Mrs. Story’s Dairy Bar, Opelika AL

I don’t know whether we’ll ever manage it, but I had it in mind, a month or so ago, that Marie and I might could visit all of the SEC schools and feature at least one restaurant from each in this blog. On the one hand, we’re in Athens, Knoxville and Nashville kind of regularly anyway, but on the other, that would mean a trip to the benighted Gainesville, Florida. Auburn, however, seemed like a decent test of the waters, since it’s only about an hour west of Columbus. Plus, I have a very reliable guide to the town in the form of my friend Cheryl. Continue reading “Mrs. Story’s Dairy Bar, Opelika AL” →

Dinglewood Pharmacy, Columbus GA

Did I ever tell you about the time that I drove two hours for a chili dog? It was 2002 and I was living in Alpharetta and woke up one Saturday morning in the summer with no particular plans but an insatiable craving for a scrambled dog from Dinglewood Pharmacy, about two hours’ south of me in the middle Georgia city of Columbus. Continue reading “Dinglewood Pharmacy, Columbus GA” →

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?

Petro’s Chili and Chips, Knoxville TN

As I was saying, I’ve written here before about loving the idea of regional specialties, and recipes that you just can’t find all over the country. I also love small regional chains that you can’t find at home. In this respect, Knoxville is one of my absolute favorite places to spot small-market fast food, particularly on a stretch of Kingston Pike where Papermill Road dead-ends. Continue reading “Petro’s Chili and Chips, Knoxville TN” →

The Varsity Jr., Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

I knew that at some point, Marie and I would have to use the blog to spread the unfortunate word about a much-loved restaurant closing, and write up an obituary tribute. I certainly never expected that I would be doing this about The Varsity Jr. on Lindbergh Drive and I’m still amazed that we’re saying goodbye to it before we had the chance to take the camera down to the main location on North Avenue for a proper entry on this Atlanta landmark.

According to the restaurant, it’s a stupid problem with city politics that have doomed the landmark after forty-five years. In a letter to their customers (available as well on the restaurant’s website), the owners explain that the time was long past for an overhaul of the old building, but their architects could not come to an agreement with the city planners. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that one sticking point was the number of driveways, of all things.

This has almost coincided with the groundbreaking of a new Varsity up north in Dawsonville. Apart from the two inside the perimeter and one in Athens, there have long been suburban Varsities northward up all three arteries out of the city, in Norcross, Alpharetta and within walking distance of us in Kennerietta. There is also, incidentally, a really small mini-Varsity in Waleska on the campus of Reinhardt College. I thought that was top secret city lore, but somebody blabbed it onto Wikipedia. Anyway, so the Varsity Jr. is effectively moving to Dawsonville, leaving behind a lot of history and memories.

Almost exactly twenty years ago, Atlanta was suffering a heat wave that would make the current one seem like an autumn breeze. I was driving around my circuit of record stores that August in my second car, a giant, two-door Oldsmobile Delta 88 without air conditioning. I felt like I was about to pass out from the heat, and I stopped into the Varsity Jr. to cool off.

I haven’t thought about this in years, and my present-day self is a little sheepishly embarrassed by how silly I was acting at age eighteen, but I remember that I ordered two small Varsity Oranges – not the better known “F.O.” Frosted Orange, but their tasty not-very-carbonated drink – and a large cup of ice water. I sat in the dining room and slowly drank one of the orange sodas and then took the other drinks outside into the hundred-and-seven degree heat. I took a deep breath, lifted the water cup above my head and slowly poured that out over me. I’m sure that it felt very good at the time. I was an ostentatious kid.

I have lots of silly memories about the place. Many of them seem to have a little sadness around the edges. When my son was just a few weeks old, he decided to go live at Scottish Rite for a month with supraventricular tachycardia. His mother and I subsided on hospital food for several days before I ventured out to get something tasty. I brought back two boxes from Varsity Jr. and stood in an elevator with about six other sad-eyed parents and visitors and grease running up both my sleeves. “Boy, that smells good,” one of them said. By the time we reached the intensive care floor, I was lucky to escape with all my food.

I also remember something really unhappy. The Varsity Jr.’s location was absolutely perfect for a quick walk before or after a movie at the Tara Theater across the street. About five years ago, I took a young lady to see Howl’s Moving Castle. We were on our way to the restaurant for a late dinner afterwards and she started spinning a yarn about an ex-boyfriend that she claimed was stalking her. The subsequent conversation, after we got our food, about the constant danger she felt turned out to be both a gigantic warning sign and a great big old lie that still actively aggravates me. There’s not been a meal here since that I didn’t feel the desire to stand in front of that booth, reach backwards in time and punch myself in the jaw.

On Saturday, Marie and the kids and I had an early lunch here to say goodbye. Between us, we had three burgers with pimento cheese and four dogs, two with slaw, one with chili and one naked. We had two orders of fries, one order of rings, two FOs and one small Coke. Only a mild case of indigestion and artery-clogging followed.

We’ll have to get to the main location again before too much longer and write that up. Heaven knows I direct enough tourists that direction every week; I’m rather overdue. But Cheshire Bridge and Lindbergh without a Varsity is just crazy talk. Where are we supposed to eat after seeing a movie at the Tara now?

Gus’s Hot Dogs, Birmingham AL

That last time that I went to Birmingham, years and years ago, on a night that Bob Dylan was coming to town to play, I had no idea whatsoever where I was going, apart from a general recommendation that I should ask around and find Reed’s Books. This was before Google Maps, and since I’ve never cottoned to buying an atlas or anything like that, traveling anywhere back then meant pointing my car in the general direction and seeing what turned up. In Birmingham’s case, it meant driving back and forth down the mostly deserted downtown streets marveling at what appeared to be a heck of a lot of hot dog restaurants. The impression that I got was during the working week, the city has a thriving financial base which supports nine or ten hot dog businesses. I don’t know whether that’s true – I’ve never sat down with anybody from Birmingham and really talked about the town – but that’s the impression that I got. Continue reading “Gus’s Hot Dogs, Birmingham AL” →

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!