Bill’s Bar-B-Q, Hull GA (take two)

The only really disagreeable part of this hobby is noting when a restaurant that we’ve visited has closed. It’s especially irritating when it’s a place that we never really gave a fair chance. Many years ago (mid-nineties, I guess), I decided that Bill’s Bar-B-Q in Hull, just north of Athens, wasn’t quite as thrilling as Zeb’s, about twenty miles up the road. Over time, this deteriorated in my dingbat head into thinking it wasn’t all that good. We revisited the place in 2011, and I was half-aggravated about how I gave them a shorter shrift than they deserved, and half-thrilled by how good it was. Continue reading “Bill’s Bar-B-Q, Hull GA (take two)”

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Mullet Bay, Saint Simons Island GA

For Christmas, Marie’s dad took everybody to supper at Mullet Bay. This is one of Saint Simons Island’s biggest and best-known fried fish palaces. If you have never visited the Golden Isles, and your experience with coastal dining is based on what you see at, say, Mobile, or Panama City, or Hilton Head, then you might be pleasantly surprised to learn that the much smaller and simpler Saint Simons doesn’t have row after row of the sort of three-story amusement park-like seafood barns that are ubiquitous around other coasts. Continue reading “Mullet Bay, Saint Simons Island GA”

Old Brick Pit, Chamblee GA (take two)

One of these days, I need to go up to Roswell and do a proper expedition of all the sixty-eleven taco joints on Highway 9 below Holcomb Bridge Road. There are quite a few of them. The kids and I were in town one Saturday to do a little beer shopping and I thought we’d get a hamburger. Driving north through the area, however, I changed my mind and pulled into Tacos Linda Vista. It is one of the newest places to set up here, in a building that had previously been home to another taqueria, Tacos Frisa. We’ve all been going back and forth about what the restaurant was before that. I say it was a Kentucky Fried Chicken, but I can’t get any consensus on that point. What say you, dear reader? Continue reading “Old Brick Pit, Chamblee GA (take two)”

Hilltop Grille, Athens GA

Since we work with both a backlog and several drafts, I’m writing this entry the day after Georgia again won the SEC Eastern division with a win over Auburn. It was a big one, a 38-0 shellacking on the Plains that had the orange-and-blue faithful dejected and abandoning Jordan-Hare Stadium at halftime. Continue reading “Hilltop Grille, Athens GA”

Mayflower Restaurant, Athens GA

The last time I went to Athens, in January with Randy, we stopped at the very good Bar-B-Q Shack. Upon reflection, what we should have done then, for thematic reasons that I like to keep in order, was gone to the Mayflower Restaurant downtown. That’s because Randy’s father, a wonderful man who was lost to us in a stupid traffic accident about eight years ago, had been a student at the University of Georgia in the mid-1950s, by which time the Mayflower was already established. In a town with restaurant turnover as brutal as Athens, finding a place that’s been around for twenty years is uncommon. A place like the Mayflower, which opened in 1948, is one of a kind. Continue reading “Mayflower Restaurant, Athens GA”