Harry’s Pig Shop (CLOSED) and The Taco Stand, Athens GA

Well, it took me a little while to get over to Harry’s Pig Shop. I had been wanting to visit for quite a while now, but I don’t just go to Athens every day, and when I do, I’d like to occasionally try something other than barbecue. There are quite a few good restaurants around that town, you know. Nevertheless, I moved it up my to-do list a couple of months ago after I read the good writeup at Buster’s BBQ Blog. Continue reading “Harry’s Pig Shop (CLOSED) and The Taco Stand, Athens GA” →

Pure Taqueria, Woodstock GA

So there’s this burrito place in Kennesaw that has been defying my efforts to eat there for years. I went there once and learned they were closed on Sundays. I went again and they were on vacation. I’m guessing that they take off every July 4th, because it was probably a year before Marie suggested burritos and I remembered the place and we drove that way and found them closed again. That’s three times that one place has stymied my plans. They win this round.

So we went back to Woodstock for the second time that day. For lunch, we had gone to Bub-Ba-Q, an area favorite, and enjoyed their appetizer portion of burnt ends for the first time. Since I was hoping for someplace new to our blog for supper, we followed that up with a visit to Pure Taqueria in the small city’s charming downtown. It’s located right across the plaza from Canyons Burger Company, and next door to what had been The Right Wing Tavern, a popular local place that unexpectedly closed quite suddenly a week or so before. This wasn’t a place that I was in any hurry to ever enter, but it was very surprising to learn that the restaurant that really drove that downtown’s resurgence shut down so abruptly.

When I was working in Alpharetta a few years back, the original Pure – named because the small building was once the home of a Pure Oil gas station – was one of the region’s foodie faves of the hour, always drawing huge crowds of all ages. The Woodstock location is one of two additional Atlanta sites. They have also opened in Matthews, NC and a fourth Atlanta store, in Duluth, is scheduled for a September opening.

Pure is one of those very rare places where we can’t fault anything specific, but it’s just far, far too loud and hot for us old-timers and a baby looking for a nice family dinner. The food was really quite good, and our server was incredibly awesome. Committing the giant volume of nightly specials to memory isn’t the work of novices. Marie enjoyed her burrito, and I quite liked my meatballs, called albondigas, which were served in a chipotle tomato sauce. My daughter had the chicken taquitos and said that she really enjoyed those, too.

By the time our entrees were served, however, we were already sweating buckets and tired of yelling at each other to be heard over the music. Honestly, this just isn’t a summertime place for us, certainly not on a Saturday night. Unfortunately, the restaurant’s design, evoking an old garage with the huge doors and high ceilings, does not lend itself to really good air conditioning. My daughter finally gave up and went outside, where a light breeze made the high nineties feel more livable. I’d like to revisit Pure on a weekday evening in the fall, and maybe sit on the upstairs patio when it’s cooler. If the food is consistently this good, I think that we’d all enjoy that experience a good deal more.

Papi’s Cuban and Caribbean Grill, Kennesaw GA

A few Fridays back, Marie and I found ourselves with just the baby. Our daughter had found a jawdropping sale on clothes at Plato’s Closet and I had made her an offer that she couldn’t refuse. If I forwarded her the next month’s clothing allowance so she could fill a bag and save something ridiculous like – no joke – 75%, then she could fend for herself for supper and Marie and I could enjoy some grownup time. The baby just sleeps at restaurants – long may that continue – so we could mostly get a break from kids.

Marie was in the mood for a sandwich, so I suggested that we give Papi’s a try. I had only been to this location once, right when it opened, and figured it was due a second glance. I did not know it at the time, but this is actually a small group of four restaurants, with one in midtown and three in the suburbs. They have daily specials and interesting entrees, but where they are said to excel the most is in their sandwiches.

We got to Papi’s just as the dinner rush was about to get heavy, and this apparently coincides with their closing a few tables to make space for a band in the second dining room. We did not have to wait, but quite a few other people arriving after us did. This is a very popular place on Friday evenings!

My readers who enjoy unusual sodas should certainly swing by one of Papi’s locations and check out the drinks on offer. They had quite a few cans of things that you very rarely see, including my beloved Ironbeer. A Cuban soft drink goes extremely well with a good Cuban sandwich.

In my mind, a Cuban sandwich is defined by its very good, slightly sweet bread, meats, lots of mayo and pickles. Marie had the medianoche sandwich with smoked pork and ham, and I had jerk chicken, and we both really enjoyed them. We were a little let down by the fries, which tasted rather too much like institutional mass-produced fries, and fried in the same grease used for the fish. Next time, we’ll have a different side. There certainly will be a next time. While perhaps not quite as tasty as the relocated-to-Birmingham Kool Korner, the sandwiches are still very good, and the atmosphere is fun and upbeat. I’d like to go again one day and enjoy the live music, and an Ironbeer.

Dreamland BBQ and Taco Casa, Tuscaloosa AL

My dad never went to Tuscaloosa. I always thought that was weird.

When he was younger, he saw his beloved Crimson Tide play many times at Legion Field in Birmingham, and, once he and my mom moved to Atlanta, back when Georgia Tech was in the sort of proto-SEC, he’d see the Tide play in Atlanta at Grant Field. Yet he never saw the Tide at what is today Bryant-Denny Stadium, which is briefly visible, towering over the trees, as you make your way down Tuscaloosa’s main commercial strip, McFarland Boulevard. At least, I think that was the stadium. I’ll feel a bit silly if it wasn’t. Continue reading “Dreamland BBQ and Taco Casa, Tuscaloosa AL” →

La Fonda Latina, Atlanta GA

Heaven only knows why I enjoy a restaurant as spectacularly unreliable as La Fonda Latina. It can’t be because of the service. You know, I figure that I have spent many chapters in this story singling out really good restaurants for their really good service. It is only fair, therefore, to occasionally single out a pretty good restaurant for its downright mediocre service. Only fair.

La Fonda is the sister restaurant to Fellini’s Pizza, a more-than-pretty good restaurant that serves up one of my favorite pizzas in the city. Fellini’s is simple and incredibly tasty and incredibly reliable and the service is also occasionally iffy. However, both the food and the service are better than Antico, which everybody’s been raving about for months. Actually, the pizza’s only a little bit better than Antico, which indeed serves up a very good pie, but the occasionally iffy service is a thousand times better than the surly antagonism that Antico dishes up.

Anyway, the cozy relationship of these two restaurants has resulted in a very interesting trio of locations where the owners have managed to construct or conspire a La Fonda and a Fellini’s right next door to each other: on Ponce near North Highland, on Peachtree in Buckhead, and on Roswell Road in Sandy Springs. The design of these particular buildings is incredibly interesting. They look remarkably 1960s, with that weird, undulating awning that reminds me of the old chain of Treasure Island discount stores.

Our friend Matt picked the Roswell La Fonda to meet up for supper one night last week, the evening that the kids and I returned from Chattanooga. We learned then that this La Fonda is the loudest restaurant in the city, and that the service was really quite remarkably mediocre, even by La Fonda standards. But wasn’t the food good?

As we got back into town with about an hour to spare before we met the group, David drove us over to the Buckhead Borders. This was an interesting sight. It’s one of the stores that’s closing, and right now everything is 20-30% off, which would be eyebrow-raising if Borders didn’t send me an email coupon every week to buy a book for 33% off. Actually, Borders seems to send me an email every stinking day, either to give me a coupon I’m not going to use, or tell me that the store nearest me is closing, or tell me that they’re very concerned that I seem to be the only person in the United States not to have purchased The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo from Borders.com.

We got back to the restaurant and lucked into a parking space. This La Fonda and Fellini’s complex has an agonizingly small parking lot, and, typically, it’s right next door to a gigantic, mostly unused shopping center with parking spaces aplenty and, because the shopping center is owned by jerks, parking here and eating at La Fonda is a guaranteed way to get your car towed. David and the kids and I were the last to arrive; Marie, Neal, Matt and his wife Kelley had already made it in and got a table on the patio, surrounded by noise and an awful lot of screaming children with Chick-fil-A kids meals while the grown-ups had something ostensibly a little nicer.

Actually, what the grown-ups had was almost certainly nicer. La Fonda has a good reputation for being one of the best places in the city to enjoy paella. That’s what Matt and Kelley each had, with different ingredients. Honestly, paella is not my favorite meal – it seems a high price to pay for a hell of a lot of rice and not nearly enough meat – but I have found myself craving it from time to time, and La Fonda does a fine job with it. My son and I split an order of three really terrific and delicious chicken tacos, served, as almost all of the meals are, with yellow rice and black beans, and an order of fried plantains and garlic sauce. Marie had a quesadilla with spinach and onions.

And we all had terrible service. I don’t know who our server ever was, because we seemed to have about nine different ones. I suspect that whomever our server originally was, he or she got pressganged into helping another table where one woman was having paella and her three screaming children were having Chick-fil-A kids meals, and then our next server was told to get an order of something else to some other table and we last saw that guy on the other side of the restaurant. In between nine different people putting things on our table and getting pulled to do other things on everybody else’s table, we got perhaps one refill of chips – most broken into fingernail-sized crumbs – and salsa – quite good, perhaps, yet also indistinguishable from this restaurant’s lazy attempt at gazpacho – and no refills of anything to drink other than water. Neal had a diet soda and, once it was done, he was out of luck.

It sounds like a night out at the restaurant from hell, but it was at least good to enjoy everybody’s company and talk about the fun trip we took to Chattanooga and the neat barbecue that we found there. The food was just super, although I’ve always felt it just a little pricey. As for the service, I just figured, heck, this was a Thursday night. I bet Fridays and Saturdays here, assuming you can find a place to park, are completely ridiculous.

When we left, though, I was thinking, as good as those chicken tacos were, it sure has been a while since I enjoyed a slice or two of Fellini’s.

Zucca, Smyrna GA

Every year, our friend Neal turns his birthday into a week-long celebration called The Festival of Neal. We asked him, a couple of weeks in advance, before he got completely booked, whether we could schedule some time to take him to supper somewhere. He selected a place near him in Smyrna called Zucca. This was one of those places that I’d been figuring that I’d get around to for many, many years.

Zucca opened its first of four Atlanta locations in 2003. There’s the one in Smyrna, which we visited, one near us in Kennesaw, one a little further up the road in Woodstock on Towne Lake Parkway, and one in Decatur. I’m of the opinion that Atlanta is completely packed with amazing pizza restaurants. Does Zucca have a chance at breaking into my personal top five of Vingenzo’s, Varasano’s, Fritti, Everybody’s and Labella’s?

Marie wasn’t able to join us Wednesday night. She needed more sleep than I do back before the pregnancy, and even more today. This past week has been lousy with allergies and pollen and it’s hit me worse than any spring of the past six years and I’ve been an absolute nightmare to sleep with, since I can barely breathe. A couple of nights previously, I banished myself to the couch for fear of waking her with nose-clogged snoring. I proceeded to wake everybody in the house, even the boy who sleeps in the basement. I mention this because the plan was for me to pick up the children and drive down to Smyrna and meet Marie at the restaurant, and instead we nearly collided at the foot of the driveway. She came home, completely exhausted and spent and full of stress and frustration and asked me to deliver apologies, but she needed to sleep. And did she ever. It was fitful and interrupted, but she got to lay down for about twelve hours, and she deserved every second of it.

Like a complete lout, the pizza slices that I brought home were covered in bacon, which she doesn’t like. Well, that’s another one in the failure column for me!

Well, the children and I stopped in to visit my mother for a few minutes, and got to the restaurant just before seven. It’s a family-friendly sports bar, with a big sign in the airlock advertising franchise opportunities. At various points during the week they have trivia and games, and on the weekends, they have loud music and DJs who evidently can’t spell their own names. Or maybe she’s called Sue Spence. Who knows? It was, unusually, a time to discuss spelling and pronounciation. Like many middle schoolers, my daughter is incapable of speaking for more than four minutes without announcing that something has been “pwned.” This is evidently pronounced “powned” in twelve year-old-ese. Our friend Todd was able to join us, and he saw the reunited British band OMD earlier in the week at The Loft. In twelve year-old-ese, that’s pronounced “owmed.”

I started with a bowl of minestrone to sooth my allergy-ravaged throat, and it was excellent. I might have saved a penny or two by ordering just a small pizza and a second bowl of that wonderful soup. The pizza that the kids and I got was my son’s choice. He wanted to try the Buffalo pizza, which skips tomato sauce in favor of blue cheese and ranch, topped with chicken, bacon and tomatoes with wing sauce and blue cheese crumbles. It was very good and there was a heck of a lot of it. A large pie here will easily feed three.

The birthday boy ordered Zucca’s Victory pie, which, they boast, earned them the 2008 prize in an International Expo of some renown. It’s a ramped up Margherita – mozzerella, basil, olive oil and parmesan – adding sausage and mushrooms. Neal substituted onions for the mushrooms. Todd also ordered a large pie – more than enough to take several slices back home to Samantha, who also could not join us – with sausage and peppers. I had a slice of this and thought it was pretty good, but certainly elevated by the quality of the sausage, which was just excellent. Sometimes, better ingredients make an enormous, palpable difference.

David was also able to meet us after bowing out of work a little early. Pizza’s not really part of his diet, but he did enjoy a bowl of the terrific minestrone, and a large Greek salad. Well, to the naked eye it was a Greek salad; according to the menu it was a Tuscany salad. I’m really not certain what the difference would be!

Overall, it was a good meal. They do good work here, and the service was fantastic. The pies are probably not as good as Antico, but the service was leagues better than what you find there, so I’d put the two on about equal footing as far as the overall experience. Just like Antico wasn’t qute able to knock its way into my personal top five, nor was this place. Not at all bad, but not quite transcendent, either.

Thumbs Up Diner, Atlanta GA

The problem with mile-long to-do lists, like mine, is that I cannot remember how on earth some of the things that have been on there the longest got there in the first place. Take Thumbs Up Diner, for instance. I haven’t been in Decatur in months, but one time I was there, I pointed out the Thumbs Up location there – it is one of five in the Atlanta area – to Marie and told her that I had heard you can get a really good breakfast here and that we need to stop in one of these days. Not long afterward, our friend David, who’s always looking out for a good place to eat, forwarded me a link to the restaurant’s web site. “Yep,” I said. “It’s on the list!” So are, if we’re honest, something like fifty other places. I have really got to get up to Cincinnati to take care of the three or four places up there I want to try.

The problem, as ever, is finding the free time and the pennies to make it to any place at the same time that my enthusiasm and curiosity push a place up to the top of the wishlist. It helps that Thumbs Up has a location about a mile from where I work, and so, with a short day last week, I decided to drive over to the Marietta Street location for a late breakfast. It has a beautiful view of the midtown skyline, except some guy at Georgia Tech decided to stick the backside of some big athletic facility in the way.

I spent what seemed like a lot of time trying to figure out what I wanted. I hear that their pancakes and waffles are really good, and thought about trying one, but I went with one of the house specialties, The Heap, instead. This is a skillet filled with cheesy potatoes, scrambled eggs, onions and peppers, and I added chicken. I’m very glad that I resisted the temptation to get a waffle with it, because the Heap alone was considerably more food than any one person needs, and I was not able to finish it. It wasn’t at all bad, but it needed some salt and pepper and Texas Pete hot sauce to bring things to life. It came with a very tasty biscuit. That, I did finish.

My little breakfast was a very pleasant getaway. I didn’t learn anything much about the diner; even if the waitresses weren’t busy refilling coffee throughout their near-full house, I really just felt like relaxing in a nice, reasonably quiet place and watching the world pass by. Sadly, there’s not a lot of pedestrian traffic on this stretch of Marietta Street, so I couldn’t do much in the way of people watching. But for sitting back with a good book and watching the world go by, this is a fine place to do it. Might have to do it again sometime soon, now that it’s no longer collecting dust on a to-do list.