Defining Tacos

We should probably all agree that there must be at least two types of hot dogs.

It really feels like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution polls its readers every other month on the best of this food in Atlanta or the best of that. I want to say that it was burgers most recently. Proving that people just don’t define anything the same way as anybody else, whenever it’s time for people to nominate and argue about hot dogs, scores and scores of people name The Varsity. They do this in much the same way that the runaway nominee for the “people’s choice” for best milkshake in the city is that machine-pumped peach-flavored goo that shows up in the summers at Chick-fil-A stores. Continue reading “Defining Tacos” →

Two “Companies” in Cobb County

I had lunch at a couple of pretty nice and fun places in the last couple of weeks. David and I had a bite at the almost-in-Vinings location of Vermont Mustard Company. Interestingly, this is a rare example of a restaurant that has either held its prices for ages or dropped them a little bit. Many, many years ago, I stopped by and, without remembering details, was surprised by the cost of sandwiches here. David also remembers them once seeming quite high, but as everybody else’s food costs have gone up, and only the national chains have borne the cost by sapping quality, Vermont Mustard is now pretty much in line with every good high-end sandwich joint. Continue reading “Two “Companies” in Cobb County” →

Hot Dog Factory, Smyrna GA

Here’s a little place on Spring Road in Smyrna that I noticed a couple of months ago and returned to try. It’s in a small strip mall that came up in the 1980s a few paces away from that Dairy Queen which has been on Spring Road forever, and which used to be the home of the first Pizza Hut delivery-only outlet that I remember seeing. I certainly enjoy hot dogs, and there are admittedly better in Cobb County, but this is still a fun place, and worth stopping by if you might be in the area. They have just enough original spirit to keep things interesting and entertaining, and the food is pretty tasty, too. Continue reading “Hot Dog Factory, Smyrna GA” →

Sushi in the Suburbs

Several weeks ago, when Marie and I went to a little media event for Outback Steakhouse, we got to meet several area bloggers, including two writers from Exclusive Eats, and shared some favorite restaurants and meals. Asked about my favorite sushi, I found myself unable to come up with anything other than Ru San’s. I mean, I know that I’ve had sushi in some other places – I was taken to a surprisingly good place in Macon once – but, at least since we began the blog last year, we’ve only ever gone back to one of Ru San’s stores. Continue reading “Sushi in the Suburbs” →

Ebony & Ivory, Smyrna GA

Have I ever told you about my sentient iPod? I’m quite serious when I say it’s alive. Six thousand songs on it, and it routinely, when shuffled, plays songs back-to-back with the strangest and most tenuous connections, like four songs in a row played by artists whom I’ve seen at one particular venue in Atlanta, or three songs in a row with the word “radio” in the title, or two songs that had made their way to the seminal soundtrack to Pretty in Pink. Once in a while, it will play songs that answer each other. There was one evening when it played Bryan Ferry’s cover of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and then “replied” with Cowboy Junkies doing “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Recently, it followed XTC with the Beatles: “My Bird Performs,” “And Your Bird Can Sing.” So I pay attention to my iPod.

A couple of Fridays ago, I was wondering what I should eat, and so I asked my iPod, aloud, “What should I eat today, o sentient iPod?” I know you’re going to think, based on the title of this chapter, that it played “Ebony and Ivory” by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, but it couldn’t do that, because I can’t stand that song and don’t have it on my iPod, but it did play “Pipes of Peace,” from Paul’s 1983 album of the same name. I probably enjoy Paul McCartney’s solo work a lot more than anybody you know, but I’ve got my limits, and that album is one of them. (London Town is another. Good grief, what a rotten record. Anyway.) But while the Pipes of Peace LP is the living definition of safe, unchallenging, soft rock treacle, that title track just manages to stand out a little, even if Paul really managed to otherwise make far too many records in a row that sounded way too much like each other, and, consequently, make himself quite irrelevant to anybody who went to high school in the late eighties. The result of this is that even though I like “Pipes of Peace,” I can’t quite listen to it without thinking about all his other early ’80s treacle, like “Ebony and Ivory,” and that reminded me that there’s a take-out barbecue place on Concord Road in Smyrna by that name.

You would agree that this is the iPod’s doing, right?

Ebony & Ivory is in a very unassuming little place near South Cobb Drive, across from the old building where Smyrna’s Fat Boy had stood for many decades. It was apparently once a Church’s Fried Chicken, but I don’t remember that, personally. Guests will have no trouble finding it, even without a street sign; just look for the big black smoker out front and follow your nose for the amazing scent of meat cooking over cherry wood. I went to speak with Victor “Ivory” Amato when I parked and told him that if his food tasted half as good as it smelled, I’d be in good shape. I was; this place is a winner.

Amato and his partner, Marcus “Ebony” Phillips, opened the small window in the summer. It’s more than just a barbecue joint; they give equal love to catfish and chicken. If you like southern cooking, there is definitely something here for you. The partners have more than twenty years’ experience in the restaurant business, and worked together at the Dantanna’s at CNN Center.

I had the pulled pork with mac and cheese and baked beans, along with a catfish taco. I think that the only thing that I don’t much like at this place is that Brunswick stew is not offered as a side, but, unusually, as a full dish which guests can order with sides of its own. Otherwise, everything from the prices to the quality of the food to Amato and Phillips’s smiles and fun, upbeat attitudes pleased me greatly.

The pulled pork was just fantastic, and while I enjoyed the white sauce that I got on the side, the meat didn’t need a drop. I am curious enough, however, to want to stop back by and get some of their other sauces next time. I might see about taking my order back to my mom’s house, as it’s only about ten minutes’ drive from the restaurant. The twenty minutes it took to get this yummy food back to my place in Marietta were agonizing.

Anyway, enjoying this good food in my own dining room, I was also really taken with the baked beans, cooked with a little pork, and the catfish taco. Overall, the food is every bit as good as the terrific stuff at Buckhead Barbecue Company, a few miles down South Cobb. My personal feeling is that BBC might just have a slight edge, as they are a full service restaurant, and I always like the opportunity to sit and visit for hours and hours when it arises, but both restaurants are serving up wonderful barbecue and are absolutely worth visiting.

Buckhead Barbecue Company, Smyrna GA

In recent months, I’ve visited some of the barbecue restaurants in and around Atlanta that can trace their lineage back to Sam’s BBQ-1 and the old – well, recent, but old in restaurant terms – alliance between Sam Huff and Dave Poe. Those two once employed several cooks and staff who have gone out and started their own restaurants, with results that, in my book, range from pretty good to what I would have called disappointing but I’ve since downgraded to “downright awful,” thanks to the online sockpuppeting antics of its supporter(s) ticking me off.

However, we have clearly saved the best – for now – for last. Despite the name, which I find pretty silly considering this place isn’t even in Vinings, much less Buckhead, the Buckhead Barbecue Company has surpassed the quite good work found at both Sam’s and Dave’s restaurants. Their chef, Kevin Fullerton, used to work with those fellas. This restaurant is serving up an exceptional product at a terrific price from a little strip mall shop in Smyrna, just a few doors down from the excellent Roy’s Cheesesteaks.

They’ve taken the bold move of opening in the shadow of an unaccountably popular location of Jim ‘n Nick’s, a mediocre chain whose local store has already claimed one barbecue fatality in a store called Atlanta Ribs. I certainly hope that Buckhead Barbecue Company can draw enough attention to their little shop one mile outside the perimeter to thrive. Hopefully, the praise and love that Roy’s has found here will keep bringing the curious into the ‘burbs to try this place out. This place deserves some attention, friends.

We had supper here a few Wednesdays ago, in the company of our good friends Dave and Amy, who live in Virginia and had come to town for Anime Weekend Atlanta and stayed to visit family. We commandeered a table on their patio for more than two hours, catching up and talking about barbecue. Actually, when Amy had requested that we meet somewhere for barbecue and told me that they were staying in Smyrna, my little “what can I blog about” senses started tingling and I knew just where I wanted to try.

All of the meats here are very good, with pulled pork smoked just perfectly and just moist enough to not need any sauce. That said, if you like drowning your meat and you like to try several different things, then Buckhead probably offers more sauces than any place that I know this side of Asheville’s Ed Boudreaux’s: a whopping nine varieties, and every one of them is lip-smacking tasty. If any one was the house sauce at a single-bottle joint, it would be a winner, which makes it a much better experience than Ed’s, where the phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” was never more true.

I was most impressed and intrigued by the different “Eastern NC Vinegar” and “Lexington NC Vinegar” varieties. I had heard that the distinctive sauce around Lexington was a vinegar-tomato blend, but, not really able to go up there and try it for myself, yet, I was left wondering what the difference is between that and the sauce common at so many restaurants around Atlanta and the I-20 corridor, which I would describe as red, and thick with a mild, vinegary kick. If what Buckhead Barbecue Company mixes is accurate, then Lexington sauce is much thinner – online recipes that I’ve since consulted suggest four parts water to one part each vinegar and ketchup, with sugar and lots of pepper – and has a different sort of kick, very much unlike what I have been finding and questioning. There is, it turns out, at least one other example of Lexington sauce in the area; Swallow at the Hollow’s vinegar sauce surprised me by splashing red all over the pink meat. Now I know why.

Apart from these, there is a very good mustard sauce, two examples of a traditional brown sweet sauce – a spicier “Kansas City” and a sweeter “Memphis” – and an Alabama white sauce, and every one of them is just wonderful. My daughter was so taken with the Kansas City sauce that, after she finished her meal, which included a fun little combo dish of Brunswick stew poured over very good mac-n-cheese, she started squeezing herself spoonfuls of sauce. Give her some saltines and she’ll look just like a starving undergraduate.

Dave had trouble deciding between two sandwiches. They offer one rather gloriously ridiculous Elvis tribute sandwich, with crunchy peanut butter, bananas and bacon, fried, and he was tempted, but he went with the Big Pig, which is a sliced pork loin beast topped with pulled pork, bacon, melted cheese and horseradish sauce. Dave was one of my groomsmen and I love the guy, so I seriously hope he had steamed vegetables for lunch the next day. On the other hand, with the bread puddings he and Amy took along with them, I’m not so sure eating healthy was on the agenda. Well, they were on vacation.

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.