Bell Street Burritos, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

Every once in a while, objectivity flies right out the window here at our blog in favor of wild, emphatic gushing. This is one of those chapters.

When I was living in Athens, and waxing eloquent about the amazing Mean Bean to anybody who would listen, I would occasionally get reports back from Atlanta about a place called Tortillas. They predated the Mean Bean by a few years, long enough to already have an imitator, Frijoleros, that I tried once in the late eighties. Somehow, though, possibly because high schoolers have far less of an awareness of the world around them than they would like to think, I never heard of Tortillas, or it never registered, until the early nineties, when I started reading papers like Creative Loafing and hearing every one of the burrito joints in Atlanta compared, unfavorably, to the mighty Tortillas. In time, there was a craze that started. Raging Burrito, Z-Teca (which became Qdoba), Chipotle, Willy’s, Moe’s and plenty of others started up, and, in time, Tortillas started feeling the effects. They shuttered in the spring of 2003, after a 19-year run. Continue reading “Bell Street Burritos, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)” →

West Egg Cafe, Atlanta GA

A few Fridays back, I had not decided where I was going for lunch, and then I got peckish early and set out to find some breakfast instead. I actually work with two former employees of West Egg Cafe on Howell Mill, and they speak fondly of their time there. So I looked over the menu and was very interested by some of the things that they assemble there.

West Egg Cafe was once a Jake’s Ice Cream store. I’m not certain for how long, but the franchise owner elected to get out of ice cream and strike out on her own with coffees, breakfasts and sandwiches. They do offer a few desserts in the form of pastries and cupcakes. I took home one of their celebrated Coca-Cola cupcakes to share with Marie and, frankly, was not impressed, but that’s okay. The omelet that I had in the restaurant was so darn good that it didn’t matter.

I’ve never had pimento cheese in an omelet before! I was torn between this and the Georgia Benedict, which is turkey sausage, eggs and gravy over a biscuit. That sounds wonderful, but the omelet was just fine. It came with a delicious biscuit and potatoes grilled in a skillet.

This place can get really busy, so breakfast guests should expect a wait. Fortunately, the deck behind the restaurant appears to be free, so there’s plenty of space to park. The service was downright excellent, with a small army of servers stopping by to check on everybody. I don’t go out for breakfast all that often, but it’s always nice to add to my options with a place as fun as this.

Osteria del Figo Pasta, Atlanta GA

Our Nashville-based friends Brooke and Tory came to town for Dragon*Con, and we had our usual Sunday night get-together with them during all that madness. I have to thank the convention for never scheduling anything unmissable on Sunday evenings, although this year, a special screening of an episode of Torchwood, with commentary by one of the actors, did mean we got together slightly later than I would have hoped.

I picked them up at the hotel while Marie and the children went ahead to Osteria del Figo on Howell Mill. I figured that we’d ask our guests what sort of food they were in the mood for and have a nearby restaurant already selected to breeze them there. I’m pretty sure I had every reasonable possibility other than pasta covered. If it wasn’t just down the street from our own house, twenty miles north of downtown, we’d probably have gone to Frankie’s, but I was momentarily stumped about a good, inexpensive Italian place near the convention hotels. A quick little look over Urbanspoon suggested this would be a good choice, and it really was.

The restaurant is easy to find; it is on the corner of Howell Mill and Huff, and it appears to have ample parking, which is kind of a rarity in this neighborhood. There’s a too-small airlock area, where guests line up to place their orders with a cashier. This part is a little slow, owing to a dense menu utterly full of possibilities. There are a good number of house specials, but also similar “build your own pasta” creations like you see at some of the larger national chains, with 18 sauces over 25 noodle selections. Speaking of which, there are currently seven Figo locations in Atlanta, but they don’t appear to have expanded to other cities. Most of the combinations here start at $8, and you can add meats for various prices. Figo prides itself on its meatballs, offered in a variety of recipes, for $1.50 each. This is a good place to get quite a lot of food for a reasonable price.

It looks like you can make some really fun meals up here. I went with spinach ravioli with amatriciana sauce, which is a red sauce with pancetta, tomatoes, peppers and olive oil. It was terrific. Marie had primavera over linguine and our daughter had pesto sauce over penne noodles. I am keen to visit again for lunch one day and give the artichoke ravioli with four cheese sauce a try. First Bite had that when she visited a couple of years ago and it looks very tasty.

As we waited for our food, we talked about visiting Nashville in a couple of months. This has been pretty much the longest I have gone without a trip to Nashville in a decade, and frankly, I miss the place, but this has been something of a ridiculous and crazy and busy year. So I tossed out a skeleton of a plan of what I’d like to do when we get there, and one or two places that I’d like to visit or revisit. Naming all these wonderful restaurants and wonderful meals had me quite hungry for my ravioli!

Well, after we had talked about Prince’s and Rotier’s and Ellington Place and Mas Tacos and Pied Piper and other such yummy places, and let the baby get lots of love and cuddling and attention, we enjoyed a really good meal. The food here is simply splendid, and we all enjoyed sampling each others’ dishes. Pasta really was a fine idea of Brooke’s, honestly. I’m very glad that we tried this place.

After we ate, the baby let us know that he really was in the mood to go home and be nursed and go to bed, so my daughter and I drove the ladies back to their hotel, but not before stopping at Flip Burger Boutique for a milkshake. I was sorry that Marie missed out, but Flip, incredibly noisy and ridiculous, isn’t baby-friendly at all. Unfortunately, they were out of the requested Cap’n Crunch shakes, but we enjoyed the Peach Melba and Krispy Kreme and Strawberry Shortcake and the remarkably curious Burnt Marshmellow with Nutella. (“It tastes like camping,” Tory exclaimed.) Everybody visiting Atlanta should try one of these.

There was a really odd loop of music videos going on the bar here, including Radiohead and, of all things, “Primary” by the Cure, which still strikes me as very odd to see anywhere other than the old Staring at the Sea VHS. My daughter is currently totally in love with the lead singer of My Chemical Romance. I pointed out the Cure, told her, truly, that MCR pilfered every idea it’s ever had from the Cure and, back before he ate all the pies, 1981-model Robert Smith was an awfully good-looking fellow. She disagreed with emphasis. Then I pointed out the bassist, Simon Gallup, and told my daughter that the girl I took to the prom was more totally in love with him in 1988 than she is with Gerard Way, today. She had to pause on that point. I never got much in the way of follow-up.

(Update, 11/12/11): As I promised myself weeks ago, I tried that artichoke ravioli with four cheese sauce. Marie and I went with our daughter and Neal to the Figo in Vinings and gave it a try.

It was every bit as tasty as I had hoped. My daughter had the paprika penne with arriabiatta sauce and was also very pleased with it.

LeRoy’s Fried Chicken, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

In a recent chapter, I noted how my interest in out-of-the-way and unheralded restaurants occasionally leads me pretty far away from the trendiest of local places. But it’s good to keep an eye on what’s going on in town and check out what people are buzzing about. I don’t get to the hawt new restaurants all that often, particularly the tableclothed ones, and I’m sometimes disappointed that location means as much as it does to some regional reviewers. Would LeRoy’s Fried Chicken be getting all this attention if it was on the Square in Marietta? Almost assuredly not.

Anyway, sometimes I go eat somewhere because it’s where all the cool kids are going.

They’re also complaining a lot. Since opening in June, Chef Julia LeRoy has evidently been having consistency issues. Either that, or a fickle public is complaining overmuch about prices, long waits, and a lack of parking, and this and that. So I knew going in that this might not be a successful visit, but I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. I’m glad to say that it worked out just fine.

I had a mid-length shift at work letting me out after 12:30, and so I had a couple of backup plans in case LeRoy’s was too crowded. Fortunately, there was still one space in front to park. (Unfortunately, it’s a complete nightmare getting back out onto Howell Mill, especially when a big truck is five hundred feet ahead, blocking the lane while unloading!) It’s all outdoor seating here, with only seven tables. Yes, there is a wait after you place your order, as the chicken, locally raised from Springer Mountain Farms and cooked in lard, is fried to order. They were finishing up a few other guests’ orders as I waited for perhaps eight or maybe nine minutes for my food.

It looks like they have heard guest complaints about the fairly high prices here and have offered a few “combo meal” options. I had two pieces of dark meat, fresh-cut fries, a biscuit and a bottle of properly sugared Coke from Mexico for just under ten bucks. Prior to assembling a few specials for their guests, the cost would have been nearer to twelve. I’m not quite sure what the complainers are comparing these prices against to find room to argue. It seems to me that most really good lunches in the area are going to run around this price.

I think that there’s simply a stigma against high-priced fried chicken, as public perception of fried chicken is something consumed in mass quantities from mediocre chains at a low price. “Feed your family” pricing at places like KFC have just dominated peoples’ concept of what good chicken should cost, I guess. I found this to be a very fair price for excellent food. Admittedly, I really don’t order fried chicken very often, but this was among the best that I can recall having lately. The meat was very tender, and while it was greasy, it was not disgusting. However they are prepping this chicken, they have absolutely nailed the mix of really moist and juicy meat with a crispy, crunchy crust. It was, flatly, as far removed from the food available at a Church’s as a really good burger is from a Wendy’s. The fries were also very good and nicely salty. The biscuit was buttery and crumbly. They thoughtfully included an extra little pat of butter. The bread doesn’t need it, frankly.

Incidentally, I’ve been wondering about the inclusion of Mexican Coke on the menu. It’s among several interesting bottled drinks like Cheerwine. I’ve been seeing this more frequently, buzz restaurants getting praise and attention for taking the extra step of ordering Coca-Cola with sugar instead of cane syrup. Sublime Doughnuts has been getting that in lately as well. I wonder whether this is having any impact, anywhere? Is some distributor reporting to his superior about how more of these trendsetting places are refusing to take the local corn syrup stuff and getting sugared Coke in from somebody else?

Anyway, I’m glad that I waited until it was just cool enough to make this place worth a visit. If they were stumbling when they opened in June, they’ve certainly got it together now. It’s a delicious and fine treat that I enjoyed a great deal. Sometimes, the crowd knows what it is talking about, and sometimes a good restaurant like this can address public grumbling with excellent results.

(Update 10/26/11: Sadly, this experiment didn’t last, and LeRoy’s shuttered yesterday.)

Pappy Red’s BBQ, Atlanta GA

Once upon a time, I wrote a letter to Pappy Red, though I am pretty sure he never saw it. No, I just left an open letter on a blog I once wrote, thanking him for the many good meals that I had enjoyed at the since-closed location up in Cumming, but sadly informing him that while I enjoyed the barbecue a good deal, my pipes were no longer processing it right. Something about it was giving me quite unbelievable heartburn. Oh, it was rough. Well, I’m in a little bit better shape than I was nine years ago. I eat better, drink less and walk more. Plus, I keep a small supply of antacids in the console of my car. Maybe I could try this barbecue again?

Of course, Pappy Red’s isn’t quite what it once was. A decade back, there were a few more locations, including the one in Cumming, one in Roswell, and one on Georgia-140 between Crabapple and Canton, each with the distinctive, lovely and ridiculous affectation of a “crashed” airplane protruding from the building’s roof. Those are all gone now, but last year, they opened their first location inside the perimeter, just north of Howell Mill Road on the ugly, industrial corridor of Chattahoochee Avenue. I double-checked my antacid supply and headed that way.

Incidentally, there is a little confusion about this restaurant’s name. Both the main sign and one of the two neon ones in the window call it “P.Red’s,” but the fellow with the sandwich board up at Howell Mill and the other neon sign read “Pappy Red’s.” I double-checked with the owner, whose grandfather was the “pappy” in question, and he confirms that the signs are only spelled that way to save space. It is still “Pappy Red’s.” Desperately glad we got that critical point cleared up, aren’t you?

While the stretch of Howell Mill just below it has a reputation for being one of Atlanta’s most celebrated food corridors, the roads that connect it with with Marietta Street are some ways off from being brought back up to code, as it were. Both Chattahoochee, and Huff, about a mile south, are old and ugly eyesores, full of direct-to-the-public warehouse distributors and moderately interesting old bridges above railroad tracks. The asphalt is worn down by heavy industrial traffic. Pappy Red’s moved into some old, long-unused restaurant space with bars on the windows and a celled box around the air conditioning unit.

The counter service here is sharp and friendly. I ordered the pulled pork sandwich on jalapeno bread, making sure to ask for it dry. They don’t cook in the sauce here, but they will drown your meat unless you specify otherwise. The pork is pretty good, and, arriving a few minutes before they opened and sitting outside with the windows down, I drank in the wonderful smoke from out back, proving a tasty appetizer.

The jalapeno bread was almost as much a treat as the pulled pork. Ordering barbecue on this bread is a must; it is chewy, spicy and delicious. While the pork is still a little greasier than I would prefer, the lower slice of bread seemed to soak up a little bit of it and made my meal taste that much better. There are two table sauces, mild and hot varieties of a brown ketchup-vinegar mix, and both are very good.

I had some Brunswick stew and was really pleased with it. It’s heavy with onions and pepper and comes out extremely hot, so guests may wish to dip saltines in it as it cools. It reminded me of the peppery concoction that I enjoyed at Lively’s Owens BBQ in Cedartown a couple of months earlier.

It is a shame that Pappy Red’s couldn’t find a space on Howell Mill itself, where it would be more likely to get more attention and notice, but honestly, whether you’re either working in the area or wanting to sample inside-the-perimeter Atlanta barbecue joints, it is definitely worth a visit. And wouldn’t you know, I didn’t have a drop of the old heartburn and didn’t need an antacid after all? Either they’re doing something better than they once did, or it’s a testament to better living and healthier eating that a meal here didn’t leave me gasping. Either way, I was very pleased.

Frankie & Johnny’s, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

Here’s an incredibly interesting restaurant. It’s not worth knocking over anybody to have breakfast here – in fact, if you go looking for good grits, it’s not worth visiting at all – but I swear, this place fell through a crack in time. It looks and feels like a place with no relationship whatsoever to the modern world. Social media? Twitter updates? Not this place. Nobody talks about it, least of all on that “internet” thing. Don’t believe me? Google it. You’ll see an Urbanspoon listing with votes from eight people, and me over at Roadfood.com asking whether anybody knew anything about it, and a bunch of Yellow Pages and Yelp listings with no user reviews at all.

The parking lot does to your car’s alignment only slightly less damage than falling off a cliff. The sign – a beautiful, rusted anachronism – has fallen apart and is no more. This weird, vintage thing is what caught my eye the first time that I drove past it. A little more than a year ago, I stopped by and photographed the sign just for my own sake. Had I known then that the silly picture of the nice young couple in the roadster was going to fall out and crash into the potholes beneath it, I would have taken more care not to capture part of a Taco Bell billboard behind it. Well, I never claimed to be a good photographer.

Inside, it is as quiet as the grave. It is a classic roadfood stop for truckers and utility company drivers. It’s where you can go to get a cheap, enormous breakfast. I had bacon – fantastic bacon – eggs, grits and toast for four bucks. Well, the grits weren’t worth eating. That bacon was amazing.

From 10:30 until 2, they serve lunch in a buffet line. Looks like they offer lasagna, meat loaf and the like, with all the trimmings. Then at two, this place shuts down and returns to the other side of 1967, to decay and rust and rot away further. It’s the most authentic – if that word means anything right now – breakfast experience I’ve had lately. I can imagine my late father eating here four times a week for years and never mentioning it to anybody, because it wouldn’t occur to him to do so. It is what it is, and does not aspire to more. But this isn’t destination food. The young crowd that “rediscovered” Pabst Blue Ribbon has not found this yet. This is for local workers, men who do not mind destroying the alignments of their company’s trucks.

I asked about it. I learned nothing. The owner, an older Asian man, said that he’d been open for seven years. I said that the business must be much older. He agreed. I suggested that the building must have been there a long time. He said that it had. I asked him what happened to his sign. He said the sign was still there. I laughed and said that once, there had been a picture in the middle, where there is only a hole now. Not laughing, he agreed that yes, once, there had been. And then he went to work setting up the lunch buffet.

I left, and time didn’t march on. It froze.

(Update, 7/25/12: Eleven months later, it was gone. Without a word or a peep or a notice anywhere, the building and the parking lot were completely gone. Logic tells us this happened after a bulldozer and a wrecking crew came in. I prefer to think it was because time folded over like a tesseract, and, just like that, the building left through a crack in time, back to where it came from, as though it had never met our troubled days.)

Bocado, Atlanta GA

So I finally took the plunge! Bocado is one of Atlanta’s best-known newer restaurants, and if I’m not mistaken, every blogger in the region has already visited the place. It’s been on my to-do list for ages, but other things and other meals kept coming up. They have a really convenient location on Howell Mill right where it meets Marietta Street, and I’ve been known, occasionally, to drive right past it in the early evenings, when Williams Street is really blocked up and I need an alternate way over to the interstate. I’ve just never had the opportunity to stop in before.
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