Yoder’s Deitsch Haus, Montezuma GA

So Thursday of last week, I went by one of the cafeterias on our to-do list of Roadfood.com-reviewed restaurants, and on Friday, the four of us visited another one. We took a trip down to visit Marie’s mother and father on Saint Simons Island, a trip that puts us within striking distance of six of the remaining restaurants on that list – five in middle Georgia and one in Savannah. I decided that we’d take the furthest one from the highway, Yoder’s Deitsch Haus. If the rumblings that I’ve been hearing about gas prices are true, I figured we should probably visit the one farthest away now, while gas is only about $3.50 a gallon. Yoder’s is about thirty miles south of Macon and then fifteen miles west of the interstate, and it’s probably worth the trip with gasoline at twice the price.

Boy, this is beautiful country down here. Much of the land in this chunk of middle Georgia around Montezuma and Americus is owned and farmed by Mennonites, as is the restaurant, bakery and country store that we visited. It’s the greenest grass you’ve ever seen, and unusually dense with black and white cows clustering around streams and milling around twisted and gnarled trees. The presence of the extended Yoder family is apparent as you drive west out State Route 26, with some of the roads that feed into the main highway sharing their name as well as the businesses. The cafeteria is set up in a large, unassuming building with a small sign out front, and staffed by servers wearing the faith’s traditional, modest dress. There’s plenty of parking, and space for buses from churches all over the state to bring in groups to eat here.

In the previous chapter, I noted that at Matthews, I had a pretty good meal. That’s not a complaint; dozens of inferior restaurants serve far worse within walking distance of that business. At Yoder’s Deitsch Haus, however, we had a genuinely terrific meal with even lower prices. I’m really glad that I didn’t do these two restaurants in reverse; I’m much more pleased to have my family share such good food with me here.

Like most cafeterias – well, apparently, I think that, prior to Matthews, it had been about six years since I’ve been in one – guests can select a salad first, and then a dessert. At Yoder’s, this could be a tremendously dangerous choice, because you could probably just sit down to four slices of pie and call it the best meal of your life. I’ll come back to that. Should you go, try and restrain yourself and select your meat and two. Marie and I each had pot roast, which was very, very good. My son had fried chicken, which was even better, and my daughter had sausages, which were evidently amazing, but she gobbled the darn things up so quickly that nobody else got to try a nibble.

But as good as the meats here are, the vegetables are even better. I was a little discouraged by the dull iceberg lettuce in the salad, but all the other veggies were quite excellent, especially the beets. I could have just had a bowl of those and the dressing. Marie says that we shouldn’t call it thousand island dressing so much as “inspired by” it, so I’ll take her lead. We each had creamed corn, which was excellent, and various other treats. My son was not as taken with his mashed potatoes, which he thought were lumpy, but my daughter loved her cheesy potatoes and Marie quite liked her green beans.

Oh, but then, these desserts. Marie had a slice of cherry pie, which she said was amazing. My daughter had chocolate, which she insisted was better. My son had peanut butter, which he not only insisted was better than either of theirs’, but even better than the peanut butter pie that he had at Zarzour’s in Chattanooga three weeks previously. True to form, he then got out his phone and updated his Facebook so that all his friends stuck in fifth period could see that, once again, my boy was out on a family trip lording his awesome desserts over them. But then I allowed my children each a single small nibble of my slice of shoofly pie, which is a crazy, thick and sticky melange of molasses and brown sugar and both children wept. This is the best pie on the entire planet. Gas could get up to seven bucks a gallon, and if you come by I-75 exit 127 in Georgia, you’re still going to want to pull over and drive the thirty mile round trip for a slice of this. Marie said that it was all right, but she likes fruit pies better. Marie is, occasionally and rarely, hopelessly mistaken on points like this.

After lunch, I thanked the staff and we wandered over to the country store. My daughter and I were distracted by a goat named Martha, whom you may feed for fifty cents. Martha probably won’t allow you to pet her unless you shell out for some food first, I noticed. In the country store, we considered buying some licorice or horehound for the road, but settled on a jar of locally-made blueberry jam. Marie’s hoping to make pancakes one morning this weekend so we can try that out. The girl at the register was very amused by the two-dollar bills that we used to pay for it.

We then enjoyed the nice ride back to the interstate, bought some gasoline while it’s still only $3.50, and made our way across the state to the coast. It’s a straight shot down Georgia 26 to Hawkinsville, where you can pick up US 341, the old Golden Isles Parkway, and take the two and a bit hour last leg to Brunswick. This is probably worth discussing a little more should we actually stop along the way and eat on this road, but I find this a much more pleasant ride than the interstate, with only one mind-numbing segment, the twenty-odd miles just east of Jesup. Then Marie drove around Brunswick down every fool road in town for half an hour before she got to the causeway. Well, she lived here for years; nostalgia can do this to a driver. And she drove right past Willie’s Wee-Nee Wagon, which is on our to-do list for a later visit, so we can’t hold it against her.

Matthews Cafeteria, Tucker GA

Marie and I made it our rule to not give a negative review to any restaurant that either of us visit. It goes against the grain of this being the story of a good life spent eating well. If we have a bad experience at a restaurant, it just doesn’t make it to these pages. That doesn’t mean, however, that I can’t express a little disappointment when an otherwise good meal just plain lets me down.

I first heard of Matthews Cafeteria when the second volume of the Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives tie-in books was released. I was really looking forward to the second book, because I feel that Georgia was badly underrepresented in the first one, with only the Marietta Diner making its pages. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a pretty good restaurant, but it’s still a little overrated. I wasn’t sure, then, which Georgia restaurants had made it onto the show. You can check out the full list yourself, thanks to the excellent Flavortown USA fan site.

So the book was released – this has been a year and a half – and Georgia got two more restaurants in the print archives of Triple-D. Neither of which I’d ever heard of. It felt like Fieri got together with the ghost of Douglas Adams to upgrade Georgia from “harmless” to “mostly harmless.”

Well, Matthews stayed off my radar until it got added to the list of restaurants reviewed at Roadfood.com late last year. When we started Marie, Let’s Eat!, we agreed to visit and feature all of the 29 restaurants there, barring two for reasons I’ll mention when we finish the goal. Last year, two more were added – Barbecue Kitchen in College Park, and Matthews Cafeteria, meaning there was no getting around it, I was going to have to go to Tucker and try this mostly harmless restaurant. (One of the Roadfood.com restaurants, Melears in Fayetteville, has since closed, leaving a total of 30 on the site. At the time of writing, we are ten away from the goal of 28. Two of those ten will be appearing in this blog over the next week.) So I grumbled and complained and looked around and actually read Fieri’s team’s writeup in the book, and watched the segment on YouTube. I also asked around a couple of months ago to see whether any of my friends knew anything about the Roadfood.com restaurants on our agenda. My friend Laura, whom I have known since high school, when I listened to too much Smiths and she listened to too much Duran Duran, said that theirs is the “most awesome home cooking ever” and that she used to brunch there every week.

And then there are the reports of their Brunswick stew. Now, if you look up the Triple-D segment on YouTube, you’ll get the very curious sight of Fieri acting like he’s never heard of Brunswick stew at all, which is really weird and not especially believable, but you’ll also see this amazing concoction of chicken, creamed corn, potatoes, Worcestershire sauce and a whole mess of other stuff that looks like the most fantastic stew ever. Suffice it to say that when Thursday rolled around, I was licking my chops in anticipation of getting to Matthews as soon as they turned the metaphorical “lunch” sign on to get ahold of that stew.

Would you believe they didn’t have any? Or that the girl at the register said that they only have it on Wednesdays?!

Stymied and not a little crushed, I enjoyed what was nevertheless a pretty good meal. I went for a traditional meat and three, with a pork chop, mashed potatoes, green beans and dirty rice. Everything was quite tasty, especially the dirty rice, which was seasoned just perfectly. I think that if I actually lived in this section of Dekalb, I’d be ready to eat here most of the time. It’s a proper southern meat and three, every bit as good as, say, Vittles or Folks Southern Kitchen. In fact, there’s a Folks just a hop, skip and a jump away, down Lavista near I-285, and you can get food of the same or better quality, for better prices, at a locally-owned place here at Matthews, so there’s no reason to frequent that particular outpost of that chain. No, the vegetables are not of the same quality as the region’s highest points – Mary Mac’s and Doug’s Place – but they’re just fine for a meat and three.

I was, nevertheless, a little disappointed, not merely in the lack of Brunswick stew, but in the lack of attention from the wait staff. They seemed to employ an army of ladies in white with red aprons, but the only ones who spoke with me at all were the lady working the line serving my food and the one at the register, who told me the bad news about Brunswick stew only being served on a day I’m working downtown. I was there for the better part of forty minutes and helped myself to a couple of top-off refills of the very good sweet tea, and not one person asked after me. It’s probably just as well; I might have asked an impertinent question about why the heck there was a microwave oven against the far wall next to the bottles of A-1 and Red Rooster. Don’t know that I’ve seen that in a dining room before.

The meal, as I keep saying, was pretty good, but whatever disappointment I had with the service was more than made up for with the strawberry shortcake. This was amazingly decadent and wonderful, and almost as good as the lovely pound cake treat that Marie made a few days before. I’m sorry that my better, sweeter half wasn’t around to try it. Hers is better, but she appreciates other people’s excellent desserts even more than I do.

But while I’m registering disappointments along with the good food, let me raise one other. The previous Saturday, Marie had to work some overtime hours. I picked her up afterward and we had a little cheap date night, just the two of us, at the wonderful America’s Top Dog. The previous visit proved to be really good, but this second trip saw me trying one of their half-smokes with chili and man, oh, man, was that ever amazing. It wasn’t until I was back on 285 after lunching at Matthews that I realized what I should have done once I realized I wasn’t going to get to try this Brunswick stew was just had two veggies and a dessert, and then stopped by America’s Top Dog one exit north for another half-smoke. I had a perfectly good meal, but I was completely stuffed, and what I should have done was thought it through a little more. For somebody who looks forward to regularly visiting a fast food joint two years in the future, I sure do let my impulsive side mess me up when it comes to getting something to eat, don’t I?

Mayflower Restaurant, Athens GA

The last time I went to Athens, in January with Randy, we stopped at the very good Bar-B-Q Shack. Upon reflection, what we should have done then, for thematic reasons that I like to keep in order, was gone to the Mayflower Restaurant downtown. That’s because Randy’s father, a wonderful man who was lost to us in a stupid traffic accident about eight years ago, had been a student at the University of Georgia in the mid-1950s, by which time the Mayflower was already established. In a town with restaurant turnover as brutal as Athens, finding a place that’s been around for twenty years is uncommon. A place like the Mayflower, which opened in 1948, is one of a kind. Continue reading “Mayflower Restaurant, Athens GA” →

Mary Mac’s Tea Room, Atlanta GA

I had been wanting to go to Mary Mac’s for a really long time. It’s the last surviving example of a brief late ’40s trend of restaurants opened by war widows looking to both stay afloat and remain a little classy, so they called their establishments “tea rooms” in the hopes of attracting a better sort of clientele than the lowlifes who went to juke joints and meat-and-threes. This fad did not last, but this one place on Ponce, started by Mary MacKenzie, survived. It is no longer in family hands – MacKenzie sold it to Margaret Lupo in 1962, who in turn sold the business to John Ferrell in the mid-nineties – but it certainly thrives. It’s one of Atlanta’s best-known destination restaurants, a place that turns a traditional meat and three into a very classy experience, and one of the very best examples of southern cooking in north Georgia, with some really amazing food.

The Saturday after my dad passed, I took Neal up on his offer to get out and relax a little. He had the goal of trying to track down a bizarre little promotional tie-in to the TV series Fringe, a short-pressed LP hiding out in various record stores, so we went by a couple of the few places in Atlanta left that still sell the darn things with no luck, and stopped at Mary Mac’s for lunch. There is a small parking lot behind the restaurant, but it fills up almost instantly. Diners will have better luck parking along Myrtle Street and enjoying a short walk.

The staff at Mary Mac’s enjoys welcoming new guests with a small, complementary bowl of pot likker. This is the slightly salty liquid left behind after boiling greens, and it starts meals here off just right. Everything here is incredibly tasty and fresh. I had a small house salad with thousand island dressing, and it looked and tasted like those vegetables were still in the ground the night before, and Neal and I shared an appetizer of fried green tomatoes. These were truly wonderful, easily the equal of the fabulous ones prepared at Blue Willow Inn and The Fickle Pickle, and served with a very light and tasty remoulade.

My meal was very good, or, at least, the sides were. I was indecisive about what to get, briefly considered the meat loaf, and finally settled on some chicken tenders. These were perfectly decent, but honestly, I should have just ordered a veggie plate. I keep telling myself that and never listen. I had pickled beets and the mac and cheese, both of which were just amazing, and Brunswick stew, which was also very good. Neal, on the other hand, really scored with his chicken livers, which he says were every bit as good as the exceptional ones at Doug’s Place in Emerson. Like me, he ordered one side too many, but enjoyed what he could finish.

We were finishing off our meal and basking in satisfaction when a woman who looked to be a little ways older than us but still bouncing with a spring in her step came up behind Neal and put her hand on his shoulder before asking how we were doing and how our food was. This unexpected burst of familiarity probably wouldn’t pass muster up north. Neal said later that he thought it was some relation of his coming to say hey.

She explained that she liked to come around and make sure everything was okay, and that while she wasn’t the one who cooked our food – I had asked whether we had her to thank – she did sample everything in the kitchen. While I joked around about how that explained why each of my beets had a bite taken already – a joke from a color Popeye cartoon that I doubt anybody else remembers – she went right to work rubbing Neal’s shoulders with such vigor that his eyes about popped out of his head.

She left her card and went onto another table. The back of her T-shirt read “I got my belly filled and my back rubbed at Mary Mac’s.” Free pot likker and shoulder rubs. They must want repeat business or something.

Ye Olde Colonial Restaurant, Madison GA (CLOSED)

Here’s a place that took me the better part of eternity to get around to visiting. I first spotted Ye Olde Colonial – and yeah, let’s go ahead and acknowledge just how silly that awful name is – about fifteen years ago, when I was living in Athens and occasionally visiting Madison every couple of months. There are some amazing antique stores in and around the town square, and I remember coveting some really neat walking sticks with silver wolf’s heads and things atop them. I’m still not completely convinced that I should not, when I hit age fifty, always go out in a very nice, old-fashioned suit and a walking cane with a silver wolf’s head. But, if we’re strictly honest, the coolest thing I found back then was my Dr. Shrinker jigsaw puzzle. Continue reading “Ye Olde Colonial Restaurant, Madison GA (CLOSED)” →

The Colonnade, Atlanta GA

If you grew up in a southern household, you simply must visit The Colonnade to have your mind blown by this menu. They serve things here that your mother or your grandmother regularly prepared and which you had completely forgotten. Last week, Marie and our daughter and I joined David and Neal for supper here. All three of us fellows had the same eye-popping reaction to the same thing. “Pears and cheese?! My mom used to make that!” With grated sharp cheddar cheese and mayo. It must have been in the secret handbook assigned by Betty Crocker to all housewives in Georgia and neighboring states between 1964 and 1975.

One of the other amazing things on the menu is tomato aspic. This savory gelatin was apparently a somewhat common dish in postwar America, until the Jell-O company turned families onto the idea of gelatin as a sweet dessert instead. “Oh, Lord,” said Neal, sampling a half-spoonful of my order. “It tastes like V-8 Jell-O.” Turns out he’s exactly right. I found a recipe for tomato aspic which calls for tomato juice, Tabasco and bay leaf along with two envelopes of unflavored gelatin. The curiosity and novelty didn’t overwhelm the reality that it wasn’t very good, but as I told Neal as I encouraged him to give it a taste, when the heck else are you going to have the chance to try tomato aspic in a restaurant?

Naturally, I had to try both of these at the Colonnade, as they’re both missing from the menus of darn near every other restaurant around. So is calf’s liver, among others, but I had to draw the line somewhere. No, I just had your common-or-garden chicken livers. Nothing adventurous here.

The Colonnade is one of Atlanta’s oldest surviving restaurants. Only the Atkins Park Tavern is older. It opened in 1927 at the intersection of Piedmont and Lindbergh, in a house that was torn down before I was born. In 1962, the Colonnade moved to its present location on Cheshire Bridge Road in front of that unbelievably skeevy motel. I know this must come as a shock to Atlantans to hear a motel on Cheshire Bridge described as skeevy, but I calls ’em as I sees ’em.

We were mistaken on one point about the Colonnade. Looking over all these old-fashioned, timelost dishes on the menu along with the fried chicken and collard greens, we all assumed, quite wrongly, that the only things to have changed here over the decades are the prices. However, in the lobby, there is a collection of old menus from earlier days, and it would appear that curiosities like the aspic and the pear and cheese are actually relatively new. Along with the menus, there are also some newspaper and magazine reviews. One of these features the ridiculous headline “PATRONS PRAISE GOOD PLACE TO EAT.” When I wrote for a newspaper in Athens, I occasionally wanted to smack the copy editors around with a baseball bat for all the awful headlines they wrote for my articles, but lordy, I never had one that bad.

There has been one very unfortunate change at the restaurant, but it’s not one that I knew about for a couple of days. We noticed in the lobby the requisite framed, autographed poster of Guy Fieri spotlighting the Colonnade’s appearance on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. I tracked down the clip – they’re on YouTube – and was surprised to see that the Food Network series visited the Colonnade during a period where they were experimenting with some really fascinating concoctions no longer available. So if you’re a Triple-D fan making your way around the country hitting the featured restaurants – and a fine use of your time that would be – it looks like you cannot currently get the redneck sushi, the lobster knuckle sandwich or, tragically, the kangaroo sirloin. Look, I like chicken livers all right, but if I’d seen kangaroo steak on the menu, that’s what I would have ordered. The Colonnade’s brief flirtation with new, wild and a little weird has ended, and they’re back to the basics, serving up fine dining the way that your grandmother knew it.

I did find one note about the fine dining experience a little unusual, however. All of the service was very good, and we enjoyed our server’s choosing to answer Marie’s request for a recommendation in reverse. Rather than telling her what he liked best, he told her the two dishes that he did not enjoy, suggesting that she’d like anything else that she ordered, and she did. But I was a little surprised at the register. The Colonnade does not accept credit cards. That’s just fine by me; I don’t like to use credit cards. (I also play Where’s George?, so it’s important that I keep ones in circulation!) I tried not to be confrontational about it, but I was curious about the policy. “I think that’s so neat that y’all don’t take credit cards. I don’t use them either, but I was wondering why you don’t.” I guess the lady at the register gets that a lot, only rudely. “We just don’t. We never have.” That’s all the answer that she wanted to give.

So much for curiosity, but then again, I think the Colonnade is older than credit cards, and they can make that choice. The rest of you, swing by your bank’s ATM first.

Doug’s Place, Emerson GA

Would you believe that Randy and Kimberly finally got married? It’s only been a week, but we haven’t heard anything about them fighting over him taking her to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, so I choose to believe the honeymoon’s still on. Then again, he did write to let me know that he perceived a heck of a lot of Asian restaurants in Asheville, where they went, so who knows what they got up to.

Their ceremony was held on Red Top Mountain near Cartersville, and looking around for something to eat on the way brought up a restaurant in the small town of Emerson called Doug’s Place. This opened up a floodgate of forgotten memories, none of which, it turns out, really have anything to do with this very agreeable Southern-style meat-and-three. When I found a photo of Doug’s Place – the one on John Bickford’s very entertaining From My Table – I suddenly remembered that when I was a child, a chunk of Interstate 75 along this stretch was closed for a couple of years while the US Army Corps of Engineers was doing some sort of digging or reconstruction of Allatoona Lake. When my parents took me along for their monthly visit to see my grandparents in Fort Payne, we would exit early and drive up US 41 through Cartersville. On about three or four occasions, I swear that we stopped for breakfast around here, and wondered whether it might have been Doug’s Place.

It wasn’t – suspicion now lies on a Cartersville restaurant called Cody Jay’s which occupies a building that, thirty-odd years ago, was the home of a place called J.R.’s – but getting to the bottom of things was kind of fun. I first asked my mom whether she remembered what that place in Bartow County we would stop in the seventies was called. Unsurprisingly, since, to hear my mom tell it, whatever good times there ever were ended around the time Nixon got in trouble with the lib’rul media, and, perhaps not coincidentally, I was two, she didn’t remember any such thing. Mom carried Dentyne cinnamon-flavored chewing gum in her purse for the better part of fifteen years, but she thinks I’ve made up this story to confound her, because everybody knows that she hates chewing gum. Getting her to identify thirty year-old breakfast stops is like getting her to identify Godzilla films that were on channel 17 on a specific evening that my parents had friends over for pinochle when I was nine. She’s not very helpful with that, either.

Wherever we ate back then, it wasn’t Doug’s Place, but heaven knows I irritated two or three people trying to get to the bottom of it. Before this place became Doug’s about fifteen years back, it was apparently Morris’s, but the building itself dates to the 1890s. There are two small dining rooms and a large, screened porch to wait for a table, and some really delicious southern food inside.

We had an early lunch, arriving at Doug’s in between rushes. There were only a couple of recently bussed tables available when we arrived, and a long line developed while we ate. The interior of the restaurant is quite small, and it’s not possible to move around to the restroom or cash register without slightly jostling other guests.

The food is mostly quite terrific, although sadly, yet again, everybody else at the table enjoyed a better entree than me. I had the country fried steak with gravy, and I wouldn’t call it bad, but I certainly wasn’t in the mood for it after having a bite of Marie’s wonderful fried chicken, and one of the truly excellent chicken livers that Neal ordered. He concluded that these livers were even better than those at Vittles, which he enjoys more than me, and I had to agree. My daughter inhaled her gumbo, leaving me unable to comment on its quality, but I imagine that it must have been pretty good for her to down that much of it so quickly.

For sides, Marie enjoyed a small cup of broccoli and cheese soup. Neal and I each had baked beans which were quite good and I also had some delicious fried green tomatoes. Each of us also ordered the creamed corn. I would not call it great – Bear’s Den in Macon cooks up much better and much creamier – but I was still quite pleased. If I had taken my sides with a different entree, it would have been a superb meal rather than merely a very good one.

I am surprised that Doug’s Place has managed to stay so far off the radar of people who enjoy this kind of food. Obviously the locals enjoy it and with great reason, but this is quite genuinely the sort of thing that should attract a much larger crowd of travelers who love southern cooking, meat-and-threes, or any unique roadfood destinations. I noticed that the restaurant did post an article from Southern Living where they got a little praise, but doing what they do as well as this, there should be articles from forty different magazines and regular appearances on The Food Network. For now, we’ll call it one of the region’s best-kept secrets.