Folk'n Good Food

Do you live near or in Atlanta, and have no dinner plans tonight?

Cool, because I've got somewhere for you to be. It's one of my new favorite places in Atlanta, and there's some dang good company who'd agree with me. Namely, Guy Fieri.

Yes, Guy Fieri of the first-ever Food Network Star winning, bleached tips, Triple D fame. He likes Folk Art, too. So much so, in fact, that if you show up at the restaurant tonight (that's July 31, to those of you who are coming late to our party) you get to see first-hand what he thinks of this joint. Folk Art is hosting a viewing party with half-price drinks and featured entrees so everyone who comes in can watch Guy eat on the big screen! You can also watch it from the comfort of your couch tonight and over the weekend, but if given the chance to enjoy it with a room full of strangers who love good food and the Inman Park neighborhood ... why wouldn't you come in person to support the restaurant?!

Let me give you a hint of what you'll be in store for.

First off, you walk up to this place and you're immediately accosted by charm. There are mid-century brand signs up all over the place, retro tiles, a drugstore counter-style bar and a patio. Good music. Good service. Even better food.

As you can gather from the headline of this food memoir, I am not the world's biggest fan of vegetables. I would much prefer to have a nice, juicy cheeseburger with lettuce, onions, tomatoes, etc. than be faced with a plate of steak salad. Thus, none was more surprised than I when I ordered the A.B.L.T. off the Folk Art menu at brunch last weekend.

The A.B.L.T. features applewood-smoked bacon, tomatoes, mixed greens and a mustard seed mayonnaise between two slices of buttered, toasted white bread. Addition of hashbrowns and pickles optional.

Yep. That beautiful sandwich is heaping with ripe, red slices of sweet tomatoes and a colorful mix of crunchy lettuces. It could be described as a salad served between two slices of bread. Oh, and how mouthwatering it was!

That "A" in front stands for applewood, as in applewood-smoked bacon. Four thick slices of bacon with a crisp edge and a subtle sweetness imparted from the wood chips they were smoked in. This was perfect bacon, the fatty edges a little bit chewy still, and the tad of grease that when mixed with the mustard seed mayonnaise spread on the bread ... y'all. This is how to make a BLT. And did I mention that this is served on good ol' white bread? There's just something about toasted, lightly buttered white bread that makes a sandwich full of vegetables so much more appetizing. On second thought, that's probably because even lettuce is good when it's dipped in butter.

To up the ante of a BLT (even though there ain't much more upping you could do to this one!), you can do what I did and completely misread the menu.

On the breakfast menu, at 8 a.m. on a Sunday when you're starving and you don't want bacon and eggs, you can occasionally read an item description and incorrectly infer that what is the side item is, in fact, served on the sandwich. I was pretty pumped about the thought of adding some crunch to a BLT with the addition of hashbrowns, so when I found out they were served on the side, I did what every other hungry 26-year-old meat-and-cheese-and-bread-loving food writer person does and forked the hashbrowns (and housemade pickles) on top of my lettuce sandwich.

Guy Fieri's face on the outside
placard invites Atlanta in

But don't despair if you're not weird and don't find BLTs topped with hashbrowns to be an appetizing breakfast. Folk Art has all the normal things, like bacon dipped in pancake batter and then deep fried. Yeah, y'all read that right.

I reckon you've read enough - it's time to shut down your computer and hop on over to this Inman Park place to watch this folk'n good food (it's their motto; I only wish I could've made it up!) get its 15 seconds of fame tonight, which I have no doubt will be the beginning of much more recognition in the Atlanta area. Party starts at 9!

P.S. I'll be the one in the back chowing down on whatever the heck collard green cole slaw is ... on top of a pork sandwich, of course.

Cinco de Taco

Like every fast food junkie who's hit up T-Bell at 3 a.m. in an effort to fulfill the desires of post-drinking food needs, when I heard the chain was offering free biscuit tacos on Cinco de Mayo, I jumped at the chance. I forced myself to wake up early (because the nearest Taco Bell is in the exact opposite direction of my office), make myself presentable and join the throngs of 20-somethings arriving promptly 7 a.m. to see whether or not we'll deign to be so-called "breakfast defectors."

By "throngs of 20-somethings" I mean me and the one other car that showed up at 7:02 a.m. The throngs are the ones who rolled out of bed at 10, assumed that only hungover college students cared about free food and marched en masse to Taco Bell only to realize that they  had been duped by those of us who have jobs, must be awake before 7 a.m. and hang on to every reminder of our inebriated college past by taking advantage of free food whenever offered. So, by the time the throngs arrived, there were no free biscuit tacos left for them, and now they're doing what kids do these days and posting mean things on social media.

Meanwhile, as these young things were sleeping, innocently assuming there would be free food awaiting them in three hours, I moseyed into my office, bacon-egg-cheese biscuit taco and bacon-egg-cheese A.M. Crunchwrap in hand, excited to celebrate this mostly American holiday with some very American things: fast food, free fast food, bacon and biscuits.

The A.M. Crunchwrap: bacon, egg, shredded cheddar and a hashbrown patty,
all wrapped up in a flour tortilla.

I began with the A.M. Crunchwrap. As my bestie and favorite fellow 3 a.m. T-Bell frequenter Gena knows well, I am a mad fan of the Crunchwrap. The regular Crunchwrap Supreme is a layer of beef, sour cream, tomatoes, lettuce and various other taco toppings stacked on a flattened hardshell taco, all wrapped in a huge soft tortilla. Dip that into some sauce and you've got one of my top five fast food items! Now, there are no vegetables in the A.M. Crunchwrap. It is carb and protein loading to the max. You've got the flour tortilla still, but this time it is wrapped around a hashbrown patty and topped with chopped bacon, scrambled egg and the signature Taco Bell shredded cheddar cheese, plus a kick courtesy of some sort of jalapeno cream sauce.

It tasted good. Like, I would go back and get it again after approximately three days of jogging around the neighborhood twice a day good. I liked that the bacon was crumbled, because you didn't have to worry about only taking one bite and suddenly the whole strip is coming out ... and then you're left with naught but egg and cheese. The scrambled eggs weren't bad. They didn't necessarily taste like something a Michelin star chef would put out there, but they weren't rubbery or hard and were sufficiently salty. Alas, the sauce (and for some reason this always happens with Crunchwraps) ended up all in one corner, so it wasn't until I was two-thirds done with my breakfast that I even realized there was sauce in it. And that was a shame, because the sauce gave a freshness and a zing to the salty flavors of the protein and carbohydrate ingredients! So, note to self, next time I'm ordering an extra tub of that on the side for dipping.

The issue I have with the A.M. Crunchwrap is the "crunch" part. In the regular menu Crunchwrap, that tortilla shell crunches quite satisfactorily when you chomp down, plus the iceberg lettuce and the tomatoes give a little bit more texture. The morning variety, sadly, does not provide that same experience. Though putting a hashbrown inside is a good idea in theory, it's easy to execute poorly. There was no satisfactory crunch from a crispy fried shredded potato patty. It was as if someone hadn't let the oil get hot enough in the fryer before dropping them in, so they absorbed too much oil and came out greasy. Fix that issue, add some more of that sauce, and this ain't a bad way to start the morning if you don't want to spend a fortune at Panera for a "healthy" carbohydrate-laden breakfast or are tired of your regular Chick-fil-A and McDonald's fare.

Onto the real reason why I showed up at Taco Bell at 7:02 a.m.: the biscuit taco. Yes, I got the bacon here again (there are sausage varieties of both), but if you've been following me, you undoubtedly read my post about bratwurst and thus my diatribe against breakfast sausage. So, bacon it is!

I knew it was going to be tough to convert me, a Southern born-and-bred woman who grew up on soul food and fresh-made biscuits cut with a jar top, to something like this. But I tried to go in with an open mind, and hey, it was free. Plus, it looked cute! Great packaging -- a little cardboard taco shell holder that claims "The world is your biscuit. Devour it." I unwrap this delicacy and think, "Heck yes, I will devour you."

Then I took a bite.

Bad news, y'all. Despite its promising exterior, the biscuit taco was lackluster.

The bacon, egg and cheese biscuit taco, wrapped in its signature packaging,
along with the day's receipt for "a Cinco de Mayo miracle."

The biscuit part of the taco is interesting. The inside is crumbly and gives you the mouthfeel of a biscuit, but the outside is almost rubbery. I mean, I understand that food science was involved here and Taco Bell had to figure out a way to get a soft, buttery, typically not flexible biscuit to bend into a taco shell shape, but it's by no means my favorite thing on the Taco Bell menu.

The construction of the biscuit taco was pretty genius: like a regular taco that has ground beef topped with stuff and cheese on top, the biscuit taco featured ground meat (bacon, in my case), the same scrambled eggs as on the A.M. Crunchwrap and again, that shredded cheddar.

Y'all I'mma be cleaning bacon off my desk for a while. The half-inch thick generous helping of crumbled bacon did not want to stay in the biscuit taco. It was messy. Not something I would recommend eating in the car while driving.

Do I appreciate Taco Bell feeding me for mostly free (I bought the Crunchwrap)? Yes.

Would I call myself a "breakfast defector" after this morning? Nah.

But if I ever do need to break out of my traditional spicy chicken biscuit boredom (not sure that sort of boredom exists; I really like spicy chicken biscuits) and have a few spare minutes to wait for a perfectly fried hashbrown patty to stuff in an A.M. Crunchwrap, I'd go back and grab one. They do say variety of the spice of life, especially when that variety comes with a side of spicy jalapeno sauce.