The Burger Club, Vinings GA (CLOSED)

Perhaps unjustly absent from the ongoing tales I tell on this blog is a sense of history and place. We live in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, a town with many very good restaurants but few claims to culinary originality and superiority. Atlanta in fact has almost no claims to a solid tradition in any one style of dining. The city is a jack of all trades, but a master of none.

Except hamburgers. There is not a population center anywhere in this country with as many excellent burger joints as Atlanta. I could write about nothing but burgers here for months and not scratch the surface. The Wall Street Journal agrees that, between Ann’s Snack Bar and The Vortex, we’re untouchable. That’s not to say that better individual burgers might not be out there in your own town – in point of fact, take thirty bucks to a little place I know in Vermont in the summer and you will be served a burger so many times superior to any you’ve ever had that you will weep, knowing the game is over – but shack for shack and joint for joint, the batting average of Atlanta beats the hell out of any other city in America.

We’ve come up with some pretty crazy concoctions to enhance the beauty of burgers in this town. It’s certainly enough to grill or fry a perfect patty, but only in Atlanta would somebody come up with the Luther Burger, which dispenses with the bun and serves the patty between two halves of a Krispy Kreme doughnut, and named for crooner Luther Vandross. Mulligan’s, the joint that came up with the recipe, closed a few years ago, but not before giving their seal of approval to Turner Field to continue the tradition at Braves games.

Over the last decade, while perfecting their recipes for perfect burgers and debating the merits of angus versus kobe beef, a few places have also tinkered with oddball experiments like the Luther. Over in Vinings, the Burger Club, a family restaurant run by the team behind the upscale Paul’s and Social Vinings, has a dozen or so weird and wonderful house specialties on the menu. Among them, their own take on the Luther. Called the Artery Annihilator, this doughnutty mess also includes bacon and cheese. No, I didn’t order one; I’m in rotten enough shape as it is and don’t want my arteries annihilated.

Fortunately for us all, my son was in town this week.

So the Burger Club moved into a space vacated by an Atlanta Bread Company that had been there forever. It’s on Paces Ferry Road, right in the heart of Vinings, next door to the fire station. It’s slightly separate from the Vinings Jubilee open-air mini-mall, where my bored crowd of high school punks would often go on Friday evenings in the late ’80s after we’d been kicked out of Cumberland. The parking lot has space for about two dozen Smart cars, or two Cadillacs. Since my parents wanted to take their precious grandson to supper, but drive nothing but Cadillacs, parking was a challenge.

Me, I had the Gastro Pub Burger, which is served with bacon and a blend of red onion marmalade and Roquefort cheese, with tater tots on the side. The burger was indeed a good one, but heaven only knows why I can’t resist these darn tots. Perhaps because I just had onion rings the day before, I passed on those, but surely any of their sides would have a little more oomph to them than a bag of frozen Ore-Ida brand tots, no matter whether I sprinkle a little salt on them or not.

In fact, my dad, who, like my mother and Marie, just had a basic beef burger without any of the specialty trimmings, said that his onion rings were among the best he’s ever had. Then again, he always eats his onion rings with Heinz 57 sauce. Nobody has a lot of sympathy for that.

But my son, well, he had his arteries annihilated. He was last heard muttering something about a “perfect blend of savory and sweet” before lapsing into a coma. Normally I’d have a bite, but I’m trying to cut down on the life-ending things. Back when I was making mistakes in 2004, though, I’d probably have had a dozen a day. It was that kind of year.

(Sadly, The Burger Club closed in December, 2010.)

Brandi’s World Famous Hot Dogs, Marietta GA

For a few weeks in 2004, I had a brief little obsession with hot dog joints. Since Atlanta is a burger town, and not a dog one, this didn’t last very long. Just about everywhere I went was exactly the same: a half-hearted sigh of a business with identical $5 Polish sausages and various photos of Chicago on the walls, trying to kid the locals into thinking that businessmen and Cubs fans in the Windy City enjoyed these. I’ve never been to Chicago, but after trying four or five of these joints, I’m convinced that there’s just no possible way that anybody in Illinois would think these to be the real thing.

Well, it’s not like that was the worst mistake I made in 2004. That was something of a stupid year.

The problem, of course, was that I was trying to experience something that, if it exists in Atlanta at all, can’t be found all over the place. If I wanted proper hot dogs in this region, I needed something that’s nothing like what they serve in Chicago. Local dogs have much more in common with The Varsity, about which, I’m certain, more another day, than any pretend Windy City concoction.

That said, I do cherish a memory of Marie trying to eat a Chicago dog at a ballpark in Nashville two years ago and getting ketchup all over her nose, and spending a spectacularly funny beat in paralyzed mortification as she had both hands full and no way to clean up until I rescued her. I’ll thank Chicago for that until the day I die.

But I digress. What I should have been doing in 2004, of course, was eating at Brandi’s. This is the real thing. A few years ago, the Marietta Daily Journal, in one of their rare moments of lucidity, named her chili dogs among the Seven Wonders of Cobb County. You’ve probably never, ever had chili dogs this good, and, unless you’re in the area during a criminally small weekday lunchtime window, you might not get the chance.

Brandi’s opened in 1979 as Betty’s, in a teeny little building near Kennestone Hospital on the Church Street Extension, right next to the railroad track. It was an immediate success. In 2002, Betty Jo Garrett retired and sold the business and the recipes to Brandi. Locals – they are legion, mostly older folk – swear it has not changed a smidgen, save for the opening of a second location thirty miles up the road in Cartersville.

As you might expect from a restaurant built into a very old service station, this is a cramped little place full of color and energy. There’s a menu above the register, but it’s not particularly extensive, so you needn’t waste anybody’s time making up your mind. There’s no time to waste here; Brandi’s is open Monday through Friday from 10-3, and the lunch window of 11.30 to about 1.30 is completely packed. I’m sure you’ll want to linger over the taste of this chili, but lingering over a book is a breach of etiquette.

This chili is something else. I’ve had a lot of good hot dog chili before, but never is it anywhere near as spicy as this. Brandi’s gives you an incredibly satisfying mouth-burn, and it gives it to you pretty cheaply. I had two dogs and an order of rings for under six bucks. Both of my kids are in town – my son’s currently residing in Kentucky with his mom and is here for spring break – and we’re going to lunch here Tuesday. I wonder how they’ll feel about the chili. It’s very difficult to judge how they feel about spicy food.

Interestingly, the understood default is that dogs here come with chili. Not knowing any different, I ordered one chili dog and one slaw dog, and got two chili dogs, one with slaw atop it. I figured the error was mine and enjoyed them both quite thoroughly.

Shame about Marie, though. Since she’s never in Cobb County between 10 and 3 on a weekday, I’ll just have to eat here without her!

Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppe, Kennesaw GA (CLOSED)

It won’t be long, I fear, before blogs like this will be the only proof that this small chain ever existed. The little Dagwood’s empire has already crumbled and collapsed, leaving just a scattered handful of franchises available. One of them is nearby in Kennesaw and serves up one of the most amazing sandwiches you can find, but nobody confidently predicts that a new generation will enjoy it.

Like many of you, I first heard of the chain thanks to some targeted Google keyword sponsored links in my gmail. For a while in 2006, it seemed like every time I received an email with the word “comics” in it, Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppe popped up on the side. Eventually I got curious enough to check it out, and was delighted by the incredible cuteness of what I saw. Apparently, Dean Young, the current writer of the King Features comic strip Blondie, which was created by his father in 1930, decided to fulfill a lifetime dream of a chain of sandwich shoppes making wild meals just like the ones that Dagwood Bumstead would concoct.

I stress that “incredible cuteness” only goes so far. I do not believe that I have looked forward to reading a new installment of Blondie since I was ten, and don’t expect to again until I’m in a retirement home. I admit some archaeological curiosity about what the strip might have been like in 1930, when Blondie was a carefree, rich flapper girl with daddy issues. What I’ve heard sounds preferable to the suburban mediocrity that King Features has been inflicting upon us for more than forty years.

In 2006, the chain had not left Florida. Throughout 2007, they started popping up in the midwest, South Carolina and Texas, and one arrived in Suwanee, Georgia. Surprisingly, in the spring of 2008, one opened near us, at the intersection of Barrett Parkway and Ridenour. I would never have known this had I not, by chance, chosen to come back that way from the far end of Whitlock, just to have something different to look at on my way. This amazing little secret has somehow, despite the ridiculously awful location, unbelievably awful hours (they usually close at 7) and occasionally awful teenage staff in place when we’ve visited, managed to stay open for two years.

How much longer is anybody’s guess. If you try looking up simply Dagwood’s on Google, you’ll first get a half-dozen unrelated restaurants from all across the country who have appropriated the name from the comic strip. If you search for Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppe, you’ll find a completely different story: tales of franchisees suing the owners, closed stores, and websites, once geared to franchises’ regions, which have defaulted to Go Daddy placeholder pages. It would appear that the Florida stores are gone, leaving the one here in Kennesaw and a handful in Indiana and Kentucky. Possibly one in Springfield, Missouri. In fact, when I first visited the local store in May of 2008, I was unaware that things were already falling apart. That very month in the magazine Franchise Times, there appeared a quite remarkable article by Jonathan Maze about how the many investors and franchises were lining up their lawyers. That Dagwood’s exists anywhere at all right now is frankly amazing.

So Marie and our daughter and I went to supper here last week and the stink of failure was so heavy that I felt I needed to order their trademark Dagwood sandwich, suspecting that I won’t have many more chances. The bad vibe was so heavy that when we left, I forgot and neglected to snap a picture of the building for the blog, necessitating this photo from our first visit, two years previously.

Over those two years, the quality of the food has not altered a jot. These are, despite everything else in this entry, leagues superior to any other sandwich chain, except Jersey Mike’s, which I completely love. Why anybody would stop at a Jimmy John’s, a Subway or a Quizno’s over Dagwood’s I couldn’t tell you. Food-wise, Dagwood’s is genuinely terrific, and the Dagwood itself is, as pictured, a giant jawbreaker of a meal, a real treat that you can barely finish. The restaurants offer Zapp’s brand chips on the side, and even have packs of their cracked pepper and sea salt flavor repackaged as Dagwood’s Zesty Pepper, so I suppose that the good people at Zapp’s, at least, were sold on this chain’s solvency.

But everything else about this place is increasingly underwhelming. At least the teens who were blaring their music at maximum volume a few months ago have gone, but the ones who replaced them were in a real hurry to get out of there as quickly as possible, and had stacked the chairs in the window shortly after six so they could clean the floors. While we were eating, two different parties drove up, saw the stacked chairs, backed out and drove away, concluding that they were closed.

One of Dagwood’s greatest follies is that about a quarter of its counter space is given over to Blondie merchandise, despite the indisputable fact that nobody between the ages of ten and seventy can be said to be a Blondie collector. Bafflingly, there is a single collected edition of the comic strip in print, but they didn’t sell that in the restaurant, just glasses and tchotchkes. Well, the merchandise shelf is, as expected, collecting dust, and the flat-screen TV which was set up to show Blondie comics, panel-by-panel, on a loop has been switched off for months.

The food’s still good. It’s excellent. But nobody seriously expects it to still be available this time next year. If you’d like to go, phone first.

(Update 8/24/11: They lasted longer than I thought, but we confirmed today that they closed earlier this month. Not a surprise, but a shame nonetheless.)

Just Around the Corner, Atlanta GA

I’m going to be so depressed when Marie’s job moves out to the Perimeter Mall area in the next month or so. Once a week, we meet for lunch downtown. The original idea had been to meet in Centennial Olympic Park and enjoy a nice picnic outside, but she has a longer lunch than me, and, honestly, I got a little tired of rushing back to work with a belly full of lunch and spending the next two hours feeling like I was going to lose it. So now she picks up our grub and we eat here at my job and it’s much more pleasant. Maybe this week, we can enjoy a nice meal on the tables outside.

More often than not, Marie picks up a burger and fries from Just Around the Corner, a teeny little place at the intersection of Spring and Marietta. I’ve actually only set foot in the place once, so I really can’t tell you much about it. It’s got just the sort of look to it that let you know, correctly, that they’re doing something right. It’s like one step up from a hot dog cart, with only room inside for perhaps five people. And in much the same way that some of the best meals come from street vendors – I don’t know that there have ever been falafels anywhere as good as the ones that this one Turkish fellow used to serve from a little cart just below Leconte and Park Halls on the UGA campus in the mid-90s – the burgers at Just Around the Corner are just dripping with character and style.

Over the last decade or so, Atlanta has really nicened up the area around the park, trying to make the place much more attractive to tourists. The whole area’s so much cleaner and family-friendly than its reputation holds. Nearby parking is usually under $10, and with so many museums and activities to check out, I imagine that you can easily find plenty of things to do, and have a really nice, juicy burger to top it off. And if you’re coming into town for an afternoon Hawks or Thrashers game, it’s certainly better than your options inside Philips Arena, and a lot cheaper, too.

Looks like the dogwoods are blooming in the park today. Yeah, maybe we can sit outside and enjoy our burgers with nature before it starts erupting with pollen too terribly. I’ve probably only got about 72 or fewer hours left before I will want to dig my eyeballs out with spoons, so I might try and enjoy the weather while I can, you know?

I have to tell you about this soup.

The best soup that there’s ever been, in the history of food, was the gazpacho at the late, dearly lamented Mean Bean in Athens. If you never had this soup, then you’ll never know what the best soup in the universe tasted like. Now about ten months ago, down in south Georgia, I did have a bowl of gazpacho which seemed to me to be in the same general hemisphere of coma-inducing wonder, but I was also a little distracted, what with being about five hours away from getting married, so I might have been exaggerating things just a little. I’ll have to try it again and see whether it holds up.

Assuming that it does, then it stands to follow that the third best soup in the world is the creamy tomato soup at Sweet Tomatoes, a national chain known on the west coast as Souplantation. And I can see disappointment in the eyes of a few readers through the screens of their laptops, as it’s just a month into this experiment and I’m already talking about a national chain. Tsk!

Obsession with the creamy tomato soup is widely known as writer Mark Evanier’s recurring joke, and I’m not trying to hem in on his well-worn territory, but I do have to thank him for cluing me in on the place. Depending on his mood, he’ll either casually mention it or go into full-bore rave when the soup returns to the restaurant’s rotating menu. This usually happens every March and for one week in the fall. I’ve never understood this. There are a few soups available here year-round. One of these is their signature deep kettle house chili, which is the blandest and most disappointingly ordinary chili I’ve ever had, and they serve that slop all the time?

Oh, and I’ll tell you what’s worse: they’ve also got some soups which are on an even sillier 15-day rotation. So if you go in the first half of March, you can alternate bowls of creamy tomato and their shrimp bisque, which is also outstanding, but in the second half of the month, they replace the shrimp bisque with clam chowder, which I can’t eat. Now what’s fair about that?

So anyway, about four years back, Mark was raving about this soup and I decided the kiddos needed some more vegetables, so we made an evening out of it and I was sold. I mean, this soup is really, really good. It doesn’t seem possible that anything made in such quantity can be so tasty, but I had something like six bowls of the stuff that first night. Then I remained sitting there for a very, very long time.

To be honest, Sweet Tomatoes is one of those places that flatly is not worth a visit unless you check the website beforehand and confirm that there’s a good soup on the menu. Now Marie likes the place regardless, because she enjoys making a nice salad to her specifications, but I never feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth unless I can enjoy several bowls of soup. The creamy tomato and the shrimp bisque are certainly deal-clinchers, and I also really like their El Paso chicken and lime. I’ll go to Sweet Tomatoes without a grumble if any one of the three are present. I mean, the day hasn’t come where I’ve dropped my fork in shock and raved about the lettuce and spinach I’ve just had, plus their pastas are uniformly disappointing, so there needs to be good soup.

Luckily, Marie’s birthday happens to come in March, so we can usually justify two or three visits during the month. I need to do a better job remembering to go at the start of March, however. Sunday night, we got a group of friends together to celebrate. We all arrived in the middle of a huge downpour, exactly the sort of weather that requires two or three bowls of soup.

Well, we were nine in total and an astonishing amount of soup was consumed. Neal had several bowls of their black bean chili, which surely must be superior to their regular deep-kettle-thing because it cannot possibly be worse, and was comatose for the next sixteen hours. Between us, my wife and I built a small fort of little red soup bowls. She didn’t have space on the table to set her gift cards down. That’s one of the advantages to having children; you can send them back to the line for more soup. Just keep it coming, with some of that cheesy bread to dunk in it. More tomato soup, and nobody gets hurt. Maybe we’ll go back Saturday afternoon, before they replace the creamy tomato with something inevitably inferior.

Other blog posts about Sweet Tomatoes in Atlanta:

Atlanta Foodies (Dec. 12 2008)
Food Near Snellville (July 30 2009)

The Real Chow Baby, Atlanta GA

There probably won’t be quite so many features in this column about restaurants as unabashedly corporate as this one, but since The Real Chow Baby is, at this stage, just a local chain with only two locations, I think it will be acceptable to write about it. I’m willing to overlook the small army of attractive young servers in matching black t-shirts and headsets, although they do reinforce the feeling that somebody’s investment in these restaurants is far more financial than emotional.

Real Chow Baby opened its first restaurant on Howell Mill some years ago, and a second in 2008 in the Cobb Galleria Center, giving area residents, at long last, a reason to actually set foot inside this misbegotten mall other than the annual Anime Weekend Atlanta convention. The Galleria’s been an embarrassment for a really long time now. When I was in middle school, it was opened with so much hoopla – an upscale mall! an AMC theater with eight screens! a video arcade with an airlock! – but it languished, a sad suburban wannabe that looked longingly at Phipps Plaza and just wished it could be that cool.

I guess about ten years ago, Cobb County finally took pity on the diseased beast, which had been coughing blood since the cinema closed, and gutted the upper floor of the mall, transforming it, quite impressively, into an extension of a mid-sized convention center that connected, above and across the shopping area, to the Waverly Hotel on the mall’s far side. There is still, nevertheless, a lot of vacant real estate inside. The excellent Sky City blog provided a terrific photoessay about the Galleria last October, which you can go read. The mall hasn’t changed a jot since those photos were taken, indeed since the top floor was converted to conference rooms and the Eckanakar people put in a reading room years ago, except that a gallery of horrible art across from Jock’s and Jill’s closed . And Sky City’s writer is quite right: unless a trade show’s in town, you’d think this mall had long been abandoned.

I overlooked the Real Chow Baby when we first noticed it during AWA 2008, but last year, Marie and I found ourselves free from children for a few hours on Friday and elected to have supper there, since it was so close to the con and looked reasonably nice. I was so taken with it that I asked whether she’d mind excusing ourselves and going back for lunch the next day. I never, never do that.

I’ve been so taken with The Real Chow Baby that I’ve eaten there probably twenty times since the con last September. They serve a stir-fry buffet, where you build a bowl from a huge array of ingredients. You can start with white or brown rice or four different pastas, work your way through dozens of veggies, add ladles of seventeen different sauces, about seven meats and then about a dozen spices. The potential for experimentation, while not mathematically endless, is pretty darn huge.

Fortunately, Marie likes this place almost as much as I do, and it didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to persuade her that bowls full of stir-fry were exactly what she wanted for her birthday dinner last week. (She had two birthday dinners, because she’s that awesome, and I’ll tell you about the second in a couple of days.) Our daughter and I met Marie after work on Friday, where there is usually a pretty good crowd of weekend revelers and families. We each sampled three bowls and enjoyed all but one of them.

Now, three bowls of stir fry sounds like a lot, and it would be, if you foolishly piled high with the food. You see, a one-trip dinner order at Real Chow Baby runs you $11.99 on the weekends – lunch is only eight – but for a buck more, you can have unlimited trips to the buffet. This is one of the city’s best-kept secrets. If you make yourself just a teeny bowl with no more than two ladles of sauce, then you can sample several different flavors, and mix and match sauce offerings without worrying about whether you’ve gorged yourself stupid. I like to start with a medium-sized bowl, very heavy on the hot spices, and then have two smaller bowls with milder taste.

Marie’s second concoction of the night mixed black bean sauce and hot mustard over white rice. None of us liked it very much, but it didn’t really matter, because you can abandon something you don’t enjoy and try something different. If you can exercise enough willpower to keep your portion sizes reasonable, then this is definitely a place to provide you with an excellent meal or twenty.

(Update: On July 19 2010, this location split off from the other and became known as “Big Chow Grill.”)

Blue Willow Inn, Social Circle GA

To help navigate around this blog, but also keep it simple, I decided that each restaurant entry should have just two tags, related to the type of food and the town that we’ve visited to eat it. Assuming this blog maintains my interest for a good while, eventually readers can get ideas and suggestions about where to eat by clicking a tag. I think that of all of them, the tag for Social Circle might end up being the least frequently troubled. Marie and I drove out here with our daughter Saturday and, other than nine hundred police cruisers maintaining order, we did not see anything whatsoever of interest other than the Blue Willow Inn.

Social Circle is about 45 minutes east of Atlanta out I-20. Louis and Billie van Dyke opened their restaurant in a gorgeous old home a couple of blocks north of Social Circle’s tiny downtown in November 1991. Among the framed articles on the walls of the main hallway, there’s a feature article from the inspirational magazine Guideposts that tells how their first few months were really tough, but a raving review by the late, great Lewis Grizzard turned things around almost overnight, and the restaurant has routinely served 200,000 visitors a year. They recommend that you make reservations, otherwise you might end up sitting in a rocking chair on their front porch for a while.

Blue Willow Inn serves up a really nice Southern-style buffet. The price is quite reasonable – just under $20 a head – and includes everything from ham and chicken livers to what might very well be the best fried green tomatoes that I’ve ever had. And I’m awfully particular to fried green tomatoes. The salad was pretty disappointing – uninspired iceberg lettuce in a concoction not unlike what you’d find at a Huddle House – but the rest of the vegetables more than made up for it.

Even though the restaurant is bustling with people, its layout is so nice that each room is comparatively quiet, allowing you to relax and take your time. Everybody there seemed to really be enjoying themselves, knowing that they were doing something particularly nice for lunch. We arrived a little bit before a birthday party started in one of the upstairs rooms. My daughter, who was making her way back from the buffet with seconds, put on a show of faux indignation and asked, of two people going upstairs with gift bags, why she had not been invited. The older ladies replied “Well, of course you’re invited, dear, come on up.” So my daughter put her plate on our table and ran skedaddling up to join them. Apparently she gave the birthday gal a big hug and wished her well before rejoining us, beaming. This is why, when my daughter feigns shyness to get out of something, we know she’s lying.

Desserts consist of a million billion calories in a series of decadent cakes, pies, brownies and forty pounds more banana pudding than I should have eaten. When we left, we made it as far as the porch before I had to commandeer a rocking chair for several minutes. Then we got as far as the koi pond and gift shop before having to stop again.

The parking lot is behind the restaurant, and behind it, there is a small, classy-designed strip mall. Actually, I was exaggerating earlier when I said there was nothing of interest other than the Blue Willow Inn around the area; there is also a small nostalgia-minded soda fountain in that strip mall which might have been worth a look had I not already consumed forty pounds of banana pudding and a slice of chocolate cake buried under whipped cream. How the dickens that place is meant to stay in business with the giant dessert buffet of the inn on the other side of a parking lot is anybody’s guess. Next door to the soda fountain, there’s one of those museums about Adam and Eve and the Jesus horses, for those of you who enjoy throwing up in public.