EATING OUT

88 Tofu House
5490 Buford Hwy.
Doraville, Atlanta

If conventional Asian cuisine has a comfort food it might be Korean. The Japanese have yakitori, noodles and tempura (adopted from the Portuguese) alongside the aesthetic brilliance of their food. The Chinese have dumplings and pancakes to go against the banquets of Beijing. Vietnam has Pho, Malaysia roti. But there's something about the warmth and simplicity of a standard Korean meal--ponchon, deceptively complex soups, and beef that Argentians would salivate at--that, at least in my mind, puts Korean food on par with the food you might find at a roadside diner in Elberton, Georgia.
88 Tofu House looks like it could have fit right into the visions of daylight and late-night roadside LA diners in Pulp Fiction, or Swingers. Like numerous other Buford Highway restaurants, it exists in a charmingly
retro roadside building, stolen from the 70s, one you imagine probably sold burgers and/or country fried steak in a previous life. Booths are of the same molded wood model you find in an old Burger King. There’s a compact and succinct IN/OUT sign on the edge of the street. There’s even evidence of what was probably a drive through window—can you imagine drive-thru Korean on the way to a ponchon and tofu soup picnic?
For my money, though, 88 Tofu House is at its best in the late hours (it’s open for 24 of them), when the harsh afternoon natural lighting scheme gives way to the soothing shades of night, youthful experts on the way home from Happy Karoake, and bubbling cauldrons of comfort. If you’re looking for any of the standard Korean tofu soups, there’s a good chance you’ll find it here. Seafood tofu soup, mushroom tofu soup, beef tofu soup, beef honeycomb tofu soup, combination tofu soup (if you want some of all of the above)—they’re all here, along with 20 or so other varieties. The soups come to your table in black, iron bowls that look like they could be used to grind corn in if you wanted. Still alive when they arrive, you might have to wait a five to ten minutes to really try them. When you do, you’ll find a reasonably seasoned, not too salty, broth with slippery, delicate pieces of tofu and the accompanying meat or vegetable. The broth is flavorful and rich without overpowering the palate with salt.
While you’re waiting for the soup to cool, there are plenty of other options to occupy your time and stomach. As always, there’s ponchon, the Korean tapas that function as appetizers and/or complements to proper Korean meals. Kimchee is the staple, whether it be in the form of marinated cabbage, cucumbers or—my favorite—small, cubed pieces of daikon, where the vegetable absorbs just enough of the savory brilliance to salt
your tongue. Marinated sprouts are a clean palette cleanser for later in the meal. Rectangular, inch long, pieces of cream colored jello are mildly salty and topped with a slightly spicy chili sauce. Dried and salty sardines are far too salty, but I’m highly averse to sodium. You might feel differently.
The comfort factor of the soups continues with the other entrees, devoid of aesthetic style or novelty, but robust in flavor and mass. LA short ribs come on a sizzling oval platter, alongside grilled onions, richly caramelized if a little fatty. Bulgolgi arrives thinly shredded with a subtle sweetness, with a metal, circular container of steamed rice.
The combos featured on the inside of the menu pair any of the tofu soups with the above beef dishes or a bowl 88 Tofu’s rice hash. The hash comes in a bigger version of the bowls used for the soup and slowly cooks until you’re finished with it. Rice forms the bedrock and is topped with zuchini and carrots julienne, thinly sliced dried seaweed, a small serving of bulgogi, and a raw egg. By the time you reach the bottom, portions of the rice have cooked to the point that you have to scrape them off the bottom with a spoon, at which point you might be offered a cup of hot water to pour to aid in the task. It’s certainly worth your time as the rice attains a consistency enjoyable in itself. Maybe not the most practical thing for a picnic, but unbeatable when it comes to late night
searches for sustenance.

Rollin' Bones
77 Edgewood Ave.
Atlanta, GA
I am not one of those BBQ guys. Like self-proclaimed Civil War buffs who throw out references to Pickett’s Charge at Thanksgiving dinner or middle-aged, ruffled-shirt clad baseball enthusiasts who take any chance possible to inject Earl Weaver’s name into a cocktail party conversation, BBQ guys wear their ‘cue loving on their sleeve like an attractive tattoo and scour and crawl over North Carolina and Texas back roads with Pentecostal fervor. I’m not one of those guys. I just like BBQ.
What education I do have began at Ollie’s BBQ in Birmingham, AL. Ollie’s was located right off of Interstate-65, around downtown Birmingham, somewhere around the line where black people stopped living and white
people started living. Infamously (or famously depending on whom you ask), Ollie’s had a part in the desegregation of the South as the Interstate Commerce Commission used its jurisdiction to force Ollie’s to integrate by way of an ultimatum that shut down shipping of supplies via interstate to the restaurant until it agreed to integrate. My memory of the restaurant is tied to snapshots of exceedingly plump black waitresses, a large counterspace curved in several different spots that gave way to a semi-open kitchen, religious publications offered for sale by the cash register in the front, and the simple plates of BBQ sandwiches, garnished with a few pickles, with a light and clean, vinegar based sauce in squirt bottles on the side.
My dad was always a fan of Birmingham’s Golden Rule, and particular to the point that he refused to eat at the location near our house, on a stretch of strip malls that would fit it in Los Angeles, opting instead for the distant Irondale location. Sadly, I never made it to the Irondale spot.
Somewhere around college I made it to Dreamland, the Tuscaloosa spot regularly name-checked by Saturday afternoon sportscasters during Alabama football games, and found a sparse rectangular room with long family style tables adorned with paper towel rolls, and a similarly sparse, but rich in particulars, menu featuring sweet tea and ribs.
I moved to Georgia in the mid-1990s and visited Harold’s, a two room shack a few steps from the Federal Pen, that serves rich Brunswick stew and smoky, refreshingly non-uniform slices of pork atop Texas Toast, sauce on
the side, allowing you to taste the flavor of the meat and the process itself, before or apart from the sauce. Daddy Dz was next: heavy, thickly sauced ribs with more than competent side offerings of broccoli casserole, collards and the like. Outside Athens I found Paul’s (open on Saturdays and 4th of July), a non-descript space off the town square, full of camo and dry goods, a place that feels more like a Sunday church supper, with paper plates, table loafs of white bread, and deeply flavorful chopped barbecue. With some decent, but less impressive, stops in between, I figured I had just about done the Atlanta/Athens BBQ scene. And then I found Rollin’ Bones.
Rollin’ Bones does not look authentic. With large glass windows that visually-aerate and relax the setting, a patio decorated with IKEAesque furniture, a streamlined flat screen I would love to own and numerous reviews from stylish magazines adorning the wall, the restaurant looks more like a trendy local (Tacqueria del Sol) that woke up one day to find itself serving barbecue instead of burritos. You can’t really trust appearances.
The menu features hot links, ribs, barbecue plates, sandwiches and a host of side items (the collards were a bit too salty, but fine nonetheless).
When you order a chopped pork sandwich, make sure to grab a fork as well. Take your sandwich (via the to-go box they may provide you) to the patio, settle down in the downtown air and open the box. What you will find is a combination of toasted bread sprinkled with herbs, slowly fading into a bread goo as it sops up the rich, sauce saturated pork it shelters, sauce spilling out the sides into the container creating a bedrock of flavor just in case you want more. The sauce is thin enough, a little oily some might say, but in possession of a subtle spice that hits you right where you want it to. I finished mine in under-two minutes. I then used my fork for the collards, which I suppose is what it was meant for.