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” →

Red Burrito, Woodstock GA

About a week and a half ago, I got so aggravated with this girl that I used to date that I have to tell you about it. Now, you might think that “girls that Grant used to date” would not necessarily be on top of the list of people whom I would want to stop and visit with my newborn baby on the way home from the hospital, and normally, you would be right. However, I’ve stayed friendly with Jennifer for years, even if we are not as close as we once were, and she’s known Marie since before Marie and I began dating. Jennifer manages a comic book store in Woodstock, which is not at all bad as far as Diamond catalog stores go. It is downright terrific for anybody interested in buying modern comic books and superhero tchotchkes, although sadly lacking in boxes full of embarrassing dot matrix Star Trek fanzines, untranslated Brazilian James Bond comics, indefineable weird Japanese things and stacks of 1960s British newspaper comics, and there’s not a single 1970s National Lampoon with since-unreprinted Gahan Wilson pages in the joint. That’s why I never visit. Screw Iron Man, I’m into the good stuff.

Well, since I wanted to show off the baby, and since Jennifer’s store was on the way home, and since Jennifer’s more than midway through her own pregnancy, I suggested to Marie that we swing by and see whether she was in. Marie, sleepy but still glowing, agreed that we should, and so we stopped by for a few minutes to say hello and brag about our youngun. Jennifer invited us to come by the next day for Free Comic Book Day, we waved goodbye, pulled back out onto Towne Lake Parkway, and I did a complete double-take because I thought I saw something quite unexpected. After we got the baby back home and settled, I went online and confirmed it. Yes, the Hardee’s people have opened a Red Burrito in Woodstock.

Red Burrito is the fast-food Mexican chain run by CKE, which is the parent corporation of Carl’s Jr. They bought Hardee’s in 1997 and seemed to shut down about a third of them, which was just about the closest thing to a mercy killing I’ve ever seen in the restaurant business. This is actually a point I’ve been meaning to come back to for ages; remind me to tell you about Chicken Express one day. Anyway, noticing the success of their rival Yum! Brands and their dual-branded Taco Bell / KFC / Long John Silver / A&W stores, CKE decided to make similar restaurants with double menus. On the far side of the Rockies, there are Carl’s Jr. stores dual-branded with Green Burrito, and on this side, there are Hardee’s dual-branded with Red Burrito. These have steadfastedly avoided the Atlanta area until about a month ago. The first two Red Burritos have finally opened in Lithia Springs and in Woodstock. There’s another one up the road outside of Rome.

So the next evening, the older children and I went back to the comic store for my son to get a free Sonic the Hedgehog book, and for me to express my aggravation. I could not believe that, knowing how I feel about small-market regional fast food, she would work one parking lot’s distance from this place and not tell me that it had opened. Jennifer, kindly, explained that she remembered well how I feel about regional, small market sodas, but had no idea that I cared about regional fast food chains. I suspect that she was drawing a polite veil of no-longer-caring-in-the-slightest about how, for years, I have gone on about White Castle and Whataburger and Jack in the Box.

Oh, all right, so I wasn’t really aggravated, but I get so few opportunities to aggravate other people by showing up at their place of business and yammering on about fast food chains when they’re exhausted and tired of working a big promotional day with hundreds of extra visitors these days. How could I resist?

So, aggravation duly caused, the children and I went up to finally try a Red Burrito. I first heard of them ages ago when, curious about some point or other, I looked up Hardee’s on Wikipedia and saw the reference. I’ve since seen a billboard for one on I-95 in northern Florida, and we drove past one in Asheville when we were last there, but my curiosity over a fast food taco wasn’t enough to pull me from our schedule in one of America’s best food cities.

And the result was, well, about what you’d expect. The burrito itself – I ordered chicken – was not bad, although the thin, light green sauce that the poor kids behind the counter claimed was guacamole was pretty laughable. The chips, rice and beans were salty and perfectly acceptable for this sort of food. It’s better than Taco Bell, whatever that’s worth. It’s multiple orders of magnitude better than that godawful Taco Bell in Canton.

However, these tacos here are just absolutely pathetic. I’ve never seen something so sad. They just drizzled a few crumbs of ground beef into the bottom of a shell, added six or seven shreds of lettuce and a baby’s handful of cheese and served it up with, literally, two fingers’ width of space remaining between the cheese and the top of the shell. I ordered two tacos and I very much doubt that I got as much filling as I would have in just one from Taco Bell. Now, whomever is in charge of quality control here needs to step in and do something about this. They hired a simply terrific high schooler to take our order, but whomever is in the back actually making the food needs to go build ships in bottles if he’s that obsessed with very small things.

My curiosity has been sated. The food here is pretty good. “Better than Taco Bell” isn’t much of a recommendation, especially when it’s still not even close to being on par with Del Taco. Still, it’s nice to enjoy something new, isn’t it?

Joe’s Mexicana Grill, Austell GA (CLOSED)

A couple of Saturdays back, I had one of those fluid days where everything kept changing based on traffic and other people’s plans. Marie had an excellent baby shower thrown for her by our friend Samantha, and some of our friends from Nashville came to attend. Later, David and I took our Nashville buddies out for a couple of hours shopping for records and for yarn, and while time didn’t afford us the chance to go enjoy a great dinner in Atlanta, we did, at least, stop by King of Pops at their usual location at North Avenue and North Highlands and have some awesome handcrafted snacks. Still no Arnold Palmer flavor for me – I’m optimistic that I’ll try it one of these days – but I can confirm that their orange basil is just about better than you could imagine.

Later in the evening, after our friends made their way back to Tennesee, David and I spent a little while trying to figure out what to eat around his place. We finally settled on Joe’s Mexicana Grill, which is a quite new place – it opened in March – on the East-West Connector in that same strip mall as the wonderful Miyako. A very good chicken place called Famous Yardbirds had briefly lived and died in the space now occupied by a package store. Joe’s itself seems, if memory holds, to be in the space where a Moe’s Southwestern Grill once was. This, in itself, was surprising. Despite the inescapable reality that you cannot spell “mediocre” without M-O-E, I didn’t think those darn places ever closed down.

Joe’s follows the same template as Moe’s and Willy’s and Hollie Guacamole! and the like. It’s assembly-line burritos, tacos and nachos, made with smiles on the other side of a sneeze guard. However, there are a pair of extras here that none of their competitors offer, which warrant commentary, even though I did not sample either. First, there’s the surprising and notable choice of artichoke as a primary ingredient. Somehow or another, I just plain misread this on the menu, said to myself that I’d rather have spicy chicken than what I thought was avocado, and when I left, stuffed from an enormous burrito bowl, I was kicking myself for not trying an artichoke taco. Further investigation is required here.

The other thing they have is a really impressive dessert counter. Their competitors work under the assumption that all anybody ever wants for dessert after a burrito is a chocolate chip cookie. Joe’s suggests that you might like a big slice of cheesecake or something exquisitely decadent. Again, I was too stuffed from a burrito bowl and some chips to even have a taco, much less a slab of chocolate cake this large, but it sure did do my eyes a favor to look at what was on offer.

Joe’s might not be destination dining, and its unfortunate interior design doesn’t really lend itself to quiet evenings out. With very high ceilings and piping and ventilation above, the sound is terrible and loud here. One television was on Nickelodeon and one was on Faux News and we couldn’t make out a word from either. Sounds just turn into howling noise here; TVs should be shut off and lower ceiling tiles installed. But for its neighborhood, it’s a pretty good addition, and the quality of the food is infinitely preferable to Moe’s.

And for those of you who noted with sadness my inability to land an Arnold Palmer-flavored pop earlier in the afternoon, you can breathe a sigh of relief that I mixed myself one to drink with my burrito. It probably wasn’t as good as a frozen popsicle on a nice spring afternoon, but it was still pretty good.

(Update 7/12/12: Unfortunately, Joe’s closed earlier this month. I never did try one of those artichoke tacos…!)

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.

Taco Cabana, Atlanta GA (CLOSED)

You can’t miss this restaurant at the intersection of Piedmont and Monroe. It’s the place that looks like the two fellows from Miami Vice are about to beat up on the guy bringing in all the cocaine in his DeLorean. Taco Cabana has always been this garish, and that’s part of why they spent about six years in court defending their look.

In the late eighties and early nineties, this spot was occupied by a nearly-identical restaurant called Two Pesos. This was the only Atlanta location of a chain that had started in Houston in 1985. I ate here several times when I was in high school and when I came home during my first year of college. In fact, my very first car – and here’s an odd memory – died for good one night after a meal here. It was a wonderful, gigantic 1979 Oldsmobile Delta 88 and that great beauty would have driven me to Europe and back, had I asked. I was having car trouble all day, and fretted with two friends at Two Pesos what I would do if it couldn’t be repaired. Well, it couldn’t. It cranked twice more, once when I left the restaurant after a horrible, grinding shriek of metal, and once, for the final time, after it conked out again at a traffic light down the road. So Two Pesos was my last meal with that Oldsmobile.

What I didn’t know then was that Two Pesos was already years into a losing battle defending their business. Two Pesos had been started by some businessmen, allied with a former manager of one of San Antonio’s Taco Cabana stores, in 1985. Within a couple of years, Two Pesos had blanketed Texas with locations, and the much slower-growing Taco Cabana found themselves facing competition from a lookalike copycat which had established themselves in cities like Houston and Dallas, flinging locations as far afield as Colorado and Georgia to establish themselves ahead of where Taco Cabana could go.

So Taco Cabana sued Two Pesos for ripping off their look, feel, design, store layout and menu to such a degree that customers were left confused as to which came first. The Supreme Court eventually weighed in Taco Cabana’s favor. Left with a lower court order to completely reconstruct every one of their existing stores, Two Pesos elected instead to sell out to Taco Cabana. The Atlanta store was remade and remodeled into a Taco Cabana over the course of about an afternoon.

I’m not sure why I never popped back by the business, whatever its name, after that fateful evening when my car cranked for the last time. I remember they always had decent food at great prices, but the road just never took me by again. Well, not when I was ready for a meal there, anyway. Years and years passed and I read about the slugfest that the two restaurants had in court and figured that I should stop by again. It might make a readable story, if nothing else. Or something weird might happen.

Now, one thing that I didn’t like about my trip to Taco Cabana is that they don’t have chips, although they offer them. For ninety-nine cents, you get a pair of flour tortillas that you can rip into small pieces and eat with their tasty salsas. Somebody should tell that guy behind the register that those aren’t chips. So I had two tortillas along with a platter of two chicken tacos, rice and beans. I asked for one hard shell and one soft in order to sample some different flavors, and thought that chicken was very good for this sort of food. There was nothing very unusual or weird in my meal, but it was a step or two up from what you’d get at a similar place, and priced right. I liked the layout and the big patio space, which is probably quite fun and relaxing in warmer weather.

So then I went to my car and it would not start. I turned the key and nothing happened. The whole electrical system was not responding.

I know this must be impossible to believe, but twenty-one years after my Oldsmobile sputtered and died after I had a meal in this building, I came here for the first time and the hotdamned restaurant killed my Camry. You want to tell me the odds of that?

Turned out I had one of those very rare car problems that I can actually solve. One of the battery terminals had a loose connection. I avoided a freakout, shook my head in disbelief, popped the hood, jiggled it, bit my lip, tried again, thanked God and drove, nerves wracked, to my brother, who spent a few minutes replacing bits and tightening things and making sure I was roadworthy again.

I figure Taco Cabana is surely the safest restaurant in the city now. My car’s had problems there twice. It’s like Garp buying that house in John Irving’s novel after an airplane crashes into it. There’s just no way in the universe I could possibly have car problems there three times, right?

Bubba Garcia’s Mexican Cantina and Zuzu’s, Saint Simons Island GA

I was just saying last month that the presence of Jack Davis artwork is a sure sign of a restaurant’s quality, and here, for the third time this year, is a place with his wonderful and distinctive art emblazoned for all the world to see. Never mind the Zagat sticker in the window, does a place get a thumbs up from one of Mad Magazine’s Usual Gang of Idiots, that’s what I’d like to know. Bubba Garcia’s, a small cantina owned by the same group on Saint Simons Island behind the popular Gnat’s Landing, goes one better than even the good places this year with caricatures of the owners – Old Brick Pit and Mayflower Restaurant – by having the business’s mascot be a signed Jack Davis creation. Continue reading “Bubba Garcia’s Mexican Cantina and Zuzu’s, Saint Simons Island GA” →

Del Taco, Spartanburg SC (CLOSED)

Del Taco left the Atlanta market eight years ago and – no kidding – I have been missing it ever since. I have explained that I allow myself one locally-available fast food weakness, Krystal. If Del Taco were to move back into Atlanta, I’d enjoy one last styrofoam container of chili cheese fries eaten with a red plastic fork and sadly wave goodbye to Krystal, because I love Del Taco and that would be that. So when I learned that there was one in Spartanburg, my carefully-crafted seven-meal trip swelled to eight. There was just no way I was going to drive past a Del Taco without stopping. Man, was it ever good. Often times, almost all the time, the memory cheats on you, but Del Taco is, somehow, as good as I remember it. Continue reading “Del Taco, Spartanburg SC (CLOSED)” →