Tag: gwinnett and rockdale county

Donut King, Snellville GA

One of my favorite foodie blogs is the “increasingly-inaccurately named” (as Douglas Adams might have termed it) Food Near Snellville. I noticed his work several months ago – he and Jennifer Zyman’s Blissful Glutton have been in a war of attrition for the top spot on Urbanspoon for the Atlanta region – and even though he’s based in one of this region’s many traffic-clogged, sprawling messes, he gets out to plenty of good restaurants and writes with a sense of infectious fun. To celebrate his finally claiming the number one spot from Blissful Glutton, we headed over to his turf.

Okay, that’s a complete lie. To be perfectly honest, Snellville, nothing more to me than that oft-gridlocked, badly traffic-managed corridor between Stone Mountain and Loganville, just happened to be on the road back from Walnut Grove, which we visited a week ago for our roadfood tour. Well, since we’re never in that neck of the woods, I wondered whether there might be anything we could grab for a snack after lunch at Kelly’s, just to try something a little different. And as for finding a new thing to try, I did this little trick: I zoomed in really close on US 78 in Google Maps until the names of restaurants started showing up. Donut King stood out, so I figured we’d each grab a treat there.

Yeah, sometimes here, you get lovingly-told stories of our life spent eating well and the wonderful histories that we have with favorite restaurants, and sometimes you get this. Anyway, there’s some really good doughnuts in Snellville.

Honestly, other than food, I’m hard-pressed to come up with a single reason to visit Snellville. Well, fair’s fair, food is, you know, second to friends as the best reason to visit anywhere, but the town is seriously lacking in bookshops and record stores. Several years ago, the kids and I were coming back from Athens this way just to have something different to see and we stopped into this utter craphole of a CD store where my son bought a VHS copy of the awful film Space Jam and the idiot behind the register wouldn’t let my daughter use the restroom. Even that place is gone now.

Food-wise, Snellville looks to be a chain paradise, with only a few standouts. Sri Thai sounds very promising, and FNS gave that place a good review. Actually, doing a little research, the most interesting thing that I’ve learned is that the national chain Dickey’s Barbecue Pit has one of its three Georgia locations in Snellville*, only it’s not listed on the corporate website, while four forthcoming restaurants are shown as “coming soon.” That’s just lovely, I say sarcastically. There’s no such thing as a good nationwide chain of barbecue restaurants. (*note: a commenter has informed me that this store has already closed.)

As for Donut King itself, I’m glad we made it an early start for the day, because this place closes at the unfortunate hour of 1 in the afternoon. It’s in a strip mall with a Provino’s and a Philly Connection and sixty thousand cars. It’s not particularly easy to get into, and a downright pain in the neck to get out of. But the dougnuts, well, they’re wonderful. Marie puts on airs of not actually liking doughnuts very much, but she found her chocolate frosted to be incredibly yummy, and the girlchild in the back seat was making happy “mmmmm” sounds as she wolfed down her eclair.

Despite their early closing time being a little inconvenient for curious eaters, the business clearly does a good job anticipating demand and bakes and fries accordingly. As you see in the photograph above, I had Marie hold her doughnut out for me to shoot. The last few times we’ve gone into a dessert place, I’ve had good results from shooting the display case showing off all the treats. Here, we arrived so late that most of their food was gone, and while my food composition skills are still admittedly meager, there’s no way any photographer could bring that decimated display to life. Thus said, the community must clearly love this place to have cleaned it out so thoroughly by 12.30 that only slim pickings were left for us. They were really good slim pickings, but it left me curious what Donut King looks like at five in the morning.

Happy Sumo, Norcross GA

One huge difficulty in doing anything around the sprawling mess of Atlanta is that the suburbs are so stupidly spread out and badly managed and maintained. Even something that looks, on a map, simple and straightforward like a twenty-mile shot east to the Gwinnett County suburb of Norcross is a forty-minute slog at the best of times, and better than an hour’s rumble in the evening traffic. I don’t mention this to object in any way to making a trip out that direction to a good meal; far from it, as there are plenty of good restaurants in Duluth, Norcross and points east and I’m glad to go visit them, but man, the traffic engineers who’ve been claiming to be at work on this job have been out to lunch for decades. At this point, there’s nothing wrong with the northern suburbs that two trolleys, twelve people movers, six newly-constructed bus lanes, sixty miles of north-south and east-west heavy-rail track and that big drilling Mole machine from Thunderbirds wouldn’t fix. You heard about that “Big Dig” under Boston? The northern ‘burbs need about seven of those.

At any rate, I’ve mentioned that we try to have some weekly get-together with some of our friends. We have to alternate days to accommodate different people that we know, and last week, between people being sick and people planning weddings and people having jobs, it was only Marie and the girlchild and I who were able to meet up with Matt. Almost all of us live in Cobb County on the northwest side of town; Matt and his wife live up in Gainesville, but he works thirty-odd miles south down around Johns Creek. His commute isn’t that unusual, either, which is why it’s so disagreeable that the city’s traffic planners have spent decades sleeping. Anyway, with the interstates, particularly the top end perimeter, a parking lot at 6 pm, we drove a wonderful back way that I know over to Roswell, and then spent a while crawling east along Holcomb Bridge Road to meet Matt at a place that he knows called Happy Sumo. Matt used to live just around the corner before marriage lured him to Gainesville, and this was one of his favorite places for dinner when he stayed here in Norcross.

Holcomb Bridge, it must be said, really is a depressing drive just for all the businesses that used to be along this stretch of road but have since closed. I counted two comic shops, one bookstore and one CD store that aren’t there anymore, along with two decent restaurants that I had enjoyed. To be honest, I’d rather not find the need to revisit Holcomb Bridge for this reason alone; it’s just too sad.

Happy Sumo is one of Atlanta’s many teppanyaki restaurants. These are often called hibachi steakhouses, but that’s not strictly accurate. At a teppanyaki restaurant, as popularized by chains like Benihana, the chef prepares the meal on a flat, iron surface heated by propane and uses soybean oil to cook the ingredients. We don’t often get out to Japanese steakhouses like this, although I don’t know that I’ve ever had a mediocre meal at one.

We got the requisite cutting up from our chef, who spun his utensils around and made an onion volcano and did goofy stunts involving Easter eggs and rubber chickens. It’s impossible not to be charmed by the silliness, and it put the girlchild in a pretty good mood.

Marie and I each ordered the teriyaki steak with fried rice – watch out for an additional $2 for having your rice fried rather than steamed – and my daughter had chicken. Matt had a nice combo meal of filet mignon and shrimp. It was a little pricy of a dinner, but everybody really enjoyed their food, and the tasty sauces. It was almost as good as Inoko in Athens, which is my standard bearer for hibachi/teppanyaki, and just the sort of evening out we needed.

The drive back, incidentally, was after the evening rush had ended and the interstates were accessible again. It didn’t take anywhere near as long to get home, but I still think International Rescue’s big drill could make it even quicker.