Ale-8-One

You might have noticed that I’ve enjoyed finding sodas that we don’t get locally for a very long time. Perhaps one very small downside to the internet is that research has become so much easier. It used to be a bit more fun to have to ask around to find out what the heck the thing you’d just found in the convenience store cooler was. Continue reading “Ale-8-One” →

Double Cola

I’m pretty sure – although I can’t swear to it specifically – that it was my dad who mentioned Double Cola to me. It’s the sort of drink where, if you didn’t know it was a really old beverage, dating back to the 1920s, you’d walk right past it in the convenience store, thinking it just another cheap knockoff. But my dad sold it to me as something really neat, and said, incorrectly, that you could only get it in its hometown of Chattanooga. Continue reading “Double Cola” →

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.

Buffalo Rock

I enjoy a great nostalgia for that feeling I had at age seventeen, going off to college and ready to both make whatever mark on the world I was going to make, and also desiring to brag to my parents about what wild, weird, wonderful things that I uncovered and experienced. So the presence of Steverino’s was a complete revelation. Not only did they serve up the biggest sandwiches I’d ever seen, they delivered them. This changed everything. Continue reading “Buffalo Rock” →

Cheerwine Milkshake

Ah, to be eighteen again. Once upon a time, when I went to school at the University of Georgia, I started paying attention to all the many soda possibilities that were out there. Used to be, there was a sandwich shop called Steverino’s that would deliver the most amazingly tasty giant subs I’ve ever had, and would bring along a choice of some unusual beverage that I’d never had before. I led a sheltered suburban childhood; IBC Root Beer was so outre that a friend’s crazy mother once chased another friend down the street for coming to her door with a brown bottle of it, screaming that she didn’t care what kind of beer it was, he should know better than to ring her bell holding a bottle. I mention this because it really was a powerful, eye-opening experience, knowing that you could take an 11 pm study break on a Tuesday and call for a twelve-inch special and a bottle of Vernor’s, or Buffalo Rock, or the mighty Budwine.

Buffalo Rock immediately became my favorite soda; I’m scheming for a trip to Montgomery as soon as it’s feasible to bring back a couple of twelve-packs. But Budwine… wow, I’d never had anything remotely like that before. It looks like the company, originally called Bludwine, was founded in nearby Watkinsville in the 1900s. They changed the name of their beverages in the 1920s, by which time an imitator, Cheerwine, had cropped up in the Carolinas. For decades, the two companies dueled in competing regions. Cheerwine had the Carolinas and Virginia, and Budwine was sold in Georgia, Florida and parts of Alabama and Tennessee. Eventually, Budwine petered out and the business closed in 1995. Cheerwine gradually moved into the region, and while it is still uncommon, you can find it in twelve-packs in Publix grocery stores.

While Budwine was around, though, there was a little secret that everybody in Athens got to know by word of mouth. The Dairy Queen on Oak Street, between campus and the bypass, would sell you a Budwine milkshake. It was just what it sounds like: they’d pump their vanillay soft serve goo into a steel mixing cup, open a bottle of Budwine and pour about a third in, then do whatever Dairy Queen magic was necessary and what you had was a very light, very sweet cherry milkshake that tasted better than anything else on that menu.

For fifteen years, I told people who never had the pleasure that those were the most wonderful things you’d ever tried. It never once occurred to me that, with Budwine’s better-known copy readily available and DQs dotting the landscape, there was nothing stopping me from recreating the taste here in Marietta. Well, nothing except the incredibly rude manager.

Earlier this week, I was poking around the Roadfood.com forums and realized that I had never noticed the Beverage Forum, and certainly not the “Favorite Discontinued Sodas” thread, which started in 2006 and has been periodically brought back to life by necroposters ever since.

The thread’s pretty amusing, particularly with all the well-meaning nostalgists who genuinely thought their favorite soda was dead only to learn some other region was still enjoying it. I was pleased to see that the legendary Ort.Carlton, who used to write such wonderful columns about beer and post offices and aimless roadtripping for Athens’ Flagpole magazine, contributed to the thread and mentioned Budwine. Finally, those two misfiring synapses finally clicked. There really wasn’t any reason why I shouldn’t try to get myself a Cheerwine milkshake!

So Tuesday, I picked up a 12-pack of Cheerwine, got my daughter from school, took her to the allergy clinic, and stopped into the DQ on the way back. We periodically do this as a treat for her; they sell half-price shakes from 2-4. They’re not exceptionally good shakes – soft serve goo just isn’t as good as, say, ice cream – but they do for a treat.

There’s a teenage girl who has been there for months, and today she was training some nervous newbie. My daughter ordered her shake. They made it and I said “And I would also like a vanilla shake, but I’d like you to open this can and pour about half of it in.”

I think that a teenager, even a nervous newbie, could have accomplished this without incident. Unfortunately, she was being discreetly watched by some manager, who, in that stereotypically loud, excited and singsong manner, jumped from somewhere I didn’t see her and shouted, without additional hyperbole from me, “No, no, no, no, no! You cannot do that!”

I really wouldn’t want to have been on the other side of me when I said “Yes, you can,” in my most emphatic and withering tone.

“If you want to put your Coke in, you can do it after we give it to you! We cannot do that for you!” she said, not politely. Well, a little something about her manner, probably that it was poor, didn’t mix well with my intense dislike of having anybody in food service tell me what I could or couldn’t do with the food I was paying for. Plus she called a Cheerwine a Coke; she was clearly a nitwit.

So I don’t mind telling you that I instantly discarded my otherwise unfailingly polite demeanor and told her, in no uncertain terms, that I used to have these all the time at Dairy Queen when I was in college, that the soda has to be mixed in for it to taste right, and that I was paying for the milkshake and I wanted it made my way. Okay, so there was probably some nine hundred page franchise contract that she and her husband – he’s usually sitting on the far end in a wooden chair – signed which clearly states that franchisees may not alter the formulae of Dairy Queen soft serve goo through the addition of whatever customers pass across the counter. But geez, just because you beat Tastee-Freez out of the local market in 1979 doesn’t give you the right to act like a horse’s ass.

Well, she caved. Common sense prevailed and I got my Cheerwine milkshake. My daughter, who’s sworn for years that she can’t stand the stuff, gave it a sip and wowed, “Oh! That’s SO GOOD!”

And she was right. I think the girl poured too much of the can, but it was otherwise a reasonable facsimile of what I remember. You should take a can to the DQ near you and give it a go. Maybe you’ll even avoid the dingbattery of the lady who thought she was trying to run the one by me and enjoy your shake without having to engage in formal debate over it.