Swallow at the Hollow, Roswell GA

I feel that we need to ramp up the barbecue reviews here over the next few weeks if we’re going to hit my goal of one hundred barbecue restaurants before the end of the year. We’re about twenty shy with three months to go, and I think it’s doable. Of course, we also have to get back on a reasonable schedule without these increasingly ridiculous month-long lags between eating and posting a blog chapter.

I also feel that, doing that, we’re going to run into some more restaurants where I’m going to leave unsatisfied. Now, negative reviews run counter to this blog’s theme, I think, and we have certainly scrapped several planned chapters to our story when a restaurant failed to meet our expectations, but every once in a while, we run into a place that does some things quite well, but the overall experience is really lacking, to the point that I find it more frustrating than disappointing. So both this week, and next, I feel that I should share a story of why a restaurant let me down.

With that in mind, it was indeed a month ago that Samantha joined us for a drive over to Roswell to revisit Swallow at the Hollow, a place I have not been in a really long time. I recall thinking that it was not bad, but this was a long time back. I was reminded of it when a new blogger, The Georgia Barbecue Hunt, stopped by Swallow at the Hollow at the beginning of August. A couple of days later, the indefatigable Food Near Snellville, whom you all really should be reading, left a cautionary note on his own blog that the Swallow’s many fans have a tendency to defend their favorite restaurant with some vigor, especially when the subject of that restaurant’s ribs, and whether they are smoked or broiled, comes up.

Just as well none of our group had any ribs, then. I sure would hate to say anything controversial. On a related note, this restaurant serves the single worst barbecue sauce of any I have ever tried, anywhere, in thirteen years of yammering about barbecue restaurants on the internet.

I’ll get the good stuff out of the way, because some facets of our meal were really quite good. The sides were all completely delicious. Best of all were the collard greens, which might well put anybody else’s in the city to shame, but the baked three beans were really tasty, and I was quite taken with the Brunswick stew, which was thick and orange and tasted equally of corn and tomato. I’ve been told that some of their specials are cooked up in conjunction with Greenwood’s, the restaurant across the street, or that perhaps they share some recipes? They boast that almost everything here is fresh and homemade, the exception being the fries, which are frozen. I’ve taken to asking about that before I order these days. I figure that I’ve had enough Sysco fries – I said the S word! – in my life; I love fries, but I’d rather try what the restaurant can make themselves. Here, the fried green tomatoes are better than most, if perhaps a little thicker and softer than I’ve usually had them. As far as vegetables and stew, this place is a winner.

The first disappointment, and it was a medium-sized one, came with the music. Most evenings, this place features live sets from up-and-coming country music stars, apparently in collaboration with Nashville’s popular Bluebird Cafe. It’s a terrific venue for them; the building is a lovably unphotogenic big shack with a tin roof and wooden walls lined with autographed glossies. As we came for lunch, I knew that we’d miss the live music, but I was still expecting country to be played above us, and not “threefer” sets by disagreeable dinosaurs like Journey and Aerosmith from some Sirius classic rawk radio station. On the other hand, we learned that my daughter, thanks to Glee, knows all of these songs despite never actually listening to classic rawk radio.

The chopped pork was, at best, decent. I have had worse. It was not at all smoky, but it was moist and not offensive. The problem, if I may be bold, is that when pork lacks a good, smoky punch, then a good sauce that complements it well can bring it back to life and make an average meal memorable. I don’t know that I would enjoy the chopped pork at Speedi-Pig in Fayetteville dry at all; it’s the addition of that good brown sauce that gives it life.

All of the sauces at the Swallow disappointed me. There are three, and the vinegar, which splashes red all over the pink meat, was the best of them, but please don’t consider that a compliment. The mustard might not have been bad on other meat, but it didn’t go well with this. The thick brown sweet sauce would go well over ice cream. It is criminally unsuited for this, or indeed any meat. The best thing that I can say about it is that it seems to have permanently cured my daughter of her infernal habit of drowning her Brunswick stew with sauce. Like the bull-in-a-China-shop twelve year-old she is, she just stampeded into squeezing about an ounce into her bowl without sampling either, not realizing that this stuff has more business in a milkshake than in stew, and retched and choked down her bowl in order to get some dessert.

Whatever their failings with the meat and sauce, the Swallow is notable for their sides, and also their desserts. My daughter and Samantha each had this decadent chocolate banana pudding, and Marie enjoyed a slice of blackberry pie. I tasted each and can confirm that they were amazing.

This brings us to the final disappointment: the check. The pie was more expensive than the slices we had the previous night at Buckhead’s Pie Shop. A chopped pork plate here costs a shocking $13.50 before tax and tip, an amazingly high price for such mediocre meat. I understand that Roswell might be thought a little pricier of a place to eat than Summerville, but that is, literally, more than twice the price for the same amount of better food at a superior barbecue restaurant, Armstrong’s, in that city. A few weeks later, I also had a massively superior plate of barbecue at Big Al’s BBQ Pit in Statham for, again, less than half the cost of this. Put another way, even factoring in the Buckhead pay lot, we spent less money ITP the previous night going to both Smashburger and Pie Shop than we did with a single lunchtime trip to Roswell, where less food was ordered.

I was genuinely pleased with the sides and the dessert. Collards this good should be tracked down, and we could be here all day listing places with poorer fried green tomatoes. As a destination for southern vegetables, meals at the Swallow at the Hollow should be encouraged. I could happily return and try a three-veggie plate here one evening listening to live country if the opportunity arises.

But this barbecue, I certainly won’t order again. Marie took a good portion of hers home to reheat for lunch. She intended to try it with some of the Dreamland sauce that we keep in the fridge for just such an occasion. It was still mediocre and overpriced, as Samantha judged it, but Dreamland sauce at least made it tolerable.

Other blog posts about Swallow at the Hollow:

My BBQ Blog (Dec. 12 2008)
Buster’s Blogs (July 24 2009)
Food Near Snellville (Oct. 5 2009)
3rd Degree Berns Barbecue Sabbatical (Feb. 16 2010)
Bacon Wrapped Rob (Jan. 30 2011)
The Georgia Barbecue Hunt (Aug. 8 2011)

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.

The Chocolaterie, Cumming GA

Boy, howdy, is it ever a good thing we don’t live very close to this place. We don’t have an awful lot of money at the best of times and have a baby on the way. This place could very, very easily blow one heck of a hole in a fellow’s wallet. Hoo, boy.

So a couple of Sundays ago, Marie and I celebrated her birthday with an afternoon together. We had lunch at Sam’s and then drove north through Roswell and Crabapple and up Georgia-372, which is called Birmingham Highway for some reason. This is a very pretty drive, past million dollar homes and gorgeous trees and into Cherokee County. Eventually, this put us sort of east of Ball Ground, near a retirement community called Big Canoe, and that sent us into the southwest corner of Forsyth County and our destination, Poole’s Mill Bridge Park.

Marie and I both love covered bridges and waterfalls, and this has both. Well, it’s more of a cascade than a waterfall, I suppose. The bridge is no longer open to vehicles, but visitors can walk through it, and play in the shallow river as it hits the rapids. It’s a quiet and secluded spot, but popular enough to bring several couples, dog walkers and families. We stayed for quite some time, and left as a birthday party was arriving in the covered pavilion.

Around 2:30, we continued east, crossed Georgia-400 and wound our way behind an enormous, upscale development off exit 13. I’d been here three or four times when I worked in Alpharetta and we celebrated co-worker’s birthdays at either Ted’s Montana Grill or Red Robin. There’s a movie theatre and a Barnes & Noble here and, a few doors down from a Stride Rite shoe store, a place that sells some of the most decadent chocolates in the city.

The Chocolaterie’s specialty is truffles, and they don’t scrimp on these. Priced at between $1.75 and $2.50 apiece, guests are not going to gorge themselves here, but they are going to get incredibly high quality with every bite. We selected a half dozen from the forty or fifty available – one for me and five for Marie – and I’ve never tasted anything like them. I made my key lime truffle last for several very small nibbles, not willing for the experience to end. And I don’t have that much of a sweet tooth. I thought Marie was going to black out and fall over.

The shop is filled with other imported treats and snacks, and they also do fudge and other drool-worthy things. For guests looking for something a little cooler, there are little single-servings of Edy’s, Ben & Jerry’s and Itti-Bitz, priced right at just a dollar or a buck-fifty each.

Perhaps the most exciting thing in their case was one that I decided to save for later. They do a small number of really spicy truffles, too. I am incredibly curious about the ghost pepper one. It’s decorated to look like a little white-sheeted kiddie haunted house ghost. Or maybe I’ll work my way up the spicy truffles until I get to that one. Marie will definitely want to return more than once; I expect I’ll have many chances.

Other blog posts about the Chocolaterie:

Atlanta Food Critic (Feb. 28 2011)
Roots in Alpharetta (Sep. 16 2011)

K Cafe, Alpharetta GA (CLOSED)

A few years ago, when I was a cubicle dweller in Alpharetta, I went out to lunch almost every day at one of the approximately seventeen thousand restaurants along Windward Parkway. Now, many people who enjoy talking and writing about food don’t really pay attention to this corridor, as you will find very few independently-owned restaurants, or examples of farm-to-table or sustainability or the latest foodie trends, or even anything with a very local flavor. This should not be surprising, because this is a lunchtime corridor for office workers like I was at the time. Area residents simply don’t come back to this strip for dinner time, meaning restaurants that want to try out here have to budget pretty closely and cross fingers for a lunch rush or die. The turnover in this area is absolutely brutal. I worked here for a little less than three years, and I bet the restaurant turnover was close to 20%.

Most of these are chains, of course, but what I have found incredibly interesting are the number of out-of-town chains that experiment with a store here first before trying elsewhere in the city. Some of these may be franchisees hoping to build into the Atlanta market or some might be company-owned and considering a footprint in Atlanta. There have been a couple of successes; I believe that the first Five Guys and Lenny’s Sub Shops in this region were on Windward. Z Pizza is still hanging on, with one of its two Atlanta locations here, and Tacone Flavor Grill, from California, has had its only Atlanta store here for about five years*. There have been several more fascinating failures. Apple Spice Junction, Taxi’s Hamburgers, Tin Star and Logan Farms are all out-of-towners who have tried to set up shop here on this stretch of road and bit the dust. If, like me, you are intrigued by regional chains, then there was usually something of interest on Windward to catch your eye. At least there was in 2006-2009, anyway.

Windward can’t even keep a barbecue place open. I was not surprised that the very popular Pig n’ Chik – not popular with me, mind you, but it has plenty of fans – closed its Windward store recently, as they might have opened in the single worst location in the history of real estate. Big D’s Barbecue, from up in Dawsonville, only had a location here for about eight months. Even One Star Ranch, at one time a baseball’s throw south of Windward on Highway 9, shuttered some weeks ago.

I had been intending for ages to see what was going on up at exit 11, but never got around to it. I did myself a huge disservice in not heading back that way, because the very best restaurant on Windward Parkway, the locally-owned Red Hen, closed in December. Now this place really was special, and they cooked up a really amazing hamburger, easily one of the best in the region. When I heard about that, I followed a link or two to the notice about the closure on a blog called Roots in Alpharetta. I enjoyed this blogger’s writing and continued to see what he had to say about the town where I used to work. There, I found something quite remarkable.

You know Krystal, right? The only local fast food place that I’ll eat, and don’t you judge me, right? Since October, they have been quietly, and without promotion, hype or commentary, testing a new “fast casual concept” on Windward Parkway, in the strip once occupied by a Carvel ice cream store. It is called K Cafe, and I just had to get back to my old stomping grounds and try this place.

I popped in on Thursday just after the lunch rush, and had a surprisingly tasty burger, but the most impressive things here were the service and the ketchup, which I am still loving and tasting. It might not last beyond the prototype stage, but the restaurant opened with an incredibly neat concept: ketchup of the month. Apart from your basic, “classic” ketchup, if you will, K Cafe is testing a rotation of different flavors to go along with it. This time out, it’s a chipotle ketchup which is just amazing, and goes very well with the fries. These, incidentally, proved to be the only minor disappointment of the meal. Basic cookie-cutter shoestring fries, these were not at all like the wonderfully chewy and potato-heavy fries you get at a Krystal. That chipotle ketchup would taste even better with those.

The service was first-rate. The girl at the register asked whether it was my first visit and showed off some of the sample foods prepared and resting in a refrigerated display case along with the desserts. K Cafe is not too different from a Panera or Rising Roll, just with burgers as well. They do a variety of sandwiches and salads, all of which have Moe’s-like silly names. She recommended their chicken salad, but I just wanted their basic burger. While they do serve traditional Krystals here if you want them, the patties on their proper burgers here are somewhat thicker, you’ll be glad to hear, and come fully dressed – with diced tomatoes, oddly – on ciabatta bread.

The other staffers who came by, including a manager who introduced himself, were similarly attentive and good-natured. I think that everybody is aware that this place is under a corporate microscope and under pressure to do well. With that in mind, Windward might prove to be a reasonable location for a place with this kind of menu. It really feels like a “lunch place,” something for quick, simple, tasty and inexpensive meals. Most of the sandwiches and burgers, which come with a side, cost about six bucks, so it’s perfectly reasonable and perfectly tasty. Plus there’s the wonderful novelty factor of trying someplace corporate-but-unique. If the concept fails (see below), I can still tell my grandkids about it, just like some folk can talk about those long extinct Kentucky Roast Beef stores that the Colonel once attempted.

Now, some no-frills restaurants are able to make the transition from junky fast food to something a little better. Whether Krystal has managed it won’t be for me to say; some corporate synergy bipartisan executive board steering committee will figure that out, but I think that it’s a success. On the other side of the equation, there’s the Taco Stand. I heard that this favorite from Athens had opened a store in Alpharetta, returning to this market after their Buckhead store closed a couple of football seasons ago, probably in anticipation of how badly the Bulldogs would end up playing. So I looked it up and swung by after finishing up at K Cafe, intending to grab a couple of two buck tacos and some chips and salsa. Heh.

The Taco Stand’s new place is three exits south, off Mansell Road, where restaurants usually live a little longer. Around North Point Parkway and the Old Alabama Road Connector, there are lots of homes, apartments and malls and movie theaters to keep families interested in the evenings, and so the restaurant turnover between exits 8 and 9 does not appear to be quite as murderous as on exit 11. I smiled broadly as I spotted the Taco Stand’s classic Milledge Avenue location’s lettering and pulled in. There was a car parked out front with the engine running as I snapped a couple of pictures. The driver, a twentysomething girl, was already waiting in the airlock at the host station of the Taco Stand for somebody to notice her.

If you figured that things were going to go spectacularly wrong at the point that I used the words “airlock,” “host station” and “Taco Stand” in the same sentence, you figured right. That evening, I was telling my family about my trip over a wonderful supper of lemon pepper chicken and rice that Marie had prepared. My son had already told me that he wanted to go check out this new Taco Stand. I got to this point in the anecdote, and when the words “host station” passed my lips, Marie visibly winced and my son’s head instantly fell, his chin hitting his chest.

So anyway, this girl and I waited for almost two minutes before somebody popped his head in from the dining room and asked “Uhhh, two?” The girl replied “I just need a to-go menu.” The fellow said that he’d be right back.

The dining room, classy, spotless, and perhaps a quarter full, looked so spectacularly unlike a Taco Stand that I started looking around for that Mr. Spock with the beard. There was a second door, perhaps to an eighteen-and-up smoking section with a bar. “This must be the upscale Taco Stand,” I said to the girl, who said that this place definitely needed to get its customer service together. She gave it one more minute and left. I learned later that the store’s grand opening was actually a couple of days off, and that they were just doing a soft opening to work out the kinks. I wish these guys the best of luck – I love the Stand – but I gave them one more minute and left as well. Losing two guests to an inattentive host – that’s the sort of kink that needs working out. Just as soon as you figure out what in the name of Herschel Walker a Taco Stand is doing with a host station in the first place.

*(2/26/11) Tacone evidently closed about three weeks after I wrote up this entry.

(8/3/11) Sadly, Krystal seems to have ended this experiment, and closed this prototype store at the end of July. They scrubbed the concept’s website and Facebook page almost instantly, suggesting that this experiment was not successful. What a shame!

The Fickle Pickle, Roswell GA

If you’ve never taken my advice before, listen to me now: do not arrange to meet friends at The Fickle Pickle. You should definitely go, and you should absolutely plan to enjoy a delicious lunch in the company of your buddies, but seriously; this place has the dinkiest parking lot imaginable. It gets really busy on the weekends, at which point downtown Roswell’s lack of overflow parking impacts everybody’s happiness. Get everybody together at somebody’s house ahead of time, and carpool in as few vehicles as possible. You’ll do everybody a favor.

In many previous chapters in this story, I’ve shared reports of what I call menu envy, which is that particular condition of sitting down to what you thought was going to be a swell meal, only to find that somebody else at your table – or, too often in my case, everybody else at my table – has ordered something even tastier than what you got. I’m very happy to say that, for my birthday last week, just about everybody else at our table had envy over my fried green tomato sandwich. Even if they didn’t know they had that envy, or were perfectly satisfied with their own sandwiches, which I’m sure were terrific, they were eating something flatly inferior to my order. This sandwich… well, let me start by saying that the Blue Willow Inn out in Social Circle probably has better fried green tomatoes, but that would be it in the region. The tomatoes are amazing. Served up on fresh bread with a tomato jam, pepperjack cheese, greens, white onions and a thin smear of basil mayo, the kitchen is making magic. I haven’t had a better sandwich in a very, very long time. The only person at the table who was not envious of my sandwich was Kimberly, who also had the good sense and fortune to order one.

Everybody’s sandwiches were really wonderful, and they each come with a very good side. Marie was very happy with her tomato basil soup, and I was very taken with my chili. The real winner, though, apart from the sandwiches, is the top choice on their appetizer board. The fried pickles here are to die for. They’re simply out of this world, crunchy and juicy and served with a really wonderful remoulade sauce. Order accordingly: a full basket is enough for four, and you’ll certainly feel very guilty letting any of these go to waste.

While I can’t praise the food here enough, I also think the service is far better than the average. The owners have done themselves no favors by building in an old house the way that they have, and indeed my only dissatisfaction comes from how hugely inefficient a system they’ve developed. With such a popular restaurant drawing so many people into such a small space, there has to be a better way than putting names in for a table and then having your party go through a very slow cafeteria-style line to place orders and ring the table up all together. The result is confusion, lots of standing around and lots of blocked doorways. Having said that, the various servers seemed very much atop the chaos and were both very graciously accommodating for our group arriving in fits and starts throughout the hour and promptly reactive to additional orders being added to our table.

Yet I can’t help but think that if the service was that good with a flawed and inefficient system, the service would become floating-on-air perfect with a more sensible one. I am very tempted to return one weekday evening and try one of these highly-praised mac-n-cheese bowls which are only available at supper, and see how the service is during a slightly less busy time than Saturday at 12:30. I’ll certainly have some more fried pickles, too.

Alpha Soda, Alpharetta GA

Alpha Soda is the oldest surviving restaurant still doing business in the northern suburb of Alpharetta, and is celebrating its ninetieth birthday this year. That’s pretty amazing, and it’s a good place to eat, but I somehow wonder whether the place’s glory days are many years behind it, back before they moved to their current location and changed their format somewhat.

When it opened, it was what we’d call today an olde-fashioned soda counter and sandwich shop, although in 1920, such things were hip and modern. It has moved at least five times over the years. I heard that the original location on Main Street was later the site of another long-lived restaurant, the Dixie Diner, which closed in 2002 after several decades, but I wouldn’t swear to it. After all, the first I heard of Alpha Soda was that it wasn’t worth visiting, and that proved not to be true at all.

Well, I should have known better than to take the word of a teenager. Ten years ago, I was tutoring high school kids prepping for the SAT and considering moving to their community in north Fulton County. I once asked one of my students where to get something to eat and he replied “Anywhere but Alpha Soda” and went on to describe everything that the wrong-headed fellow didn’t like about the place. He was mistaken on every front; years later, I gave it a try, enjoyed it thoroughly, and longed to give that kid a kick in the hindquarters for costing me several decent meals here.

When Alpha Soda moved to their present location in 1995, the latest owners elected to spruce it up a bit and transform it into a somewhat upscale family restaurant, with an inspired interior design that evokes the fashionable Art Deco style of the 1920s. The menu apparently more than tripled in size, with several additions from the Greek-American school of dining that serves many of the region’s large family diners well. A meal here is quite similar to what you can receive at the famous Marietta Diner, only I find Alpha Soda much quieter and laid-back.

This past week, it was our friend Matt’s turn to pick some socializin’ activity for us to enjoy, and he suggested we get a small group together here, as it’s a little closer to his place in Gainesville than the rest of us in Cobb County. Illness and work prevented a very large crowd, but Kimberly came by to eat before heading back into Atlanta to teach a class at Oglethorpe, and Marie came straight up 400 from work, and my daughter and I made the fun overland trek across Post Oak Tritt Road.

Everybody seemed to enjoy their meals, although I was left with a little menu envy yet again. I had the pecan-encrusted tilapia, which was okay. The beets and the cucumber and tomato salad that I had as side dishes were more tasty, and the great big order of homemade potato chips sprinkled with Old Bay seasoning were even better. Matt had a terrific-looking London broil and Marie enjoyed an ugly-but-delicious meatloaf sandwich served with a very good, thick marinara sauce. Heck, even Kimberly’s big chicken caesar salad was better than my tilapia. Now what’s fair about that?

Fortunately, my comparatively disappointing meal was more than made up for by the dessert. We don’t often have a dessert when we go out, but, in deference to Alpha Soda’s fountain origins, I felt it appropriate to have some ice cream. They don’t mess around with these treats.

This was one heck of a good banana split. Marie and Ivy and I, combined, couldn’t quite finish it, but we enjoyed every second of the trying. It makes me wonder what the original, olde-timey 1920s version of Alpha Soda was like, and whether it wasn’t a more consistently fun and delightful experience.

Moksha Restaurant and Bar, Roswell GA (CLOSED)

“I found this amazing Indian restaurant,” Randy told me. I was skeptical. “They have an amazing lunch buffet,” he added. I was doubly so.

I have a tolerate-hate relationship with Indian food, because I’ve found so little of it that rises above a very low batting average. I think I like the idea of it more than the reality, at least locally. Here, quite a few Indian restaurants, more than most of them, go for the fine dining experience, and I almost never feel that the quality of the food warrants the price tag. Since I emphatically do not need to be served by tuxedoed waiters nor eat from fine china and fancy tablecloths, eventually I started to resent paying for it.

Now there was once a lovely little place in Smyrna which did it right: a no-frills presentation of extremely tasty food in styrofoam containers, and you could get out of there, extremely satisfied, for under seven bucks. I got to eat there only twice before I arrived once to see an “under new management” banner out front, fancy tablecloths masking the rickety and unbalanced tables, and a buffet. I don’t know that anything good had ever come from an Indian buffet in Atlanta prior to about a year ago. That was the first time I’ve ever chewed the manager of a restaurant out. I gave him an earful, telling him that raising the prices and making his restaurant exactly like the four restaurants that I drove past to get to his was amazingly stupid. I don’t know whether it was worth it or not, but I seem to recall they shut down within a year.

I’ve tried lots of places in Atlanta. It seems that what passes for Indian cuisine in this town is, regardless of the trimmings and the tablecloths, pretty similar to the El-This-Los-That faux-Mexican meals that we used to get everywhere before enough of a Hispanic population developed for the owners to stop worrying about courting the Anglos and focused on people who knew the food from back home. That’s a topic for another chapter, I think, but it was a very similar experience: the restaurant would be called “Calcutta” or “Bombay” and claim to serve “authentic north Indian cuisine,” and have the same menu and the same flavor as another restaurant twenty miles away called “Taj Mahal” or “Sitar” which claimed to serve “authentic eastern Indian cuisine.” The sole, lone exception was a place in Chamblee called Himalayas, which was a little higher than the average, and where I had rogan josh for the first time.

I’m not claiming that any of it’s really bad, but rather that I knew that my periodic cravings for sopping up a really hot vindaloo with fresh naan would be no different anywhere I went, much in the same way that I could indulge a really intense desire for chips, salsa, rice, beans and some kind of meat at any one of three hundred identikit Mexican places. Thank heaven I found Maizetos brand chips and Garden Fresh Gourmet salsa, otherwise I’d still be wasting money at some “El Sombrero” place once a week.

And the buffet. Don’t get me started. It wasn’t just that I know about Randy and his all-no-fool-would-ever-eat Chinese buffets; one right after another, for years, everything on every Indian buffet in Atlanta came from the same damn kitchen.

I give you this backstory to explain why it was, with a heavy heart and healthy skepticism, I agreed to accompany Randy to this buffet.

Holy bajole. This place is amazing.

Randy discovered Moksha because a buddy of his married into the owner’s family. That meant that Randy joined nine hundred and twenty people for a gigantic meal catered by them. He went to the restaurant, concluded that among Roswell’s many very good restaurants, this was a standout, and insisted that I join him.

Now I must say that the city of Roswell clearly does not care how amazing a treasure their city has. They have made finding this place a complete headache via an ongoing, ages-long road construction project that has worked its way up Old Roswell Road all the way back to its intersection with Warsaw and has left one lamebrained detour after another in its wake. Old Roswell has, in fact, been shifted away from the restaurant, which now sits quietly at the end of where the street used to be, hidden well away from traffic and any potential impulse eaters. Moksha is now a place you have to search out; you cannot find it by accident.

Despite the fact that its location cannot be good for business, it’s excellent for a quiet getaway. The restaurant is in an old farmhouse in the woods, with an event hall behind it. Randy remembers that the property used to belong to a fancy Southern cooking joint called Lickskillet, and it has a polite, isolated charm to it that lets you forget that you’re just a thicket of trees away from a bank and a dozen car dealers on Mansell.

Inside, there are tablecloths and a buffet. I tried to remain strong, and was rewarded by a simply terrific meal. It is, by leagues, more flavorful and tasty than any other Indian cuisine that I have found anywhere in metro Atlanta.

I don’t even pretend expertise, or even knowledge, of what I should be looking for in Indian food, but I’ll tell you this: the buffet is considerably smaller than most. The lettuce they use in the tossed salad is quite disappointing. Everything else is amazing. They have about four wonderful sauces for the salad which overcome the lettuce’s deficiency, and another little mix of chickpeas, onions and tomatoes in a light sauce which is incredible.

For my main meal, I usually get some fried vegetable pakodas along with a big spoonful of rice, and then fill up with ladles of curry. They’ve had chicken tikka marsala each of the three times we’ve gone, and occasionally rogan josh. This time, it was lamb korma, cooked in a thick, spicy cardamom sauce with onions. The flavor is so strong, with a hint of mint.

Desserts vary; often they have rice pudding, but not this time. Actually, I did really well this time and didn’t overdo it. The last time, Randy and I went late and they were ready to take away whatever we weren’t going to eat, so we ate everything. We got as far as the little airlock lobby and sat down again for about as long as we’d spent eating the meal. We were just about ready to call Marie to come get us, because neither of us could face driving home for quite some time. On Friday, I was much more sensible. I was still so stuffed at supper that I had about four bites of chicken and a forkful of rice and called it a night, but I didn’t have to undo my belt after lunch, either.

I’m sure we’ll go back again. Maybe one day we can even go with Marie. We just need to time it right and not feel compelled to finish off every drop of the chicken tikka marsala’s creamy tomato curry. Temptation like that, I just don’t need.

Sadly, Moksha closed at the end of August, 2010.