My Cousin Vinny’s, Kennesaw GA (CLOSED)

This is Marie, contributing an uncharacteristically dessert-free chapter. One of the local places we don’t visit often enough because of our roaming tendencies is a pleasant little pizza joint with a brick oven. I usually forget the actual name of the place, in fact, but luckily Grant knows that when I suggest eating at the Brick Oven pizza place I mean this restaurant. However, given our tendency towards variety combined with the tendency of that area to have an infestation of mall traffic, we don’t eat there very often. That is a shame, because besides good regular food, every so often they have fried green beans as a special and I am rather fond of those. Actually, the last time we’d tried to go we had to pass because there was a line out the door and we were too hungry to wait that long for dinner.

There are a lot of pizza joints in the area, and that’s one of the reasons we tend to change out. There’s another Italian place I’m particularly fond of, in fact, but we go even less often because of budgetary constraints. They happen not to have fried green beans, but that’s irrelevant.

On this particular occasion we had a good excuse to go to a familiar place. My aunt Lori and her husband let us know that they would be coming down through Atlanta on their way to Florida and wanted to visit over dinner, and that was the first thing that came to mind that would be easy for an out-of-town guest driving down I-75 to find. Their visit was scheduled for a Thursday (traditionally my most stressful and longest day at work) so having something to look forward to for the evening was definitely a positive addition to my day. As good hosts, though, it was important to give them a place that would be easy to find and which I could get to independently if (as it almost turned out) I would need to drive there on my own because of the effects of Thursdays on my schedule. Then, as a surprise, after dinner we got to open a late wedding gift. I am always partial to late gifts as it is a good excuse to keep the original celebration going.

One of the peculiar aspects to this particular visit is that for the first time I visited the online reviews of the place. We’d just stopped by the first time and liked it, so we hadn’t ever checked what the internet was saying about the place. Now, when I looked at the web in order to send directions and maybe send a copy of the menu for them to look at, I saw a clutter of negative reviews scattered around several lists (in between quite a few much more positive ones). The puzzling thing about them is that these particular reviews didn’t seem to be about the same place we’d visited. All our experiences have been at the least tasty and at the best very good.

This particular evening went quite well. Most of the other business for the place that night was people stopping by for take-out so we had the dining room nearly to ourselves. I hope it’s not because of the reviews, but the server did say that they do a lot of their business on the weekend. The last time we’d tried to go we had to pass because there was a line out the door and we were too hungry to wait that long for dinner!

The food there is not overly complicated, just tasty. Sadly, the fried green beans were not available that day. Our order started with a huge plate of rolls covered in melted garlic butter, hot and rather addictive themselves. My uncle commented that he could eat just those for dinner and that got us another plateful so he almost did! Generally, if I can have only one topping on a pizza I’ll go for sausage but that’s not an option these days. After the baby I am going to have a salami sandwich followed by a sausage pizza, then when I get home I’ll probably make one of my family’s Dutch recipes that involve more sausage, even though that’s winter food down here in Georgia!

We had ordered two pizzas to share except for our daughter, who had to be different and get ravioli. She got a salad out of the deal, and although not a fan of green stuff ate most of it, only passing on the onions. Grant and I chose a pizza that was new to us for the evening, the chicken pesto with spinach and tomatoes. It’s a really good combination that I would definitely take again. So all in all, I would have to say that if they ever deserved those poor reviews they’ve definitely outgrown that phase.

After dinner we got to open a late wedding gift. I am always partial to late gifts as it is a good excuse to keep the original celebration going.

(Update 7/11/12: Sadly, we have learned that My Cousin Vinny’s shuttered in late June. We were speaking to Malika of Atlanta Restaurant Blog last night, and she remembered that when this place was on US-41 some years ago, it was always packed. We only ever saw it busy just one time after we discovered it in its Busbee Parkway home, and thought of it as just a quiet getaway. That, of course, probably isn’t what restaurants need to keep the lights on. Our best wishes to the owners and staff.)

Steak ‘n Shake, Kennesaw GA

A few years ago, the Steak ‘n Shake chain, which has 500 stores in 22 states in the southeast and midwest and is, by my definition, large enough to be called national, decided to introduce a terrific promotion which my daughter and I used to enjoy greatly. They have a “happy hour” with half-price milkshakes from 2 to 4 every weekday afternoon, and again from 2 to 4 am overnight. When I took a job that left me with a couple of weekday afternoons free, and my daughter was in elementary school, this meant that I could take her by the Steak ‘n Shake nearest us on Barrett Parkway – said to be the busiest and most profitable in the whole chain – and join the mob for a daddy-daughter milkshake treat.

Those days are actually gone for us, since she started middle school and no longer gets home until close enough to suppertime to make a milkshake “ruin yer dinner” impractical. I slightly resent the loss of quality time, but then again, that’s just one of the many downsides to having your kids grow up.

The milkshakes here are terrific – my particular poison is a mix of their banana and orange cream – but the food is only slightly on the preferable side of average. The beef is okay, albeit pressed into sadly small and weedy patties, and the fries are thin enough to make you wonder whether there’s any potato in there, but the chain does offer a dish which is actually worth a second look. It’s not the same as what you can find in Cincinnati’s chili parlors, but Steak ‘n Shake does offer their version of a 5-way.

I’ve only been through northeastern Kentucky four times, but on each of those occasions, I’ve made it a point to stop at either a Skyline Chili or a Gold Star. I imagine that people more familiar with Cincinnati would be pleased to tell me about a better, more humble, non-chain restaurant to get chili made in that city’s style, and perhaps the next time I’m in that region, I’ll give that a try. In these restaurants, you get the area’s particular chili recipe – very finely chopped ground beef served in a light stew containing (as Wikipedia terms it) “unusual ingredients such as cinnamon, cloves, allspice or chocolate,” but without the traditional chili peppers or chili powder like you would expect from other regions.

This chili is intended to be eaten over noodles or on a hot dog, and not in a bowl on its own. Over time, some traditions developed about how to order this dish in area restaurants. A two-way is simply the chili poured over spaghetti noodles, and a three-way adds a giant mound of shredded cheese. A four-way adds either beans or diced onions, and a five-way contains the lot.

Steak ‘n Shake’s version can’t be characterized as a proper Cincinnati 5-way, because the beef is not spiced the same way, nor is it chopped as finely as what you would see in a Skyline. It’s just average canned chili beef in a “special” sauce of ketchup and Worcestershire. At any rate, I got to thinking about it after reading an amusing thread about the chain’s chili over at Roadfood.com, and it made me peckish enough to want to get back over there. In a bit of nice timing, my daughter had early release last week for parent-teacher conferences and so we had an early supper together. With milkshakes, of course. It wasn’t bad at all. It was no Gold Star, but it will do until the next time I can get to Cincinnati, anyway.

Big Pie in the Sky, Kennesaw GA

I am sure that many fine pictures have been taken around Kennesaw Mountain and its battlefield, but I’m willing to wager that over the last eighteen months, Big Pie in the Sky has become the single most photographed place in that area. Marie and I risked the crowd last Friday night for a quiet little getaway – we didn’t get the “quiet” part – while our daughter went to a football game, and you’d think every single guest that night was a blogger snapping pictures of the building and their pies. At one point, Marie got up to help a family take a photo of a mother and her wide-smiling twelve year-old in front of the words “MAN V. FOOD” painted on the front window. The mother explained that her son saw this place on the infamous Travel Channel program and asked to come here for a birthday treat. From McDonough. I told her that boy’s all right by me.

Like most of us, I first heard of Big Pie in the Sky when the restaurant and its celebrated “Carnivore Challenge” appeared on Man vs. Food. The particulars of that business have already been detailed on plenty of other blogs and needn’t be repeated here. Our pal David recorded the Atlanta-set episode when it was first broadcast and sent me a copy with a note that this previously unknown place was something to see.

A few Saturdays after we watched the episode, we came out to Kennesaw for one of the biggest mobs we’ve seen at a suburban restaurant, and almost two hour wait. We figured we’d come back another time. Almost eighteen months later, the crowds are still enormous, the seating is still a nightmare, the wait’s still a good 45 minutes on an early Friday evening and lengthening as the night goes on, and I’m of the opinion that it’s worth it.

The problem, of course, is that the publicity brought on by the TV appearance has brought a much larger crowd than the small storefront can easily handle. It’s apparently not uncommon for guests, who place their orders and pay upon arrival, to stand around hovering with their order numbers waiting for a table to clear. In the evening, the three outdoor tables belonging to the coffee shop next door become available, but it doesn’t help the bottleneck very much.

Having said that, we’ve certainly visited other places that have made impressive appearances on popular TV programs, and the crowds eventually die off a little. But Big Pie in the Sky is so consistently popular that much of this weekend mob is repeat business. Everybody except for the kids – and there were a lot of children here – is pretty patient with the service. On that note, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t call this service good at all. However, you have to make exceptions when the restaurant is such a chaotic zoo. It is unbelievably loud and ridiculous here, and I realize that I might be describing what some might consider the least appealing night out ever devised. Between ordering up front, fighting for a table, waiting in a line to refill your drink and having kids chase each other around your chairs as overworked servers try desperately not to drop pies while bellowing out your table number, this is assuredly not a restaurant for everybody.

Having said that, if you like a good pizza as much as Marie and I do, you should be ready to deal with dining room chaos, no matter how wild. Or just take an outdoor table like we did, which minimizes the madness. We shared a supreme with olives only on half – Marie doesn’t loathe olives the way that she does bacon, but she’s still awfully funny about them – and I thought it quite good, with a soft, chewy crust and very tasty sauce and cheese. A sixteen-inch pie gets you eight big slices for under twenty bucks.

In our case, some of the leftovers were very much appreciated. Our daughter announced that there had been nothing to eat at the football game – she might possibly have been fibbing there – and that she was going to die of starvation. Thank heaven we had two slices set aside for her; we wouldn’t want anybody to starve to death.

Other blog posts about Big Pie in the Sky:

Atlanta Restaurant Blog (May 1 2009)
Amy on Food (Aug. 14 2010)

Ru San’s, Kennesaw GA

Now this is weird. I’ve eaten at one Ru San’s or another better than a dozen times, but I can’t remember a single occasion that lends itself to an anecdote worth relating. I remember watching DJ Shockley make a spectacular end zone dive when the Gamecocks came to town in 2005 at the one in Athens, but I was wasting time with somebody who didn’t like football that fall and might not have that quite right. I remember watching what must been a sixth generation VHS copy of an old Gundam cartoon at the one in Buckhead in 2004 and thinking that incredibly odd, that surely they could have laid their hands on a better copy of that. Of course I remember that my daughter shouts “Wasabi!” in the manner of South Park‘s “Timmy!” every time we walk into one of their locations. Perhaps sushi does not lend itself to anecdotes? Continue reading “Ru San’s, Kennesaw GA” →

Chilito’s, Kennesaw GA (CLOSED)

Wednesday was one of those rotten days full of delays and lane closures and slow drivers. Contrary to what you might suspect from this food blog, Marie and I do eat in more often than we go out, although in my case, since she’s the wizard in the kitchen, it often means sandwiches and leftovers. However, I do allow myself one lunch out a week, and I was looking forward to it that morning. My destination was, typically, closed. Then it was every student driver and testing failure in Cobb County getting in my way as I headed home to reconsider my options.

I was listening to Contra, the new album by Vampire Weekend, and it cycled back around to the opening song, “Horchata.” That reminded me that I hadn’t been by Chilito’s in an incredibly long time. They brew up some really good horchata, but I was in the mood for sweet tea. I mention it just because I wouldn’t have even thought about the place were it not for that song.

You don’t see many restaurants like this one opening anymore. It’s a remnant of the “gourmet burrito” craze that started in the late ’90s and lasted for about a decade. There are certainly a few regional chains that I don’t mind at all – Barberito’s, Qdoba and Willy’s all serve reasonably tasty food – but the better examples of single-store ideas didn’t last long. Raging Burrito in midtown was very good, and I also quite liked Extreme Burrito, which lasted for maybe nine months on Baxter Street in Athens. I’ll always remember an incident there in the spring of 2000 when a friend of mine who would probably prefer to remain nameless started flirting with the waitress there and I suddenly understood why that reporter bellowed “Oh, the humanity!” when the Hindenburg caught fire.

I think that Chilito’s tried to become a similar regional chain, but it didn’t get very far. Its first store was on Bells Ferry Road near I-575, perhaps in 2005, and closed two years later. This one opened in 2006 in some unnecessary identikit development on Chastain Road and has been hanging in there for a while, mainly serving the Kennesaw State University community with promotions and student-targeted discounts. I’m not aware of any other expansion, and the restaurant’s website is, shall we say, unhelpful.

At any rate, Chilito’s is kind of like Moe’s, only not terrible. (“Always remember, kids, you can’t spell mediocre without m – o – e!”) You walk down a line having somebody on the other side of a sneeze guard slap various ingredients onto your tortilla or shell. You hope that the tortilla has not been steamed so long that it’s trapped water, and that the cilantro has been diced finely enough so that you won’t be picking a stem out from between your teeth, and you bristle that you have to pay an extra forty cents for corn. You go get salsa, some of it quite good and some of it blandly inoffensive, from another little bar with a sneeze guard with little plastic cups that are too darn tiny to be much good. There is nothing remarkable about this place, and you leave equally grateful for a low-priced meal with a “buy ten get one free” bribe card as you do for the quality of the food.

It’s a long way from outstanding, but I’ve always found it perfectly serviceable, even if I don’t go there with any regularity. The bribe card that I mentioned is finally, after Wednesday’s trip, full. It has taken me four years to get it there. This trip, I had a chicken taco salad, because that was their daily special for $5.99. The fellow on the other side of the sneeze guard filled it with black beans, not-especially-spicy chicken, queso dip, lettuce, pico de gallo, cheese and costs-forty-cents-extra corn. Not at all a bad price, especially coming with chips and a drink. (Sweet tea, and, surprisingly, awful. I had half a cup of Mr. Pibb to wash the taste away.)

Chilito’s offers fish tacos and these are, honestly, very good. I should probably get away with eating these more often. Honestly, though, the reason I haven’t eaten at Chilito’s often enough to fill up a bribe card in under four years is simple: my kids can’t stand the place. I don’t know what it is they find objectionable, beyond just a general thought that it’s “yucky,” but the psychologists tell us that children’s minds are still cooking and not fully formed yet. I try to remember that when they occasionally protest that they’d really prefer mediocre Moe’s to a nice Chilito’s fish taco.

Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppe, Kennesaw GA (CLOSED)

It won’t be long, I fear, before blogs like this will be the only proof that this small chain ever existed. The little Dagwood’s empire has already crumbled and collapsed, leaving just a scattered handful of franchises available. One of them is nearby in Kennesaw and serves up one of the most amazing sandwiches you can find, but nobody confidently predicts that a new generation will enjoy it.

Like many of you, I first heard of the chain thanks to some targeted Google keyword sponsored links in my gmail. For a while in 2006, it seemed like every time I received an email with the word “comics” in it, Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppe popped up on the side. Eventually I got curious enough to check it out, and was delighted by the incredible cuteness of what I saw. Apparently, Dean Young, the current writer of the King Features comic strip Blondie, which was created by his father in 1930, decided to fulfill a lifetime dream of a chain of sandwich shoppes making wild meals just like the ones that Dagwood Bumstead would concoct.

I stress that “incredible cuteness” only goes so far. I do not believe that I have looked forward to reading a new installment of Blondie since I was ten, and don’t expect to again until I’m in a retirement home. I admit some archaeological curiosity about what the strip might have been like in 1930, when Blondie was a carefree, rich flapper girl with daddy issues. What I’ve heard sounds preferable to the suburban mediocrity that King Features has been inflicting upon us for more than forty years.

In 2006, the chain had not left Florida. Throughout 2007, they started popping up in the midwest, South Carolina and Texas, and one arrived in Suwanee, Georgia. Surprisingly, in the spring of 2008, one opened near us, at the intersection of Barrett Parkway and Ridenour. I would never have known this had I not, by chance, chosen to come back that way from the far end of Whitlock, just to have something different to look at on my way. This amazing little secret has somehow, despite the ridiculously awful location, unbelievably awful hours (they usually close at 7) and occasionally awful teenage staff in place when we’ve visited, managed to stay open for two years.

How much longer is anybody’s guess. If you try looking up simply Dagwood’s on Google, you’ll first get a half-dozen unrelated restaurants from all across the country who have appropriated the name from the comic strip. If you search for Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppe, you’ll find a completely different story: tales of franchisees suing the owners, closed stores, and websites, once geared to franchises’ regions, which have defaulted to Go Daddy placeholder pages. It would appear that the Florida stores are gone, leaving the one here in Kennesaw and a handful in Indiana and Kentucky. Possibly one in Springfield, Missouri. In fact, when I first visited the local store in May of 2008, I was unaware that things were already falling apart. That very month in the magazine Franchise Times, there appeared a quite remarkable article by Jonathan Maze about how the many investors and franchises were lining up their lawyers. That Dagwood’s exists anywhere at all right now is frankly amazing.

So Marie and our daughter and I went to supper here last week and the stink of failure was so heavy that I felt I needed to order their trademark Dagwood sandwich, suspecting that I won’t have many more chances. The bad vibe was so heavy that when we left, I forgot and neglected to snap a picture of the building for the blog, necessitating this photo from our first visit, two years previously.

Over those two years, the quality of the food has not altered a jot. These are, despite everything else in this entry, leagues superior to any other sandwich chain, except Jersey Mike’s, which I completely love. Why anybody would stop at a Jimmy John’s, a Subway or a Quizno’s over Dagwood’s I couldn’t tell you. Food-wise, Dagwood’s is genuinely terrific, and the Dagwood itself is, as pictured, a giant jawbreaker of a meal, a real treat that you can barely finish. The restaurants offer Zapp’s brand chips on the side, and even have packs of their cracked pepper and sea salt flavor repackaged as Dagwood’s Zesty Pepper, so I suppose that the good people at Zapp’s, at least, were sold on this chain’s solvency.

But everything else about this place is increasingly underwhelming. At least the teens who were blaring their music at maximum volume a few months ago have gone, but the ones who replaced them were in a real hurry to get out of there as quickly as possible, and had stacked the chairs in the window shortly after six so they could clean the floors. While we were eating, two different parties drove up, saw the stacked chairs, backed out and drove away, concluding that they were closed.

One of Dagwood’s greatest follies is that about a quarter of its counter space is given over to Blondie merchandise, despite the indisputable fact that nobody between the ages of ten and seventy can be said to be a Blondie collector. Bafflingly, there is a single collected edition of the comic strip in print, but they didn’t sell that in the restaurant, just glasses and tchotchkes. Well, the merchandise shelf is, as expected, collecting dust, and the flat-screen TV which was set up to show Blondie comics, panel-by-panel, on a loop has been switched off for months.

The food’s still good. It’s excellent. But nobody seriously expects it to still be available this time next year. If you’d like to go, phone first.

(Update 8/24/11: They lasted longer than I thought, but we confirmed today that they closed earlier this month. Not a surprise, but a shame nonetheless.)

I have to tell you about this soup.

The best soup that there’s ever been, in the history of food, was the gazpacho at the late, dearly lamented Mean Bean in Athens. If you never had this soup, then you’ll never know what the best soup in the universe tasted like. Now about ten months ago, down in south Georgia, I did have a bowl of gazpacho which seemed to me to be in the same general hemisphere of coma-inducing wonder, but I was also a little distracted, what with being about five hours away from getting married, so I might have been exaggerating things just a little. I’ll have to try it again and see whether it holds up.

Assuming that it does, then it stands to follow that the third best soup in the world is the creamy tomato soup at Sweet Tomatoes, a national chain known on the west coast as Souplantation. And I can see disappointment in the eyes of a few readers through the screens of their laptops, as it’s just a month into this experiment and I’m already talking about a national chain. Tsk!

Obsession with the creamy tomato soup is widely known as writer Mark Evanier’s recurring joke, and I’m not trying to hem in on his well-worn territory, but I do have to thank him for cluing me in on the place. Depending on his mood, he’ll either casually mention it or go into full-bore rave when the soup returns to the restaurant’s rotating menu. This usually happens every March and for one week in the fall. I’ve never understood this. There are a few soups available here year-round. One of these is their signature deep kettle house chili, which is the blandest and most disappointingly ordinary chili I’ve ever had, and they serve that slop all the time?

Oh, and I’ll tell you what’s worse: they’ve also got some soups which are on an even sillier 15-day rotation. So if you go in the first half of March, you can alternate bowls of creamy tomato and their shrimp bisque, which is also outstanding, but in the second half of the month, they replace the shrimp bisque with clam chowder, which I can’t eat. Now what’s fair about that?

So anyway, about four years back, Mark was raving about this soup and I decided the kiddos needed some more vegetables, so we made an evening out of it and I was sold. I mean, this soup is really, really good. It doesn’t seem possible that anything made in such quantity can be so tasty, but I had something like six bowls of the stuff that first night. Then I remained sitting there for a very, very long time.

To be honest, Sweet Tomatoes is one of those places that flatly is not worth a visit unless you check the website beforehand and confirm that there’s a good soup on the menu. Now Marie likes the place regardless, because she enjoys making a nice salad to her specifications, but I never feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth unless I can enjoy several bowls of soup. The creamy tomato and the shrimp bisque are certainly deal-clinchers, and I also really like their El Paso chicken and lime. I’ll go to Sweet Tomatoes without a grumble if any one of the three are present. I mean, the day hasn’t come where I’ve dropped my fork in shock and raved about the lettuce and spinach I’ve just had, plus their pastas are uniformly disappointing, so there needs to be good soup.

Luckily, Marie’s birthday happens to come in March, so we can usually justify two or three visits during the month. I need to do a better job remembering to go at the start of March, however. Sunday night, we got a group of friends together to celebrate. We all arrived in the middle of a huge downpour, exactly the sort of weather that requires two or three bowls of soup.

Well, we were nine in total and an astonishing amount of soup was consumed. Neal had several bowls of their black bean chili, which surely must be superior to their regular deep-kettle-thing because it cannot possibly be worse, and was comatose for the next sixteen hours. Between us, my wife and I built a small fort of little red soup bowls. She didn’t have space on the table to set her gift cards down. That’s one of the advantages to having children; you can send them back to the line for more soup. Just keep it coming, with some of that cheesy bread to dunk in it. More tomato soup, and nobody gets hurt. Maybe we’ll go back Saturday afternoon, before they replace the creamy tomato with something inevitably inferior.

Other blog posts about Sweet Tomatoes in Atlanta:

Atlanta Foodies (Dec. 12 2008)
Food Near Snellville (July 30 2009)