On the culinary front, Atlanta was disappointing – five restaurants, the best of which was one I’ve been to many times, and two of which were big disappointments.

The Flying Biscuit is a bit of a local legend, apparently, but I’d been warned that it wasn’t as good as it was in its heyday. Given how I feel about biscuits, though, I thought it was worth a shot, especially since the one thing I expected them to still do well was the food item that appears in their name. No such luck: The biscuit was tasteless and even a bit flat, with a dry exterior and a doughy interior. Nothing else on the plate stood out, and I was a bit put off by the fact that the menu includes no pork products of any kind. It’s breakfast, kids. Bacon comes from a pig. Don’t insult me by trying to make it out of poultry.

On the other hand, the biscuits at the Silver Skillet, over by Georgia Tech, were excellent – light, fluffy, buttery (maybe a bit too much so – seriously, just brush the tops, don’t douse them), and you get two of them with your eggs and pork product. The eggs (scrambled) were nicely cooked as well. Some other online reviewers seem to like the décor, but I found it kitschy, and they get a point or two off for serving food-service tea.

Two separate rankings (one by CitySearch) put Williamson Bros. Bar-B-Q at the top of Atlanta-area barbecue joints … which doesn’t say much for Atlanta-area barbecue. (J.C. Bradbury, of Sabernomics blogging fame, told me later that day that Atlanta has no good ‘cue. Figures.) I went with a combo plate – ribs (which turned out to be spare ribs), pulled pork, fried okra, BBQ beans, and a slice of toast. The ribs were so tough that I gave up after one. The pulled pork was better, nice and moist, but really light on flavor; they get bonus points for including some end bits in the mix. The okra was greasy, and the batter didn’t include the traditional cornmeal. The BBQ beans were actually quite good, with a fruity flavor I couldn’t identify (I’m thinking apple juice, but I’m not sure). I’d go back for a plate of pulled pork or a sandwich, but a Q place that can’t do ribs doesn’t belong at the top of any rankings.

Back over by Georgia Tech, I walked from the park (a top-notch college facility) up to the Tin Drum Asia Café, which theoretically is a quick food option. I say theoretically because it took over 20 minutes from when I placed my order for me to get my very simple lunch, which I don’t believe they started making until I complained that it was taking so long. To make matters worse, the food was nothing special: The coconut soup with chicken (tom kha gai) was bland, and the shrimp tempura “drumroll” (a couple of fried shrimp with avocado, tomato, and a honey-miso dressing on a small roti) was greasy. I can see why the student body likes it, though – all that plus a bottle of water was under $10.

Finally, the best meal I had on the trip was an old standby: Annie’s Thai Castle in Buckhead, which I’ve been visiting on trips to Atlanta for about twelve years now, and it’s still as good today as it was when my friend Steve first took me there. Their pad prik with beef was the highlight of this visit – spicy but not incendiary, with extremely tender strips of beef – and their pad thai is always solid. We also had their chicken with yellow curry, which was very good, not too sweet the way a lot of places serve it. You also get plenty of food at Annie’s, which is important, since I was eating with a scout who has two hollow legs.

Not much new food-wise on this trip – just two new restaurants that I managed to hit while otherwise stuck in chain-restaurant hell. Line Thai, on Bell Road in Sun City, jumped out at me as a non-chain place, although it’s not exactly a hole-in-the-wall either, with a big, brightly-lit dining room and a pretty extensive menu.

Anyway, I went for the pad thai (spelled phat thai on their menu), and also added a “salad” the Thai name of which I can’t hope to remember. It was actually a dish of finely chopped chicken that had been sautéed with lemongrass, mint, chili powder (just a little), and scallions, and was served with cilantro and with sliced green cabbage wedges. It was good, not great, with a pleasant but mild flavor that unfortunately didn’t do enough to disguise the plain taste of the chicken. The pad thai was excellent, with an earthy sauce, shrimp that didn’t taste like they went from the freezer to the wok (which happens way too often, even in “good” Thai joints), and a nice hit of spice from what I presume was either chili powder or a chili sauce.

The big hit of the trip was a relatively new gelateria in Scottsdale called the Gelato Spot, on the corner of 3rd Ave and Scottsdale Rd. This is the newest of the chain’s four locations, and the gelato was very good. The texture was excellent, smooth with no granularity found in a lot of cheaper gelato places. They do keep it very cold, too much so, so that it was harder than the gelato you’d get at a really top-notch gelateria or at any gelateria in Italy. The chocolate flavor was superb, not too sweet with a nice cocoa flavor, while the caramel flavor was fair with a weird sour undertone, almost like a cheesecake flavor.

Let’s just get one thing out of the way first: Downtown Houston is something of a disaster, at least over by Minute Maid Park. That area is particularly decrepit, with abandoned buildings ringing the stadium. I walked across the street from my hotel to the ballpark, but didn’t feel safe walking anywhere else in that part of town. I drove up to Market Square in search of a restaurant that turned out to be closed for dinner (it’s only open three hours a day, 11-2 – great business model), and that area is also ringed by abandoned buildings, not to mention the ultimate feel-good establishment, the bail bondsman, which I passed on the way there.

Azuma is a high-end sushi joint in the Market Square area, and by high-end, I mean that only one person who worked in the place spoke Japanese, and the restaurant was more about ambiance and selling booze than it was about the fish. But unlike most of the other restaurants I saw in a walk around Market Square, it was open, had customers, and didn’t look like a front for the Lithuanian mob or something. (Most ominous was the “Irish pub” that had one customer, a cop, sitting out front. In fact, the sheer number of cops I saw around Market Square made me wonder what the hell goes on around there that requires that many cops in a two-square-block radius.)

Anyway, Azuma’s food didn’t live up to its ambiance. I went with an “Asian mixed greens salad,” which was a mesclun salad with asparagus added, and enough dressing to drown a rhinoceros. Once I was done spattering dressing all over Market Square – you try eating vinegar soup with a pair of chopsticks – I turned to the sushi. The spicy tuna rolls didn’t contain mayo (bonus points), but the tuna itself was fishy, and the chefs hadn’t removed the blood-line portion of the fish. It was also too spicy for my tastes, but that did have the benefit of making me forget that it tasted fishy. The salmon was better and was clearly fresh, but didn’t have much taste of its own, lacking that slight sweetness that good sake should have. I also tried a fish called escolar, which had a good smooth texture but tasted something like Styrofoam peanuts. Add in one serving of unagi and the total came to over $30.

Friday morning I headed to a restaurant featured on The Hungry Detective, a Food Network show aimed at finding “off the beaten path” restaurants and a new addition to my Save-Until-I-Delete list on the Tivo. The Breakfast Klub is just what the name says – a breakfast joint that serves up eggs, bacon, sausage, waffles (with fried chicken wings, the house specialty), and what I have to say is the best breakfast biscuit I have ever had. The thing was pillow-soft, almost like cotton candy, with a tremendous butter flavor and just a hint of a buttermilk tang. Seriously, a box of those vs. a box of Krispy Kremes … wars have started over dilemmas like that. (I’ll take one box of each, thanks.) I went back the next day to try the waffle, but was disappointed; although it was made on a Belgian-style griddle, it was a traditional batter, so the finished product was dense and a bit dry, and I was surprised that it wasn’t sweet. The eggs were good the first day but divine the second, cooked but not overcooked and still moist when they reached the table. I’d also take the country sausage (a little tough, but with outstanding flavor) over the bacon (nothing special). But the biscuits – seriously, I’d beat you to death with a butter knife over the last one.

The other pleasant surprise of the trip was, of all things, the restaurant in my hotel, the Inn at the Ballpark. Because the hotel and its Ballpark Café (okay, no points for the name) are right across the street from Minute Maid, it made a perfect spot for me to jump over, grab lunch, and get back during the one-hour breaks between games. And it turns out that the food there is very good, especially because they’re clearly using fresh ingredients for everything they make. At my first visit, I went for the default option, the grilled chicken sandwich (served with roasted red peppers on focaccia), and was amazed to find that unlike most grilled chicken breasts, this one wasn’t cooked within an inch of its life. It had a perfect brown sear on the outside, and the inside was fully-cooked but still moist. The shrimp BLT – I ordered the fried shrimp sandwich (which sounded like a makeshift po’ boy), but the waitress screwed up my order) – was also delicious, with shrimp that were also cooked properly, as well as sliced avocado and bacon. The restaurant makes its own potato chips, and I’d bet that the French fries were cut on-site as well.

The kicker for me was the Sunday breakfast, which is usually a disaster at good restaurants. I ordered off the menu – if you’ve read Kitchen Confidential, you know why – and went for the yogurt/fruit plate. I ended up with a 10″ plate full of fresh fruit, a dish of yogurt, and a blueberry muffin that had just been made. The waiter thought I was done with the dish with the last bite of the muffin on it, and I nearly broke his wrist to keep him from taking it. But what impressed me the most was the fact that the executive chef, Oscar Mejia, came out and manned the omelette station himself. I told him how much I’d enjoyed the food over the past few days, and he gave all the credit to the people who work for him in the kitchen.

One last note on Houston – while flying out of IAH, I grabbed a chopped beef sandwich at Harlon’s BBQ, the only non-fast-food chain dinner option I could find, and for a quick airport meal, it was pretty good; the meat wasn’t dry and didn’t taste or look like it had been sitting for hours. Out in the world I’d demand better, but by the low standards of airport cuisine, this was pretty good.

My wife and I recently got the chance to go out for dinner without our daughter for the first time in about five months, but neither of us was interested in heading downtown, so our options for a nicer meal were somewhat limited. We decided to try Porcini’s, an Italian restaurant in Watertown very close to our favorite little restaurant in the area, Strip-T’s.

It was a mistake.

The main meal was fair; my wife liked her veal saltimbocca, but my veal piccata wasn’t pounded thin enough and the sauce was very tart, meaning that it didn’t have enough butter to balance out the acidity. But the gigantic failure on Porcini’s part was their tiramisu, which we decided to split. It looked like it was done correctly, but after one bite each, we realized that the cheese-custard was sour. It overwhelmed the taste of the dessert, and I thought they might have skimped on the ingredients by using cream cheese instead of mascarpone (an imported Italian cheese that has a texture similar to American cream cheese, but a much milder and smoother taste). So I asked the waitress if there was cream cheese in it. She asked the chef, and came back to tell us that yes, the tiramisu contained a “mixture” of cream cheese and mascarpone (which I took to mean that it had 98% cream cheese and 2% mascarpone). I pointed out that that “wasn’t exactly traditional,” and she just shrugged her shoulders.

She didn’t take it off the bill. I took it out of her tip.

And for what it’s worth, I’m not a fan of any restaurant that cuts corners on ingredients. I don’t care how good your chef is; if the ingredients suck, so will the finished product. Porcini’s cuts corners on ingredients. That’s a dealbreaker for me.

My wife pointed out that we should have just gone to Strip-T’s, which is a much more casual, mom-and-pop type of restaurant that specializes in ridiculously fresh fish. We wanted to do something a little more upscale, but as often as not, upscale just means a higher price, not a better meal.

Naples didn’t offer many hidden-gem restaurants of the sort that I particularly like to hit when I travel, but there were two spots worth mentioning, one on each end of the price scale.

Driving towards the hotel (the Naples Grande Resort) from the Fort Myers airport, I caught a glimpse of a place called Tacos Ardiente in a strip mall just before I got to the hotel. Since almost every other restaurant I saw on Pine Ridge Road was a fast-food restaurant or casual-dining chain franchise, I was pretty sure that I’d need a place like that to keep me sane. It was good enough the first day that I went back for a second. I can’t speak to authenticity, but their tacos were outstanding, and unlike any I’d had before. I tried both the chicken and steak tacos; the steak ones had more flavor. The tacos were served in a soft flour shell with lettuce, shredded cabbage, cheese (although naturally I had them leave it out), and a fresh tomato salsa; they went for $1.99 each. I also ordered a small side order of guacamole (50 cents), which tasted homemade. So the damage for one meal, including a Jarritos tamarind soda, was about $6 including tax.

I saw a few good comments on chowhound about a sushi place a mile or two north of the hotel on US-41 called Sushi-Thai. I’m usually wary of sushi-plus-non-Japanese-food restaurants, but this is Florida, and beggars can’t be choosers. I stuck with sushi and was pleasantly surprised. The salmon was very fresh and mild-tasting; it didn’t have the slight sweetness of Pacific salmon, but it still had good flavor and boded well for the rest of the fish. The unagi was excellent, although it’s hard to screw it up. The spicy tuna maki was a treat, as I’d never had it prepared this way before: Rather than tossing finely chopped tuna with a spicy sauce (sometimes containing mayo, making the whole thing wretched), the chef made a plain tuna maki, cut the roll into eight pieces, then drizzled a hot chile pepper sauce over the top of it. The taste of the tuna really came through in a way that traditional spicy tuna rolls don’t allow. I also splurged on fried shumai, which were just lightly browned and not even a little bit greasy.

By the way, the best quote from the GM meetings belongs to Jeff Angus of Management by Baseball fame: “Alcohol is the humidor of conversation.”