If there's one thing Andersonville was just begging to add to its culinary repertoire, it's down home, deep-fried, good old Southern cooking. Too bad (so sad) Big Jones' take on Southern cuisine is more high-class than homegrown, as if the yuppies of the new millennium went back in time in their $60,000 DeLoreans to the plantations of old just so they could remake their food. Visually, there's a definite similarity to the kind of interior decoration you might find in the American South (or so "Designing Women" would have us believe); the walls are lime-green over skin-color trim, with low-lit lamps on woven straw mats and old-fashioned chairs that beg to rock back and forth but lack the mechanism to do so.
Eight baby-back ribs atop a pile of onion rings will set you back about $24, which is the first sign that you're a long way from Podunk, Georgia. But few though they are—not to mention light on the precious meat you came to eat—they taste like candy bars on bones (metaphorically) and make you sweat out your mouth they're so good. Or, if you want something slightly cheaper and slightly more meat-heavy, try the Tallgrass beef sirloin, $22. On the sandwich side of things (all of which range from $10-$14), your best bet is the Tallgrass beef burger ($14) which is enormous and especially fantastic in the buttery-bun department.
Big Jones isn't the biggest place on the block, and it's usually packed tighter than John Travolta's pants in the Sylvester Stallone-directed, "Saturday Night Fever" sequel "Stayin' Alive." So this hopping place often becomes a very loud and hopping place, therefore rendering the music coming out of the overhead speakers useless. Oh well. With food this good, who needs tunes?
Centerstage Reviewer: Benjamin Andrew Moore
