→ April 20, 2026
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Charleston, Atlanta, and Athens eats.

I’ve been Charleston a few times, and I can never run out of new restaurants to try there. I don’t think any city of its size is this dense with quality places to eat (and drink, both coffee and cocktails). This time around, I finally tried one of their two famous barbecue places, Lewis BBQ, which also has locations in Greenville, SC, and now Atlanta. Their ribs were some of the best I’ve ever had, with the perfect texture to the bark and the interior, sliding off the bone while still retaining some bite, and the rub has a rich brown sugar flavor. The pulled pork sandwich has maybe two servings’ worth of meat on it, also with excellent texture, although I didn’t get a lot of bark there so the flavor was more muted. The collard greens are solid, but the corn pudding is a star, almost dessert-like because it’s so rich and the corn gives it so much sweetness. It’s got to be among the top five BBQ places I’ve ever tried, although that list isn’t growing as much now that I’ve stopped eating beef and eat much less pork than I used to. (I’ve still yet to get to the other Charleston institution, Rodney Scott’s.)

Dave’s Carry Out is a tiny Black-owned shop that mostly does just one thing: fried seafood. It looks like it’s closed, or even abandoned, and the interior is bare-bones with only a few places to sit, but man is that fried flounder good. It was more than a serving’s worth, two large fillets, fried to order, perfectly crisp with plenty of seasoning. The sandwich comes with basic white bread, lettuce, tomato, and mayo. They also offer fried shrimp, red rice (which was fine), and sometimes special sides like lima beans.

I’d wanted to go to EVO, a pizzeria in North Charleston, for probably a decade or more, and finally got there on this trip. They offer wood-fired pizzas that sit somewhere between Neapolitan and New York styles, with a crispier crust than the former, and they use mostly locally grown and sourced ingredients. The pizzas are small, and the crust itself is more texture than flavor – it’s crisp, but without a whole lot of interior to it, so you don’t taste the dough very much, and it’s more a vehicle for the toppings than a part of the whole. We also got their version of a caprese salad, which was some early tomatoes (so their flavor wasn’t close to peak) with a small amount of crumbled mozzarella on top. I’d call this a disappointment, given how long I’d heard that they were one of the best pizzerias, if not the best, in Charleston.

For coffee, I went to my downtown favorite, Second State, twice, getting a pour-over once and a macchiato the other time. The pour-over was a Colombian Sidra that was fermented using the thermal shock process, so the beans are rapidly heated and cooled, described here. The barista said there were guava notes, and she wasn’t kidding – this coffee is a guava bomb, from the aroma through the first note you get on every sip. That won’t be for everyone, but I thought it was outstanding, with some more complex notes in the finish that were less overtly tropical. I also spent some time writing at Mudhouse over on King, as they have a better loose-leaf tea selection (and above-average coffee). My favorite coffee roaster in the area is Prophet up in North Charleston, but I didn’t get there on this trip.

I had lunch at Sorelle, a restaurant inspired by Italy’s all-day cafes, which has a take-away market with seating available for lunch before the tables turn over to the fine-dining dinner menu. The excellent spicy chicken Caesar sandwich isn’t actually that spicy, with a little ‘nduja in the dressing, and includes some roasted peppers and lemon, so it’s much more interesting and complex than the typical Caesar salad. The Sicilian pizza was a little disappointing, as there wasn’t much cheese on it and there was way too much garlic (a phrase I very rarely use in my life).

Portrait Coffee in Atlanta’s West End is a Black-owned roastery/café – very rare in the specialty coffee space, unfortunately – that recently did a collaboration with Big Boi to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Outkast’s Stankonia. I didn’t try that coffee, as it’s a darker roast than I typically like, but did have a lighter roast Honduran coffee that was excellent with the honeyish notes common to that region. I also loved the café space itself, which was decorated with LPs, books, and art from Black artists of the last half-century.

Portrait happens to be next door to one of Eater’s top restaurants in Atlanta, the all-vegan Tassili’s Raw Reality, which mostly sells wraps and salads built around their dressed kale, which you can get as mild, spicy,  or a mix of the two. I went for the mixed, which was just the right spice level for my tepid palate, in the South of the Border wrap, which has black-eyed pea hummus, couscous, avocadoes, and tomatoes on a chili-pepper tortilla. I got the half size, which was more than enough for a meal for me. After my first bite, I thought I’d made a huge tiny mistake; it was a little bitter, which definitely happens with raw kale if you don’t dress it properly, and seemed underseasoned. I ended up eating the whole thing, because it clearly got better the more I ate – or maybe I just got the end of it without as much dressing and other toppings in that initial taste. So if you go there, don’t give up after a bite or two. It was all good enough that I’m going to try to replicate the concept at home with my own dressings.

Moving along to Athens, I got out of the Friday night game just in time to get into Puma Yu’s right before their kitchen closed at 9:30. It’s a “non-traditional Thai” restaurant and cocktail bar in what is otherwise mostly an industrial park, with a pergola outside and a dozen or so tables inside that help wall off the distinctly un-homey vibe of the rest of the complex it’s in. I was looking for something lighter, so I ordered their spring salad and tuna crudo. The salad had mixed local greens, including chard, little gem, and spinach, with crushed peanuts, fried shallots, several herbs, chili flakes, and a tangy tamarind dressing. I’d go back just for that salad – it was ridiculously good, from the quality of the greens themselves (mostly ‘baby’ greens so they were still pretty tender) to the balance of salt, acid, and sweetness in the dressing and the shallots, to the texture contrasts from the peanuts, shallots, and the crisp greens. The tuna crudo in lemongrass vinegar and makrut lime leaf oil ended up a little overshadowed because its flavors were milder, and I probably should have eaten them in the reverse order because the acidity of the salad’s dressing ended up muting that of the tuna. The fish’s quality was superb, though. For a cocktail, I tried the Retirement Plan, which, hey, I’m 52, it’s never too early to think about retirement, right? It’s made with rhum agricole, which doesn’t always play well with mixers, along with cachaça, both spirits made from sugar cane juice (rather than molasses, like traditional rum). The drink is finished with maraschino liqueur, melon (I think honeydew), lime, and Thai basil; it was pleasantly alcoholic but not overpowering, and the Thai basil was prominent enough to keep the drink from tasting too much like a beach resort cocktail.

White Tiger is a small barbecue & burger spot in a converted house a stone’s throw south of Puma Yu’s; I zagged a little here and got the seared salmon sandwich, thanks in part to their employee’s recommendation, and the grilled vegetables of the day. The sandwich comes with cream cheese (which I omitted because that stuff is gross), capers, cucumbers, organic field greens and lemon vinaigrette dressing, on a toasted ciabatta, and my only complaint is that ciabatta isn’t strong enough for that much stuff in the middle. The salmon was dead-on medium, which is how I like it (probably more than most folks like it cooked, but I either want salmon raw or close to cooked through, not the in-between gummy-bear consistently of rare), and vegetables on top added plenty of bright acidity and salt to help balance the fattiness of the fish. The grilled vegetables will vary by season; I got primarily broccoli and cabbage, which were really smoky and a little charred to bring out some sweetness, although they needed a little acidity so I ended mixing them with some of the toppings that fell off the sandwich.

My one coffee stop in Athens was 1000 Faces, which I’d actually been to before, when I went to UGA in 2020 to see Emerson Hancock and Cole Wilcox. It’s a great space, busy both times I’ve been there, and their pour-overs are just $5.

Mama’s Boy comes up on lots of lists of the best restaurants in Athens, particularly for their biscuits. The biscuits are good, but not elite, and everything else was just okay or worse, particularly the “hashed potatoes,” which tasted like they came out of a freezer bag.

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→ 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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→ September 5, 2009
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Philadelphia eats.

Before I get to Philly, a few of you have asked about the restaurant where my cousin is the pastry chef. It’s called City Limits Diner, and there are two locations, one on the edge of White Plains near Yonkers, the other in Stamford, Connecticut. My cousin is the pastry chef and her husband is the executive chef. I wouldn’t bring it up if I didn’t genuinely like the food. If you do go, make sure you have dessert, and tell your server that Tracy’s cousin Keith sent you (not that it will get you anything, but it’ll score me some points).

I ate all of my non-ballpark meals in Philly at Reading Terminal Market, an eating paradise on Filbert between 11th and 12th streets, right across from the Market East train station. I could have stayed a week and still had places there I wanted to try.

For breakfast, I hit the Dutch Eating Place – Dutch as in Pennsylvania Dutch, a community responsible for at least ten of the stands around the market. They’re best known for their blueberry pancakes, which were solid average or a bit above, and for their cured meats, which were a mixed bag – the pork sausage was meaty and peppery and the portion was beyond generous, but the turkey bacon was gamey and greasy. I also tried their “apple” french toast, which as far as I can tell, was just some whole or multi-grain sandwich bread, dipped in egg batter, fried, and topped with too much cheap cinnamon, with no evidence whatsoever of apples. The pancakes were worth a trip, though. Cash only, cost $10 including tea and tip both days.

DiNic’s serves hot Italian sandwiches in just a few varieties, but everyone recommended the roast pork, thinly sliced, served on fresh crusty Italian bread, with just a few possible toppings – sharp provolone, roasted peppers (sweet or hot), broccoli rabe, or spinach. I went with the rabe and sweet peppers. The sandwich was about a foot long, so I barely got halfway through it, and the inside of the bread was soaked with the juice of the pork (that’s a good thing). For about $8 it’s a bargain and was the best thing I ate on the trip.

Delilah’s Soul Food had some of the best fried chicken I’ve ever eaten. Even though the chicken was more warm than hot when I got it, the crust was still crispy, not greasy, and was well seasoned with salt and pepper without having too much of either. For $8.50 or so you get chicken, cornbread (the sweet kind, unfortunately), and one side; I chose collard greens and got a big bowl that I got maybe halfway through and then poured the juice at the bottom over the cornbread. It’s one of the few places in RTM with table service.

The Famous Fourth Street Cookie Company had a long line around lunch time on my first trip there; the cookies are constantly coming out of the oven, so you can get something hot at that hour, although I found that at room temperature a few hours later, they were just average cookies. They’re a good four inches or so in diameter and cost about $2 apiece. The “double chocolate chip” is just a chocolate chip cookie with a lot of chips, and the chocolate chip with pecans didn’t skimp on the nuts.

I grabbed a pumpkin muffin from Le Bus Bakery for the flight home; it was a bit greasy, staining the paper bag, but it didn’t have the usual pumpkin muffin flavor of stale pumpkin pie spice mix, and it wasn’t overly sweet. There was a faint spicy note, almost like cardamom, but otherwise the pumpkin was allowed to take its place at the center of the muffin.

Leaving RTM, La Colombe is a small cafe best known for its coffee-roasting operation, as they apparently supply many of the best restaurants in town. I found their espresso to be far too watery with no body, but it did have a defined flavor, with strong notes of cocoa beans and a pleasant acidity. My guess is that the beans were from Africa, although I’m no expert on varietals since I always use blends to make espresso at home.

I learned about Capogiro Gelato a few years ago on the short-lived Food Network show, The Hungry Detective, a good concept dressed up with a few too many gimmicks but with plenty of emphasis on the actual food. They have at least one more location now, at 13th and Walnut, very close to my hotel and the RTM. The gelato is very expensive – a medium, roughly 3/4 cup of gelato, cost $6.15 with tax – but outstanding quality. I got three flavors, figuring that was almost an obligation to my readers: dark chocolate, coconut, and toasted almond. The almond was a waste, as the gelato itself had almost no flavor; it comes with toasted slivered almonds, but the flavor needs to be in the gelato, not on it. The coconut was ultra-smooth with a strong, clean coconut flavor. The dark chocolate stole the show, probably the darkest, richest chocolate ice cream I’ve ever had, with a thick consistency more like cocoa pudding ice cream than a typical chocolate gelato; a medium cup of that might be overkill, but I’m willing to risk it.

I didn’t eat at any concessions at CBP, but it’s worth mentioning that the press box food was, by press box food standards, impressive. The worst part of eating while traveling is how hard it is to eat fruits and vegetables while sticking to quick, inexpensive places, and the CBP press box had cups of fresh fruit, a basic salad mix that wasn’t brown or wilted or dried out, and a few vegetable side dishes each night. I know this isn’t of much use to the majority of you, but I wanted to give credit to the Phillies for doing a nice job.

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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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