Food Near Snellville

This is a creation of my mother-in-law, sliced bitter melon with water, vinegar, onions, garlic, and a small amount of boonie peppers. If you don’t have boonies, you can use the pequin or tepin peppers you can get at BHFM.

The bitterness is moderated a little, and the onions, garlic, and pepper add a lot of flavor on the plate.

This wasn’t a place I would have chosen, but one my father had visited, and one for which he was wanting another opinion. Some friends of his just loved this chain. Others could take it or leave it. He felt, in advance, that it was pretty good, but hardly divine.

Another Broken Egg is a small chain, and the morning we went, was full of people.

Eggs benedict.

Smoked salmon omelet.

I enjoyed my breakfast, a smoked salmon omelet. My father’s order, eggs benedict, was made using ham instead of the Canadian bacon he prefers. He liked it but it wasn’t, in his opinion, heavenly. That takes a good hollandaise sauce and the right ingredients. The service was good, so I’d tend to the view that this is a good, not great deal for breakfast.

Another Broken Egg Cafe
855 Pierremont Ste. 132
Shreveport, LA 71106
(318) 865-1124

Shreveport

It’s the best known of the Mediterranean restaurants in Shreveport, and one I’ve been curious about for some time. From the outside it looks like a hole in the wall, and most of its business, the day I dropped by, was through a drive through window. Inside, though, it’s nice, with heavy expensive furniture dominating the scene. It is actually pretty small inside, so if you’re coming during a rush, you might not get inside seating.

I had their lamb chops and my dad had their muffuletta. It was a big muffuletta with a traditional seeded bun. I liked the chops, enjoyed what I ate, but the contrast from the modest take out window to the luxurious inside is really tangible.

Yeero Yeero
4511 Youree Dr
Shreveport, LA 71105
(318) 219-0027

Shreveport

Near Perimeter Mall, just to one side of Barnes and Noble, used to be a Fire of Brazil. That restaurant has closed, and replacing it is Chuy’s.

As the sign says, it will be opening December 6th of 2011.

On Scenic Highway (Highway 124) in Snellville, there is an Olive Garden now open. I know, because I’ve driven past it, but haven’t had a chance to try it. My wife has long been a fan of the linguini fra diavolo at OG. Also of note is that Lobster House (a grill and sushi place) is now open. It’s very gaudy. In looks, it reminds me of a small casino on the Red or Mississippi River.

Lobster House, on Pleasant Hill in Duluth. It's where the old Smokey Bones used to be.

Also of note is a new sushi place roughly on the corner of Dogwood and Five Forks Trickum Road.

Sushi in .. I believe this corner is formally Lawrenceville, actually.

Again, this is a place I know of, but have had no time to try. My wife is recovering from surgery and it has taken a toll on my food blogging.

It lives in one of the oldest buildings in Shreveport, so old it’s on the National Registry. The section of town is hardly the best, and it’s only open at lunch. But the look, outside and inside, has to be seen to be believed, and they serve what they call a muffy, so designated (so my father tells me) because Fertitta’s was sued when they tried to use the phrase “muffuletta”.

The "small" muffy. The large one is bigger than my spread hand.

Fertitta’s muffy is an original, in part because of the home made olive salad they use, in part because it’s a sweeter olive salad than most. It doesn’t transport me the way the muffuletta at E. 48th Street Market Italian did, but something with a near 80 year history deserves some respect. I enjoyed the sandwich, enjoyed the meal, loved the ambience. The ambience alone makes this something of a “must visit” for a food aficionado in the Shreveport area.

Fertitta’s Delicatessen
1124 Fairfield Ave
Shreveport, LA 71101
(318) 424-5508

Shreveport

It’s a pretty place inside, with gold records on the walls and a sultry sound. The clientele are largely black, but that shouldn’t be surprising in this part of Georgia, because it’s the same in the nearby Olive Garden. The menu is relatively simple, the serving sizes are enormous.

They have a braised oxtail on the Lithonia menu, but I was told it wasn’t available that day. Two of my party ordered the “Midnight Train”, which was a mix of waffles and chicken wings. The wings were larger than some drumsticks I’ve bought, simply enormous. I bought a plate whose name escapes me, but in essence was three pieces of chicken and two sides. Many of the sides were starchy, so it was a little tricky to find sides I could eat. This restaurant has good collard greens, but I couldn’t try their green beans because they were out of green beans as well.  When you have so few entrees,  I’m not sure what the issue is with keeping adequate stocks of things like oxtail and green beans.

I had two thighs, and they managed to tread the thin line between “juicy” and oily. The chicken wings, by contrast, ran a little dry. My wife’s chicken breast, which seemed to cover half the plate, was touched but not entirely consumed. This is a place where a single chicken piece could be an entire meal.

For those who are curious, the menu suggests that chicken and waffles was a combination that began in Harlem. So it’s not a ‘Georgia’ thing. Given that my wife told me when we were dating that she could eat chicken seven days a week, this was a useful place to explore. It’s a couple dollars more than Popeyes or KFC, but the seating is pleasant, the music is good, the food is decent, and the serving size has to be seen to be believed.

Gladys Knight and Ron Winian’s Chicken and Waffles
7301 Stonecrest Concourse
Lithonia, GA 30038
(678) 619-4570
 

I haven’t spoken much about my boonie peppers this year, perhaps because they sprouted and grew, but not spectacularly. I didn’t fertilize them much after the spring, because I wanted flowers, of which I saw not a one all this year.

But I just took them inside, after the recent freeze, and within one day after taking them inside, every last boonie pepper now has flower buds. If I had to guess, it was a temperature thing. The summer was too hot, and the fall too cool to trigger any flowering.

It suggests next time taking the plants inside earlier, to trigger the growth of peppers.

Update: the lighting tools we’re using to grow peppers inside are described here and here. 4 desk lamps with grow bulbs as described in the links are being kept on a 16 hour cycle.

Normally this restaurant would be a little too far down Buford Highway for my comfort, but BuHi had his fifth blogger meetup here, and that was too much temptation to pass up.

A visitor from Chattanooga, TN

The crowd, well over a dozen, had regulars and some new comers. Regulars included BuHi and Beth Robinette, @TowerATL and “IT guy”, a fellow who talks phones and tech and has been to just about every one of these meetups (one day I’ll remember his name). Newcomers included a pair from Chattanooga, the blogger Who Eats That Stuff, and @SeanEatsAtlanta. It was a good crowd and an exceptionally friendly crowd. Given the issues in my life, the timing was this event couldn’t have been better.

The food? It’s been covered before, especially in a three way meetup between Chloe, Sean of Take Thou Food and Foodie Buddha. Given my health issues, I had targeted the Vietnamese beef stew with baguette as a dish I could eat without many problems. Meat was plentiful, the broth was rich, and overall was a good choice for someone who has to limit carbs in a meal.

Vietnames beef stew. Rich flavors, baguette optional.

Other eaters enjoyed the spring rolls, and the one taste I was given of pho broth showed a lot of flavor, and was pleasingly aromatic. The bun dishes here are respected, and they have rice dishes, and those with noodles and more in a bowl. It’s easy to see why this eatery remains on the “pho short list” of a large number of bloggers.

Pho Dai Loi #2
4186 Buford Highway
Atlanta, GA 30345
(404) 633-2111

Many years ago I met and befriended a guy named Wayne Comeaux, and he was from the city of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. I heard plenty about Breaux Bridge’s crawfish festival, and when I recently visited home to attend a high school reunion, on the way back I decided to give the memory of Wayne the homage it deserved and find an eatery in Breaux Bridge and try  it out. It was about 3 hours out of my way, but I thought it would be a worthwhile detour.

Breaux Bridge is about 6 miles or so east of the I-49/I-10 intersection, and its historic district is less than 2 miles off the interstate. It makes this small community very  inviting for a  traveler, and historic Breaux Bridge itself is an eyeful.

I arrived on a Sunday around 10:30am, and so was ordering from Cafe Des Amis’s Sunday brunch menu. A lot of the items were starchy and  I was alone, so I had to avoid personal favorites for those items I could safely eat. I had a cup of their chicken and sausage gumbo, and what they called their marinated seafood salad.

The cup of gumbo was small (a bowl was available for 5 dollars extra), but flavorful, and not especially hot. I’d say that was also true of the salad as well, being more sneak-up-on-you hot than anything else. I’m still not quite sure of the  salad’s “vinaigrette”. Perhaps it’s me, but I don’t associate that orange shade with any kind of vinaigrette. Nonetheless, I enjoyed  the flavor of the dish, bits of seafood sparkling like jewels between the sauce and chunks of cheese.

The building itself is very pretty upon entry. Walls are largely brick, with plenty of wood and also some aluminum siding towards the front. It looks old, it feels old, but the walls are also decorated in art – abstracts when I was there, along with some religious iconography near the bar. There was seating equivalent to about 15 to 20 or so tables for 4, though some tables were scooted together so large parties could eat. There is a lot of graffiti on the walls, and a sign to please not add to it, unless you were one of the artists that contributed to the walls in one fashion or another.

Service was friendly and excellent. The experience was pleasing. I’m going to have to make this detour at least one more time.

Cafe Des Amis
140 East Bridge Street
Breaux Bridge, LA, 70517
(337) 332-5273

Breaux Bridge