I had been planning to stop by Sheik Burritos n Kabobs for weeks and weeks, and it sort of slipped down the to-do list. In time, another burrito joint opened on Howell Mill and started getting some buzz. I thought about heading that way, but remembered that I owed Sheik Burritos a visit first. It’s only fair to get them crossed off the list before I try a (relative) upstart. Continue reading “Sheik Burritos n Kabobs, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)”
Tag: mexican
Nuevo Laredo Cantina, Atlanta GA
Meredith Ford’s name is still on the front window of Nuevo Laredo, still barred from entering. Four years ago, the former AJC critic penned a quite mild criticism of the restaurant for the newspaper and war was declared. At the time, only a handful of blogs were active, and this was an early-to-our-hobby example of something that all food writers, bloggers and amateur critics have since come to know: conveying the gentlest of disappointments can be, in the eyes of the faithful (or the owners), a blight upon God’s eye. Continue reading “Nuevo Laredo Cantina, Atlanta GA”
Buckhead Burrito Grill, Kennesaw GA (CLOSED)
There are coincidences and connections all around in the restaurant business. Sometime in 2008, I read some people on a message board raving about Big Shanty Smokehouse, up in Kennesaw off Wade Green Road. I took the children up there for what would be the first of many terrific meals, and we noticed, along the way, this little burrito place in a strip mall closer to the interstate. I said then that, one of these days, we needed to stop by and give them a try. It was not a priority, as longtime readers might have read, as I have been losing my taste for, and interest in, American-styled burritos and tacos. Somebody really needs to prompt me to go get a burrito anymore.
So several months passed, and we drove up there one Sunday, only to find them closed. They don’t open on Sundays. They also take a short vacation and close down around the Fourth of July every year. I know this because around that date in 2010 and again this year, we tried coming by and, stymied, left with a shrug.
A couple of Fridays ago, we decided it was time to let Marie relax for a weekend. We complement each other very well, I think, but one way that we have really started to differ since we had the great emotional drain that is a baby is that I spend all week antsy for the freedom to get out and drive and relax by getting up at the comparatively late hour of about seven and finding someplace miles and miles away to eat, and Marie, who’s much more of a workaholic and has a more demanding desk job than I do, and could, given the chance, sleep for a whole lot longer than anybody, enjoys the occasional weekend where she can stay in bed until ten – ten! – and not do anything for two and a half days. Weekends where I really, really relax leave her completely exhausted, and weekends where she really, really relaxes leave me completely unfulfilled. We compensate by allowing me weekends where I overplan and completely fill it with things to do – oh, and I’m two months away from the most awesome weekend ever – and, once in a while, allowing a weekend with not a single thing on the agenda.
This was one of those Fridays. I asked what we were doing for supper and she said that she’d simply like to get a burrito from Willy’s. I suggested that we might could go a few exits up and give Buckhead Burrito Grill one last try. If they weren’t open, we’d come back to Willy’s. Not only were they open, and excellent, but we also learned that they moved to this location from the very space into which Big Shanty Smokehouse, the restaurant that we visited when we first saw these guys, opened. If the Buckhead Burrito Grill had not been successful enough to move into a bigger place with more parking, then the Smokehouse would not have started up in the space that they vacated, and we would never have seen this “California-style” place. Well, I think that it’s weird, anyway.
Bob and Melissa Ross started the restaurant, so named because, when they opened about ten years ago, they felt that you had to drive down to Buckhead to get a decent burrito, and they still own it. We didn’t know when we arrived that their signature item was the fish taco, and so Marie and I each had burritos. She had the “house” style, made with your basic chicken, rice, beans, cheese and pico de gallo, and I had the “Rio” style, which was chicken, rice, cheese, lettuce, and two sauces, one a hot red sauce and the other thick, creamy and peppery. They were both perfectly acceptable and tasty, probably better than what we would have had at Willy’s and leagues better than what they sell you at Moe’s. I feel like they could probably spare a few more chips in the basket, however. The salsa bar here is stocked with really terrific and tasty blends, even if, like most places, they offer little plastic dipping cups that are just too darn small, and I would have gladly indulged in many, many more chips after I finished the puny number that came with my meal.
There are a couple of newspaper reviews on the wall here, and after we read those raves, we realized we probably needed to try the fish taco. This thing deserves the hype. It’s tilapia fried in a batter full of ingredients that the woman at the register would not divulge, and served with onions, cabbage, cilantro and a really unique jalapeno yogurt that they call “Mexican tartar sauce.” Marie liked it more than I did, and I liked it a lot.
They seem to rotate their unusual desserts, which are usually deep-fried American snack foods served in a burrito with whipped cream. When we went, Snickers were on offer. Personally, I don’t like Snickers at all – a friend in middle school once described the sensation of spitting out little peanut crumbs two hours after he had a bar and I’ve never forgotten the accuracy – and so I passed, but my daughter just loved it.
Honestly, it was good to finally try this place. It’s not my favorite type of food in the world, and, to be honest, I’d be happier driving a little further down to the Smokehouse, but the fish tacos were quite surprisingly good. The next time that Marie gets a hankering for California-styled Mexican food, we’d do all right to see whether this place is open before trying anybody else in the area.
Mas Tacos Por Favor and The Wild Cow, Nashville TN
When we first told our friends that we were going to make a blog out of our hobby of traveling and eating at fun local places, our good buddy Brooke piped up with a suggestion in Nashville. She told us that we needed to try Mas Tacos, a food truck that has, in the nearly two years since she told us about it, found a brick-and-mortar base and has been serving up some ridiculously good Tennessee-styled takes on traditional Mexican dishes. We visited Nashville twice in 2010, but neither visit really coincided with a good time to go meet up with Mas Tacos, either the truck or the shop, during their limited hours. Continue reading “Mas Tacos Por Favor and The Wild Cow, Nashville TN”
Goodbye to El Pollo Loco
I will always associate El Pollo Loco with death.
That’s hardly fair, of course, but that’s how these things happen. One of my earliest memories is the death of an uncle named Ruford, who married my father’s oldest sister before Dad was born. This is, in part, why I am convinced that there must have been some old family contract that made it illegal for anybody to marry into my family unless they had a name as silly as any of ours. My grandfather had a sensible name like Joseph, gave all five of his kids oddball names, and the oldest of them married somebody with a name like Ruford.
Anyway, Ruford died when I was five or so, and somebody, probably his daughter, my cousin Sandie, told all of us small ones who were at the hospital that somebody had brought some Mississippi mud cake for us and it was back at the house. Ever since then, Mississippi mud cake has been off my menu. Seeing its name in print reminds me of the first time that I ever encountered death, and my kindergarten-aged self shudders inside.
I was really pleased to hear that El Pollo Loco was entering the Atlanta market in 2007, because, of course, I am interested in smaller chains. One of the first of what would be perhaps nine – down from a planned and announced fifty – opened on Holcomb Bridge Road in Roswell. I would drive right past it on my way home from work. Now, at that job, on the last business day of each month, everybody had to stay late until everybody else had finished and the books were balanced, possibly because my boss was Bill Lumbergh. So on the last business day of the month, my mother would pick up the children from school for me, since heaven knew when I would leave, and I would get supper somewhere in Roswell and enjoy a good book.
So, I settled on trying out the new El Pollo Loco that November, left sometime after the sun went down and somebody’s financing was finally approved and a contract written, got in the car and my phone rang. It was the children’s mother, calling to say that her mother was in the hospital. This was a Friday; I asked whether she wanted me to bring the children to Knoxville the next day to see her, and she said, firmly, not to, to give it a week. She then took a sharp turn for the worse and died on Wednesday morning.
Not that I had any kind of love left for anybody in that family, but, for my children, I should have told her that I was coming anyway, and just gone home and packed. Instead, I spent Friday night wowing the avocado sauce on El Pollo Loco’s salsa bar. I ate at three of the city’s El Pollo Loco locations quite a few times in 2008 and 2009, before I cut fast food from the diet, and always enjoyed the meals here. But with every one of them, I heard that voice in the back of my head saying “You should have taken your kids to see their grandmother one last time.”
Which is a pretty unfair thing to do to myself; hell, earlier in 2007, I deliberately curtailed a plan to drive straight from Toronto home to Atlanta in one go, just to give these rotten kids a few hours with her. You’d think that’d give me a little pass on the guilt, but guilt’s a stupid, senseless thing, and that’s why El Pollo Loco never meant “the crazy chicken” to me. It meant death.
Tomorrow’s News Today, a good site about Atlanta retail that locals should certainly be reading, wrapped up the restaurant’s four-and-a-half-year run in the region with an obituary and recap and noted that three of the nine stores indeed formally changed their name to The Crazy Chicken, an act which surely must have been borne of desperation.
While they were with us, though, El Pollo Loco served up some pretty good meals for what it was. I always thought of it as a cross between a Mrs. Winners and a Del Taco. Sure, you could find better if you wanted to pay a little more, but when it was convenient for us to stop by the Smyrna, Marietta or Roswell stores for a cheap, reliable meal and load up on chicken burritos and chips and salsa, this was a little better than the average.
I’d been telling myself for months to stop back by the Smyrna store, because the sluggish halt to the franchise group’s expansion plans sounded like it would make a good story. I put it off too long; even after the Marietta “Crazy Chicken” had shuttered and become an IHOP, I just kept saying that I’d get around to Smyrna eventually, and never did. We’ll just have to see them on the west coast, if we ever make it out that way.
In the meantime, I continue to wait impatiently for that long-promised Del Taco to finally open in Snellville. The obituary linked above suggests that this location might finally open in February 2012. I’m starting to get impatient.
Blue Water Cafe and Barberitos, St. Simons Island GA
Here’s a first for our blog. Today, I’m writing about a restaurant where I did not get to eat. Before anybody harrumphs about any lack of journalistic integrity, however, it is a place where I have eaten previously. About four months before we started the blog, Marie’s father took us to dinner at Blue Water, a nice casual American restaurant on Mallery Street in the last building on the right as you’re approaching the Saint Simons Pier. On that occasion, I had the Mardi Gras pasta and really enjoyed it. Continue reading “Blue Water Cafe and Barberitos, St. Simons Island GA”
Sausalito West Coast Grill, Atlanta GA
I felt a little rotten about David. The last time we went out to eat with him, he wasn’t all that enthusiastic about going to Johnny’s Bar-B-Que and Steaks, and while I enjoyed my meal and was curious and excited about this very localized style of barbecue, I couldn’t help but notice that he only said that his steak was pretty good.
Now, some of you dear readers have commented about what has been perceived as my tendency towards damning with faint praise. Naturally, of course, body language is invisible in blog posts, and you can’t hear my often excited voice gushing with praise. I have a tendency, it’s been noted, towards hyperbole. I try to temper that a little, but basically, when I say that something is pretty good, you can usually read that as though italicized and emphasized, with a silent “damn” in the middle. Unfortunately, when David says that something is pretty good, he might well be saying it with all the enthusiasm of Eeyore offering thanks to Pooh for reattaching his tail. His manners are impeccable, but I’ve known him for a decade. He didn’t want to eat here, and he wasn’t pleased by his supper. Clearly, I needed to make this up to him.
So when we next had a free day in town, I suggested to Marie that I make myself scarce and make that meal at Johnny’s up to David. I didn’t know where we’d go or what we’d eat, but wherever he wanted to go was absolutely fine by me. Happily, David’s taste is just about as impeccable as his manners, and I was comfortably assured that I’d enjoy wherever we went, and get a nice experience to share with you all.
We went to Sausalito West Coast Grill, which is in midtown on Peachtree near 17th Street, sort of catty-cornered from the High Museum of Art. I’m reasonably sure that once upon a time, there was an ice cream place in this space, and on the side of the building, there was a delightful neon sign for it. Next door to Sausalito, there’s a Subway. How anybody can eat at the Subway with Sausalito sitting right next to it and still look at themselves in the mirror is a mystery to me.
The menu here is pretty dense, ranging from the usual Cali-Mex burritos, tacos and nachos to dishes from Chile, which is where the owner was born. He greeted David like he was his oldest and closest pal. David works just up the road and has lunch here two or three times a month. Noticing how I was lost in the menu, the owner asked whether I like chicken. I said that I certainly do, and he sliced a little taste, about the size of your index finger, and grilled it quickly, offering it to me with a toothpick and a tortilla chip. It was really wonderful, seasoned just perfectly and cooked just right. A taco filled with this meat would indeed be something else.
However, I did not get to try that. I enjoyed something even better. David insisted, quite rightly, that I order a sandwich called the Sausalito Lomito. This is sliced, marinated pork sirloin served on a bun with lettuce, tomato, guacamole and a really good chipotle mayo. Oh, heaven, was it ever good! It comes with a heaping pile of yellow rice and black beans and all the chips-n-red sauce that you care to eat and a small salad. I had the blackberry habanero dressing, which you simply must try. Four alarm and fruity, how nice!
The prices here are admittedly on the high side for this style of food, but budgeting eaters – as I often am – can just get a taco or two for two bucks and change each. This is one of those occasions where the price tag is definitely worth it, though, because they do such a good job with their grilled meat. Heck, if I worked at the High, I’d be over here all the time. The design is interesting. It looks extremely corporate, thanks to signage and table wraps paid for by Coca-Cola. I think this must be the modern, intown equivalent of the old white grocery store signs that you sometimes still see around the south, with little red “Coke” squares on either side.
David certainly picks good places to eat. I’ll give him a holler next time I have a free afternoon and let him pick again. You should probably get to know him and let him recommend some places for you, too.
Marie, Let's Eat! 