Category — Travel

Okay, so Atlanta, being in the South, has a lot of fried food.  This is true.  I think I had something fried with every meal I ate in my week-long trip.  However…there is also some seriously good food in that place.  I’m talking Atlanta and the lesbian-infused suburb of Decatur.  Here are the highlights from the trip’s food log.  Food pretty much fell into three categories:  Breakfast, veggie burger, and fried.  There was some overlap.  There were also a couple of healthyish meals thrown in for good measure.

Breakfast:

My first day there, my hostess, Kelly, took me to one of the best breakfast spots in town:  Highland Bakery.  (It just so happens, it’s gay-owned, too.  Joy!)  I’d been there about 7 years ago when I last visited Atlanta.  It was good then, but now it’s bigger, better and even more delicious.

What’s better than being greeted by a cupcake-laden pastry counter?  Not much really.  Unless it’s a mini-muffin sampler!

Yeah, that was good.

The actual meal was a breakfast sandwich of some kind for Kelly, and the breakfast burrito, recommended by our waiter.  I’ll have to go back to try the Hoppin’ Highland.

Pretty much every day, I headed to the Dancing Goats for coffee and bagels.  Mmmmm, bagels.  I hadn’t my usual bagel fix for over a month, so I was really excited to encounter the hand-made, wood-fired bagels at Dancing Goats.

Not to mention the world-class coffee.  (There are only two Dancing Goats coffee-shops, despite the coffee being sold everywhere.)

And then there were donuts.  I heard there was a place that’s been compared to Voodoo Donut in Portland.  I knew it couldn’t actually be like Voodoo.  That’s not possible.  It was, however, delicious.

Housed in a non-descript strip-mall of a building, Sublime Donuts turns out gourmet donuts.  We chatted with the owner who, when asked for his favorite, waived his arm dramatically and declared “all of them!”  Kelly had the caramel-apple fritter.

And I signed up for a red velvet cake and an orange dream star.

The red velvet was topped with cream cheese frosting and pecans and the orange dream star was filled with creaminess and topped with a delicate, sweet orange frosting.

Next there were the sweet potato waffles at Rise and Dine.  Kelly raved about these things from the second I got in until we had them.  And then a little after that.

She had hers with bacon.  I had mine with Jalapeno cheddar grits.

Turns out I’m a grits girl.

Which I proved again and again, next at The Flying Biscuit.  This place used to be owned by the Indigo Girls.  Now it’s not, but it’s tasty.  I had this:

It was black bean patties, over-medium eggs, tomatillo salsa and feta cheese.  With a side of cheesy grits.  And a biscuit.  And homemade jam.  O. M. Y.  Oh my yum.  This is possibly the best thing I ate in Atlanta.  At least for breakfast.  Don’t be dirty.

The award for most beautiful breakfast in Atlanta came from Rise ‘n’ Dine.  I made a return trip.  This time I had a scramble with tomato, goat cheese and basil.  It came with a beautiful biscuit and house-made, no-sugar-added jam.  It was terrific.  And pretty.

The least delicious, but most interesting breakfast was at IHOP.  It’s been years since I had eaten at an IHOP.  I was a fiend in college.  Currently, IHOP has a 600 calorie or less menu.  I’m really not sure how many people in the house were eating off of it, but my other hostess, Linda, and I were.  Not a bad meal, in fact.  Harvest Nut and Grain pancake, egg substitutes and a banana.

The other quasi-healthy, and much tastier meal I had was at Kelly’s place.  She and her partner cooked for me.  The takeaway from the meal was a recipe for kale chips.  Yep, kale chips.  If you rip kale into potato chip sized pieces, place them on a baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper, and then bake at 400ish until they’re crispy, you’ll be delighted.  It’s almost like a potato chip.  But healthy.  And kale.

I’ve since learned that you can add a bit of mustard to give it a zing.  Paired with cheese I brought back from Italy, we had a darn good meal.

For other healthyish meals, I hit ragin’ tacos for a plate of delicious tofu tacos,

and Lotta Frutta, an excellent, exotic fruit smoothie bar.  I had a guana smoothie and a grilled cheese.

The sandwich came with seasoned corn bits that I would, oddly enough, experience a week later in Peru.

Veggie burgers:

I was pleasantly surprised by the presence of house-made veggie burgers on menus all over the city.  Some of these were seriously good.  Some of these were seriously fried.  Some of these were served in restaurants I will not frequent.

The first was at Joe’s on Juniper, a gay sports bar with a great outdoor seating area.

The burger was house made with black beans, and fried.  It was tasty, but fell apart in my hands, which irritates me, truth be told.  I sat on the patio and listened to labor protestors across the street.  My waiter apologized, but I had good time listening to the chants.

That same night, Kelly took me to a fancy burger bar, called Flip Burger.  I only tell you the name so that you will know that it’s the place that serves fois gras.  For that reason, I won’t, personally, go back.  The burgers were good.  Mine might have been fried, I don’t recall, but it was topped with pickled onions, goat cheese, and microgreens.  Kelly had a bacon cheeseburger.

The real purpose of the trip, however, was the milkshakes.  Kelly’s was toasted marshmallow, and mine was turtle.  Neither of us opted for the goose-liver pate option…

While we were there, we ordered a tray of fried pickles.

Yes, they were good.  They were bread and butter, and came with some kind of buttermilk dipping sauce.  I’ve always pictured a fried pickle as a whole pickle, dropped into a deep fryer.  That’s not what these were.  They could have been bread and butter shoeleather, fried and slathered and they would have tasted good.

Much like the fried okra I had a couple of days later at a place called Farm Burger.

This had some kind of chipotle dipping sauce.  I think I liked this veggie burger best of all.  It was fried and fell apart, but it was quinoa.  I like quinoa.  It’s another grain I saw a lot of in Peru…  Paired with the sweet pickles and goat cheese, the burger was nice.  It went down smoothly.  Which is good, because Farm Burger also serves ice cream floats.  I had a ginger beer one.

While the award for best veggie burger goes to Farm Burger, the award for best fried food goes to Watershed.

That’s an okra pancake.  Actually, it’s two of them.  Chopped and battered and formed into cakes, the okra retains some of its former glory, the tapioca-sized seeds bursting in your mouth.  But it becomes more.  It’s far better than the usual fried-okra, which is pretty darn good.  It was delicate and crispy.  It didn’t hit me over the head with its okraness or its fried nature.  It was just simple and good.  Like everything else on the plate.  There was no surplus.  The heirloom tomatoes were simply seasoned with salt and pepper.  The cucumber salad was dressed with crème fraische.  I left full and happy.  Plus, it was at Emily Saliers place, Watershed.  So it was staffed by cute girls, and had a certain lesbian sensibility about it.

While I ate well the whole time, there’s one meal that stands out.  After a long day of writing, I was hoping to grab a piece of pizza and head back home.  Only, on the way to the pizza place, I got sidetracked by a menu in the window of the Iberian Pig.

That’s the pig.  Or it’s A pig.  Might not be the actually Iberian Pig.  Unclear.  What was clear was that the food was divine.  Peaches, quinoa and churros.  If you want more detail, you’ll have to wait.  This place deserves its own post.

When I first decided to go to Peru within a week of returning from Italy, I thought it would be a good idea to spend the week in between back in the states.  It seemed the culture shock of first-world Italy might be a little much next to the unfamiliarity of third-world Peru.  But Portland, my home base, is on the other side of the country from my entry point on the East Coast, and I’d be traveling with a friend from Atlanta, so I thought I’d spend some time there.  In the South.

Now, I know that some of you are saying, “Atlanta’s not the South!”  Well, it is.  For someone from Portland, it’s the South.  I like Atlanta, but it might have been less of a shock to head directly to Peru, where the language difference would have alerted my brain that I was, indeed, in a different country/culture.  Spending a week in a place that looked and sounded somewhat familiar was just enough to make me feel like I was losing my mind.  I spent time searching for the gayness that I’d missed so desperately over the last month, and finding fried food

Stone Mountain

and slow-talking hospitality.

Total strangers put me up in their beautiful guest-house.  Amazing.

I even found some of the gayness, too.

But that just contributed to the feeling of being constantly off-balance.  I could read the menus, but couldn’t anticipate the constantly fried preparations.  I could navigate the nature hikes, but couldn’t absorb the confederate flags along the trail.  I still don’t know if it’s good or bad etiquette to take pictures of confederate monuments, or if there’s a reason to put fois gras in a milkshake.  Anyone?  Anyone?

Here’s the thing about Torre Del Lago, the city Deb and Sandra took us to:

There’s a tower.

There’s a lake.

There’s a beach.

There’s Puccini’s opera house.

There’s a gay disco or two.

There’s more than one crazy person.

And there’s more than one vendor.

We experienced this.  All of it.

Also, should you forget your bathing suit, it’s not a problem.

The locals don’t mind.

My return to Italy was a friendly one.  It felt like going home in a way.  To familiar airports and train stations.  To familiar smells and sounds and colors.

My return to Barga was something more essential.  It was like returning my soul to the place I first recognized it.  And to a place that had challenged me to the core of my being.  It comforted me.

And frightened me.

What would it be like to return?  Would it feel the same?  Would I be remembered?  Welcomed?  Judged?  Would my language be good enough?  Would I appear confident?  Over-confident?  Would I see her?

(The answers are: great, yes, yes, yes, maybe, yes, yes, maybe, yes.)

I tried not to think too much about it during the three weeks that came before.  Thinking about it wouldn’t change it, either way.  I’d see as much of the hodgepodge that I’d come to regard as my Italian family as possible in the two days I’d be there.

Then I got an email.  We had a place to stay.  A beautiful place.  An apartment above the home of some of my family.  And we had a ride from the train station.

Suddenly our two days became four.  The thought of spending a couple of nights in another city were lost.  The call of this home was strong.

I rode the train with my camera in-hand.  I knew the change that would take place.  How the lush fields would give way to rocky riverbeds.  I missed these rivers.  I hadn’t realized it, but now, riding over them, I felt their pull.

We changed trains in Lucca, another city where I’d been welcomed into the home of friends.

This place spoke to me, too.

I felt emotions rising as we climbed aboard the dirty, regional train, and I warned the Ant.

“I’m going to try to be cool, but I really don’t know what’s going to come up for me, emotionally.”  After all, this was the place my life had changed.  This was the place where my world had shifted dramatically, sending me into a tailspin that would bring me back a few months later to live with strangers after selling my house and quitting my job.

“You don’t have to explain.”  She looked equally shaken.  She’d been there when it happened.

We rolled along, and I considered my legs.  It’s always my legs that bring me to the present.  Snap me to the here and now.

And here I was again.  Riding the train from Lucca to Fornaci di Barga.  The names of familiar train stops flashed by.   In no time at all, we were there, hugging and kissing and thanking Ryo for picking us up.

“I don’t like Kristin!”  The first test came as I climbed in the front seat of the car.  Two-year-old Andre was crying.  “Da-ddy!”

“Yes, Andre, I’m here.”  Ryo was trying to comfort his son from the front seat.  The Ant, sitting next to the boy looked terribly unsure.  I just laughed.  It was like I’d never left.  “Andre, what is it?”

“I DON’T LIKE KRISTIN.”  Ah yes.  If you’d ever like to have your soul crushed a little, have a child scream to the heavens that he doesn’t like you.  Over and over, for 20 minutes.  In a confined space.

I just kept laughing.

Now, it turned out that Andre had been in a fit of “I don’t like” all day.  But I didn’t know that.  And it didn’t really take the sting away once I found out.  Still, it did afford me the remarkable exercise of laughing while someone declared their dislike for me.  Their honest, heartfelt, loud dislike.  Dislike that, over the course of the next 4 days would disappear completely, lost in penguin bowling and soccer.

We stopped by the house in Fornaci where I’d spent two months in the gracious care of my friends, for a quick hello and a cup of tea.  The dogs recognized me, and seemed happy enough to see me, and Berti and I greeted with hugs, kisses, and more Italian than I’d spoken the entire time I’d been there before.  Deb made me a cup of tea, and Tommy threatened me with his paint-sodden hands.

Then we were off, up the hill to Barga, where we’d be staying in the same house as Ryo and Andre, and the rest of their family.

We settled into the beautiful apartment quickly, each of us choosing a room with a big bed and too many pillows.  I sent an email to my friend Frank to let him know we were there and tell him where we’d be for dinner, in the off chance he checked his email and wanted to join us.  We’d already planned to meet the next day for lunch, but I was hoping for a little extra Frank-time.

Hungry from the day’s travels and emotions, the Ant and I decided to head into town.  We’d probably grab a pizza at the place we’d eaten the first day we spent in Barga, over a year ago.

Not to be outdone by Venice, Barga was acting like a diva throwing all kinds of dramatic clouds around the sky.

Up we climbed, into the old heart of Barga, past the studio I knew intimately, and the shop that had drawn me in with its pretty stools.  As we reached the top, huffing and puffing, I looked up from the stone street.  And I smiled.

Frank stood there.  In the middle of a group of people, chatting away.  We all smiled and called out to each other.

“Did you get my email?”

“No.  Did you just get in?”  Perfect.  This was a chance meeting.  Barga is a small place, but I was happy to celebrate meeting Frank here tonight.

He joined us for dinner.  One of many meals we would share over the next few days.  Only our morning coffee and pastry were reserved for the two of us.  Nearly every other meal was in the company of others.

Pizza with the whole family,

curry and rugby at the house,

pasta and opera with Frank.

It was a whirlwind of food and love and discussion and humility.  And every second in between was filled with middle-of-the-street conversation with new friends,

visits to ancient cloisters,

and familiar views.

We even squeezed in games of Pictionary, tossing my little Italian dictionary back and forth.  Playing in two languages.  And when the game was put away, the dishes done, and our last goodbyes said, the final night continued.

The one family member I hadn’t seen enough of during my last trip remained.

“We could play games,” I suggested.

“I’d like that,” she said in her perfect English.

The Ant tucked behind her bedroom door, we closed ourselves into the drawing room.  For four hours we shuffled and dealt and talked.  About life and love, and language.  About “r” and “rr” and “d” and “tt.”   We argued about where your tongue hits your teeth when you say “do.”  And I amazed her with my perfect pronunciation of “boh.”

“You are Italian!” she exclaimed.

I muttered something in her language.

“No, you are a stranger.”  A stranger.  It was more crushing than a two year old screaming his dislike.

I wasn’t a stranger.  Just a newcomer.  After all, I recognized people on the street.  And they recognized me.

When we finally called it quits, I walked her to her car, relishing the summer air and the flickering lightning bugs.

“A dopo,” I promised to me as much as to her.  It wasn’t forever, just until later.

Despite the fit that Venice threw while we were there, we managed to find some serious food.

Even in the storm, I was able to find my favorite restaurants.  Whether it was Grom for incredible, fresh gelato,

or Pizza al Volo for the best veggie pizza ever,

my old haunts materialized before us.  I was even able to find the most remote of my previous dinner places on the first try.

Trattoria della Madonna is marked by a big, green lantern.  As I went to tell the Ant this, I found myself looking at it.

Like last time, I found the Madonna an elegantly simple restaurant.

Serving seafood specialties and seasonal vegetables, I find it a delight to point my waiter in a direction – vegetarian, meat, fish – and let him bring something good.

Tonight, we had a great dinner of Bolognese and pasta e fagioli

And snapper (it came whole and was boned for the Ant) and veggies.

The Ant loved her snapper, and I was unable to finish the huge plate of vegetables.  Though I stuffed as many of the carrots, peas and veiny beans down my throat as I could.

And then I ordered dessert.

Not because I was hungry, but because you can’t really go to the alleged birthplace of tiramisu and not have it.  Can you?

I think I cannot.

Regardless, it was a good first night of food.  But we had another.  After considering the menus of both Casi nobili, and Ristoteca Oniga, we decided to go with Oniga for our second night of food.

Oniga is a really warm place.

It glows with hospitality.  I sat next to the owner’s Staffordshire terrier, asleep in her bed.

And we were soon in conversation with the two couples on either side of us.  Of course, it helped that we were crammed in like sardines, but still.  While we considered the menu, we shared travel tips and recommendations for food.  The Ant and I found ourselves the resident experts on Venice, Rome and Siena, and we were glad to share what knowledge we had with our dining companions.

Tonight, I settled on a giant gnocchi and the Ant on a spaghetti with clams.

The gnocchi were the exact right firmness, even though they were twice the size of any gnocchi I’d ever had.  And the sauce was a lovely, delicate blend of tomato, basil and bufala mozzarella – three of my favorite things.

The Ant raved about her spaghetti, and we passed along the recommendations to our friends around us, who were asking how it was.

Next came another whole fish for the Ant, and something the waiter had thrown together for me.

It was cheese.  More bufala mozzarella.  And the most absolutely astounding tomatoes I think I’ve ever had.  I’d guess they were plum.  Maybe Roma.  But they were sweet and dressed with balsamic.  Really good balsamic vinegar.  And there was a dollop of fresh pesto.  I made little stacks of cheese, pesto and tomatoes piled on bread.

And then I ordered dessert again.

A meek bus girl came over to take our plates, and asked if we wanted something sweet.

“What do you recommend?”  I asked in some kind of Italian that she recognized.

“Ciocolata,” she smiled enthusiastically.  I nodded and settled in, eager to see what she would bring.

Yeah, it was chocolate.  Cake.  With some kind of maybe creamy-nut filling.  And fudgy frosting.  And a drizzle of chocolate sauce.

This, my friends, is why I ask for recommendations.

The Ant leaned over to one of the couples, and I leaned over to the other.

“You have to order this.  No, I don’t know what it is.  She just said, ‘ciocolata’.”  They all nodded and thanked us for the recommendation.

We finished up our little espressos, paid the bill, said goodnight to the dog and our new friends, and headed out into the night, to our little room a couple of blocks away, jacked up on caffeine and sugar, and blissfully exhausted.