March 27, 2011
Large chunks of lobster and Alaskan king crab swim over the top of this enormous bowl of seafood soup. It was a gift, to my daughter, for making an unexpected ‘A’ in school.
Not everyone was as thrilled with this dish as my daughter was. My wife felt it a bit too salty. But with serving sizes so large we were bound to take food home, no one went away hungry.
Marietta Diner
306 Cobb Parkway
Marietta, GA 30060
(770) 423-9390
January 15, 2011
It’s in a section of town that steps back in time, with small, single story buildings overrun by the larger houses that have grown up around these structures. Old, in the style of a town center. Still, it’s fashionable these days, repainted and fresh, and in this segue back to the first half of the twentieth century is the City Cafe.
It has an exceptional online reputation for being an inexpensive “meal and three” shop. Lines will form, waiting for seating. According to users of Urban Spoon, it can take as long as 20 minutes to get a meal around lunchtime. So when we arrived about 11:30ish on a Monday just after New Years, I counted myself lucky that only 7 or 8 people were ahead of us.
The deal is this: you basically wait and watch for one of the booths to open up, and when it does, you sit in it. Staff will then come by, clean up and then take your order.
Service is fast and efficient. Prices are dirt cheap. Meal and 3 costs $5.10, and you don’t have to get 3 vegetables.
I wish I could say we had no issues with the food, because so many other components of the experience were appealing. But my daughter had issues with the flavor of her catfish and my wife felt her chicken was a bit too salty. The bigger issue for me was the catfish, which either had an odd spice or was a little old that day. I couldn’t be sure. I had salmon croquettes, and they were good. So, our experience with the entrées here was hit or miss. Choose carefully. Vegetables were excellent, and made in the southern style.
Verdict: Good sides, hit or miss main dishes. Choose carefully, and you’ll be rewarded.
City Cafe
408 Main Avenue
Northport AL 35476
(205) 758-9171
January 8, 2011
It’s a red building, seen on your right as you head north on highway 69. It’s not the easiest to get to, nor the easiest to find parking for, though signs for parking exist and eventually will get you to the right spot. It is small, the converted house, and the size is the eventual cause of our misfortunes here, because being small and also being popular create unique issues for any eatery.
We came here for breakfast. Waysider serves a variety of breakfast items. There are good looking pancakes, good buttery biscuits, excellent buttery grits. Rich starchy foods abound. The Paula Deen axiom, “You can never have too much butter,” is in play here. Walls, like so many Tuscaloosa eateries, are covered with Bear Bryant and Alabama football memorabilia. There aren’t many staffers but they constantly move, remaking the eatery for every new family, or group that eats here. Groups of eaters often exceed a dozen in a party.
Good juice, tiny glasses of it.
The only plate of food that came as we ordered it.
I had ordered steak and eggs.
Hash browns missing here.
Our issue with Waysider is a little exceptional, and a product of the need to feed many mouths. Our waitress didn’t get our order accurately, and to be plain, she goofed big time. I had hardly half the food I wanted, and big portions of my wife’s order were simply skipped. So much of it was missing I simply assumed that it was coming on a separate set of plates. Now, in 99% of other establishments, this gets fixed. But not in the Waysider.
When I finally told our waitress that there was a problem with the order, staff came out of the kitchen and in a loud voice exclaimed
WHAT’S GOING ON HERE? ARE YOU TRYING TO TAKE ANOTHER ORDER? YOU CAN’T TAKE AN ORDER TWICE HERE!
At that, we decided the best approach was to pay our bill and leave.
I just have a few more words to add to this. Our situation was unusual, but the actions were not hard to understand, given the crowd of eaters behind us. That said, the actions were hardly “Southern Hospitality”. In fact, we were treated quite harshly, the worst treatment I’ve suffered in my nearly 2 years of food blogging. This isn’t a failure of the waitress, or the staff. This is a wholesale management failure. Management has to step in and fix this, or decide if they want a reputation for ruthlessness in dealing with customers to dog them the rest of their days.
Verdict: Good food. Staff is broken, literally. Recommend as long as they can get your order right.
Waysider
1512 Greensboro Ave
Tuscaloosa, AL 35401
(205) 345-8239
June 2, 2010
The Marietta Diner is an Atlanta icon, the model on which most diners in the city are based. It isn’t a product of random fame, but rather a function of it performing better than the competition. It starts with a good staff, dressed in white shirts and tie, staff that is courteous and cooperative. Having more than one staff member work with your table seems routine here. It continues with a deft handling of a large menu. Food isn’t all staples, nor is it boring.
The diner has a good looking outside, though the combination of chrome, glass, and gray cinder block is an interesting one. The Marietta Diner is part of a family of restaurants, the sign announcing the sister restaurants clearly visible from the diner parking lot. Inside, brown wood is supplemented with a color scheme dealing in burnt oranges and reds, resulting in a more subdued look than many neon and chrome diner interiors.
On this day I had a series of dilemmas caused by the menu, which I mostly solved by making the most conservative choices I could. There was an Irish lamb stew in the specials, which looked really good. But did it have potatoes? If so, how many? So, I chickened out and had the Mediterranean panini instead. Yes, it had sweet potato fries on the side, but I didn’t have to eat them. It came with a soup, so I chose cream of spinach, trying to avoid the pastas of, say, chicken noodle. The soup came out quickly.
I tasted creamy, buttery, and cheesy flavors in the soup. The flavors of spinach were more hinted at than dominant. This isn’t a food I’ve had much of, since my diet pretty strictly limits my fat consumptions, and the soup was quite rich.
The panini was an interesting dish. There was far more cheese in it than chicken, and the vegetable slices were thick and delicious. The chicken that was there added a distinct grilled flavor to the sandwich and the gooey cheese acted as the glue that held it all together.
The serving of fries was huge and enticing. I had one fry. I couldn’t resist. In general, dishes in this eatery were enormous. The wings plate and the chicken fried steak plates served next to me could easily feed two people. Take out bags looked like grocery shopping bags. Desserts, in glass and chrome display cases, were huge.
This diner brings back memories, as the first place I stayed in Atlanta was a couple minutes away from this diner. Age seems to have enhanced the reputation of this eatery. Guy Fieri’s visit made it much easier to get my family here (no photos of that visit though). And the sheer efficiency of the place, the quality of service, the easily accessible menu keeps people coming back for more.
Verdict: An iconic diner that easily holds up to its reputation. Highly recommended.
Marietta Diner
306 Cobb Parkway South (i.e. US 41)
Marietta, GA 30060
(770) 423-9390
Notes: Other blog reviews of this diner include one by John Bickford, another by Amy of Amy on Food, and also the blog Vainas Varias.
May 7, 2010
The Flying Biscuit Cafe leaves me with very mixed emotions. Obviously modeled after a side item, the biscuit, this eatery is intended to be an homage to the kind of eating seen in the rural South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The menu is politically incorrect. They revel in the fats they serve, the starches they offer, and mixing meats, starches, and fats in irremovable ways. This is great for someone wanting to eat the way grandma used to cook and eat.
Thing is, my grandmother on my father’s side died of a series of strokes at the age of 60. Being rural and engaged in a lot of low grade hard labor, and having only country doctors, it’s entirely plausable she had undiagnosed diabetes, and that vascular complications of diabetes killed her. According to Gretchen Becker, most diabetics die of heart and blood vessel complications in the end. So, I don’t want to eat like my grandmother. I must eat better than her.
And so, when someone like me encounters a dish like Coca Cola salmon – you know, high fructose corn syrup embedded into one of the most heart healthy fishes available – and with no obvious alternatives (such as fish without a corn syrup marinade), it tends to make me angry. There is nothing intentional or malicious about this. The intent in the cafe is to mix old country favorites in ways that appeal to 21st century palates. And it succeeds. The place was crowded when I arrived at the Sandy Springs location. Speech patterns could have been taken from an MTV remake of Frank Zappa’s “Valley Girl”. The crowd was young, happy, enjoying themselves. In the end, though, I couldn’t escape the feeling that Flying Biscuit Cafe is clueless about food issues. Not mean spirited, not as if they’re not trying to please customers, but just blindly, gleefully clueless.
If you are willing to look, there are a number of items I could eat. I ended up getting a Bacon and Cheddar chicken sandwich. There are nice chunks of turkey bacon in the sandwich and plenty of cheddar cheese. I tried to order a separate salad as well but the waitress kept insisting I get a side salad. So I ended up with far fewer greens than I wanted, because the side salad is hardly enough for someone on a diet requiring 4-6 servings of vegetables a day.
Clueless.
The inside, to note, is bright and colored in nice pastels. Tables are covered in pretty plastic flowered tablecloths. Chairs are made of wood. Flying Biscuit Cafe is a chain, and there are several in the Atlanta area. And yes, the greens were quite tasty and the sandwich enjoyable. I’d probably have been much happier had I gone to this place for breakfast, where they seem to excel in terms of combinations and options, but I didn’t and those are the breaks.
Verdict: If you and your party are young and 100% healthy, highly recommended. Otherwise caveat emptor.
Flying Biscuit Cafe
5975 Roswell Rd.
Atlanta, GA 30328
(404) 252-1182
December 21, 2009
We went to Ria’s on a day when my wife’s plane flight was cancelled, and she needed something to eat before heading back to the airport. Ria’s Bluebird had been on my “to go” list for ages, and so we winged it. Knowing it was in the general vicinity of Grant Park, we drove onto Memorial and just looked. As it turns out, you could throw a stone from Six Feet Under and it could land on Ria’s Bluebird.
Once we were there, we ended up in a line, seven parties in front of us. Because of a general lack of space, waiting for a table at Ria’s happens outside. It was cold outside, and they had a propane heater on one side of the eatery. That helped the issue with heat, but it didn’t help my wife’s asthma at all. She left the area because the heater was affecting her breathing.
When they finally seated us, we had what was certainly the worst seating I’ve had in 13 years in Atlanta. It was outside, on a table. In order to keep customers warm, they had wrapped the framework around the outside seating in plastic tarpaulin, using plastic ties to hold it to the railing. Most of this seating was pretty decent, but our particular table was by the opening to let customers in (suffering from cold blasts of air). Further, the table was also the target of the nearby heater. The hot air was blowing directly on all three of us, and it was uncomfortable, to say the least. I suspect the only reason we tried to endure it was the long wait we had just suffered through at the airport.
Once seated, we were hungry and I know my wife likes biscuits, so we ordered the biscuits and gravy along with our drinks. The biscuits were quite nice, and the pepper Ria’s adds to their white gravy is a nice touch. The biscuits are crumbly, so if you use biscuits to fish out the gravy, you’ll be using forks to dig bits of biscuit out of the gravy.
The sodas are tiny at Ria's.
After starting on the biscuits, my wife ordered the arugula salad with chicken, my daughter ordered fish and grits, and I ordered the short stack of pancakes with pecans and also the bionic breakfast. I figured the pancakes could be shared between all of us. Before our entrées arrived we ran out of biscuits and my wife ordered two more. She likes good bread and she really liked Ria’s biscuits.
The greens in the salad were tender, and the chicken was good. Still, I think I’d have preferred the salad without the chicken. My wife didn’t feel that way at all, and was quite happy with her dish.
The tilapia was crusty, warm, tender and mild. The grits were creamy, cheesy, richly flavored and delicious. The combination of fish and grits was better than either dish separately, warm mild fish a fine complement to the sharper flavors of the grits.
The bionic breakfast was more a hit with my wife and daughter, who would sneak tastes on occasion. I didn’t think the dish was bad, but I was hoping for a lot more corn and a lot more peppers in the dish. The sauce for this dish is delightfully spicy though, a welcome respite from tamer than tame Atlanta food.
The pancakes surprised me. When they arrived, I looked at the pecans on top and thought I hadn’t received much of any of them. Then I poured some syrup (maple syrup, a nice touch) onto the pancakes and had a bite. Flipping a pancake over shows the tale. The roasted pecans were in the pancake and the combination is flavor dynamite. I tried to make sure everyone got at least a taste but I ended up eating most of these. They were just amazingly good.
So, I have just one bit of advice if you come here. Please don’t sit where we sat. Simply refuse.
Verdict: Highly recommended for the food. Seating, however, can be wretched.
Ria’s Bluebird
421 Memorial Drive
Atlanta, GA 30312
(404) 521-3737
August 18, 2009
New Orleans – The People’s Restaurant is carved out of an old diner in Roswell. The grill is visible to view and the restaurant so small at times you feel you can reach out and touch the chef. There are 7 bar stools along the counter top and 4 booths in the main area. They have another area roped off, if there are a lot of customers.
I came one day with my wife. She was seeing a physician in the area that I work so we took off afterwards, looking for food. This eatery had caught my eye, while going to Red Salt and Indigo, and I had been reading about it on the Internet. The web site was a little confusing, as it spoke of catering. I figured we could straighten that out on site.
Once there, I ordered half a muffuletta and an off the menu seafood gumbo. My wife ordered a vegetable plate. The food came rather quickly.
A muffuletta is a well known New Orleans sandwich so large that a whole muffuletta can feed two. The muffuletta I was served was warm, toasty, delicious and well worth the drive. In my opinion, the muffulatta was the star of the foods we ordered. The seafood gumbo was a good gumbo, but not a great gumbo.
In my opinion the vegetable plate is good, but that recommendation comes with a warning: this restaurant sweetens their greens. I had never run into that before. I’ve been asking ever since. I now know two ladies whose grandmothers would sweeten their greens. It seems to be something the “older folks” would do.
In any event the sweet got into the red beans and also the jambalaya and that affected my wife’s enjoyment of them. I did taste the greens. They were tasty and tender. The jambalaya had a sneaky spiciness that built as you ate it. The red beans and rice weren’t bad at all, but had some sweetness from the greens.
Service was both personal and good. As small as the restaurant is, not all items on the menu (mostly sides) were available.
Verdict: A bit of New Orleans in Roswell. Serves a mean muffuletta. Recommended, and highly recommended if you’re after the sandwich.
New Orleans – The People’s Restaurant
659 Atlanta Street
Roswell, GA 30075
(770) 642-6400
Update: Recipes where collard greens are sweetened can be found here, here, here, and here. In the last recipe it’s a reader that suggests sweetening the dish.
August 1, 2009
The Blue Rooster Cafe and Bakery is a small restaurant on Main Street in Lilburn, a pretty building with a blue and cream color theme. The cafe itself is connected to a red colored annex called “The Hen House”, a larger structure that’s easier to see. It’s in a tiny connected ‘strip mall’ in the old section of Lilburn, not that far from the police station and city hall.
I came here with my daughter around 11:30am on a weekday, to see what the place was like. Inside, it has an old country look, with cream walls and a lot of blue trim. Paintings of roosters and ceramic roosters are everywhere. The roof is industrial, painted in blue, and in the main portion of the restaurant, there are about 4 booths and 8 tables. There are additional tables in the annex, some of them long, and suitable for families or parties. There is also outside seating, about 5 sets of black iron tables and chairs, under umbrellas.
Inside, there are bakery cabinets in an ‘L’ shape in the back of the room, and blackboards on the walls have the offerings of the day written in colored chalk. The menu tends to breakfast items, soups and salads, sandwiches, both cold and grilled on panini bread. This day, they had a special, fried chicken with two sides for $6.95. My daughter ordered the special and I ordered a Cuban panini sandwich ($8.50).
My daughter’s meal came out almost immediately. Cutlery is plastic and sealed, and the plates are also disposables. My sandwich took a bit longer, but pretty soon they called my name and I received a healthy sized panini, grill marks evident on the bread.
My daughter’s chicken came with macaroni and cheese and also green beans. I got a taste of all of her dishes. The chicken was tender, salt and pepper evident in the batter but not overwhelming. I found the chicken to be reasonably spiced. My daughter liked it better with some hot sauce on it. The macaroni and cheese was good, the green beans were decent. The panini was a healthy chunk of ham and pork, pickles and cheese, and it tasted really good. I’m happy I got my sandwich, to be honest.
By the time we started eating, the restaurant started filling up. They had clientele of all ages, from teens in party dresses to grey haired elders. The atmosphere was a lot like an old fashioned southern tea house, and there were a lot of people just taking their time while they ate.
One of the more exotic visitors to Blue Rooster
Verdict: A slice of the old south in old downtown Lilburn. If you like to relax a little while you eat, highly recommended.
The Blue Rooster Cafe and Bakery
107 Main Street
Lilburn GA, 30047
(770) 931-2445
Hours:
8am to 4pm Mon-Thurs and Saturday
8am to 8pm Friday
The easiest way to get to the Blue Rooster Cafe, if you’re coming from Snellville and heading west down Killian Hills Road, is to look for Poplar Street on the left and exit there. Poplar will run into Main Street. Blue Rooster is about a block away on the right if you turn left onto Main.
Food Near Snellville 