Papa’s & Beer, Asheville NC

Not every restaurant in Asheville is a farm-to-table, low-footprint indie, although quite a few of the places in the city’s wonderful downtown are. As you get away from the downtown area and into the sprawl, you’ll find the fern bars and the chains, although there are actually a couple of decent places to eat alongside the Olive Gardens and Red Lobsters on Tunnel Road. One of these had been Fiddlin Pig Bluegrass and Blues, which had shared a parking lot with an Outback Steakhouse or something. Marie and I had eaten here on our honeymoon and we were looking forward to a return visit, but were disappointed to find that the business had closed quite some time earlier and nobody had yet updated Urbanspoon with the news. Then again, it was on Tunnel Road, and most restaurant hobbyists are not interested in what happens on Tunnel Road. Continue reading “Papa’s & Beer, Asheville NC” →

Smokejack Blues & Barbecue, Alpharetta GA

I have a little goal here to visit and report upon one hundred barbecue restaurants before the end of 2011. I’m not sure whether we will make it – we’re almost three-quarters there – but any opportunity to grab one for the blog is one that we’ll try to take. Two Saturdays ago, I looked over the map and decided that we hadn’t trucked up GA-400 in a while, and I was curious what new restaurant developments could be seen on Windward Parkway. Alpharetta is the home of Smokejack Blues & Barbecue, a business seven years old which has expanded to a second location a little further north in the town of Cumming. Smokejack’s not getting quite all the press and attention among barbecue restaurants in that area right now – there’s a place called ‘Cue that everybody’s talking about – but I remembered having a pretty good, albeit pricy, meal there a few years ago.

When I worked in Alpharetta, there was one perk that certainly beat any that I have at my current job. To celebrate birthdays, our department would take all the staff out to eat once a month. She wasn’t with the company for really long, but I did have the pleasure of working with a girl named Kristi who was a completely fun trip, just overflowing with silliness, light, Southern slang and malapropisms. She chose Smokejack for her birthday and I remembered enjoying it greatly, even if the restaurant’s prices kept it out of my regular rotation of places to visit. Marie and I had lunch here for just under $30. That’s a heck of a lot to pay for barbecue for two, but in their defense, the restaurant tells guests up front that theirs is less a traditional BBQ place and more an upscale eatery that focuses on smoked meat.

Marie and I hoped to have our daughter and our good friend Samantha join us for lunch, but each of them asked for rain checks in the end, not feeling well. So Marie and I made it a quasi-date day, with the baby bundled in the back seat and spent a few hours enjoying each other’s company and eating pretty well.

Smokejack, located in Alpharetta’s small, but very cute, downtown, offers the usual assortment of pulled pork or chicken dishes. Most of them apparently are sauced just before they send them out of the kitchen, but they’ll serve them dry if you ask. I noted that they have a chicken sandwich with white, north Alabama-style sauce, and while normally I might be expected to give that a try, I was really in the mood for another order of burnt edges.

I had these for the first time a couple of weeks previously at Woodstock’s Bub-Ba-Q and was curious to try another restaurant’s take. I had the sauce, a delicious black, sticky-sweet Kansas City-styled goo, on the side. The beef was so good that no sauce was necessary, and I strongly advise anybody curious to order this dry. I had the burnt edges with baked beans, which were pretty ordinary, and a very tasty corn pudding that Marie and I shared. She ordered chicken thighs from the appetizer menu. These came with an orange habanero glaze and were served on a bed of pretty good slaw. She also had a side of wood-roasted vegetables that she mostly enjoyed. Brunswick stew is available, but, sadly, with a small additional charge as it is not technically a “side,” but rather a “soup.”

A little driving around town didn’t convince me that I was missing very much, foodwise, by leaving my job in Alpharetta. We got back on GA-400 and made one more stop in the area, though. Two days previously, I had visited one of the wonderful Taco Stands in Athens. They had opened a store in Alpharetta several months earlier. I had stopped in and was pretty disappointed, but chalked it up to opening week catastrophe. I was curious, now that they’ve hopefully got their act together, how they compare to one of the originals.

The honest answer is that they compare poorly, but are still pretty good. It’s a very different sort of restaurant to the Taco Stands of Athens, or even to the since-closed Buckhead watering hole. It tries to be a lot – upscale and family-friendly, even offering X-Box games for children – but it’s all so unnecessary. The prices are disagreeably higher than the originals. Seriously, a taco, $1.39 at Barnett Shoals, runs you $1.99 here. If I’m wanting Taco Stand, I don’t need an airlock and hostess station, I don’t need my tacos served in a little IKEA basket, and I don’t want to tip a server. I want my name called and I want my tacos on a tray.

That said…

There are certain realities of eating that trump fancy-shmancy considerations. Admittedly, the prime ingredient in the Taco Stand is nostalgia, but you can’t deny the awesomeness of the chicken enchilada and its wonderful dark sauce. On the other hand, while the tacos are good, they are nevertheless different, and in fact, inferior, to the tacos in Athens. They’re served on grilled flour shells rather than hard corn, and the beef is markedly different. The sauce tasted the same to me.

As much as I like the food, I really just don’t feel like the Taco Stand transfers well to this type of environment. I’ll forgive a lot for a good chicken enchilada like this, but in much the same way that a Burger King Whopper doesn’t gain anything from being served on a nice white plate, remaining, at it’s core, fast food, this “upscale” store doesn’t make the scruffy, tasty, wonderful food any better. It just makes it more expensive.

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” →

Pork Tamales from Zocalo

Last month, I shared how our trip to Mississippi found me looking, unsuccessfully, for tamales in the wrong part of the state. The tamales that I did find, at Petty’s BBQ in Starkville, were not at all like what I was expecting. Obviously, regional and family recipes are going to vary, and that’s a great thing, but I was sort of hoping for something in particular – thick, starchy cornmeal boiled in a corn husk – and did not get it. I resolved that at some point, I’d make sure that the road took me back to the Mississippi Delta and I could hunt around for other takes on the dish.

So I was quite surprised when, just a few weeks later, I found homemade tamales for sale at the Marietta Square Farmers Market. They’ve actually been right under my nose for ages at the Zocalo stand. I’m such a chump. I’ve been shopping at the farmer’s market with Marie for all this time and occasionally snuck a few samples of chips-n-salsa and it never even occurred to me to look twice at what these good folks offer. They sell tamales, prepared the night before, in bags of a half-dozen for $15.

Zocalo opened its first restaurant in 1995. I’ve never visited, but evidently, I should. It appears to be one of the first Mexican restaurants in Atlanta to make the strong claim of being traditional. For many years, they didn’t even serve chips-n-salsa, as that is an American tradition. The restaurant slowly grew from its location on 10th Street into two other stores. Sadly, the recession hit it pretty hard and the stores in Decatur and Grant Park shuttered. The owners, brothers Marco and Luis Martinez, needed a new revenue stream, and fast. They’d already capitulated on the chips-n-salsa issue, and began looking into placing a small variety of pre-packaged salsas in grocery stores.

I should digress here, especially since I’ve mentioned Mexican-style places in this blog several times this month, and explain that while I do feel strongly about traditions being upheld and want to applaud restaurants that do it the original, right way, I personally used to really, really love the pleasure of absolutely gorging myself stupid on chips-n-salsa. Times and tastes change, and red salsas no longer hold the attraction that they once did. I still keep a bag of Golden Flake brand Maizetos in the pantry, and usually eat them with Zapatas brand medium green salsa verde. The typical red ketchupy salsa usually found on tables at all the El-This-Los-That places around Atlanta, well, that’s not what I’m looking to eat anymore. Michael, a buddy of mine in California, once explained, “that stuff’s not salsa, it’s Marinara sauce.” I still sample with a smile, but the days of keeping the server at hard work constantly refreshing me are long, long gone.

So anyway, the fellows at Zocalo decided to try out a line of salsas at the farmers market on Peachtree Road. They found they were definitely onto a winner, but perhaps not necessarily one that can be packaged and shipped away quite just yet. Instead, they keep their kitchens open all night from Friday to Saturday morning, making tamales and, I believe, seven fresh varieties of salsa, and then send sales teams to something like thirty different farmers markets in Georgia, Florida and in Chattanooga selling salsa that’s just a few hours old. This has proved to be a really good idea. According to a profile in Atlanta Magazine in March, they sold 54,000 units last year and are hoping to hit 70,000 in 2011.

After all this discussion, I hope I’m not hitting too sour a note when I say that the tamales were really just okay. We enjoyed some for supper the night that we bought them, along with some astonishingly good brandywine tomatoes and guacamole that Marie made from avocados that she bought that morning. We couldn’t quite get the tamales to heat evenly through, although the pork, spiced with adobo salsa, really was quite tasty.

Clearly, what is still needed is a trip to the Delta and a tamale straight from a boiler, with none of this business of packing in ice and reheating. But that’s okay; I am certainly grateful of Zocalo giving me the chance to try the real thing, and I made sure they knew of my appreciation. The following week, I asked Marie to bring me home a container of their amazing arbol salsa to eat at home with Maizetos. It’s the least I could do.

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.

Taco Roc, Chattanooga TN

I’ve mentioned before that the main draw that persuades some of my local friends to visit Chattanooga with me is McKay, a frankly remarkable used bookstore that deals in the consumption of mass quantities of books, DVDs and CDs. There are three stores in Tennessee and the scale of this place is just eye-popping. It is always crowded and books are constantly moving. They made the decision years ago to treat the guests coming to sell or trade books as suppliers and not act like customers are bringing them a burden by asking them to look through a box. You know that heavy sigh you almost always get before the guy at the used record store tells you that they probably won’t be able to sell most of what you brought in, but they’ll take about a third of it for pennies in store credit? That doesn’t happen at McKay. McKay’s not doing you a favor by taking some of this off your hands; you are doing them a favor by selling them your books, and the staff acts like it. No, they don’t take everything, but they take a darn good chunk of it and give you a fair price. Cash, too. No wonder we keep seeing Cobb and Fulton license plates in their parking lot. McKay is undercutting the bejezus out of every similar store in Atlanta. Continue reading “Taco Roc, Chattanooga TN” →

Sr. Sol, Athens GA

Two weeks after he was born, Marie and I took a trip to Athens to show off the baby. A month later, we made a somewhat more low-key trip to just visit a new-to-me restaurant and swing by the place where Marie and I used to work to see some old co-workers and friends. She and I did not start dating until 2006, but we first met around 1995 or so. I left that job in the spring of 2000 and she eight years later. Naturally, darn near all the people that I knew have moved on in the last eleven years since I was there, but I did get to speak with four people from all that time ago. Continue reading “Sr. Sol, Athens GA” →