→ May 16, 2010
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Atlanta & Dallas eats.

The updated draft top 100 went up on Friday, and I just went into the Conversation to answer your questions.

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I was only on the ground in Atlanta for about 24 hours last week but did end up eating at three new places.

Big Daddy’s is a well-reviewed and inexpensive soul food place just south of the airport where you order at the counter from steam trays, much like the meat-and-three places I found in Nashville a few years ago. The one surprise to me was the lack of fried dishes – they offer fried fish to order but no fried chicken, which I think of as a staple of Southern cuisine. I’m assuming that they don’t offer it because fried chicken that has been sitting is just not good eats. The service was extremely friendly, but the food – roasted chicken, cornbread stuffing that was way too salty, steamed okra that was just slimy, and collard greens – was unremarkable. Grade 45.

I met a friend of mine from high school for dinner at Milton’s in the town of that name in Fulton County, where we ended up ordering the same thing, the panko-crusted trout with black sesame seeds, which the server told us was their most popular dish. The fish was excellent, very fresh, pan-fried but not greasy, and the sweet red chili sauce underneath was a good complement to the slightly salty taste of the breading. The dish was overloaded with sides, including shrimp-sweet potato fritters that looked amazing but were kind of gummy, and some ho-hum mashed potatoes. I’d give them a 50 for the fish but they may be trying too hard with the extras.

The best meal of the trip came on a tip from Friend of the Dish Richard Dansky, whose novel Firefly Rain earned my recommendation last month. The Buckhead Bread Company is part bakery, part upscale brunch spot. I’m not normally a French toast guy, but I figured that was a smart order in restaurant attached to a bakery. The chef uses rounds cut from brioche and must finish them under a broiler to add a sweet, crunchy crumb topping, and the dish comes with a blueberry sauce and fresh blueberries, strawberries, and blackberries. I also had the sausage patties, which were on the savory side for breakfast and were overcooked, but the saltiness was a good offset to the sweetness of the French toast, which could easily have been on the dessert menu for a fine restaurant. (Pain perdu, the French version of French toast, is served as dessert in France, not as breakfast.) The menu wasn’t extensive but they had several other offerings I wanted to try, so between that and the high quality of what I got, it’s a 55.

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My 24 hours in Dallas were less productive from an eating perspective, as I only ate one meal outside a hotel or ballpark. Spring Creek BBQ is a local chain of Q joints, and there’s one not far from UTA’s park that was reasonably convenient for me to hit before hopping my flight out of DFW. Their sliced beef (brisket) was mixed – the ends were flavorful on their own and just needed a little sauce to cut their dryness, while the center slices were almost too moist and had the texture of corned beef (one of the few foods that I absolutely despise). The mild smoked sausage was plus, a salty-sweet-smoky link of porcine goodness. The sides are serve-yourself, which makes me think about how utterly disgusting most people are, but the meal comes with unlimited hot rolls, a little like a large Parker house roll but white rather than slightly yellow inside, which I assume means it’s made with milk but doesn’t contain much butter. It’s a high 50 for me.

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→ May 15, 2008
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Georgia eats.

On the first season of Feasting on Asphalt, Alton Brown and his crew stopped at a tiny place in Toccoa, Georgia, called Shirley’s Sole Food Café. Ethan Martin, a likely first-rounder in this year’s Rule 4 draft, goes to school in Toccoa, and when I finally put two and two together the night before I flew down there, I figured I had to eat a meal at Shirley’s as sort of a pilgrimage. Unfortunately, I was there on a Friday, which is all-you-can-eat fish fry night at Shirley’s, meaning I didn’t get the menu that Alton et al got on their visit. The meal was slightly disappointing, although I was impressed that nothing tasted fishy. The fish is fried in large batches and placed in warming trays up front; you walk along the counter and point to what you want. The fried shrimp were the best option, in a crunchy crust (like panko, but can you really get panko bread crumbs out there?), while the fried tilapia ended up a bit chewy. It was $12 for the fish fry, plus another $8 if you wanted fresh steamed crab legs … which I did, receiving more crab legs than I could eat. They were fresh and had a lot of meat, but the meat itself was a little bland, lacking that distinctive undertone of sweetness that, for me, has always separated crab from lobster.

This week, I was driving down 19/41 to Griffin to see Tim Beckham when I passed McGhin’s Southern Pit Barbecue and saw the parking lot was pretty full for lunchtime on a weekday, so I pulled in. It certainly looked the part, and the menu was pretty straightforward without a lot of descriptions – the type of place that assumes you know your Q. However, it turned out to be more evidence that, as JC Bradbury told me last year, there is no good barbecue in Georgia. I went with a pork/beef platter, which came with piles of shredded meat plus two sides and “cracklin’ cornbread.” That cornbread was the only item on the plate to which I’d give an average grade (it was plus, plenty of fat in it and no sugar). Both meats were very dry and more chopped than shredded; I hate to be forced to add sauce to pulled pork or beef because it needs the moisture, and it was worse because the sauce was North Carolina style, heavy on the vinegar, which to my palate means one-dimensional. The baked beans were also too vinegary and more like a soup than actual baked beans. I didn’t even touch the coleslaw because it was sitting in a pool of a mayo-based dressing; God only knows what microbes might be living in there. For dessert – I had room – I got the peach cobbler, when in Rome, etc. It was more of a deconstructed peach pie, with a pie crust mixed in with the filling of a peach pie. (A cobbler dough is more akin to a biscuit dough than a pie crust dough, lighter and a little cakey rather than the flaky and tender and very fatty characteristics of pie dough.) The filling was overcooked and had way more cornstarch than needed to thicken it. I have to give the waitress credit, however; when I said I didn’t know what Brunswick stew was and, after she described it, decided not to order it as a side, she brought a tiny dish of it to me anyway so I could try it. I wish I could have said better things about the food, but I’m not going to lie to you – it just wasn’t good.

It’s also time for another update on Paschal’s. I went to the original location on MLK Jr. Drive in downtown Atlanta for breakfast, and the food was generally quite good and was made to order. I decided to branch out and try the salmon croquettes, a platter that comes with two eggs cooked to order, home fries, and a biscuit. The waitress actually asked me whether I wanted my eggs scrambled hard, medium, or soft, which is the first time I’ve ever been asked that; I went with soft, and they were perfect for me, although if you like ‘em runny they may seem overdone. The biscuit was excellent, very soft, but without much of a crust – the top was golden, but it was like a thin layer of parchment paper rather than the traditional semi-hard crust. The supposed star of the dish, the croquettes, were obviously made from tinned salmon and had a fishy taste that couldn’t really be avoided.

I also revisited the Paschal’s in the Atlanta airport before my flight home, and at the suggestion of one of you, tried the collard greens. They had a strong cured-pork flavor – I’m assuming ham hock – and the sweetness of a little sugar, although nothing can disguise the fact that collard greens, even cooked properly for hours, are bitter. And this time around, I got my quarter-dark fried chicken, which could not have been more perfectly cooked.

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→ April 9, 2008
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Florida panhandle eats.

On the heels of a rainout at FSU, I had dinner at the bar at Cypress, a fine-dining restaurant in downtown Tallahassee. I decided to go tapas-style and order three starters as my meal, two of which were excellent.

I began with the salad special, local organic baby spinach with red onion, goat cheese, and candied pecans, served with a poppyseed vinaigrette and topped with duck confit. I left a few poppyseeds. The duck confit was outstanding – not that I’ve ever had bad duck confit – while the spinach leaves were very fresh and unbelievably green. All the dish lacked was a little heat, because it hit so many other dimensions of flavor, from the sweetness of the pecans to the tang/acidity of the cheese and the vinaigrette to the slight bitterness in the spinach.

The second dish was a blue crab cake tower, with two crab cakes, each sitting on a tostone, then stacked on top of each other, with a jicama-melon salsa on top and a smoked onion-jalapeño tartar sauce on the bottom. The crab cakes weren’t made from lump meat, but that would be my only real complaint, as they still had great crab flavor and a red pepper kick, which was nicely complemented by the creaminess of the sauce and the faint sweetness of the melons in the salsa. The tostones were sort of irrelevant, since it required a lot of work to cut them into manageable pieces.

The last dish was a pecan-crusted quail which turned out to be a pecan-battered quail, and it was the one disappointment of the evening. The interior of the quail was undercooked, and while I know that game is typically served medium-rare, I find quail that’s cooked less than medium to be gamey in texture and flavor. The accompaniments lacked the balance of the earlier dishes, and the smoked tomato vinaigrette and sweet pickle relish created a rather low pH for the dish as a whole.

I loved the food but was most impressed by the little things at Cypress. They make their own breads in-house every morning; my bread basket had two miniature buttermilk biscuits as well as two pieces of a fantastic sponge bread, with a perfect crust and very soft interior. Because I said it was my first time at the restaurant, I received a “gift from the kitchen,” a watermelon shooter with diced heirloom strawberries and a hint of mint in the liquid. And most impressively, even though I didn’t complain at all about the quail, the bartender, Grant, took it off of my bill because he noticed how much food I left on the dish after practically licking the previous two plates clean. It was an unnecessary step but indicative of an awareness of the importance of customer service.

• I stayed in the Fort Walton Beach area Friday night after seeing a game in Niceville and got takeout from a little Thai place in Fort Walton called Thai House. The kitchen had just closed but they were willing to make me some pad thai to go, but I’m sorry to report that it had zero taste. I was a little put off when I discovered that it had no heat; I was asked how spicy I’d like it, and I said, “Just a little bit,” after which the woman who took my order said, “Mild.” That’s not the same thing to me, and what I got was mild, not a little bit spicy.
• On the drive from Niceville to Tallahassee, there ain’t much for lunch, so I stopped at a Sonny’s BBQ, which is a chain of Q joints I’ve seen all over Florida. Don’t waste your time. Their “signature” baby-back ribs had no flavor whatsoever, while the BBQ beans were almost as blah, and the corn bread was sickeningly sweet. The only acceptable item was the fried okra, straight out of the fryer with a crispy crust made with stone-ground cornmeal.
• I hit Paschal’s in the Atlanta airport for Sunday breakfast. I ordered their chicken hash, which is more of a stew with onions and chicken stock thickened with some form of starch, although it was pretty good even if it wasn’t really a hash. The main problem was the service, as the waitress screwed up two parts of my order, and the coffee, which was what my cousins in Italy call acqua sporca – dirty water, which I could see through when I held the glass mug up to the light.

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→ April 4, 2008
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Quick hit – Paschal’s at ATL.

So I’m in travel limbo here, waiting at Atlanta-Hartsfield on a connection that’s already delayed 90 minutes, which will mean I’ll be lucky to get to tonight’s high school game in time for the first pitch, but it did give me time for a proper lunch. I went to the Paschal’s full-service location in Terminal C, and by the depressed standard of airport food, it’s off the charts.

Paschal’s is an Atlanta institution, so applying my philosophy to always start with a signature dish when possible, I went with the fried chicken, getting sides of green beans and black-eyed peas. The dinner comes with a generic house salad and two mini-corn muffins for $9.95. The best part of the meal, unsurprisingly, was the corn muffins, made with stone-ground meal and little sugar, containing plenty of fat (I’m assuming butter, but it could have had some bacon fat mixed in). The fried chicken – a quarter-white, which was a small disappointment because I assumed it would be a quarter-dark – was perfectly cooked, not a bit dry, with a slightly salty crust that didn’t lose its crunch even after ten minutes. The black-eyed peas were delicious but I expected bits of salt pork or ham hock in the mix; the green beans were unremarkable. I also liked the sweet iced tea, even though I normally hate it because it’s too damn sweet. (I take my iced tea unsweetened with a squeeze of lemon.) This sweet tea was too damn sweet, but the flavor of the tea reminded me of Thai iced tea without the sweetened condensed milk. Total bill including a 20% tip was $15.20. I believe there is at least one other Paschal’s location, by the ticketing counters before security, and there may be more in other terminals.

My only real complaint is that the food took a long time to arrive, since airport restaurants tend to move quickly, but I suppose that’s the price of getting true fried chicken.

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