Serenbe Farms

Up and Went, Palmetto, GA Tweet Map

From Serenbe Farms

When somebody uses the words, “organic farming community,” my first thoughts are of some kind of hippie throwback community with folks who make their own clothes and odors of patchouli drown out odors of, well, other things. Not exactly my primary thought when I’m looking for a getaway with my significant other. But so many Atlantans just love the place. It usually wins the readers polls for best daytrip. So when the right moment came, this monkey made an afternoon trip to Serenbe Farms in Palmetto, Georgia.

Serenbe Farms is exactly as it states a farming community using organic principles to emulate sustainability. Its produce can be sampled at three dining establishments in the area, as well as some Atlanta restaurants like Restaurant Eugene or Holeman & Finch. For the record, I like the principle of sourcing things locally and understand that if there was only organic farming, there would be a lot more starvation in the world. I think the folks at Serenbe get the idea: if you are blessed with the prosperity to allow yourself to make more environmentally friendly decisions, you really ought to, but I digress.

What you get to see at Serenbe is three basic elements. First, there are the Farmlands, which radiate a well maintained and rustic beauty. Farm Tours are available, but take some prior arrangement that we did not make, but one can still walk along the path enjoying its aesthetic beauty without understanding the agricultural science behind it. Second, are the shops and services. The reputation Serenbe has garnered has made it attracted a number of shops for your perusal. They are pricier, high end, sort of things, I would rarely buy from, but often find it fun to stop and look around. I will note that the wine store had a significant number of items under $20, so kudos to them for having something for the everyman.

Finally, and probably, the most notable attraction at Serenbe are the Restaurants themselves. There is a quaint little bakery shop called the Blue Eyed Daisy, which seems to be open most of the day, and doubles as the area’s grocery store. And then there’s the two major restaurants, The Hil, a more upscale eatery in the commercial district, and the Farmhouse, which is part of the original Farmhouse and Inn, where we chose to eat. Both places take and basically need reservations, and as I have said, we just up and went with no planning, but both offered to seat us without reservations, as long as we arrived immediately upon opening at 5pm (the website now says they open at 6p). We considered this generous and gladly accepted.

From 4-5pm outside the dining area at the Farmhouse, they had significant drink specials for happy hour. If my memory serves, mixed drinks were half off, and this wasn’t in the advertising. So we had a drink and waited for the doors to open. Then menu was simple, choice between two starters ($6), two entrees ($18), and two desserts($5). This made the deciding process quicker, but might hamper the more finicky eaters. I had the pork chops over grits, while my companion had the chicken dish. All the food was organic and local and very tasty. The menu does change regularly, but the format remains the same. We had planned to spend the afternoon at nearby Cochran Mill Parkexploring the trails, waterfall, and mill ruins, but the necessity of being at the restaurant at exactly 5pm curtailed that excursion.

So why do I think people love this place? Because it is sort of an oasis from what you normally see on a day to day basis in the Atlanta Area, and the food is authentic, organic, and really good. The Farmland and the area around the Farmhouse was the most beautiful. The commercial district was little weird to me, as I have a guttural disdain for planned playgrounds that only the affluent can enjoy, that comes from so much of my life being lived in the Shadow of Disneyworld. The Farm seems real and true to its purpose, the business district seems to be an overpriced and fairly surreal, a place where people should visit like a museum or a zoo but not live.

Restaurant Fundamentals

The Farmhouse at Serenbe
Address: Hutcheson Ferry Rd, Palmetto, Georgia
Hours: Thu & Fri 6-9pm, Sat 11:30-3pm, 6-9pm, Sun 11:30-3p
Phone: 770.463.2622
Website: Serenbe Farmhouse

Cultural Significance: B
Food Quality: A+
Healthiness: A
Price: B
Value: A

Overall Rating: A

Recommendations: I would suggest you order as much local vegetables and sides as you can. The Fried Green tomato on the salad was probably the best I’ve ever had.
Significance: Sustainable, organic, Farm to table restaurant ahead of its time.

Sweet Water Brewery

FREE BEER (4 days a week) Map

From Sweetwater Brewery

About two decades ago, I was really into beer. I did all the stuff you would think a guy who was into beer would. I even made my own, and got pretty good at it. But for the last decade of my life, I’ve steered away from beer first toward neutral and then less neutral spirits. But it doesn’t mean I don’t still appreciate a good beer. And I am glad that Atlanta has got a worthy craft brewery to represent us in the Sweetwater Brewing Company, just off the Peachtree Exit on I-85, located at 195 Ottley Drive in Atlanta.

From Sweetwater Brewery

Now this is not exactly a secret, as the crowds can attest, but it doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. Every Wednesday, Thursday, & Friday from 5:30p-7:30p (and Saturday from 2:30p-4:30p), these guys basically open their doors to the public to visit and taste some fine Georgia draft beers. They do two things: they operate a tasting room and they have a tour of the facilities. They are both technically free, though most patrons will opt to spend the $8 on a souvenir glass because you will get significantly larger “tastes” of the beers and they make nice keepsakes.
At the tasting room, you have a choice of their 5 Standard Brews: 420, IPA, Sch’wheat, Georgia Brown, and Blue, as well as one seasonal brew, they call “Catch and Release,” which was for us something called Motor Boat. As I knew before coming there, these guys know what they are doing and the beer is solid.
I would rank IPA & 420 as very good; Georgia Brown, Motor Boat, and Sch’wheat as good (though I’m not partial to wheat beers—I believe it’s done nicely); and Blue as just plain weird. Blue has an odor of Boo Berry cereal and that olfactory experience is so discordant that I can’t even tell you what it tastes like. That being said there’s a market for less beer-like beers and that’s apparently what they are going for. I do want to reiterate that the other beers were good to very good. Heck, I can honestly say that “I don’t often drink beer, but when I do I normally drink 420.”

The tour is a little underwhelming. After touring various whiskey distilleries, I probably expected a bit too much from this. With the large crowd it is hard to accomplish any kind of meaningfully informational tour, and I bet that most of the folks there didn’t really care that much. When they asked if anyone brewed beer at home only me and one other tour patron raised their hand. But considering the obstacles, it came off quite well. The impression I received was that this open house and tour was Sweetwater Brewery’s honest and sincere way to say thanks to its patrons. This type of heartfelt connection to a company’s customers is pretty rare, but nice to witness. It was also nice that the second half of the tour was held inside the huge walk-in cooler, allowing a nice way to beat the heat, if just for a few moments.

So if you like beer or know someone who does, and are over the age of 21 (this is important – no children are allowed), a trip to the Sweetwater Brewery is good way to spend a few hours of your day on the way to some Atlanta evening destination. Be prepared to drink, for crowds, and to walk a short distance from parking to the buildings. As I said, they seemed to thank me for my patronage, this article is my Thank You to them just for being there.

Whistle Stop Cafe

"That frying pan did more than fry chicken that night" Map

From Whistle Stop Cafe

I have said that I was going to talk a little about food (among other things) on this site. But the food has to be a little more than just a cute little restaurant down the road, of which we in Atlanta have plenty. A short while back I was asked a question about my East Juliette Dam post, which I couldn’t answer until I rewatched (at least the first 15 minutes) of the movie Fried Green Tomatoes. During which I remembered that I intended to post about the restaurant about an hour and a half from Atlanta, where the film was made, but never got around to it. Until now, so I bring you the Whistle Stop Cafe in Juliette, Georgia.


Now the film Fried Green Tomatoes seems to be one of those Southern Chick Films (using the film term with absolutely no additional connotation), which I’ve never met a Southern Girl who doesn’t love. So if you decide to go here, you get a two for one as a guy, you make her day a special outing and you get to eat some good fried country cooking without any real questions about your eating choices. A free pass to Fried Chicken, as it were. She’ll love the story and you’ll like the food.


It’s not the restaurant that inspired the book. No, that place is a little café in Irondale, Alabama just this side of Birmingham, Alabama called the Irondale Cafe (I’ve stopped there too and its pretty good). This is the place they chose to shoot the film. You see prior to Fried Green Tomatoes, Juliette was a bit of a ghost town, with packed up and shuttered buildings which made for a good cheap place for a Hollywood set. But when they left, they left some of the film stuff intact, including the café, which some industrious locals decided to reopen in tribute to the restaurant that played such an important part in the film. The building itself was built in 1927 and was primarily used as a general store, but its new function is much more visit friendly.


We ate a big pile of Southern Fried Goodness. We had to order the Fried Green Tomatoes, and I doubt you could make the trek without doing the same. I had a plate full of Fried Chicken Livers, while the missus had a mighty fine country fried steak (I was looking at the menu and I don’t think they sell livers no more). We got them with a bunch of sides, sweet potato soufflé, mac and cheese, and fried okra (though the sides rotate). We also split some peach cobbler, which rounded out a nice traditional Georgia meal. And the setting takes one back to a much less hectic time.


The city itself has undergone a mild rejuvenation because of the Whistle Stop and the Fried Green Tomatoes movie. We stopped for a spell at a kind of opry house with some folks fiddling and strumming on the porch. They run the occasional music fest there, but check for schedules. Out back of the restaurant is the brick oven, they cooked old Frank Bennett in. Also, is the small shack that was the movie home of Smokey Lonesome. If you walk around the little town, there are some neat old buildings, a nice train track view, and across the way in an old mill factory.


So if you are out Southeast of the city, and the timing is right (due to their limited hours), you can get a special treat of good food with a nifty backdrop by visiting the Whistlestop Café in Juliette. I’m sure it’ll be easy to talk your woman into making this stop. I apologize for writing this in a tone which might imply I am a true Southerner.



Restaurant Fundamentals
Address: 443 McCracken Street, Juliette, Georgia (Monroe County)
Hours: Sun-Fri 11-4 Sat 11-8
Phone: 478.992.8886
Website: The Whistle Stop Cafe

Cultural Significance: B
Food Quality: B+
Healthiness: C
Price: A
Value: B+

Overall Rating: B+

Recommendations: You go to a place like this for “Southern Food” so check your diet at the door and stick with the southern stuff: BBQ, Fried Chicken, Country Fried Steak and, of course, the Fried Green Tomatoes and southern sides.
Significance: The location for the movie, Fried Green Tomatoes.

Flying Machine at Gwinnett Briscoe Field

The Gwinett Briscoe Airport, Fun amid Controversy Map

From Flying Machine

Ok, this one’s a little nepotistic because a good friend of mine runs the joint. But there used to be a time when I was younger when I would sit out on Frontage Road outside Orlando International Airport and watch airplanes take off and land as a nice way to pass the evening with a special friend. With the onset of terrorist watches, you can’t sit out on that road anymore without being moved along by police. However, you can still get the same experience (while it lasts), at the Flying Machine in Lawrenceville, Georgia.


Now, I wish I had more photos of the food and bar area, I thought I had enough from previous visits. Briscoe Field is a small airport, which may be getting bigger, but currently is capable of handling light aircraft and corporate jets. The volume of air traffic isn’t huge, as it is almost entirely private planes, and is affected for better and worse by the quality of the day’s weather. During my last day there, we saw about a dozen planes use the runway over a two and a half hour period on a Sunday Afternoon.


As for the food, you get solid pub food done at fair prices (Menu). The $100 burger costs $6 (the higher price due to the cost of flying your plane in to get one). They have a few beers on tap, all domestics, with a wallet friendly $2.75 price. And a couple of dozen more in the bottle (I drank Landshark for $3.99). It is a very nice place to have a drink and some food on the patio, with the planes creating a nice backdrop.


They are also well known for music, particularly country music. The proprietor, who uses the name, Hokey Sloan had some minor fame with a song called “I didn’t give her the car.” The day we were there he played a new tune called “Same Ol Same Ol” and the rumor is he’s spending some time in the recording studio. He also played a Conway Twitty number at our request. A number of country acts play through there and you can check their website for a schedule.


What you get is good pub food and drinks at reasonable prices, nice music, and the planes creating a wonderful backdrop for you and your friends. I’m surprised more kids aren’t there as the place is family friendly and the children we saw were enthralled by the speeding aircrafts. And if the recent brouhaha about privatizing the airport comes to fruition, you might not have that much more opportunity to chill at Gwinnett’s quaint little airstrip. So you better get while the getting’s good and enjoy while it lasts. You can tell him I sent you (Hokey knows me as Doug).


Restaurant Fundamentals
Address: 510 Briscoe Blvd, Lawrenceville GA 30045 ( Gwinnett County)
Phone: 770.962.2262
Website: www.theflyingmachine.com

Cultural Significance: B+
Food Quality: B
Healthiness: C (its pub food remember)
Price: A
Value: A+

Overall Rating: A-

Recommendations: Burgers and Beer, topped with Hummingbird Cake
Significance: A Deck literally right on an Airport Runway, Country Music

Mercier Orchards

Pickin’ N Grinnin’ Map

From Mercier Orchards

Some experiences in Georgia aren’t of the Natural Wonder or Historical Variety. But they are just as important to our culture. We can forget, living in the concrete confines of the big city, how important agriculture is to our lives. Heck, you can’t speak about our most famous President without out mentioning the Peanut. In the North of Georgia, there is some really good local purveyors of produce. The weekend before last, I had the good fortune to spend some time at one of our most famous public farms, Mercier Orchards , about 2 hours North of Atlanta in Blue Ridge, Georgia


Now they are most famous for, like most of the Georgia Hwy 5 area, Apples . And having sampled the apples, which are often available at local markets like Whole Foods, I know they are quite good. But with Apple Season not coming for months, the good folks at Mercier have other produce you can pick and eat. We went up for their Cherries Jubilee, but at different times they also do blueberries and strawberries. They got great produce and they’ve been doing this up there in North Georgia since the 30’s.


What you get when you get there is this: you buy a bag for your pickings (a half peck of Cherries--about 5 lbs--cost $15--I'm sure different crops have different prices), you walk around the side of the building and ride a tractor pulled carriage up to the ripest part of the orchard, and then you get to picking. The red of the cherries against the green of the trees and field shines majestically in the Georgia Sun. So how do you know if you got good ones? Well, you could look for the darkest color as the field hands pointed out or you could simply taste them, and tasting is encouraged. It was like a fun game trying to find the best possible cherries. We spent about 40 minutes there, having fun, filling our bags, and filling our faces before a very pleasant walk back to the store.


Now the store has everything related to Georgia Produce you could possibly want: Apples, Corn, Ciders, Jam, & the like. You could order from their online store here . But it is really famous for its pie. We sat in the café and split a fried pie and an apple fritter and took a whole Dutch Apple pie home. Now, I’m not a big pie eater, but I believe in the “when in Rome” adage. I thought they were about as good as I have tasted. The five friends we shared the Dutch Apple pie with on Memorial Day concurred.


Now the reason I am writing this is because Cherry Season is short, with Blueberries becoming the pick of the litter in just a couple of weeks. I’d love to get back there in Apple Season (Mid August through October), and it just might happen. The bigger reason is that I spent a few hours pitting cherries for a little homemade cherry pie, which is in the oven as I write. So if you have an hour to kill in the vicinity of Blue Ridge, a stop by Mercier orchard may just give you much more than 60 minutes of happiness.

 Here is our home cooked Cherry Lattice Pie,


Restaurant Fundamentals
Address: 8660 Blue Ridge Drive (Highway 5) Blue Ridge, Georgia 30513
Phone: 1-800-361-7731
Website: http://www.mercier-orchards.com/

Cultural Significance: A-
Food Quality: A+
Healthiness: C+ (basically deserts, but at least its fresh local fruit)
Price: A
Value: A

Overall Rating: A-

Recommendations: Fried Pie, Apple Pie, basically any Pies
Significance: Southern Magazines favorite Roadside Apple Market, A true taste of Georgia

The Varsity

Atlanta’s Premier Restaurant Map

From The Varsity

I’ve been wanting to expand into writing about restaurants and shops around Atlanta but have been putting it off because there seems to be a lot of that kind of thing going around. My contention is that you would have to be an idiot or a complete snob not to be able to find a good meal in this great and diverse city. But an anonymous poster on my picture index page reminded me that restaurants can be more than restaurants, they can be events, they can be special places, and, in certain cases, they can be icons of Atlanta Culture. I always said to my foodie friends that no matter how good the food gets in this metropolis, the two most recognizable restaurants in Atlanta will always be “The Big Chicken“ and the subject of this post, The Varsity . With this gentle reminder, plus the PBS special about the place airing on September 6, 2008 at 8 pm (view trailer ), I decided the time has come.



The Varsity, bills itself as the world’s largest drive-in, can serve up to 30,000 folks on a given day, and has been serving our fair city since 1928. To my friends who attended Georgia Tech, they speak wistfully about the fast food joint as if it was holy ground, the way I might talk about my visit to St. Peter’s in Rome. To have that effect it must be something special. I must admit that I had never eaten at its downtown location since moving here, and based on the performance at its satellite stores, I was never in a hurry to go.



But, a few friends of mine were headed downtown, a little late after church one June morning. We were hungry and we needed something quick. And the Varsity sounded so much more interesting than other fast foods. We pulled in as an added excursion to our day.



My First Impression was the enormity of the place. The lines were 3-5 deep and at a dozen different registers. And each and every patron was greeted with a chorus of “What’ll ya have?” just like I was told. My absent Tech friends always swore by the Chili Slaw dog, but I wanted to understand the place in full, so I had a chili cheese hamburger and chili cheese hotdog combo (the #2), with fries and rings to share, and the other two recommendations for a true varsity experience, a frozen Orange and a fried peach pie. I paid for three people in our group and the bill didn’t exceed thirty dollars, and it could be much cheaper (menu & prices ), if you ordered less (We wanted to embrace the experience in full), so I would gauge this a fairly cheap place to eat. We moved to sit in the expansive atrium, which hit me with the next great impression of the downtown location, a terrific view of the city of Atlanta. The Olympic Torch blazed to the North, the west overlooked the 75/85 corridor, and the South gave a really nice view of the Atlanta Skyline. I thought it a great starting point for a foray into the city.



Back to the food, and I must be honest about this, the Hamburger was nothing special, so I would echo the Techies, and say you ought to go with the dogs at this place. Not that the hotdogs are earth shattering, but they are solid. Where the dining gets good at the Varsity are in the extras. The French Fries and Onion Rings are handmade and fantastic. The Frozen Orange was to me, a Native of somewhere else reminiscent on a childhood favorite the Orange Push-Up and refreshing on a Georgia Summer day . I am not a huge fan of desserts, but the Varsity pies were a clear notch above other fried pies I’ve had in my life. The experience certainly wasn’t healthy (we knew that going in), but was enjoyable. Even the one Chef friend of mine remarked, “it was fine.” A high compliment from a critical palate. His children were in heaven as I believe it may have been the first time in their lives their father took them out for fast food (and they are in their early teens). They let us put on the classic Varsity hats and we acted like goof balls for half an hour.



This place does what it sets out to do. It serves Atlantans quality fast food, at fair prices quickly. Just as it did for your father and his father, and will for your son and daughters and there sons and daughters.



The place has a gift shop, ample parking, and a lots of drive up carhop style serving areas. In the 1940’s comedian Nipsey Russell worked there and honed his comedy while working as a bell hop. They have there own Lingo in calling out the orders, that gives it an old diner feel. There is a great Coffee table book about the store that could fit properly in any Atlanta Living room. They do have several satellite locations, but the true experience is at the corner of North and Spring Street. And Like I said, this is Atlanta’s First Restaurant, and in that role, I’ll echo my culinary compadre’s words: It does a fine job.



Restaurant Fundamentals
Address: 61 North Avenue, Atlanta, Georgia (Fulton County)
Phone: 404.881.1706
Website: www.the varsity.com

Cultural Significance: A
Food Quality: B+
Healthiness: D
Price: A
Value: A

Overall Rating: A-

Recommendations: Stick with the dogs, Frozen Orange, Fries and Onion Rings, and the Fried Peach Pie
Significance: An Atlanta Institution for 80 years