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If there is a truism about living in the Triad, it is this: people here love to eat out. More than any place I’ve lived, the residents of Greensboro enjoy dining out. A lot. Ask anyone who’s tried to get a table here after 6 pm and they’ll most likely tell you they had to wait. As the area’s population has exploded, so has the strain on Greensboro’s dining circuit. Yet despite all this, the place is littered with the corpses of eateries that for one reason or another, couldn’t take the heat. Some of these fine establishments were ahead of their time, others suffered from poor location, but a few died sudden and mysterious deaths. This post is dedicated to these wonderful joints, that for whatever reason, went the way of the dodo. Let us all join hands now and fondly remember:

Simply Italian - Doomed Italian Drive-thru

Simply Italian used to be located at the corner of Hilltop and Highpoint road near Adam’s Farm in Greensboro. It opened right after I moved to the area in 1994 and lasted less than a year, but what a year! The place was built around an old instant photo processing building and as such had no interior or exterior seating. You had to drive or walk up, order and take your food away. Simply Italian served some of the best Italian food I’ve ever eaten and offered huge quantities of classic Italian dishes for just pennies. You could order an entire 12″ lasagna for $7.00 and they’d even throw in garlic bread, utensils and more. The day Simply Italian closed was a sad one for me and my friends. A classic example of pricing yourself right out of business.

Hey Mon - Bermuda Triangle Swallows Caribbean Cafe

Formerly located at 2408 Spring Garden St. in Greensboro, Hey Mon was a jumping little joint that featured wonderful Caribbean flavors including spicy jerked chicken sandwiches, wraps and my all-time favorite - Caribbean cole slaw. When I worked at Image Technology, Hey Mon was one of our absolute favorite places to visit for lunch. The place was always packed and sometimes there was even a line out the door. One day at lunch, our group found the restaurant closed and a sign on the door saying they were moving. We were disappointed that we didn’t get our lunch, but excited that Hey Mon was moving into new, and possibly larger digs. Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months and still no Hey Mon. To this day I have no idea what happened to this awesome eatery. It’s almost like it never existed.

Sushi Rock - Seppuku, Sushi Style

This wonderful sushi house used to be located on Battleground Avenue and was known for its reasonable prices and wonderful decor. When my friend Talos first introduced me to Sushi Rock, I knew I had found my new favorite sushi restaurant. It didn’t take long to realize however, that the place was in trouble. Crowds thinned and prices rose slightly and then one day it was just gone. Thankfully there’s no shortage of good sushi restaurants in the Triad. My current favorites are U.S. Sushi at the corner of Eastchester and Wendover in Highpoint and the always yummie Asahi on West Market St.

Pie Works - Death by a Thousand Cuts

I know what you’re thinking. Pie Works isn’t dead, at least not yet. Technically that may be true, but if you’ve lived here as long as I have then you may remember that there used to be many more Pie Works’ than the one (yes, there is only one left) on Lawndale Ave in Greensboro. Pie Works serves up some of the best gourmet pizza this side of New York and yet the franchise is faltering. I used to frequent the small Pie Works that lived down on West Market back in the day, but that location didn’t last long and is now a laundromat. There used to be a Pie Works in Winston Salem as well, but that too is gone. There are now a grand total of 3 Pie Works locations in Louisiana compared to one in North Carolina. Like it or not, I fully expect the Lawndale location to visit that big pizzeria in the sky in not-too-distant future. I think I’ll miss the Rosemary Roast most of all. My stomach is sad.

Bo Hogs - Another Pig Bites the Dust

When Bo Hogs opened a few years back at the corner of West Market St. and Muirs Chapel road, the last thing I thought Greensboro needed was another BBQ place. Marked by good service, a friendly atmosphere and excellent food, Bo Hogs quickly changed my mind and it became my favorite NC barbeque joint. That was their kiss of death. Although they seemed constantly busy, like many other eateries I’ve fallen in love with, one day they just closed. No explanation was given and no forwarding address was left on the door for a new location. I calling the developer to find out what happened, but only got a cryptic “The owner decided to close it down.” in response. Oh the horror! Today, my favorite Triad BBQ places are Prissy Polly’s of Kernersville, Carter Brothers BBQ in High Point and Country BBQ on Wendover Ave. in Greensboro. Pig places may come and go, but there will always be a hush-puppy in my heart for Bo Hogs.

Restaurant Death Watch

Finally, here are a list of places that as of this writing, seem to be alive and kicking, but that I’m keeping a close eye on. My track record indicates that at least one or more of these places may go belly up within the next 3 years for no other reason than I enjoy eating there.

Mykonos Grill - The best Greek restaurant in Greensboro, hands down. Took up the mantle after Pita Works closed in Quaker Village. Place is always packed to the roof at lunch, which unfortunately means it’s probably doomed.

Leblon - Brazilian steak house that hosts the Iconfactory’s annual Christmas party, or as we call it, “The Night of Meat“. Awesome food, great service. Seems underpriced for all-you-can-eat top notch cuts of meat. Danger Will Robinson!

Rearn Thai - Their original location across the street on West Market was small but cozy and inviting. The new all-glass building is no bigger (maybe even smaller), but also cold feeling and loud. I’ve eaten there just once since they moved. This will be the one time when it’s not my fault when they go. Good food but their architect doomed them IMHO.

What about you? Have any favorite restaurants that bought the farm? Feel free to add yours in the comments below. Misery loves company!

Another journey into the land of hypocrisy (on both sides of the issue) this morning on the Brad & Britt show on FM Talk 101.1. You see, some people have had enough of the hate-spewing rhetoric of Michael Savage and have decided to contact his advertisers to try and get them to yank support of his show. The plan seems to be working and Savage has lost at least 4 major sponsors to date.

Into the fold, once again, comes our local radio talk radio hosts, Brad Kranz & Britt Whitmire who did a segment on Savage this morning. Unsurprisingly both hosts take the position that while some of the things Savage broadcasts to millions of people each day are offensive, and even in some cases as Britt said “indefensible”, if people don’t like it, they can turn the dial and simply not listen.

It’s interesting because I actually do turn the dial as soon as Alan Handleman goes off the air. I’ve tried to listen to Savage several times, but find myself becoming nauseous very quickly. I agree he does make some interesting points from time to time on issues of the day. But then he goes and says stuff like this:

“90 percent of the people on the Nobel Committee are into child pornography and molestation.” - 12/12/07

Madeline Albright is “a traitor. In my opinion, she should be tried for treason, and when she’s found guilty, she should be hung.” - 10/9/06

“Liberalism is, in essence, the HIV virus, and it weakens the defense cells of a nation.” - 7/6/06

and the one that got him rightfully fired from MSNBC:

“Oh, you’re one of the sodomites,” Savage said. “You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How’s that? Why don’t you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it.”

Being the “liberal” that I am, I fully support free speech and the First Amendment. I have a problem however when someone’s rhetoric goes from being simply one of opinion (no matter how difficult that opinion might be to take) to one of hate. Michael Savage is a purveyor of hate, pure and simple. Britt would tell you that’s all “part of his act”. As if that makes everything he says acceptable somehow. I find it interesting how they’ll spend 2 or 3 minutes berating Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, but Neal Boortz and Michael Savage, for some reason, get treated a little differently.

So my questions to Brad & Britt are these: Is there anything a radio talk show host (particularly one on your own station) could say that you think would merit them being either fired or boycotted? Why is it unacceptable for groups of citizens to try and get a person who fills our airwaves with hate, fear and intolerance, off the air? And finally, are we all just expected to let talk radio hosts say whatever they want, no matter how hurtful and offensive it is, all the time?

My friend Rick Yaeger just tweeted some astonishing news about the national computer chain CompUSA. Apparently, after the holiday buying season is over, all 103 of the stores will be closing. For good. From Yahoo:

“Consumer electronics retailer CompUSA said Friday it will close its store operations after the holidays following sale of the company to Gordon Brothers Group LLC, a restructuring firm. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

CompUSA operates 103 stores, which plan to run store-closing sales during the holidays.

Privately held CompUSA, controlled by Mexican financier Carlos Slim Helu’s Grupo Carso SA, said discussions were under way to sell certain stores in key markets. Stores that can’t be sold will be closed.”

All I have to say about this is that thank GOODNESS Apple recently announced plans to open an Apple retail store here next spring/summer. Between January and the opening of the new Apple store however, there will be a huge hole for local merchants to fill. Best Buy will probably pick up a great deal of the slack, but the business potential for the new Apple store in Greensboro just got a whole lot brighter. As a side note, Twitter & Twitterrific win points once again for the first point of contact for me with breaking news items.

Regular visitors to my blog know that I occasionally dabble in submarine sandwich reviews. I’ve not reviewed a new sub place in a while, so this should serve as a stopgap until the next write-up. In all of my reviews, I use a “Yummie Scale” to rate the overall taste, appearance and value of the sub. At the bottom of this scale is Subway which rates a 1. At the opposite end of the extreme is Dibella’s Old Fashion Subs based in New York and Ohio which rates a 9. I grew addicted to Dibella’s when I went to school at R.I.T. and have never found anything that comes even close to them anywhere else. My friend Talos recently went up north for Thanksgiving and was kind enough to bring back Dibella’s subs for all of us at the Iconfactory, which gave me a chance to do this detailed guide explaining just what makes Dibella’s so good.

With my Dibella’s Godfather sub in hand (thanks to Talos), I made the rounds to some of the sub shops I frequent around Greensboro. The three that I chose were Giacomo’s Italian Market on New Garden Road, Subway (does it matter where?) and Jimmy John’s at the Quaker Village Shopping Plaza. I ordered the same basic Italian sub at each location to try and level the playing field as much as possible. The first tell-tale sign of a good sub is the cross section. Click the thumbnail image here to get a detailed look at the four subs by cross section as well as how they stack up by price.

Everyone from students to working folk appreciate the value of a buck. How that buck stretches when it comes to subs varies from place to place. This photo shows the dramatic difference of just what six bucks will get you around the Triad and how that compares to Dibella’s. If anyone knows a place in Greensboro or Winston that has 14″ subs for $7.50, please let me know.

The key to any good submarine sandwich is the bread. In my opinion, as your humble sub reviewer, sub rolls should be crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. Some places like Subway have what amounts to pathetic excuses for bread and it’s important that you know the difference. The sub places around the Triad seem to all use similar bread recipes and it’s starting to tick me off. If you own a deli, for the love of the sub, look here and study well. Our stomachs will thank you later.

So there you have it. The next time I get a chance to write up a Triad Sub Review, you can refer back to this handy comparison chart to get a better sense of all those things I’ll be talking about. Of course, you may not even enjoy submarine sandwiches, in which case you probably didn’t even read this far in the first place. What do I look like a mind reader?

If you listened to Brad & Britt’s “interview” this morning of Ann Coulter, then what you heard wasn’t so much of an interview, so much as a 15 minute joke published over public airwaves. Brad & Britt evidently tried to take the “high road” and not go toe to toe with this disgusting excuse for a pundit and what we got was the usual hate spewing rhetoric that went unanswered and unchallenged while she shopped her latest book.

I called into the station to give my thoughts on the entire matter, but when I asked the producer who’s idea it was to put her on, he told me that they try to showcase both sides of the “argument” to try and be fair. I laughed so hard at the notion Ann Coulter and “fairness” used in the same sentence that I simply hung up. I’d love to know when 101.1 FM Talk has ever had anyone on Brad & Britt’s show from the left who is as extreme as Coulter. Because for the 2 years I’ve been listening, I can’t remember them interviewing anyone who called for the murder of public officials on the right, or who issues unilateral statements of hate against all Republicans. If I’m wrong, please let me know.

The worst part is that after she was off the air, the duo spent the next half our segment berating her and claiming that they needed a shower. So they’ll talk smack about her when the segment is done, but not while everyone is actually listening. Brilliant. I love Brad & Britt in the morning, but not when they do crap like this. Very disappointing.

Imagine my surprise when I tuned into Brad & Britt this morning and the familiar Fox news bumper with the laughable “Fair and Balanced” tag line was replaced with the soothing tones of ABC News. Yes, it seems that FM Talk 101.1 WZTK has opted out of their contract with Fox to supply them with their on-air news updates in favor of the “World leader in news.” I called the station to confirm and they indeed told me that their contract with Fox was done.

I never personally heard an on-air Fox report on 101.1 that seemed overly biased, but I have witnessed it many times on Fox News. Personally, any company that decides to deny Rupert Murdoch even the tiniest piece of our world’s media inter-web, is okay by me. Now if we could just get them to do something about Michael “Weiner” Savage…

Mercedes-Benz and Smart are currently touring the country to give eager fans of the Smart Fortwo an early look. Various models of the automobile have been a hit in Europe since it debuted in 1998. Its micro size gives the car an ability to park almost anywhere, which tends to come in handy on the narrow streets of European capitals. The “StreetSmart” tour, as is being called in the U.S., finally came to Greensboro this weekend, and so my friends Talos & Rachel Tsui and I packed up and headed out to the Shops at Friendly center to get a good look and test drive the Fortwo.

The sign-up and waiting period for the test drive lasted 2 full hours. Thankfully the weather was cooler than it’s been in recent memory, with gray skies that kept the beating sun off of us and the hundreds of other people waiting to get their hands on the wheel. We queued up through a high-tech trailer lined with safety videos and technical illustrations of the car as we wound our way out back, closer and closer to the car. The entire event reminded me of being in line for Space Mountain at Disney World, except there were no screaming kids and it was free.

The Fortwo has what Smart calls “automated manual transmission”. If that sounds confusing, that’s because it is. Once inside the car, the Smart representative informed me that the transmission does more work for you than a manual, but I quickly found it isn’t an true automatic either. With the push of a button, you can leave the car in “automatic” and it will shift in and out of the appropriate gears. However, at any time, you can begin to shift manually using either of the paddle shifters nested on the steering wheel, or via the more traditional shifter on the floor. I quickly found that shifting manually was not only more fun, but resulted in a smoother drive as well. I’m told the car is still geared for European roads and the shift timing will be improved for automatic mode prior to its official launch.

Overall I was surprised at how roomy the car was. I’m a big guy, and yet I had enough space to be comfortable, and was able to see out over the ultra-small hood and side windows easily. I had the pleasure of driving the cabrio convertible, which was especially fun on the streets behind the Shops at Friendly. According to Smart, the car will start at prices under $12K and should get an average of 40 mpg in the city, which is pretty good. The European market also has the option of a diesel engine, which I’m starting to get keen on thanks to more info from my friend Corey. No telling yet if the diesel version will be available in the United States.

All in all, the Smart Fortwo was a pleasure to drive and look at. Although the visual design of the Smart can’t help but bring a toy to mind, the car itself does not feel toyish in any way. The controls, materials and handling are all what you would expect from Mercedes-Benz. As an in-town commuter car, I think it would be ideal. Trips to work, the grocery store, and errands would all shine with the Fortwo. Obviously I’m not sure how it would hold up on long trips, or extended drives on highways crowded with impatient drivers. It was encouraging to see so many people waiting in line to test drive the Smart. Given the ever climbing price of gas, and the U.S.’s seemingly endless need for huge SUVs, the Smart may very live up to its name and help bring Americans, driving stylishly, into the 21st century.

Twice this week, my friend Talos spotted a Google Car cruising the Greensboro streets. The first time was at the intersection of Wendover and Penny, and the second was further up Wendover near Spring Garden. Both times he managed to snap picts of the high-tech automobile thanks to his trusty iPhone. The gadget blog Gizmodo first reported on Google’s picture-snapping auto fleet some time ago. The company has been criss-crossing the nation to document street views of major cities for its online mapping site.

So if you’re driving in the Triad and spot a car with a strange looking periscope thing strapped to its roof, make sure you smile nice and pretty for the camera. You never know, you might be immortalized forever on the pages of the world’s most popular search engine. Remember, no road rage people!!

Tonight after work I swung down Friendly Ave. to pick up dinner from P.F. Changs at the Friendly Center Shopping Plaza. The good news is the road work that has been going on for the better part of a year two years seems to be coming to a close. The bad news is the section of West Friendly from Westridge Road down to the Shops at Friendly Center is a classic example of civil planning gone horribly wrong.

Although the city technically widened Friendly by 2 full lanes, driving on it actually feels more cramped and crowded than it did before. This is because of the new median divider the size of the Neutral Zone that somehow made its way smack-dab into the middle of this once beautiful thoroughfare. Left turns can only be taken at certain points along the median, creating an almost one-way street effect that is anything but pleasant. God help the poor folks who live along this stretch of Friendly. Getting to and from their homes must now be a little slice of paved hell. If I was in their shoes, I’d be down at City Hall raising cain like there’s no tomorrow.

Sometimes I just don’t understand why cities decide to alter roads, change traffic flows and generally screw things up for us little people. If Friendly had simply had one lane added to either side, and left the center turn lane alone, the new construction would have been quite welcome. Instead we have confusion and bottlenecking. I was looking forward to the completion of Painter Blvd., but now I’m not so sure.

This was going to be a nice, in-depth post about the brand new Fresh Market that opened today at Jefferson Village on New Garden Street. The store completed its move from Quaker Village and had its grand opening this morning. I was looking forward to taking loads of great, colorful pictures to show off how awesome this new location was and expounding on the wonderful customer service that the Fresh Market is known for.

Two things conspired against this. The first was a manager who seemed more interested in speaking with Fresh Market big-wigs and employees than customers, told me she’d “prefer that I not take pictures”. This was only after I told her it was for my local blog. Had I been an employee or a member of the press, then I could have snapped away I suppose.

The second was that after wandering for a good 45 minutes, I simply wasn’t that impressed. Sure the store is brand new, and has much more space, has better parking and looks wonderful, but there was nothing new. My wife and I were really looking forward to the market expanding their meat offerings to include venison and bison, having new fresh salad recipes, and some new exotic produce. None of this materialized however, which was disappointing to say the least. For selection, Whole Foods in Winston Salem seems to have the Fresh Market beat. Its distance, price, and tiny isles work against them however and we’ll most likely stick with our FM.

Taken as a whole, The Fresh Market really is a wonderful place to shop. It might be a bit more pricey, but the quality is well worth it. Plus, it is staffed by some of the nicest people in Greensboro (with the exception of the afore mentioned manager). The sushi lady and elderly bagging gentleman (wish I knew their names!) bring a smile to our faces each and every time we walk in. We’ll be back, I just wish I could have shown you the place. I suppose you’ll just have to go visit it for yourself, which I guess is the point.