A sweet, blood red splatter dot the size of a pinhead gave it all away. Standing there, I tried my hardest to beat back the smile creeping across my face. I didn’t stay home – I couldn’t, not tonight – nothing drives me away from my laptop like an essay paper due the next morning.
When the Jamaican waitress with a sugary sweet accent asked for my order on this particular sunday evening, ‘the sampler plate’ spilled out of my mouth with giddy excitement. Daddy D’z BBQ joint located south of the MARTA tracks and just off the King/Memorial station is clearly not in the middle of a suburban planned community. A soccer mom and her son sit happily in the corner, pacing themselves through the meal and laughing in between bits of meat and spoonfuls of their top shelf sweet potato sides, clearly they know a good thing when they find it. No longer a secret, and to the point of being cliche, the food at Daddy D’z is good – sickeningly great in fact.
Barbecue shacks in the deep south are as abundant as Filiberto shacks in the south west. Heavy debates over which is better, over which is the best, over which sauce lathered on the most tender meat will cause you to curse the day you decided to become vegetarian and regret all the lost time that could have been spent devouring red covered animal parts. A grinning smile I once fought back, stretches across my face right now just thinking about the beef, the pork, and the sides.
The building creeks under the weight of the big Daddy D’z sign when you walk through the gravel parking lot towards the door barely hanging on its hinges. After your food arrives, you sit there with one plate full of meat and another plate sitting empty, waiting for the bones beneath the hunks of smokey flesh to be uncovered and discarded.
Thinking back, some of my absolute best meals have been eaten from styrofoam plates, using plastic silverware – Daddy D’z is no different. Recently, on the rare night when my vegetarian girlfriend is out and I’m left to my own devices, I’ve been heading directly for the next barbecue spot, the next great place that everyone raves about, the spot that everyone says you must try – and then I remember how reviews tend to mathematically compare each spot as if it’s an equation – a poor comparison of souls. While sitting there at my dingy, uneven table, surrounded by walls that have obviously soaked in their share of pork and beef fat molecules, I have no idea how anything anywhere else could possibly be better than this.
Daddy D’z is everything it wants to be and on that tired Sunday night the only diners in the restaurant were people seemingly not there for anything other than what they know – that this place delivers the goods and it doesn’t matter who you are. Whether you’re the hipster twenty-something woman with thick rimmed glasses in the corner, the father and his two sons trying to watch the football game on the big screen, or me – some guy desperately trying to avoid writing his paper that’s due the next morning.
So when my girlfriend came home later that evening and asked me how the paper was coming along, before I could utter any sort of simple lie, she noticed the blood red splatter dot on my shirt and immediately knew how I had spent my evening. Daddy D’z is my new favorite barbecue joint and it was absolutely worth it.
Review Summary: 4.8 out of 5
Daddy D’z BBQ Joint
264 Memorial Dr SE
Atlanta, GA 30312
(404) 222-0206