, and so it slid off my radar for a while, but in considering places to visit for this blog, I figured I was overdue for a return visit and Marie needed to give it a try.

Like the best delis, Square Bagel has one of those absurdly dense menus that take you forever to read through. If you’re going at lunch, it’s obvious you want a sandwich, but unless you know up front that what you want is pastrami, turkey, cheese, slaw and Russian dressing on rye, and that’s not the sort of thing I ever know, you have to dig through a long list of sandwiches with funny names until you find the ingredient list you were looking for.

I don’t know who came up with putting Russian dressing on sandwiches, but that man deserves a beer. One of the little cafes in the Ravinia complex where I used to work served sandwiches like the one I got at Square Bagel and I think I had one for lunch every day for two weeks. Saturday’s was a delicious, nostalgic little treat, really.

Marie had egg salad on a bagel, and she and I both had potato pancakes as our side. She didn’t enjoy her side as much as I did mine, but I’m always happy to have a latke, especially one with such a slight taste of onion as this had. I’ve been trying to wean myself off potato salad, and it’s hard, especially when I wandered over to the counter and saw all the really decadent trays of twelve thousand-calorie dishes cooling there.

Kimberly had some sort of roast beef sandwich with horseradish on the side. We had to debate that point a little. My feeling is that if you’re ordering a sandwich with horseradish, you’re intending for it to be a sinus-clearing hurricane of a meal. Horseradish shows you’re serious, while mayo shows you just want to clog your arteries with fat. Kimberly said that it’s possible for horseradish to be too strong. I call shenanigans on that. The default state of horseradish should be only-just-tolerable; the problem with today’s youth is that they’ve grown up accustomed to that wimpy stuff they serve at Arby’s.

Kimberly’s horseradish came on the side. She took a little smear on her knife and said “Yeah, that’s strong.” I dipped one of her French fries in it and had a big swallow. Nostril hairs I never knew I had stood to attention. “No, that’s just right,” I said.