If you’ve been following our stories here, you’ve read that my son has returned to the Atlanta area and is living with us again. When we started the blog about a year ago, my son had been with his mother in Louisville, Kentucky, for about five months. We were glad to have him back for spring break last year, and for a few months in the summer, and anticipated him returning this coming fall for high school. He decided over Christmas break, a few days before my father passed, that he wanted to stay with us, and not return to Louisville. Continue reading “The Tomato Head, Knoxville TN”
Tag: tennessee
Zarzour’s Cafe, Chattanooga TN
Here’s a really interesting restaurant that I supposed I would not get the chance to try. Zarzour’s Cafe opened in 1918 and has a wonderful reputation for their meat-and-three meals, but, sadly, the restaurant, for years, has only been open from 11 am to 2 in the afternoon, and only on weekdays. That’s not a very good window for out-of-town guests! Fortunately, they have elected to stay open a little bit longer each weekday – to the comparatively late hour of 3.30 – even though the kitchen itself still closes at 2. Guests in this last ninety minute window can still order some of their very famous burgers, grilled up by an exceptionally sassy lady who let us know how she drank her way out of college in Knoxville. Yes, this place is a dive in the finest possible sense of the word, and I love it absolutely. Continue reading “Zarzour’s Cafe, Chattanooga TN”
Pizza Palace, Knoxville TN
So I was reading the tie-in book for Guy Fieri’s Food Network TV series Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives and I told myself, “Self, you totally need to eat at some of these places.” A few months after that, in the summer of ’09, Marie and I started talking about where we’d like to go for our honeymoon and we settled on a big old road trip. As I’m recounting in my first-of-each-month honeymoon flashbacks, this trip started in Charlotte, wound its way up to Montreal and finished, ten days later, in one of our favorite towns, Knoxville, where we met up with the children after they spent two weeks’ summer vacation with their mom. There, we settled in for supper at one of three Triple-D restaurants that were featured on Fieri’s show and book which we were able to visit on our trip. Continue reading “Pizza Palace, Knoxville TN”
The French Market Crêperie, Knoxville TN
Oh, heck, I might have created a monster here.
This past Saturday, Marie and I returned to Knoxville, one of our favorite cities, for a few hours to pick up my son for the Christmas break. We’d planned to leave my daughter in the care of her aunt and cousins, go have a couple of meals and shop and have a good time, and then collect both kids after lunch. So that left us looking for a very good breakfast for the two of us after starting the day at the very early hour of five. I kind of figured that making Marie wake that early for a Knoxville-and-back road trip was going to require penance in the form of an awesome meal. Continue reading “The French Market Crêperie, Knoxville TN”
Loveless Cafe, Nashville TN
Apart from waking at three in the morning feeling pretty awful, I really enjoyed the trip that Marie and I took to Nashville a couple of weeks ago. We got to visit some friends and meet some of their buddies at a party, and see the last vestiges of fall color, and the hotel where we stayed was not at all bad. I guess one other downside was that I neglected to consider that we might have done better to check the Tennessee Titans’ schedule, and not book a hotel that was on the other side of the Adelphia or, what the heck’s it called now, LP Field, from our lunch plans. Continue reading “Loveless Cafe, Nashville TN”
Jack in the Box, Nashville TN
I have readers in other states who no doubt are raising an eyebrow to see a junky fast food place like this show up in their RSS reader. Hear me out, though. In the Atlanta area, Jack in the Box is a complete novelty, because this chain has very oddly chosen a curious path in its coast-to-coast expansion. Somehow, and I’m not sure this was an accident, they’ve hopped right over the entire I-75 corridor. Ubiquitous in California and the southwest, they expanded as far east as Murfreesboro, and then there’s not a thing until you get to the Carolinas. Our friend Samantha suggests that the nearest to us is in Anderson. They haven’t touched anyplace in Virginia or points north, nor Florida. It’s very weird. Continue reading “Jack in the Box, Nashville TN”
Pied Piper Eatery, Nashville TN
I am running a little bit behind in sharing stories from our most recent road trip; we just had so much going on and enjoyed so many small, fun meals that we developed a little backlog of entries. Anyway, the road took us to Owensboro and back, with an overnight stay in one of our favorite cities, Nashville. This town, of course, has no shortage of very, very good restaurants. Since I made some friends here more than a decade ago, I’ve had some really great meals in their company. In the summer of last year, some our friends introduced us to Pied Piper Eatery in the Inglewood neighborhood northeast of downtown. It’s the sister restaurant of the long-running, much-loved Pied Piper Creamery, and is owned by family members, though they try not to cannibalize ice cream sales at the Creamery too much by only offering one or two flavors at a time. Continue reading “Pied Piper Eatery, Nashville TN”
Marie, Let's Eat! 