Restaurants in Athens

Athens native Emily Ullrich began cultivating a fervor for food at an early age, spending her youth cooking southern-style dishes under the guidance of her grandmother. At age 16, Emily took a job at the local Hawthorne Drugs’s soda fountain, working there intermittently before taking charge and transforming it into a full-service restaurant 12 years later. Visitors to the drugstore can meander into the restaurant’s intimate dining room, where apple-green and azure walls and antiques create a welcoming household kitchen atmosphere. The eatery’s menu of classic and specialty sandwiches placed it among the top local restaurants at Taste of Athens 2012, and its signature Brunswick stew landed it in the list of finalists for the Flavor of Georgia 2012. If the scent of baking cheesy biscuits and roasting authentic Cuban sandwiches don’t inspire nostrils to belt out the chorus of Yankee Doodle, the dexterous chef welcomes guests to suggest their own creations from kitchen ingredients.

Weaver D's Delicious Fine Foods’ owner and founder, Dexter Weaver, has built a business around his company slogan, "automatic for the people," which also inspired R.E.M.'s 1992 hit album by the same name. A Los Angeles Times article reveals the story behind the words—each day within the neon-green building, Dexter and his staff dish out a mountain of fried chicken, pork-chop sandwiches, and squash casserole, all served "automatic with a smile." He even wrote a book, Automatic Y’all: Weaver D’s Guide to the Soul, which outlines his eatery's recipes, how they relate to life, and some of the best reasons to name a dog Okra.

Chefs at Bulldawg Pizza’s two locations hand toss pizza dough to form regular-, thin-, and thick-crust vehicles for alfredo sauce, barbecue chicken, or feta cheese. They ready gourmet pies for delivery, carry-out, or dine-in (Baxter St. location only), loading spicy buffalo-chicken pizzas with a blend of blue cheese, ranch, and tomato sauce or piling Hawaiian pies with ham, pineapple, and ukulele sauce. As calzones and toasted subs share oven space, the chefs scoop house-made alfredo sauce over steaming plates of pasta.

Long hailed for a mastery of ham far beyond the skills of mere mortal meat cookers, the meat mavens at HoneyBaked Ham invite you to put their newly honed turkey skills to the test with today's Groupon: a whole roasted turkey breast for $12 (an up to $25 value). Get your moist turkey breast unadulterated, or let the HoneyBaked masters finish your bird with crackling sweet glaze, which may or may not be cooled by having volunteer glaze-pixies fan it with their wings. Call one of HoneyBaked's participating locations (found here and in the sidebar to the right) to reserve your order, and pick up your juicy bird.

Pie slingers at Romeo’s New York Pizza twirl their ‘za from scratch, piling dough made in-house with red sauce and toppings such as garlic, ground beef, meatballs, and sundried tomatoes. The cozy neighborhood joint has purveyed New York–style pizza since 1945, when delivery boys first started using hovercrafts. Its unfussy menu includes hearty appetizers such as cheese bread or fried ravioli, alongside healthy salads in vegetarian or meaty iterations. Those who opt not to build their own pies can go in for one of three chef-crafted incarnations—margherita, spinach and mushroom, or vegetarian, sold by the slice or in 12-inch or 16-inch rounds.

Pizza chefs conjure fresh dough on a daily basis at Uncle Vito’s, a traditional pizzeria specializing in New York–style pies peppered with market-fresh ingredients. Layers of gooey mozzarella blanket fragrant pools of homemade tomato sauce and toppings such as eggplant, bacon, and broccoli on each thin-crust pizza. The thinness of nine specialty Neapolitan-style pies offsets the thickness of Sicilian-style pizzas, which boast inch-deep crusts ideal for toughening up teeth made of gummy candy. Culinary crewmembers accessorize oven-baked calzones and stromboli with sides of marinara, and they festoon baked ziti and manicotti dinners with a one-two punch of ricotta and mozzarella.