Now For Those Pictures I Promised

I promised you photos on Saturday and when I promise, you receive, except when you don't. Here are a few photos from that restaurant we visited on Saturday.


There were all sort of wood carvings in this place. Some were in the style of the classic ventriloquist dummy except that they were almost life size. Actually they would have been life size for very short people, except that they weren't to scale exactly. This lady sat in the corner and watched us eat our meal.


The guy in the left is perhaps a little too minstrel show for my tastes, but he really does kind of fit the exaggerated features of his fellow card players, however. This was the first thing you saw when you walked in the door.

There's a lot of hand-carved detail in this bar. There was also a hand-carved cabinet for the wine selection (we picked out a Petite Syrah that was actually pretty damn tasty), but you don't get that picture. The boobs on the wine cabinet were more obvious than the boobs on the one post on the bar and this is a family blog.


Now that you've got a feel for the whimsy of this place, here's what keeps them coming back. If you look closely in the above shot, you'll catch sight of two thick New York strips in a sautee pan amidst the flames. Actually, all you'll see is part of the two steaks, but you can imagine the rest.

And now for the money shot. This is the actual oven. The guy cooking the steaks here actually built the oven by hand. He also renovated the formerly burned-out shell of a house and started the restaurant for $600. Here he's attaching the long metal pole to the handle of the steak pan to remove the cooked steaks from the oven.

After pulling the steaks from the fire, he deglazes the pan with wine and a little pico de gallo for the sauce. Actually, good steaks just need salt and pepper to be divinely tasty hunks o' fauna, but I'm not against tasty sauces. The only problem is that they don't season their steaks enough prior for cooking for my tastes. It was good meat, not overcooked, and tasty sauce, but the meat itself needed more salt for perfection. I still didn't reach for the A1 sauce if you get what I'm saying. Despite my very mild disappointment in the flavor of the steak, K's Calypso Chicken (stuffed with feta cheese, artichokes and more) was amazing, and my mom's shrimp dish and my sister's seafood, chicken and sausage dish were all more than tasty. I'd really wanted to taste their lamb dish, but the guy you saw cooking my steak wasn't happy with the looks of the lamb he saw when he went shopping earlier so they were out.

I'm sure that no one who reads this blog has a reason to be in Augusta, GA, unless they are an avid golf fan, but here's a link to the information about this place in case you're in Augusta and don't mind driving 30 minutes out of your way for dinner. It's an interesting experience.