1 GA Restaurant Among America's Best For Eating-On-The-Cheap

ATLANTA, GA — Forget getting uncomfortably dressed up to go out for a fantastic meal, Georgia has a casual restaurant where you can go – right now! – to take the kids and get cheap food, and you don't even have to dress up.

Or maybe you can take a date, because you don't have to worry about making a reservation. And you don't have to pay too much to enjoy yourself. This place is are so good that the popular food-and-drink website, The Daily Meal, named it among the 101 best casual restaurants in America. Georgia landed one eatery in the top 101.

The Daily Meal says that, since its 2011 founding, its set out to compile a comprehensive ranking of the 101 Best Restaurants in America. "However, we've been hit with a dilemma: Does a restaurant like, say, the venerable Frank Pepe Pizzeria in New Haven, Connecticut, as stellar as it is for what it does, really belong in the same ranking as a place like Manhattan's Eleven Madison Park, with its three Michelin stars?"

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"That's why four years ago we decided to separate out the casual from the fancy with an initial ranking of 50 casual restaurants, expanded to 101 in 2015," the website says. "From hot dog shacks to taco joints, from neighborhood hangouts to legendary barbecue spots, these are amazing restaurants where price is no barrier to entry and you'll feel right at home in jeans.

The Daily Meal's criteria:

• "Can two people fill themselves up and get out for less than $50, excluding tip and alcohol?"
• Is there "an overall comfortable and relaxed ambiance"
• Does it have "a 'destination' status (that is, is the place worth traveling for?), and a proven reputation and longevity?"

The Daily Meal compiled a list of America's best purveyors of pizza, burgers, hot dogs, tacos, and more, ending up with more than 500 restaurants that the website believes represent a vast cross-section of America and the casual restaurants that make them great.

"From there we assembled a survey, and sent it out to a panel of hundreds of America's leading culinary authorities. We asked them to vote for their favorites, but only ones that they'd dined at within the past two years."

Here is the Georgia restaurant on the list:

#72 Busy Bee Café, Atlanta

An Atlanta landmark, the Busy Bee Café has been serving traditional soul food to hungry locals since first opening in 1947. The cozy restaurant features a long lunch counter and a handful of tables, and the food is homestyle, delicious, and inexpensive. You’d be hard-pressed to find better fried or smothered chicken, pork chops, fried fish, smoked ham hocks, oxtails, slow-smoked ribs, or baked macaroni and cheese anywhere else in town, and the desserts, including scratch-made cakes and Georgia peach and blackberry cobblers, are the stuff of legend.

>>>You can view the entire 101 locations here, including more details on the Georgia location.

Written by Tom Davis, Patch Staff

Image courtesy of Joshua Resnick via Shutterstock