BBQgeek

Quick Bite - Bu-Ba-Q - Woodstock, GA

Location: 10020 Georgia 92, Woodstock, GA 30188-6428     (678) 402-1662                    

Parking: Located in a Ingles strip Mall on Hwy 92 just east of 75. Parking is no problem.

Menu: Bu-Ba-Q menu

Service: Table service for the main dining area and take out counter.

Cooking on:  Old Hickory cooker

The Vibe:  When I first visited Bu-Ba-Q a couple years ago they had recently moved into a former Slopes BBQ space and had not really made the space their own.  Since then, Bu-Ba-Q has doubled the space of the dining room to accommodate roughly 120-150 diners.  Every spare inch of the restaurant is decorated with scads of Bubba's competition BBQ trophies.  Currently #6 in the National BBQ competition team rankings, Bubba walks the walk and talks the talk.  Of all the restaurants that claim to serve competition style BBQ in Atlanta, Bubba is certainly the most active and successful competitor in the city.  My family ate at Bu-Ba-Q  just a little before 1pm on a Sunday, so we caught the after church crowd.  Families of all shapes and sizes were having a nice Sunday lunch and the dining room was easily three quarters full.  Servers were challenged with keeping up with their tables, seating new guests, and busing finished tables.  Bu-ba-Q could use a little front-of-house consulting to help them iron out the service kinks.  If you are going to go full service, dedicated hostesses and bus boys are a must.  Waiters should be focused on tending to seated guests.  All of this to say....I'm not a fan of full service BBQ restaurants. But maybe it was one of those days when the hostess and bus boys called in sick.

 

The Food:  Truth be told, my first visit to Bu-Ba-Q shortly after they opened went so poorly that I didn't think I would be back to visit.  But a couple food friends, including a well-known magazine critic, urged me to give Bu-Ba-Q a second chance.  This day we sampled ribs and pulled pork.  I thoroughly enjoyed my ribs - properly smoked and not overcooked.  But as you can see in the picture, the pulled pork was over-pulled and dry (aka hammered).  The pork was the same for my wife and daughter's pulled pork sandwiches.  I'm just guessing, but I suspect the pork may have been held in a steam table which can quickly lead to dry pork.  The Brunswick stew did not offend but was not remarkable.  Collard greens bordered on dull with no sparkle of acid or bite of red pepper.  Out of the four sauces on our table - mustard, hot and spicy, vinegar, and sweet - I preferred sweet.  The vinegar sauce had a very strange bitter quality to it and was too similar to the hot sauce.  Bubba's  menu is extensive and wanders a bit outside the normal fare for a BBQ restaurant.  Burgers and steaks are offered as well as something called the Hog-a-changa which appears to be a BBQ riff on the mexican american chimichanga. My suggestion would be to cut the menu by at least 50% and bring that intense focus common in competition BBQ back to the restaurant.

Bottom Line:  Bu-ba-Q is doing a great job of putting out BBQ for the masses.  There's nothing wrong going on, but  with a few tweaks a lot more could be going right.

 

Slow Food International at Community Q

Pictured left to right:  Community Q owner David Roberts,  Slow Foods Atlanta founder Julie Shaffer  Slow Foods International Secretary General Paolo Di Croce,  Love is Love Farm co-owner/farmer Judith Winfrey.

Emory University hosted the Secretary General of Slow Food International, Paolo Di Croce, for a meeting to announce the exploration of uniting city and state Slow Food groups throughout the Southeastern Seaboard into a regional Southeastern Slow Foods group.    Slow Food International was founded in 1989 and is a grass roots organization of over 100,000 members worldwide united in their support for good, clean, and fair food and farming practices.  Considered by many as the origin of the food to table movement that has seized American restaurants in the past decade, Slow Food is dedicated to uniting farmers, chefs, and people that care about the quality of our food and how it is grown and delivered to the plate.  

Paolo's visit to Emory represented a shift in how Slow Food is helping organize their member groups.  For the first time, Slow Foods International is working to unite some of their smaller local groups into larger organizations capable of greater reach and influence.  Paolo's trip to the US from Italy included stops in Atlanta to organize a Southeastern Slow Food Alliance as well California, where there are a large number of Slow Foods groups.  Both regions have strong ties to farming and unique cultural and food histories that made them natural candidates for a experimental program like this regional affiliation.

Community Q has strong ties with local farmers with most of the side item vegetables coming from local farms like Riverview Farm or TaylOrganic Farm.  Slow Food values have been part of Community Q's since its inception with Community included right in the name.  The restaurant also is a CSA dropoff for Riverview farm's meat and actively participates in local events sponsored by Georgia Organics and the Southern Food Association.  Community Q uses all natural pork when the opportunity presents itself but does use commodity pork to satisfy the regular demand.  Dave looks forward to the day when all natural, sustainable farms can compete on volume and price with commercial food purveyors.

This gathering was the first opportunity for Paolo to try authentic Georgia BBQ.  When asked what he thought about the meal, he said that he "enjoyed the family style meal". He added "this is the ideal way to end two days... eating the real slow food style - slow food style 110%!"

Love is Love Farmer Joe Reynolds obliges us with the classic "gnawing on a rib" shot

First Bite - Zeiglar's BBQ - Acworth, GA

Location: 3451 Cobb Pkwy NW #13  Acworth, Georgia 30101
(770) 529-5227         

Parking: Located in a strip mall at the intersection of Cobb Parkway and Mars Hill road, there is plenty of parking available.

Menu:  Zeigler's menu

Service: Counter service with food trays delivered to the table.    Our server this day was friendly and pleasant.  Drinks are DIY with a drink station located near the counter. 

Cooking on:  Southern Pride

The Vibe:  I'm not sure why, but I expected Zeigler's to be bigger.  I guess I had pictured a larger restaurant due to some of the high accolades this restaurant has received from notable local food writers.   However I've learned over the years that in BBQ  bigger rarely equals better.  Zeiglar's websie states that the owners got into the restaurant business as a natural progression from competition team to caterers to restaurant owners.  The restaurant's homespun feeling has plenty of evidence of the Zeiglar's competition and catering history with awards and photos scattered around the walls.  There is pleasant seating and lighting, a nonobtrusive tv, and a clean feeling to the place.  

continue reading First Bite - Zeiglar's BBQ - Acworth, GA here.....

First Bite - Grand Champion BBQ, Milton GA

Location: 12635 Crabapple Rd. Suite 210, Milton, GA 30004  770-993-4227            

Parking: Located in a mixed use residential development directly on Crabapple Rd.  Plenty of parking available.  Make sure to note the address as the restaurant can be a little tough to spot on your first trip.  Milton restricts vendors ability to use roadside signage.

Menu:  Grand Champion BBQ - Milton

Sauces & Rubs:  Recently,Grand Champion made their Kansas City and North Caroline sauces and Pork and Chicken rub available for purchase at their restaurants.  My favorite is the traditional NC sauce.  The Sow Dust is a complex pork rub with a nice heat to it and a sweet finish.  The poultry rub is very different with a strong herbal flavor.  

Service: Counter service. The Milton restaurant's food service area is built into an attractive butcher block counter.  Customers are able to see their food as it is prepared.  The front of house staff is very attentive, offering refills and picking up finished trays.  

Cooking on:  The very first thing customers see as they enter the restaurant is a shiny, new Southern Pride built into the wall behind the food service area.  I really  like the idea of putting the cooker right out in plain view as opposed to hidden out back in a smoke shack.

The Vibe:  Grand Champion Milton feels very different than the Roswell location.  Natural light floods the space.  The room feels open and clean.  Three picnic tables outside provide a great outside dining option.  The walls are colorful and the blackboard menus are a great addition.  The open kitchen gives a communal feel to the room.  I really love the new restaurant.  It feels like a great step forward in terms of conceptual development and brand maturation.

Our Selection for the Day:  Owner Robert Owens put together a sampler plate that included pulled pork, brisket, sausage,and ribs.  Our sides for the day were their award winning mac & cheese, collards, cole slaw, and bbq beans.  Desert was the pear & cranberry pie pictured below.  Everything was delicious.

Fun Fact - Daniel Vaughan, prominent BBQ blogger and soon-to-be author on Anthony Bourdain's new Ecco publishing imprint visited Grand Champion in Milton the same day I visited.  Following him on Twitter that day, Daniel visited Dave Poe's, Fatt Mat's, and Grand Champion Milton and proclaimed GC's pulled pork to be the winner of the day with Poe's coming in a close second.  Check out this instagram photo of what he got at GC.  It looks like they really rolled out the red carpet.

Verdict - Grand Champion is a strong addition to the growing Milton dining scene.  Food and service are consistent with their Roswell location which is no easy feat.

Homemade pies are one of Grand Champion's secret weapons.  Pies are cooked daily at their Roswell location.  Recent pies include chocolate, chocolate walnut, apple, and pear & cranberry (pictured above). Grand Champion's pies follow the seasonal offerings available from our local Georgia farms.

This photo was taken just inside the door.  Note the Southern Pride nestled off to the left and the open service line.  

Grand Champion's Milton location as seen from Crabapple Rd.

Taste of Atlanta 2012 - Big Grills "Grills Gone Wild" Event

For the first time in Taste of Atlanta history, the event kicked off on a Friday night with an event called the Big Grill - Grills Gone Wild.  Seventeen of Atlanta's best chefs served up smokey bites while attendees enjoyed 70's music by kitch-rockers, Yacht Rock.  The People's Choice winner for the Big Grill was David Roberts from Community Q with his St.Louis Ribs.

What does Ford Fry do on the day his brand spankin' new restaurant, The Optimist, is named Esquire Magazine's Restaurant of the year?  Well, he jams with his chef buddies Ted Lahey (Table & Main) and Gary Mennie (High Cotton) on a bunch of rockin' cover tunes for a crowd of hundreds.

Continue reading Taste of Atlanta 2012 - Big Grills "Grills Gone Wild" Event here...

 

BBQ Pitmasters Reality Show at the 2012 Atlanta BBQ Festival

In addition to hosting both a KCBS cookoff and a backyard cookoff, this year's Atlanta BBQ Festival played host for the filming of an episode of the fourth season of Destination America reality series BBQ Pitmasters.  Over the course of Friday and Saturday night, three teams competed for a chance to appear in one of the final episodes.  The three competition teams were GA Bob's out of Macon. Lazy Bear BBQ from Gainesville and Holy Smokes BBQ from Dublin, GA.  Season 4's judges are a welcome carryover from Season 3 - Myron Mixon from Jack's Old South BBQ, Aaron Franklin of Franklin BBQ in Austin, TX, and Tuffy Stone of Cool Smoke BBQ, Richmond, VA.  All three judges are extremely well respected and well seasoned competitors and restaurant owners.  BBQ Pitmasters seemed to struggle a little in seasons 1 and 2 in finding its format and judging personalities.  But all signs are that season 4 is a reprise of the winning Season 3 formula.  It will be interesting to see how the GA teams carry on into the finals.  Most interesting to me is where Aaron Franklin had dinner while here in ATL.  The guy gets repeated features on No Reservations and has the number one BBQ restaurant in the country.  Does anyone know where the judges chowed down?

Follow BBQ pitmasters on Facebook here and on Twitter here....

 

 

 

 

 

First Bite - JD's BBQ - Woodstock, GA

Location: 6557 Bells Ferry Rd, Woodstock GA 30189 - 678.445.7730 - website   

Parking: Plenty of parking out front.  Make sure to notice the parking pylons painted like pink pigs.

Menu:  link

Style:  Old school.  Buffalo chopper pork.  Traditional brisket and ribs.  Minimal spice or fuss.  Decent smoke level.

Sauces:  Two sauces - Sweet, and Spicy

Service: Seat yourself full service plus take out.

Cooking on:  Stick-burner in rear of restaurant.  3 different cookers visible this day but the smokehouse was empty.  Have a suspicion that it was empty because the main cooker was to be used on a TV segment for ATL46 the following morning.  

Backstory:  First location opened in 1999 inside a small farmers market.  Within four years, the owners decided to open a dine in restaurant. According to the website, JD's now has a second location in Acworth.  JD's has all the charm and trappings of an owner-operated BBQ joint.

Our Selection for the Day:  The "Boss Hog" 3 meat platter with chopped pork, sliced brisket, baby back ribs, brunswick stew, and baked beans.

One of three stickburners out back.  I suspect this is their catering rig, based on the photos I've seen on their website.

Continue reading First Bite - JD's BBQ - Woodstock, GA here....

 

First Bite - Bar-B-Cutie - Acworth, GA

Location: 4427 Towne Lake Drive, Woodstock, GA - 770.924.9491  - website        

Parking: Located in a Publix Shopping Center.  Plenty of parking

Menu:  Bar-B-Cutie Menu

Style:  Hard to pin down. Probably best described as corporate.  Reminded me of Shane's Rib Shack.

Sauces:  Three vaguely Kansas City style sauces - Mild, Sweet, and Spicy

Service: Counter service with meals delivered to table.  Drink station and refills are DIY.

Cooking on:  Couldn't tell.  Cooker not visible from dining room and didn't see one out back.

Backstory:  First location opened in Nashville, TN in 1950.  Over the next 40 years the location grew into a 300 seat restaurant.  Bar-B-Cutie began franchising in 2004.  The website lists a total of 17 locations in Tennesse, Ohio, Texas, Georgia and... three locations in Valencia, Spain???

Our Selection for the Day:  Chopped pork platter with cole slaw, mac-n-cheese, BBQ bread.  Sliced brisket platter with brunswick stew, potato salad, and BBQ bread.  Two kid servings of chicken fingers and fries.  The kids weren't feeling the BBQ love this day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Continue reading First Bite : Bar-B-Cutie here....

Heywood Provision's Bac-O-Burger

60% grass fed beef, 40% apple wood smoked bacon, roughly 33% fat and 100% genius, Heywood Provision's Bac-O-Burger is one of the tastiest things I have eaten in quite a long time.  I've always been a sucker for a good bacon cheeseburger.  But in all my years, it never really crossed my mind to investigate grinding the bacon INTO the burger. At first glance, the Bac-O-burger seems a little gimmicky.  But after cooking and eating a couple sliders, I'm convinced this is a superior way of approaching the the bacon cheeseburger.  The Bac-O-Burger changes the equation from the moment you open the vacuum sealed bag.  The first thing I noticed is that this concoction smells different.  Instead of a beefy, iron-ish aroma, I was almost overwhelmed by an assertive apple wood smoke scent.  It was all I could do to to restrain myself from grabbing a pinchful of the raw meat to take a taste (and I'm pretty sure I will next time).

I decided to forego the grill for this experiment and go with my cast iron griddle to take advantage of enhanced fat content.  After getting the griddle hot and greasing it up with a little locally sourced lard, I threw down golf ball sized patties and smashed them with my spatula.  Within just a few seconds, I was hit with a smokey aroma that I'm typically used to smelling when I cook up breakfast.  Very shortly afterwards, I noticed a good bit more fat surrounding the patties than I am used to seeing  with my standard big box grocery supplier beef.

The amount of fat that rendered out of the sliders was a little surprising, but it did a great job of helping build up a nice crust on the patties as I flipped them. After laying down a layer of cheese, setting the sliders to rest and toasting the buns, it was time for the taste test.  The Bac-O-Burger tasted just like it smelled.  Smoke.  Fat.  Beef.  Pork.  It was a bacon cheeseburger on steroids.  I missed the sensation of biting through the bun and hitting the the crunch and salt of rendered bacon before consuming a hearty bite of beef.  But the smoky pork flavor inside the patty was an entirely new sensation.  After a few bites, I didn't really miss the bacon as much as I began to consider what could happen if I layered rendered bacon on top of the Bac-O-Burger patty.  Beyond my simple slider experiment laid untold options.  What would a Bac-O-Burger meatball taste like?  Or Bac-O-Burger meatloaf?  So many choices....  Do yourself a favor and stop by Heywood's to pick up a little bacon infused ground beef and then get creative.  And by all means, let us know if you stumble across a little slice of genius.

Quick Bite - Grand Champion BBQ - Roswell, GA

Location: 4401 Shallowford Rd, Roswell, GA 30075 - Tel: 770-587-4227 - www.gcbbq.net

Specialty:  AJC readers voted GC BBQ best ribs, brisket, and mac & cheese in Atlanta.

Service:  Order at the counter and have it delivered to your table.  Take out service welcome.

Cooking On:  Southern Pride 500 series cooker.  For my money, nothing delivers a more consistent product once you learn how to dial it in.  GC's BBQ definitely reflects time well spent learning how to tweak their cooker for maximum smoke, flavor, and tenderness.

Backstory: Grand Champion's ties to the former Sam and Dave's BBQ empire was well documented in a glowing two star reviewin the AJC,   Having worked with owner Robert Owens several times in the Sam and Dave's years, I can tell you that Robert brings passion to his cooking and is committed to delivering a superior product day in and day out.  Grand Champion's success has allowed them to expand to a second location in Milton, GA that will be opening in the next few weeks just as soon as all the last minute details (aka permits) get ironed out.

Why visit?:  Grand Champion stands with other great restaurants like Community Q, Fox Bros, Dave Poe's, and Heirloom BBQ as examples of just how great Atlanta BBQ can be when the best quality ingredients are treated with attention and care to detail.  As an added bonus, Grand Champion offers home made pies on a semi-regular basis.  Take a look at these delicious pies.  Take the time to get out and visit Robert and crew at Grand Champion BBQ and make sure to try the brisket!