Brainerd/East Ridge Archives

Big News from Chattavore!

August 1, 2017

Okay, so this doesn’t directly involve the blog…not yet anyway…but something has been in the works for a while and here it is:

Philip went and bought a craft beer store.

Yep, that’s right. He’s been working at Sigler’s Craft Beer & Cigars for a year and some change now and he and some partners officially took over the store yesterday.

At the moment we are mildly freaking out. Business ownership is a huge step. I mean, this blog is a business but, you know, no inventory or overhead or any of that mess. So, we’re probably going to lay low on the restaurant posts for a little bit. I mean, I will still do some but just maybe not one a week for a while. You know, for money-saving and all. Also because time, which is something that Philip doesn’t have a lot of right now (I promise you some budget-friendly meal posts, though!).

If you’re in Chattanooga or nearby, or even if you just drive through Chattanooga sometime, we’d love it if you’d stop by Sigler’s and see Philip (or Phil, ahem…I just can’t get used to that. I will never call him Phil. Amen and amen.

So…Sigler’s Craft Beer & Cigars is a tasting room and retail bottle shop. You can stop by for a flight or a pint and pick up some bottles while you’re there. They also (obviously) sell cigars if you’re so inclined. They’re not really “closing” per se, but they’ll be having their grand “re-opening” on August 18 with a tap takeover by Reformation Brewery, so you should stop in and see them!

Sigler’s Craft Beer and Cigars is located at 1309 Panorama Drive, Chattanooga, TN 37421. They are open Sunday 12-5, Monday – Thursday 12-8, and Friday – Saturday 10-8. You can call them at (423) 485-3271. And be sure to follow them on Facebook and Instagram. Philip does lots of videos, so you can see more of this crazy guy I married!

Olive Branch Mediterranean Foods – East Ridge, TN

April 26, 2017

Olive Branch Mediterranean Foods is a Mediterranean deli/grocery located in East Ridge, Tennessee, serving delicious foods with great service!

It’s funny how some of my favorite places around town are places that I probably wouldn’t even know about if someone didn’t tell me. For example, if a friend had not sent me a message telling me that I had to eat at Thai Chili, it probably wouldn’t be my favorite Thai restaurant, because I never would have figured out it was there.

Likewise with Olive Branch. It’s been around in East Ridge (directly in front of East Ridge Elementary) for a while now (maybe about a year? I’m not sure.) but because of Philip’s Saturday work schedule we haven’t been able to make it out there (well, so I thought…I was thinking that they closed earlier on Saturday than they actually do). He’s not working on Saturdays for the time being, so it seemed like a perfect opportunity to try something new.

Olive Branch is located in a pretty unassuming location – a little strip mall that also houses a teriyaki restaurant that we haven’t tried yet. When you enter, you are greeted with a nice little selection of Mediterranean groceries and kitchen supplies, then a deli counter well-stocked with tasty looking foods.

When we entered, we were greeted by Chris, who enthusiastically explained the menu to us. You order and pay at the counter and take a seat in the dining room or at one of the high-top tables in the grocery area. You can choose from a made-to-order sandwich with your choice of Boar’s Head meat, cheese, vegetables, bread, etc., or you can order a specialty sandwich (traditional gyro, falafel, meatball, steak & cheese, eggplant parm, Italian, or vegetarian. OR you can order one of their specials, which are held in a cafeteria-style warming table. The specials on the day of our visit were lemon chicken, moussaka, lasagna, and stuffed tomatoes. You can also order a large Greek salad, and they’ll add chicken or gyro meat to it for $2 if you’d like.

I’m a sucker for a great falafel so I really didn’t have to think twice about my order (though I might have ordered a gyro if I had known that Philip wouldn’t order one). The sandwiches are served with a scoop of potato salad. You can get the falafel with tzatziki, tahini, or hummus on it. I went with the traditional tzatziki…I can’t get enough of that stuff. It’s served on a flatbread style pita with several slices of tomato and a few strips of red onion. The falafel was so good – very crispy and a little bit spicier than what I’ve had at other places. It was pretty messy so I ended up eating it with a knife and fork, and I was okay with that. The potato salad was pretty simple – just potatoes, green onion, and whatever binder they use – I couldn’t tell if it was sour cream or mayo. I would definitely recommend this if you are a falafel fan.

Philip decided to go for the moussaka (moo-sah-KAH), which is a layered dish, similar to a lasagna, made with sliced potatoes, spiced ground beef, sliced eggplant, and béchamel sauce. It was served with a small greek salad, bread, and a side (Philip got gigantes plaki, or baked giant beans). The salad was good – pretty standard ingredients (lettuce, tomato, cucumber, red onion, a pepperoncini, feta cheese, kalamata olives) with a great homemade dressing with lots of oregano. The gigantes plaki were great – giant beans, like butter beans, in a spiced tomato-based sauce. And, well, I’m going to have to learn to make moussaka because it was fantastic. I loved the spices in the meat, and the textures all went perfectly.

We also got a spanakopita (spinach pie). How can you go wrong with spinach layered in buttery, crunchy, flaky phyllo dough? It was amazing and I could have made an entire meal out of spanakopita or tiropita (cheese pie). We veered off our usual course and instead of drinking water we got a bottled Hank’s soda out of the cooler. Philip had cream soda and I had orange cream soda – both very tasty.

Of course, before we left, we had to choose something out of the bakery case to bring home. The black and white cookies were very tempting – I have a thing for black and white cookies – but how can you leave a Mediterranean restaurant without baklava? We took a box of two baklava and a box of two wedding cookies and had those with coffee after we got home. I’m telling you, I think that baklava might be the perfect dessert. I can’t think of much better than ground spiced nuts sandwiched between layers of phyllo and dripping with buttery honey. Can you??? The cookies were great too – a little crumbly and not too sweet, despite the fact that they were coated in a liberal dusting of powdered sugar.

It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but as soon as you step inside of Olive Branch Mediterranean Foods you realize that the “can’t judge a book by its cover” adage is definitely true here. Not only is the interior perfectly lovely (colander light fixtures!!!), so are the people, especially Chris, who really went out of his way to show us all the different options that were available to us. And the food is just fantastic, and a great value to boot ($31 pre-tip for an entree, a sandwich, a spinach pie, two baklava, two cookies, and two sodas – that’s a lot of food!). I wish it weren’t so far from me, because I think that Olive Branch may be my new favorite Mediterranean restaurant. Thanks to everyone who recommended it to me!

Olive Branch Mediterranean Foods is located at 3992 Ringgold Road, East Ridge, Tennessee, 37412. They are open 10:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Monday – Friday and 10:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on Saturday. You can call them at (423) 805-5295. Olive Branch Mediterranean Foods does not have a website, but you can follow them on Facebook, where they post pictures of their “specials” menu every day.

Thai Esan

March 17, 2017

Thai Esan is a small and unassuming (and easy to miss) Thai restaurant located in a strip mall on Ringgold Road in East Ridge, Tennessee.

I still have plenty of places that I need to try, but after almost 6 (SIX!!!!!) years of writing about Chattanooga restaurants there are times that I feel like I’ve been everywhere and pretty soon I’m going to run out of new places to try. Totally irrational, I know, but the truth is that I can’t be everywhere and there are always new places opening that I don’t know about (not to mention long-standing secrets that I need to be told about).

I posted on my Facebook page recently asking for my readers to tell me some new places that I needed to try. Multiple Thai spots were mentioned, which caused me and Philip to develop a craving for some noodles. It is not difficult to make us crave Thai food (by the way, will someone please open a Thai restaurant in Hixson? Please and thank you.). One of the places that was mentioned was Thai Esan, which is located on Ringgold Road near the Food Lion complex (in the strip mall where Cakemakers, Etc. is located).

Thai Esan is located in the former home of Mom’s Thai Kitchen, another spot that I was told by multiple people that I needed to try and never got around to before they closed up shop. I have no idea if there is any common thread (other than Thai food, obvi) between Mom’s and Thai Esan, but I did not want to make the same mistake twice.

We headed out to Thai Esan around 4:00 on a Saturday afternoon. There was only one other couple in the restaurant dining and several to-go orders were picked up while we were there. It’s a pretty bare-bones place…not a lot of decor, and the booths need to be reupholstered or at least patched. It was clean, though, so it was all good.

A server quickly greeted us, brought us menus, and took our drink orders. We both decided to get a Thai tea because it is just so good, and we also got an order of spring rolls (4 spring rolls per order). The spring rolls were hot and fresh and the dipping sauce sweet and just a little spicy. The Thai tea did not disappoint, with the sweet black tea spice that you expect from Thai tea and a generous splash of half-and-half.

Chattavore followers, you know that I love my pad Thai. I just can’t order anything else when I visit a Thai restaurant. I know that I should, but I like to use the excuse that if I always order pad Thai that I can be consistent with giving a review. So….I went with the pad Thai with chicken. I was not disappointed. It was a generous portion – I only ate about a third, then had more for dinner the following Monday, and Philip had the rest for lunch one day. This is a lot of food. The noodles were sweet and a little bit spicier than most pad Thai that I’ve had (though I ordered it without spice). The chicken was very thinly sliced and cooked well, but I would have liked to have had a little bit more chicken just for a balance of protein and carbs.

Like me, Philip has his usual these days, ever since discovering pad see ew at Thai Chili. Unlike me, he is a little bit braver with the spice and went for “medium”. He ordered tofu as his protein, as his visits to Hong Kong Chinese restaurant have helped him discover a love for tofu. Everything was well cooked (the tofu was a gorgeous golden brown and it did have a great flavor from the sauce). He did end up regretting the medium spice, though. Apparently Thai cooks have a little bit of a different definition of “medium” than he does, and he ended up spending much of the meal picking out little pieces of fresh red chili from the dish in order to avoid breathing fire. He did say that aside from the heat, the food was delicious.

Thai Esan is relatively quick and very casual. The food is very tasty, but be careful with the spice levels unless you know that you can handle it. The prices are pretty much on par with other Thai restaurants in the area and the portions are huge so you are likely going to get more than one meal from it.

If you’re looking for some tasty Thai food in East Ridge, give Thai Esan a try!

Thai Esan is located at 4330 Ringgold Road, Chattanooga, Tennessee, 37412. They are open Monday – Friday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Saturday – Sunday, 12 p.m. to 9 p.m. You can call them at (423) 668-8924. They do not have a website, but you can like Thai Esan on Facebook.

Greg’s Sandwich Works

February 27, 2017

Greg’s Sandwich Works is a great restaurant in the Brainerd/East Brainerd area serving sandwiches, hot dogs, salads, baked potatoes, and more!

Sometimes finding a place to go on Saturday afternoons gets taxing. Philip usually doesn’t get home from work until around 3:30 and I never knew how many things close at 4 p.m. on Saturdays! I’m sure I have complained about this before. Have I complained about this before? He loves his job and for that I am happy, but I miss the old days when he didn’t work on Saturdays and we could go wherever, whenever we wanted.

Anyway…last weekend I really wanted to go to Greg’s Sandwich Works, which is located in the location formerly known as GollyWhoppers. I was honestly shocked when GollyWhoppers closed…it seemed like a pretty popular place and it had been around for a long time. Not too long after, though, the former manager (Greg, in case you were wondering?) decided to open his own sandwich shop there.

It wasn’t in the cards for us to go Saturday, because (you guessed it) they close at 4 every day (except Sundays, when they are closed). It’s definitely more of a lunch-type place, so I get it. Luckily for us, it was a long weekend, so we decided to wait until Monday to head over there. We had a late lunch, around 1:30. There were several tables occupied but it wasn’t super-crowded, which I attributed to the fact that (a) it was past “lunch hour”; and (b) it was a holiday.

The menu here is very similar to the menu from GollyWhoppers – Greg clearly knows that there is no point in messing with what has proven to work. A popular item on the GollyWhoppers menu was the taco salad, and Greg has recreated it as the “Fiesta Salad”. Shredded lettuce gets topped with seasoned ground beef, salsa, shredded cheese, sour cream, red onions, pickled jalapeños, and black olives, served with a side of tortilla chips ($6.99). If you like, you can ask them to crush the chips up for you so that you can scoop the chips up with your fork. I, however, like to use my chips to scoop up my salad. I asked for my salad without jalapeños, and if I had not skipped right over the mention of onions I would have nixed those too, but that’s okay – they were chopped pretty large so they were easy to pick out. The salad was very tasty, with a great taco flavor to the meat and a nice contrast between the warm meat and the cold salads and toppings.

Philip decided to go with the Italian sandwich – ham, salami, provolone cheese, tomato, onion, Italian dressing, salt, pepper, oregano, and Parmesan cheese ($6.49). The sandwich is served warm on your choice of bread. Philip is a sucker for a good Italian sandwich (surprisingly, one of his favorites is at – are you sitting down? Chuck E. Cheese’s. He grew to love them when we worked there, and we still go there from time to time so he can order them even though we know that the kitchen staff hates making sandwiches. Sorry, guys.) and this was a great Italian sandwich. The flavors just work together so well, and the bread was just fantastic. I loved that it was served warm so the cheese got a little melty and the flavors a little more pronounced (cold dulls flavors a little bit).

While we were eating, Greg made the rounds bussing tables and talking to customers. He stopped to talk to me about the whole chips versus crushed chips approach on the taco salad. He obviously enjoys interacting with the customers and he and his staff are doing a great job serving delicious sandwiches, salads, etc. My only disappointment was that they did not have the selection of cookies and bars that GollyWhoppers had (Greg’s does have cookies and bars, just not as many varieties as GollyWhoppers always had available to tempt me).

If you’re looking for a great lunch spot in East Brainerd, you have to give Greg’s Sandwich Works a try!

Greg’s Sandwich Works is located at 6336 East Brainerd Road, Chattanooga, TN 37411. They are open Monday – Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. You can call Greg’s Sandwich Works at (423) 551-8634. For more information, you can check out Greg’s Sandwich Works’ website and menu as well as their Facebook page.

Teriyaki House (East Ridge)

October 26, 2016

Teriyaki House in East Ridge, Tennessee, serves quick and inexpensive hibachi-style food in a friendly and casual atmosphere.

Our dinner out plans got messed up last weekend. We had planned to go back to Bones Smokehouse, since they just recently reopened in a new location after a long vacation. However, the Tennesee-Alabama game was starting right around the time that we would be arriving, so we decided to go somewhere where there would be a little less raucous football-watching.

We ended up at Teriyaki House on Ringgold Road in East Ridge. It’s been on my list forever, but we so rarely go to East Ridge that it never really lands on our radar. When I started trying to think of restaurants that would not be full of football fans, Teriyaki House came to mind. We arrived at around 4 p.m., and while there was a television showing the game, there were no fans watching, unless you count the two employees who were rolling silverware. There was only one other table occupied (though a few other people did come in while we were there and several came in to order or pick up takeout.

We have eaten at Teriyaki House before, though it has been a very long time – long before the Chattavore days. When I worked in Brainerd I liked to get takeout from there from time to time because it is very similar to Typhoon of Tokyo – so similar that I think that they must be connected in some way. Unlike Typhoon, where you order at the counter, you are seated at the table at Teriyaki House and the server takes your order.

I decided to go classic and order the chicken and steak combo. Since I went with a “large” plate, it was served with fried rice, zucchini, mushrooms, onions, and broccoli, as well as two (TWO!) little bowls of white sauce. The “regular” plate is not served with broccoli – and only a few options are available in both regular and large (mine was only available in large). This is your classic quick service hibachi style chicken – no frills, just chunks of chicken and steak browned and tossed in a light brown sauce, fried rice, and vegetables. The rice was not quite as good as Typhoon of Tokyo, but it was still pretty good. The sauce was delicious, the vegetables cooked well, and the chicken tender. The steak was tasty but cooked just slightly past the doneness that I prefer.

Philip decided to go with the garlic steak. We were a little concerned when we could smell the garlic cooking from where we were sitting (far from the kitchen!) that it would be too garlicky. It was indeed very garlicky, but not in an overwhelming way – just in a flavorful way. His plate was identical to mine otherwise. The steak was delicious and his was a little more tender than mine.

The total for our meal (steak & chicken combo, garlic steak, and two waters) was $18.68 – definitely an affordable dinner. Our server was very friendly and attentive, though sadly, I did not get her name (this was the second week in a row!). The restaurant is clean, and while not really super-modern in their decor, it’s not your standard outdated Asian restaurant decor either. By the way, the building quite obviously used to be a Pizza Hut (prior to that, it was located in a former Kay’s Kastle, complete with the giant ice cream cone outside – and, to top it off, they actually do have several ice cream desserts on their menu).

Teriyaki House is a great place for a quick, tasty, and not too pricey meal in East Ridge.

Teriyaki House is located at 5908 Ringgold Road, Chattanooga, TN 37412. They are open Monday – Friday, 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., and Saturday, 4-9 p.m. They are closed on Sunday. You can call Teriyaki House at (423) 892-8483. You can find more information about Teriyaki House on their Facebook page (the website linked on there is not their website).