Mark "LeahAndMark.com !" T.'s Profile

Metro Cafe Diner... is awesome in a 1980's neon-retro sort of way.

The food is alright, the bar is a loser, and I have no idea who regularly comes here on a nightly basis that would constitute the need for having karaoke available EVERY night of the week.

On the night I went with Leah F., Rick & Amanda W. - we ran the Karaoke Mic. When you can easily sing 4 or five songs without a serious wait, then you know that this is your night to sing everything you ever wanted and anything that you really shouldn't.

However, as the bar filled up with regular folks who were definitely not there to hear or sing karaoke, it only became more fun - As Amanda W. belts out a song by Danzig, Rick dedicates Fat Bottom Girls to all the 'large broads', and I end the night butchering Wilson Phillips song - Hold On -

You know we had a great night but that's because we made it happen.

Dancing Goats is awesome for those times when you don't feel like being in a cozy little coffee shop full of college students or art wannabes clammoring for outlets so their laptops live on while they avoid doing school work and instead update their facebook or wordpress blog.

Just a quarter mile down the road from Java Monkey but completely different, Dancing Goats is much more accessible with it's own substantial parking lot, and there is arguably more seating. Also, it's just a nice place for anyone with kids, or a dog, or friends, or wanting to do work.

Starbucks is Jealous of Dancing Goats. They wish they had coffee that was anywhere near as good as the DG-blend. With free WiFi, and some of the absolute best plain sugar donuts on the planet, this place is an easy winner when we think about getting coffee these days.

Located next door to a StarSux and barely noticeable from the street or even the parking lot, Bagel Boys Cafe is quite an awesome secret in Alpharetta and it's sad that it took me a whole year to actually try this place out.

Clean, corporate looking-but-not and with food that actually taste good - I tried hard to not come back and avoid spending the money, but I failed miserably on a weekly basis.

The coffee is some of the best I've had - and that's only because they usually have a cinnamon hazelnut blend that's as awesomely fake sounding but delicious tasting as it can be.

Couple the coffee with their bagel melt - and I'm done - all for under $5.00 - I probably lose 20 minutes on my way to work when I stop here, but knowing that if I don't I'll be sitting there at my desk, in a cold cubicle and a starving stomach - and I realize that I have no choice at all in the matter.

Add this to the very short list of reasons why I don't feel so bad about living in Decatur and working in Alpharetta.

As if I needed any excuse to give a steakhouse a chance. I'll give any steakhouse a chance. Why not - with so many ways to prepare steak and make it great - some of the best have been the most simple - because at some point, you realize that a majority of the task is in the technique and it becomes an art form for those who elevate their skills.

McKendricks is nice in an old New York steakhouse fashion. Don't come wearing your torn jeans and emo/hipster/whatever clothes - unless you're dining with your parents or grandparents who will dress appropriately for this steakhouse.

With meats cooked closer to the rare side, the beef is good. While the sides of meat is generally better quality than you'll find at many other places, I did find the taste to be a bit plain. Sure the all out beef flavor was there but it felt like something was missing. Some slight seasoning of any sort of would've been nice - although I sometimes I do appreciate a plain piece of meat cooked without anything else other than... itself.

The service is generally top notch and they'll cater to you in any way you would like - if you receive less than stellar service it's because your individual waiter sucks, not really the restaurant itself - at least that's the case we experienced during our visit to this spot across from Perimeter Mall and hidden in the back of a shopping center.

It's good here, but there are many other places I'd choose before I ever made it back to McKendricks.

With so many options for southern greatness located in and around Atlanta, it's hard to imagine any reason for driving out to Social Circle, Georgia. It's difficult to justify, to provide enough reasoning that it would compel you to load up into your car and drive nearly 2 hours east to the relative middle of nowhere.

Because you took the scenic route. The route that winds between towns with barely a name and pass by in a blink or less and before you realize it, you're at the next field, the next pasture or farm with horses and cattle grazing.

On a cloudy day you arrive in Social Circle, Georgia and pulling up to the parking lot of the Blue Willow, you immediately notice how grand, how immense, how deeply southern and traditional the scene feels. A historic house and tour buses parked in the lot out back. Not school buses, chartered buses, the kind people pay good money for in order to travel in large groups. What's so special about this place? Why drive out to the middle of nowhere or the edge of somewhere and visit Social Circle?

It's simply because of the food. The service is adequate, but it's the food that draws the people. Without getting too intense and overdoing forever made dishes, The Blue Willow Restaurant and Inn is actually a southern comfort food buffet - of the highest quality possible without going much further than the epitome of the greatest dishes any matriarch of a Georgian family could pull together for a special gathering.

Fried chicken, collard greens, mac & cheese, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, seafod au gratin, meat loaf, and a host of other dishes.

The deserts are all fine, but as if it were state law, the pecan pie is the best.

The Blue Willow Restaurant is an excellent slice, of Georgia, of southern food, and of road trip destinations that should be on anyone's list of options for a day trip - when you want to leave Atlanta for something else, for something different, when the roads all lead to possibility simply because you've left the main highway and drove until you arrived, wherever you ended up.

Very few things in life have ever taken care of me as well as my vehicles - even when I've treated them so poorly. My latest was purchased at the beginning of one of my incarnations, the first of a string of rebirths where I presumed to have the answers until I repeatedly found myself deep in a dark wood in the middle of life's journey.

No matter how bleak or suffocating the situation, like a desperate lifeline or an extension of my legs, my car took me away - running from any problem, person, or myself, much faster than a posted speed limit.

With scars and wounds from a life of mistakes, I always arrive unscathed and as if I was Dorian Gray, my car shows how I feel.

It's difficult to trust anyone. I've decided that I trust these guys at this location. I trust them to fix my car, to tell me when it needs something done and that they'll do it right, and fast - even if they bill me professional prices with rarely an attempt at a discount I've always chosen them to take care of things.

I don't bring my car here to save money. I don't end up at this garage because they charge the least or throw in an extra tire or any other gimmicks. Oil changes, creaking sounds, belts, screeches and howls, I come here because they fix everything I need them to fix with the car that I regularly anthropomorphize.

Rather than a separate entity, it's an extension of me, a machine enabling my impulse to escape and flee, and once when love left and I decided to run away, driving all night to reach the ocean for a chance to breathe new life - I understood that if my car broke down halfway between Phoenix and the Pacific that it would only be my car's heart breaking in accordance with my own.

I wish all Irish pubs had a requirement that one of the staff, no matter the night, must always be dressed as a leprechaun. Maybe I'd like them more. Maybe then I'd consider it worth noting that a pub considers itself an 'Irish' pub. I just don't identify with the whole game.

What I DO identify with is that when you find a great one, an Irish pub that attracts customers that lose themselves, and forget any pretense of pretending to be something else for everyone else... you meet some awesome people. In Phoenix it's Rosie McCaffrey's, and here in Atlanta... well, It's not Pub 71 - but that's okay.

As the second stop on the 100 Strong Attendance MARTA pub crawl, Pub 71 was as loud and overwhelming as it should have been. Like a million-man march for alcohol, the bar and main dining area was overrun and the servers tried their best to stick to their designated cuts of area. By chance I met a knitting chemist and a bbq foodie that answers rental ads only to be propositioned by the man answering the door - circumstance and chance are lucky signs in an Irish pub.

With the servers doing their best to handle the crowd, and the drinks flowing everywhere around, we ordered food. Just the basics, a bag of salt & vinegar chips and calamari. It's comfortable here. I can see it being a Meehan's Public House long ago, but not as elegant and fake upscale as the newer locations. The salt & vinegar chips were some of the best I've had, and the soaked through bag made it exponentially better in every way possible, but the night was early and the hundred-man pub crawl moved on.

A GOOD STEAK BELIES BLOOD AND MUSCLE FIBERS no matter how you cook it - and I've had a couple of great ones. When the slab comes out and you hope for the best, you hope that it's not cooked through and what's left are shades of red that serve as evidence that this meat before your eyes was once alive.

You're optimistic that no matter what, it's not fully cooked and the bloodiness of the meat is preserved and protected at all cost. As if any side of beef that's cooked all the way should be thrown out, or served to the less worthy.  

I have to hand it to them. This Longhorn steakhouse cooked the meat to the definition of  'medium'. A fine cut from a perfectly decent and dead cow. With the gaudy 'Texas' paraphenalia hung from the walls and ceiling, joined by the elegant servers dressed in western-wear as if the Lonestar state vomited all over them, I still enjoyed my steak.

When you get down to it, a dead cow is a dead cow - unless it's from Japan - then it's magic. They don't serve magic at Longhorn but it's still good enough to eat.

On a weekend morning with no writing deadlines and laundry and dishes pushed off, we gathered ourselves and went on a roadtrip. By mid-afternoon, having reached our destination several hours earlier and once wandering had grown tiresome, we arrived at the Liberty Restaurant in Scottsboro, Alabama.

With a plate of fried chicken and with an apparent side of Ore Ida crinkle cut french fries, it's hard to not balk at the food. Even though the fried chicken is better than most you'll find at other places, it's delivered without any such claims of being 'the best', or any of the many superlatives and adjectives that simply add to the hype that only sets you up for a big let down. Liberty Restaurant serves good fried chicken, and on that weekend afternoon with the hours ticking away, there are few places I'd rather be than there with my girlfriend and the knowledge that we still had the drive back.

Because roadtrips are our thing. It's our time, our meager attempt at real travel but not the limited and mutated form experienced through flights and airports, but across landscapes and country sides. When you turn off a highway and hope to get lost, in search of nothing but always happy with what you find.

The Liberty Restaurant in Scottsboro, Alabama is nearly perfect. It's great where it can be and falters everywhere you would want it to. With one dining room decorated with turquoise blue chairs and bright pink checkered tiles, and the other room using the opposite color scheme of neon pink chairs and turqoise checkered square tiles, it's awesomely mismatched with the fake wood paneling still hanging from a 70's remodeling job.

Passing through the pasture towns stringed along a two lane highway, it's a rare escape and it's on trips like these that I find my breath. When I don't know where we're going to end up. When the Liberty Restaurant is all of a sudden the most memorable moment of a roadtrip and I never knew it existed until then. With the open road winding and twisting into areas I've never seen, the shallow breath I keep while sitting at my desk in this office is freed and being in the moment was never so real.

Liberty Restaurant in Scottsboro, Alabama is great if you happen to find yourself in town on a weekend afternoon. The food is passable, and the town has few surprises. But none of that was ever the reason why we left the main freeway and drove through towns with no names and getting lost was always a great choice.

IT'S ALWAYS BEEN A BARREN SIGHT when I've walked into Java Lords on Euclid. With the narrow corridor of a coffee shop stretching further back than I've ever stepped, I've never made it past a few feet inside, only going as far as the condiment station to throw in my 17 fake sugars and a lid on my coffee cup. I've been here four times and each time the only other person was the sole barista, a guy that I never caught the name of and will probably never see again.

The first visit was on the last rainy day here in town and as he crafted my drink, the conversation drifted from how Phoenix has never forced water rations but they receive no where near the rain that falls in Atlanta, to how life sucker punches you and sometimes even kicks you while you're gasping for breath, and then one day you look around and discover that you're absolutely lost even though you have a road map with a sticker screaming at you, 'YOU ARE HERE!', but you're stuck where that sticker says you are because it seems like everyone's left you behind, and you don't have anywhere else to go.

On that rainy day morning just off Little Five Points, I received an exceptionally made latte and my commute to Alpharetta still took forever, but it didn't matter.

The next few visits were on drier mornings but surprisingly, it was always just me and him and no other customers during the few minutes I'd spend between ordering my drink, waiting, and then adding slight adjustments towards preferences discovered during my years spent as a barista at StarSux.

Serving the B&B coffee brand so popular and familiar around these parts, the coffee was always great and we rarely ever mentioned the topic. The small talk would start as just that, but an odd question would work it's way into the conversation and he'd let go a tangent flow of half memories about family and vague allusions to loves long gone and always having to push through the weeds with no end in sight because the only other choice is no choice at all - and without even a tinge of self-pity.

With less pretense and none of those faux-philosophical-reality-show-confessional epiphanies, it was always a surprisingly different experience of a morning coffee stop. With no line, no constant rush of the espresso machine, and absolutely none of that artificial-corporate-ordained-happiness pumped into apron wearing baristas, I barely noticed the rest of the space.

Rather than an all out coffee-house-guitar/band/music/songwriter scene there is a slant towards theater, and improv splatter fliers line the bulletin board.

My fourth visit was his last day working there, having moved onto a new job someplace in Buckhead. And although I've been back, and the coffee is just as awesome and the space just as empty on nearly every morning, it's different. I suppose that's why some of us keep trying new places and meeting new people at random, for those chance meetings that glimmer and fade but connect strangers before we disappear forever.

***2/33