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Restaurant White Tiger is a Boulevard staple
Two guests at White Tiger wait outside for their food to be prepared. (PHOTO/Amanda Harkins, adjh@uga.edu)
“Careful there bruiser,” Ken Manring warn his pudgy 1-year-old daughter. “She’s the real reason people come here.”
While he is apparently joking, one can see the attraction of this adorable child adorned in pink tutu and tiger-striped tights, as she attempts to waddle out the front door of her parent’s restaurant, White Tiger.
As Manring returns with the almost-escapee, having apparently lost a shoe, he begins the story of White Tiger.
White Tiger is located on Hiawassee Street in the Boulevard neighborhood. The charming, yet modest white building is enveloped by the limbs of massive trees adding to the outdoor picnic area situated off the main part of the restaurant.
Through the white screen door, the warm and welcoming atmosphere is immediately apparent. It is the combination of the relaxed tone, faint sound of background music, and familiar faces of the Boulevard that bring back White Tiger’s many patrons. Inside, small square tables are ideal for a coffee with friends on a cold day in December, while outside wooden picnic tables are filled with guests eating lunch on a warm fall day.
The co-owners Amanda Crouse and Ken Manring opened their restaurant two years ago. The original plan was for a Chinese restaurant, hence the name ‘White Tiger.’
The building now home to their restaurant is no stranger to change. Built in 1905 by the current landowner, Catrina Ingram’s grandfather, it was originally a grocery store called Davis House serving the needs of the then mill neighborhood. In the sixties, it became a restaurant called Thrashers. People still come to the current restaurant in search of Thrasher’s famous sausage biscuits.
Manring, always found in the restaurant’s kitchen or out back in front of the grill, began cooking at age fifteen. After attending cooking school in New York and gaining some experience in fine dining, he realized that he rather liked “simple food that people just like.”
While Manring greets patrons through the square cut-out in the wall separating the kitchen from the front counter, their order of chicken salad sandwiches is not a surprise. The owners know the most popular items from the very diverse menu are the chicken salad and barbeque.
As a woman enters, obviously a regular, the co-owners daughter, either quite familiar with the returning patron or simply used to the convivial atmosphere, squats, then thuds to her backside, fingers reaching, infatuated with the guests exposed toes.
Crouse, rescuing the woman’s feet from her daughter’s grasp, moves without hesitation, behind the large glass case filled with her homemade chocolates. Crouse seems to have expected the return of this regular customer and knows, without having to ask, exactly which of her chocolates she has come for.
Beside the corner clearly designated by Fisher Price and Walt Disney to their daughter, the back wall is full of artwork; all pieces created and sold by local artists. Crouse, not only known for her mouth-watering chocolates, has adorned the back shelves with her own individualistic pieces of pottery.
White Tiger is frequented mainly by residents of the Boulevard neighborhood usually walking or riding bikes along the sidewalk that stretches in front of the restaurant.
It is Ken Manring and Amanda Crouse, opening White Tiger as a welcoming neighborhood restaurant and incorporating local artists and their own gourmet expertise, that have succeeded in capturing the essence of Boulevard in a place where the patrons will always want to come back.
It's gourmet all day at White Tiger
Athens Banner Herald 4/22/07
When Amanda Jane Crouse and Ken Manring began making music together about two years ago, they also found out they shared a love of good food.
"We've been eating really well since we both like to cook," Crouse said.
Crouse specializes in sweets, and Manring enjoys smoking meats among other cooking options. Now the two have combined their talents and opened White Tiger Gourmet Food and Chocolates on the corner of Hiawasee Avenue and Boulevard, where Rooster's Barbecue formerly operated. White Tiger offers breakfast foods, sandwiches, salads and barbecue all day long, Crouse said.
"Everything we have, we have all the time," Crouse said, adding, "We have gourmet food and everything is to go.
The breakfast menu includes pancakes with fruit toppings and egg sandwiches. Sausage, Canadian bacon or honey-baked ham are options. A $4 pancake sandwich features two strawberry pancakes with hazel nut cream in between, and customers can add bananas, apples and grapes, Crouse said.
"I try not to eat (the pancake sandwich) every day, but it's hard," she said.
White Tiger's regular menu includes vegetarian ciabatta sandwiches, pecan-wood-smoked pulled pork barbecue sandwiches and smoked chicken, which is used to make chicken salad sandwiches. Tuna salad also is available.
Sandwiches and breakfast items cost anywhere from $2 to $6, but a seared salmon steak or New York strip served with potato salad, a roll and a field green salad topped with homemade strawberry vinaigrette is priced at $10.
Drinks include fancy bottled sodas, lemonade and homemade peppermint green tea and 1,000 Faces coffee.
For those with a sweet tooth, Crouse makes homemade chocolates, fudge, hard candies and cookies dipped in various confections. Crouse worked for a couple of years at the Chocolate Shoppe in downtown Athens, which closed in 2003, before she began attending graduate school in ceramics at the University of Georgia.
Manring, a Gainesville native and a graduate of New York's Culinary Institute of America, worked in fine-dining restaurants in Vermont, Washington, Nevada, California and Mexico, but in 2004 decided to return to the Northeast Georgia area. In 2005 he set up a barbecue cart in downtown Athens, but only operated that for a brief time.
Crouse and Manring's musical alliance began about two years ago when they played together in Mandy Jane and the Jaws of Life.
Fantastic BBQ
Ok this is not your typical BBQ joint. Below the name of the place says Catering, Gourmet Food, Chocolate. Where does it say they have great BBQ? They need to add it. They have a variety of sandwiches from chicken salad to tofo. The atmoshpere is of an old time general store in an old neighborhood. I believe it was the best pulled pork sandwich I've every had in the greater Athens, GA. area and one of the best ever period. The bark of the sandwich was black and had a slight crunch. The pork was in nice chunks that had a nice smoke flavor and quite moist. This was definitly a nice suprise. Thanks BCLS for calling me and inviting me to lunch. Go give it a try and have some of their homemade chocolate treats for dessert.
Satisfy Your Sweet Sabertooth
A Real Rarity: Google will tell you that the only way to make a white tiger is through a rigorous program of inbreeding. Fortunately,Amanda Jane Crouse and Ken Manring, the owners and operators of White Tiger Gourmet Food and Chocolates (217 Hiawasee Ave., 706-353-6847), don't seem to be related in any way, other than in their souls, through their desire to provide the citizens of Athens with more charming weirdness. What is it about this location? Once The Green Scene and more recently Rooster's BBQ, the old, square space, which still isn't zoned for eat-in, requiring you to carry your food outside to a picnic table next-door or even farther away, attracts characters, business owners determined to do something different. You could say that White Tiger is sort of a combination of two former Athens establishments: The Chocolate Shoppe (Amanda used to work there, and many of the items in the case are produced according to their old recipes, which were passed along) and the barbecue stand Ken used to run downtown, in front of the ACC Courthouse. His pulled pork sandwich is on the menu, if you've been missing it, next to a selection of sandwiches from vegetarian on ciabatta to smoked chicken salad to seared salmon to build-your-own veggie (you select three ingredients from a list taped to the counter). The potato salad could use some improvement. Homemade is wonderful, but the mayo dressing has an aftertaste almost of frosting and could benefit from a heavier hand with the salt.
The major non-chocolate appeal of the place is in its all-day breakfast, a concept that should fly nicely in a town where a good chunk of the population still says “good morning” at 2 p.m. The strawberry Nutella pancake sandwich (the pancakes being the bread in this equation, and either made incorporating strawberries or with strawberries merely between them) has attracted attention, but I tend toward savory with my breakfast desires, and the sandwich I had satisfied those nicely. If you say, “just make me one that's delicious,” unable to select which ingredients you want, you may end up with sausage, cheese, Canadian bacon and an egg over-easy, all stuffed into an English muffin, and the staff will have taken your instructions to heart. Really, it's hard to imagine how the same selection of stuff wouldn't overpower a croissant or toast, the other bread options, as it comes spilling out of even the sturdiest sandwich material. White Tiger's chocolates and such reside in a large refrigerated case and include chocolate-dipped Nutter Butters and s'mores, truffles and, recently, a sandwich cookie made with buttery waffle cookies enclosing a lemon ganache, then dunked, you guessed it, in chocolate. Jacques Torres it is not quite, but The Chocolate Shoppe was always a great place for gifts, as well as for satisfying your own sugar needs, and it's great to have that option again. The shop also serves an interesting range of beverages, including Sesame Street juice boxes, Sundrop, Blenheim's and free trade coffee and sells doodads and pottery. White Tiger is not set up for credit cards, but if you look pathetic, hungry and trustworthy, they may honor your check.