Hot Cranky People

I’m going to visit my parents this weekend in Atlanta, where I grew up. This got me thinking about the old days at the Snack N’ Shop.<

The Snack N' Shop was a local delicatessan, about a mile or two from our house. It was in the same shopping center as the dance studio where I took lessons up until I was about 14. They had great matzoh ball soup, great corned beef sandwiches, great bagels, etc.

But really, it was all about the potato salad.

Seriously, this stuff was good. Crazy good. I can't imagine what they put in it to make it so good. Nobody knew. It was legendary. I always suspected there might be sour cream involved, but looking back, I'm thinking it was most likely crack.

Mom would bring home a big container of it for a party or bbq or something and stash it in the fridge with explicit instructions to me, my sister, and our dad to LEAVE IT ALONE. Sometimes she would even use the phrase "Under penalty of death".

It was always the same. Throughout the day, my sister and my dad and I would each sneak in and steal a spoonful of it. A few times. Each. We never talked about it, but we all knew we were all doing it. Occasionally I'd come tiptoe-ing into the kitchen just as my father was putting the spoon he had just used and then washed and then dried back in the drawer. (You couldn't just leave a spoon in the sink, or even the drainer. She would know.) Our eyes would meet briefly, a flickering with understanding would pass between us, then he would sneak back out nonchalantly into the den to watch tennis on TV and I’d get my own spoonful.

Inevitably, we would hear Mom’s voice from the kitchen at about 6:00pm.

“Who ate the potato salad?? There’s a good third of it missing!!”

Yes, Mom. It was a good third. A really, really good third.

It occurred to me today that we can’t have been the only people in Atlanta who felt this way about the crack salad. So I Googled.

A letter to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

I enjoyed your article on potato salad and look forward to trying some of your suggested places. It’s too bad that the best place for potato salad closed. The Snack ‘n Shop at West Paces Ferry and Northside Parkway closed several years ago, and its potato salad was legendary. Atlanta women were known to take their serving bowl into the Snack ‘n Shop and have it filled with their potato salad to take somewhere! I hope you’ve been in Atlanta long enough to remember the Snack ‘n Shop. The potato salad wasn’t cheap — but it was worth every penny!

I got so excited. She knew! She understood! I Googled onward, with images of recipes floating about my head.

No dice. No recipe. I am crushed.

The Snack N’ Shop closed in 1996. When I’m in town, we often go to the Houston’s restaurant, which is across the parking lot from where the Snack N’ Shop was. Inevitably, the talk turns to the good old days of the Snack N’ Shop potato salad. Now Mom laughs with us when we talk about how we would steal bites.

I can’t remember what’s there in its place now. I’ll have to take notice when I’m there this weekend. I think it might be a pet supply place.

Whatever it is now, they don’t sell crack potato salad.