Barbecue for Jews

My hotel straddles dead-middle and upper-middle on the Aminzade scale. The specifics: 49″ towel width, Vanilla Bean and Peach Nectar moisturizing soap, Juniper Breeze body lotion, shower cap and a shoe mitt, presented on a a tasteful zenlike wood platform in lieu of wicker. This is nice. I was getting tired of wicker. The porter tells me that Elvis once slept here.

My room also has a terrace. I overlook The Varsity, a sprawling neon-trimmed grease pit of a drive-in restaurant beloved of Georgia Tech students. The Varsity claims to be World’s largest drive-in restaurant and to sell more Coca-Cola than any other single outlet. Field-research note: The onion rings are very good. You can learn what a “bag of rags and an n.i.p.c.” ” is at http://thevarsity.com.

I can also see the freeway. It’s a pleasure to gloat over the poor souls stuck in Atlanta’s notorious rush hour traffic. There are cities with worse traffic, but I’ve never been any place where people complain about the traffic as much.

If I lean out over the balcony, I can see the Coca-Cola building. It’s a blank and meaningless tower of cement and glass, in cross-section like a pinched triangle. It must have been built in the Goizetta years. He was the guy who came up with “New Coke,” missing the whole point of the Coca-Cola Mystique. If they had built this thing in the 1990s, no architect could resist a design evocative of the classic Coke bottle.

Atlanta, of course, is the home of Coca-Cola. People here drink it for breakfast, and there is little sign of Pepsi here. Frankly, I’ve never been able to tell those two brown sugar-waters apart (I’m a Dr. Pepper man myself), but I’ve learned that some Atlantans are fiercely loyal to the stuff. If you want to read a fascinating book about Coca-Cola, I’d recommend “For God, Country and Coca-Cola” by my former colleague Mark Pendergrast. It’s really a history of American capitalism viewed through a Coke bottle. Mark’s book explains how a morphine-addicted Civil War veteran invented Coke as an herbal-medicine tonic. Mark also thinks he’s found the secret recipe, which he includes in an appendix. By the way, there really was some cocaine in it, but not much at all. Today the company buys decocainized coca leaves for the syrup

I am in the Southland and I must have barbecued ribs (and grits for breakfast, but that’s another tale). I did my research: reading guidebooks, and rounding up the names of several quality rib joints, cross-checking with my native guide and old high school friend Chris. Despite my careful preparations, my first efforts to find good barbecue meet with failure. I spent several hours driving through Atlanta’s abundant sprawl before I found Chris’s first suggestion, Son’s Place. It looked great, with a folk-art picture of Son on the side. However I got there at 5:30, and it closed at 4 PM. Returning to my hotel, I call the other restaurants on my list. Each either doesn’t exist any more or doesn’t answer the phone.

I figured that the hotel concierge, a person of African-American heritage, might help. Nope. He tried to send me to some yuppy place nearby. The ribs might have been good (at triple the price), but a glance at the menu makes me reject the place. I can’t bring myself to travel to the Deep South and eat barbecue at a place that offers mesclun greens with balsamic vinaigrette. I want Collards. With pot likker. I’ve also heard that a true aficionado won’t eat in a barbecue joint where all the chairs match.

An emergency call to Chris yields the explanation that few authentic Southern restaurants are open for dinner, and a recommendation: Dusty’s. I’m suspicious (sounds like a tex-mex theme restaurant chain to me), but drive blindly through the darkened city in a frenzied search for meat.

After a long search, I’m rewarded with just what I’m looking for — excellent barbecue, local pig-related art on the wall, unmatched chairs, and hush puppies on the side. As a bonus one of the strangest garnishes I’ve ever seen sits atop my plate: a chitterling. For those of you unfamiliar with soul food or white-trash cuisine, a chitterling (or “chitlin”) is a piece of deep-friend pig intestine. It’s actually quite tasty, though about as unhealthy a morsel as you could find anywhere.

The menu at Dusty’s follows the canonical southern “one meat two sides” plan, sides being corn on the cob, beans, macaroni and cheese, cole slaw and such. No collards with pot likker, though. Dang. I enjoyed an assortment platter with a cold beer and read the local weekly newspapers. These include a paper called “Jewish Atlanta.” I am more than a little surprised to find a stack of these in the entrance to this shrine to porcine pleasure. America is a wonderful place.

You can order your ribs at http://www.dustys.com, though they don’t deliver.