Bella’s Pizzeria, Smyrna GA

It’s always a little discouraging when a place that you know to be capable of giving you a good meal lets you down. We don’t eat at Bella’s very often – perhaps eight or nine times over the years – but it has a deserved reputation for giving you a perfectly good New York-style pie. It’s certainly nowhere near the best in the region, and not in my top five, but I’ve always felt it to be a reliable place.

It’s a sports bar, basically. I’m not sure how much of its loud, late-evening hoopla was designed and how much evolved from answering customer requests for things to do, but over time they’ve introduced Team Trivia and other games, and usually have live music – blues and classic rock covers, mainly – on Fridays and Saturdays. It’s a very fun neighborhood pizza place. The pie’s usually pretty good, and you can complement it with a very decent side salad with a delicious house dressing or some garlic knots which put most of their rivals to shame, and they offer Boylan’s sodas by the bottle. It’s a good place.

This past week, we had the first subpar meal we’ve ever had at Bella’s. We had a veggie pie and a stuffed pie with meatballs and ham, and neither was worth writing home about. They were certainly better than what Domino’s might like to deliver, but not at all like what I have had in the past. The dough didn’t taste right, and the sauce seemed bland and canned. I thought the cheese was fine, and the veggie toppings were all quite good, but it just felt like it was made without attention to detail. It didn’t have any spark.

When this happens with pizza, it’s hugely aggravating because you’re sharing with the group. Marie, my daughter and I met Neal here and we could all only agree that the food was “all right.” Sadly, the blow to the wallet seems a lot harsher when your meal isn’t a standout. Bella’s seems a little pricier than most of its competitors anyway, but they do offer coupons which aren’t hard to find. In fact, we got our coupon from my folks, who eat here all the time. My dad is often found shopping in that strip mall, and he loves Bella’s, but he’s also honest about their inconsistency. Most of the time, they’re pretty good, once in a while they are outstanding, and once in a very long while, they’re bland and disappointing.

I’ve mentioned before that 2004 was something of a mistake-filled year for me. The very last time one of those mistakes and I had supper together, I brought her and her daughter here. The pizza that night was completely amazing, although I think that the girl I was seeing was a little too distracted by her daughter’s really awful conduct that night to notice. I’m willing to cut Bella’s a little slack, because I know first-hand that they can do better. That and those garlic knots will knock you out.

Roy’s Cheesesteaks, Smyrna GA

Here’s another restaurant that I’d never have known about were it not for the old Atlanta Cuisine message boards. I thought that I liked a good cheesesteak as much as the next guy, but it turns out that I had not really enjoyed the real thing yet. I’d enjoyed some pretty good cheesesteaks in my time – The Mad Italian serves up a splendid one, and I’ve heard for years that Woody’s, on Monroe, should be a destination – but now that I know what the real thing should be, I’ve reconsidered what we’d had in the past.

I feel good about calling this the real thing because Roy grew up in Cherry Hill in South Jersey and knows what a good cheesesteak should taste like. He gets his bread in from a Philadelphia bakery called Amoroso and offers a variety of cheeses for his sandwiches. Most people probably just get it with white American, but if you want Cheese Whiz, like some folk from up there prefer, they will gladly do that for you, too. I tried a sandwich wit’ Whiz once and wasn’t completely sold, myself.

For those of us who enjoy hard-to-find sodas, there’s an even better reason to go: Roy’s may well be the only restaurant in the Atlanta region to still serve Fanta birch beer, which I believe is the best soda that Coca-Cola has ever concocted. Once upon a time, Roy started up the regional chain of Philly Connection restaurants, but franchising and overexpanding turned those into a regular disappointment. Back when Roy still ran some of those, you could get Fanta birch beer from them, but the last few times that I’ve popped my head in a Philly Connection’s door hoping for some birch beer, it was a Pepsi soda fountain that greeted me. So if you want a birch beer, and believe me, you do, make your way to Smyrna.

We’ve only been to Roy’s about six or seven times. They don’t keep extremely friendly hours, although I can’t blame them for taking an early supper and closing on Sundays, considering their location. This really is, unfortunately, a place you have to know about to find. It’s off South Cobb Drive, very near I-285, up a little road called Highlands Parkway in an easily-missed strip mall with a gas station and a nail place. The interior is very franchise-friendly — you can easily imagine some sign company retaining the schematics of everything inside, from menus to giant photos of the streets of Philly and the Liberty Bell, to refit any similar-sized space in the city — but, as of this writing, the Smyrna location is the only one.

This past Friday, my dad took me to lunch here. It turned out he wasn’t very hungry himself, so he just had some pizza bread, an Amoroso roll baked with darn good sauce and parmesan cheese, while I got a small loaded cheesesteak, as I always do. A small is more than enough to suit me, especially packed as this is with onions, peppers and pepperoni, with a bag of Zapp’s chips and a short rest before returning to the register to buy a small pack of Tastykakes. The experience just wouldn’t be the same without three peanut butter Tastykakes for dessert.

I still haven’t got around to trying Roy’s hoagies and other sandwiches, because I like the cheesesteaks so darn much. As a final point of emphasis on how tasty these are, and how authentic, last summer, I visited Philadelphia for the first time. On the recommendation of our buddy Chris in Jacksonville, Marie and I stopped by the Little Hut, a tiny takeout place in Ridley Park that his family has sworn by for many years. Roy’s and Little Hut are so similar, and so wonderful, that I can’t pick one over the other, and are absolutely a match in terms of quality. This does do Chris a small service in that Roy’s is something like 512 miles closer to him, the next time he needs an authentic Philly experience. If the Tastykakes people only sent their pies down to this market, we’d probably see him up here twice as often.

The Real Chow Baby, Atlanta GA

There probably won’t be quite so many features in this column about restaurants as unabashedly corporate as this one, but since The Real Chow Baby is, at this stage, just a local chain with only two locations, I think it will be acceptable to write about it. I’m willing to overlook the small army of attractive young servers in matching black t-shirts and headsets, although they do reinforce the feeling that somebody’s investment in these restaurants is far more financial than emotional.

Real Chow Baby opened its first restaurant on Howell Mill some years ago, and a second in 2008 in the Cobb Galleria Center, giving area residents, at long last, a reason to actually set foot inside this misbegotten mall other than the annual Anime Weekend Atlanta convention. The Galleria’s been an embarrassment for a really long time now. When I was in middle school, it was opened with so much hoopla – an upscale mall! an AMC theater with eight screens! a video arcade with an airlock! – but it languished, a sad suburban wannabe that looked longingly at Phipps Plaza and just wished it could be that cool.

I guess about ten years ago, Cobb County finally took pity on the diseased beast, which had been coughing blood since the cinema closed, and gutted the upper floor of the mall, transforming it, quite impressively, into an extension of a mid-sized convention center that connected, above and across the shopping area, to the Waverly Hotel on the mall’s far side. There is still, nevertheless, a lot of vacant real estate inside. The excellent Sky City blog provided a terrific photoessay about the Galleria last October, which you can go read. The mall hasn’t changed a jot since those photos were taken, indeed since the top floor was converted to conference rooms and the Eckanakar people put in a reading room years ago, except that a gallery of horrible art across from Jock’s and Jill’s closed . And Sky City’s writer is quite right: unless a trade show’s in town, you’d think this mall had long been abandoned.

I overlooked the Real Chow Baby when we first noticed it during AWA 2008, but last year, Marie and I found ourselves free from children for a few hours on Friday and elected to have supper there, since it was so close to the con and looked reasonably nice. I was so taken with it that I asked whether she’d mind excusing ourselves and going back for lunch the next day. I never, never do that.

I’ve been so taken with The Real Chow Baby that I’ve eaten there probably twenty times since the con last September. They serve a stir-fry buffet, where you build a bowl from a huge array of ingredients. You can start with white or brown rice or four different pastas, work your way through dozens of veggies, add ladles of seventeen different sauces, about seven meats and then about a dozen spices. The potential for experimentation, while not mathematically endless, is pretty darn huge.

Fortunately, Marie likes this place almost as much as I do, and it didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to persuade her that bowls full of stir-fry were exactly what she wanted for her birthday dinner last week. (She had two birthday dinners, because she’s that awesome, and I’ll tell you about the second in a couple of days.) Our daughter and I met Marie after work on Friday, where there is usually a pretty good crowd of weekend revelers and families. We each sampled three bowls and enjoyed all but one of them.

Now, three bowls of stir fry sounds like a lot, and it would be, if you foolishly piled high with the food. You see, a one-trip dinner order at Real Chow Baby runs you $11.99 on the weekends – lunch is only eight – but for a buck more, you can have unlimited trips to the buffet. This is one of the city’s best-kept secrets. If you make yourself just a teeny bowl with no more than two ladles of sauce, then you can sample several different flavors, and mix and match sauce offerings without worrying about whether you’ve gorged yourself stupid. I like to start with a medium-sized bowl, very heavy on the hot spices, and then have two smaller bowls with milder taste.

Marie’s second concoction of the night mixed black bean sauce and hot mustard over white rice. None of us liked it very much, but it didn’t really matter, because you can abandon something you don’t enjoy and try something different. If you can exercise enough willpower to keep your portion sizes reasonable, then this is definitely a place to provide you with an excellent meal or twenty.

(Update: On July 19 2010, this location split off from the other and became known as “Big Chow Grill.”)