Blue Ridge Country March/April 2024 - 70

'Elbows up!'
Pork Tenderloin and Georgia History
Our hard-traveling dining writers celebrate many things northern
Georgia, including a hole in the wall . . . wait, the Hole in the Wall!
BY FRED & JILL SAUCEMAN | PHOTOS BY FRED AND JILL SAUCEMAN
F
or us, northern Georgia is a land of endless
discovery. As Blue Ridge Country begins
its 36th year of publication, we are reminded
of the magazine's mission of finding
and celebrating places that are often overlooked.
While northern Georgia has its share of wellknown
restaurants like The Dillard House, it's also
home to many whose owners quietly go about their
business, with little attention from outside the area.
And the
cuisine
of
northern
Georgia is incredibly varied. We
have eaten Republican barbecue in
East Ellijay and Democratic barbecue
in Cherry Log. In Habersham
County, we were served barbecue
with a side of polenta by an Italian
restaurant owner from New Jersey.
We found convenience-store fried
pies that we ate in the car in Rabun
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: Hole in
the Wall started serving food in
1931, two years after the stock
market crash.
At Hole in the Wall, breakfast,
including pork tenderloin, is
served all day.
Blairsville is a courthousesquare
town.
County, and we began an elegant, farm-to-table meal
with bowls of winter squash bisque at Harvest Habersham,
in the beautifully named White County town
of Sautee Nacoochee.
House-cured country ham and green tomato relish
often call us back to The Dillard House, where boardinghouse-style
meals have been served since 1917.
Perhaps most surprising of all, we found flavors of
the Caribbean in the mountains of northern Georgia
and reported on them last year.
Elizabeth Correa served us rum
cake laced with Italian limoncello
liqueur at her café in McCaysville.
Dan Hernandez placed before us
his Cuban grandmother's version
of picadillo at Dan's Grill in Blairsville.
Across town, Lissy Rodriguez,
owner of Lala's Kitchen, placed
before us the best restaurant flan
we have ever found, and in that
same town, at Nani's, we savored
plates of Cuban ropa vieja, black beans and yellow
rice, prepared by Ray Arrazcaeta, who is Cuban, and
his wife Marife, who is Puerto Rican.
All these Latin American immigrants told us they
were drawn to northern Georgia by the friendliness
of the people and the beauty of the mountains. We
were drawn there, too, by the promise of sorghum
syrup. Blairsville is home to an annual festival in October
that highlights this amber-colored sweetener
made from cane that originated in Africa.
In late 2022, we arrived in Blairsville several weeks
after the festival had ended, but we were able to find
one of the few remaining quart jars of Terry Hughes'
" Pure North Georgia Sorghum Syrup. " The Hughes
family has been making it in Young Harris since 1954.
70 BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM
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Blue Ridge Country March/April 2024

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