Luigi’s, Augusta GA

This is Marie, contributing an article about a place that my father and I went to together when he lived in Augusta. My dad liked Luigi’s because it had Greek chicken, was convenient, and had a plate on the floor in front of the door stating “On this date in 1870 nothing happened”. (It is possible I may have slightly misremembered the date.) My dad is the kind of person for whom a tickle to the funny bone is worth twelve great meals. And this place seems to have offered him more than twelve. Grant had originally scheduled a popular burrito place, Nacho Mama’s, to sample as we drove through Augusta, but, protesting that he’d reached his limit, asked whether I’d mind having the burrito and telling him how it was. If that was going to be the case, I would rather visit a restaurant that’s important to my memory.

Luigi’s is a family type restaurant on the bad side of downtown. The restaurant has been in place since 1949, and a lot of bad things have happened to downtowns since then; Augusta doesn’t seem to have escaped from even one. For goodness sakes, there’s even a pillar that is supposedly able to strike you dead. The pillar does seem somewhat forgiving to work crews that move or repair it, so I have to assume that the curse was displaced onto the downtown itself. There’s even a pool hall, a tattoo parlor and a strip club in the otherwise mostly empty row of shop fronts where Luigi’s lives. And it does live – the place was packed, and early, when we got there with only two booths left available, and a wait list swiftly built up while we waited for our food to arrive. Local legend has it that the actor Jackie Gleason, in town for the Masters in the 1970s, followed up his meal at Luigi’s with an all-night hustling in the pool hall next door.

The original owner’s son currently runs the place. Curiously, neither of them was actually named Luigi. He’d been in an entirely different field of work and moved back to town to take care of his Dad, and wound up taking over the business. The decor is very strongly influenced by golf and ’50s music. The booth where we sat had in a large frame an almost uninterrupted run of Masters badges going back to the early ’60s, including one labeled as being a counterfeit. The kitsch is amusing and the juke box by the door works.

Reviews of the food vary from highly positive to lukewarm; there seems to be some variability in the quality. The menu has a curious combination of American Italian and Greek recipes, and my dad’s choice was generally the Greek chicken. That is a half chicken, roasted for at least 2 hours, and served with salad, rolls, a side, and lots of gravy. The meat is tender and flavorful without being overspiced. Of course there was no reason for me to buy anything except that for this visit.

This chicken was one of the few things he mentioned missing when he moved away from Augusta. One time when I was still living in Athens, I decided on a whim to drop by Luigi’s “on my way” to St. Simons Island and bring my Dad some Greek chicken. It only added a couple of hours to the trip, but it connected me with my grandfather, who was known to drive five hours or more out of his way (he would regularly drive between Minnesota and Mexico) to have a cup of coffee in my mother’s kitchen for twenty minutes. On the whole, I don’t know that anyone else would need to go that far out of the way for this place, but it made me happy to visit.

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.

CJ’s Italian Restaurant, St. Simons Island GA (take two)

Not content with confusing me with the long and involved story of Terry Gironda and all the restaurants that she’s owned on Saint Simons Island and in Brunswick and all the names that keep changing, Marie’s father took the initiative to confuse me further. He suggested that I tell you good readers that he “bored” me further, but I figure that if I were to print that, no matter how many disclaimers I used, the same sort of humorless bozos who thought that I was being negative about Atlanta’s Antico Pizza would be up in arms about how tactless it was to accuse my father-in-law of boring me. Especially in light of me spending two of the previous three chapters teasing Marie about where we’ve eaten on the island anyway, it just strikes me as a little wrongheaded. Continue reading “CJ’s Italian Restaurant, St. Simons Island GA (take two)” →

Forno Italian Restaurant, Jasper GA

You ever had one of those trips where you feel compelled to go home and look at a map and figure out where in the heck you were? Last week, I had one of those. Since Wednesday is my free day, I took a former boss of mine up on her invitation to take a nice drive way out, and I mean way out, in the country, where she’d moved as part of her “urban evacuation” earlier in the year. I knew that Melissa was a goodly ways north and east of Ball Ground, but when she took the wheel up and over more back roads to go from her house to lunch, whatever navigational skills that I had abandoned me.

After not too long a drive up sparsely populated trails, during which time Melissa told me about an interesting run-in, along a stretch by a weatherbeaten old barn, with a police officer who had asked her whether she had seen three ne’er-do-well hillbillies who were up to some nebulous rottenness… oh, all right, the Pickens County cops were looking for a meth lab. Anyway, we ended up in a small strip mall in the community of Marble Hill near Jasper, punctuated by an IGA grocer that caters to the vacationers at nearby Big Canoe. Alongside the strip is a quite nice little Italian place that recently found new ownership and apparently a very new menu.

This is the first time that I’ve run into this issue doing these writeups. Melissa suggested this restaurant based on the food that they served on her previous visits, but since she last went there, they have revamped almost completely. Previously, Forno served pizza, burgers and hot dogs with a Chicago theme. The original owner, who was from the Windy City, decorated the interior with pictures of area landmarks and street signs, along with an amusing poster explaining the various components of the famous Chicago dog. If you’ve been to the wonderful Bobby G’s in Alpharetta, you have a general idea of what I mean, although Forno is not quite so densely decorated.

The new owner has dispensed with the old menu, although the Illinois decor remains for now. He’s spruced the place up a little, and is trying to turn it into an upscale Italian-styled destination, with higher-end entrees. I’m not certain how easily such a conversion can be managed with the TVs in each booth to watch the game of your choice still reflecting the previous sports bar feel, but that’s the goal.

It’s really not fair to judge a place based on the quality of its buffet, but I’ll plead poverty. Expecting a burger and the attendant cost, I was a hair sticker shocked at a menu full of $15-16 entrees, and so Melissa and I just had the pasta buffet. The salad was not bad, although Melissa correctly observed that most of the available ingredients also made for good pizza toppings, and the pastas, which included ziti with sausage in a red sauce and ziti with chicken in a cream sauce with vegetables, were acceptable and tasty if not outstanding, and the service was just fine.

I do have to confess a little skepticism about Forno’s long-term prospects. As always, I wish restaurant owners all the best luck and success in the world, but their menu does seem awfully high priced for being out in the middle of nowhere. Of course, looking at it on the map, it’s really closer to State Route 515, and the Atlanta-to-Ellijay traffic, than I would have thought, but most of its potential customers certainly live in the back of beyond. It looks like this is a place that’s going to have to work very hard to convert lots of locals into regulars to stick around. My fingers are crossed for them!

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Frankie’s Italian Ristorante, Marietta GA

I don’t remember exactly what prompted us to stop into Frankie’s that first time, only that the situation was awful and my kids, very small at the time, were upset. They’d suffered some disappointment or other, their weekend went wrong and they were cranky and aggravated and wherever we were going to eat supper was closed or something. I figured Frankie’s, a small place on Canton Road north of us, would be an expensive dinner, but one which might just cheer them up a little. Indeed it was pretty pricy, but it was excellent and did the trick perfectly. I then spent the next two years with my wallet locked away with the kids whining that they wanted to go back.

Honestly, I protest too much over a reasonable evening out for a nice meal – dinner for four will cost you about $60 – but this was back when I was raising the two children by myself on a pretty tight budget. Until I got my student loan paid off, I didn’t have the extra dollars. I bought a lot of garbage I didn’t need and deprived myself of some good meals, but we all make poor decisions.

That first trip, we had pizza and sandwiches. As befits a New York-styled Italian-American joint, they do these extremely well, but it wasn’t until Marie and I started dating quite some time later that I came back. I discovered the chicken scarpariello then and I don’t know what the heck else is on the menu anymore. This stuff is amazing.

Have you ever had chicken scarpariello before? It’s said to mean “shoemaker’s chicken” and it mixes sausage and chicken with mushrooms, olives, potatoes and pepperoncini in a thick, slightly spicy brown sauce. It’s not really Italian; it apparently was first concocted in Boston. I found a recipe for the dish at Almost Italian; that site suggests making sure you have bread to sop up the sauce. A wonderful blend of olive oil, wine, lemon and spices, I’ve been doing that for quite some time now.

After we got back from Memphis, we didn’t eat out for a couple of weeks, save to two places that we’ve already written up here in this blog. Last weekend, I suggested that Marie pick a place that we haven’t written up, either someplace new or an older favorite we haven’t visited in a while. It didn’t take her long to come up with Frankie’s. We have an excellent meal every few months here. It’s a small place, cozy, with a small parking lot. They have a second location a few miles away on the other side of Marietta which I’ve never visited. This one does us just fine. With its cute caricatures of Italian-American icons like Dean Martin and Don Corleone, it skirts the side of tacky but it pulls it off all right.

Marie usually has the pasta primavera. The kids don’t have favorites yet, but I think my son might want to have the stromboli again the next time he goes. It does the same things that the big chains do – endless garlic bread, bottomless salad – but it does it a whole lot better and with a really unique and classy style. Why anybody in Marietta would want to eat at an Olive Garden instead of Frankie’s is beyond me.

We’ve enjoyed meals here with each of our families and, last year, when we returned from getting married down on St. Simons Island, this is what Marie and I had for supper our first night back. I could stand a 20% off coupon every once in a while, but you know the place you enjoy your first married supper together and the place you eat with your folks? That’s a special place, really.

Coletta’s, Memphis TN

On the Sunday we were in Memphis, I chose to wear my Zeb Dean’s T-shirt. I packed it even before we established the bizarre truth that Marie had not selected a barbecue restaurant for us to try. It’s just that I’m going to carry my home town pride with me, and even though Danielsville’s not my home town, I wasn’t about to visit a barbecue-happy city like Memphis without wearing my local colors somehow, much in the same way that I want to pack my Bulldog shirt when I’m in somebody else’s football town. Continue reading “Coletta’s, Memphis TN” →

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” →