"You know what word I hate?" asked my friend as we motored through Nowheresville, DeKalb County. "Concept. I mean, why do restaurant people use that word? You just know it means there's nothing real about it."

My friend is a restaurant person, or was. Now she's still in the food business, but mostly she writes and consults instead of coping with the nonstop stress of running a small business. We zip past once-proud subdivisions — one has French château turrets for an entrance gate — that seem to sink into a semi-cultivated forest of loblolly pine, kudzu, crape myrtle and fescue grass. Low-slung ranch houses give way to mini malls and gas stations before reclaiming their rightful spot alongside the road.

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I agree that concept is a particularly lousy word, as is "foodie." She tells me about a barbecue restaurant in New York, dressed to the nines in Texas roadhouse honky-tonk, with good cooks consulting on the menu and an owner itching to franchise it all over the country.

As the five-store malls whiz past, we see signs for tax services, oil and lube, cheap cigarettes. Soon we see a newer, grander subdivision with big houses crammed onto small plots, their three-car garages commanding stubby driveways.

"I love these old tree lines," my friend said, pointing up to the two rows of oaks flanking the street. The scenery, still suburbia, had started to cough up a few vestiges of its past — a bit of fenced pasture here, a weather vane there. The treetops ribbon the street.

"Do you know where you're going?" my friend asked.

Yes, there it was, right at the bend in the road, behind the two vintage gas pumps painted fire-engine red. Behind the handful of tables on the porch — each set with a plastic gingham cloth, a bottle of barbecue sauce and a fresh sunflower in a jam-jar vase. Behind the wilting yellow flowers in flower boxes, and the hand-painted wooden sign of a rising sun, and behind the door that opens with a creak and shuts with a snap, lies our destination, Garden Produce & Country Store.

Inside: information. More information than my brain can process quickly. Patty Tennis welcoming us from behind a counter — "Hi!" — her curly hair up in a bandanna. That high, solid counter stacked with shelves, and in the shelves plastic bins, and in the bins penny candies. Robust air conditioning tickling us like an air spirit. A loud TV somewhere up high tuned to a travel show about Parisian ice cream. A jar of pickled pigs' feet. A crammed-full bookcase. Oozy pie slices wrapped on plates in clear film. A sign next to an empty shelf offering phantom pear preserves. Gallon bags of dried chiles. A dry-erase list of the day's veggies. Gray tubs filled with green and yellow squash as big as salamis.

"Hi?"

It's Patty Tennis again, trying to focus our wandering eyes. "You guys need a minute?" She stands there holding a steaming tub of field peas.

Yes, we need to decide. The display-board menu offers all kinds of barbecue that Tennis' partner Wayne Germon smokes in the big pit we saw just outside. There's fried catfish and shrimp. And those veggies.

"You should get the squash casserole," Tennis calls from the semi-obscured kitchen. "It's from the garden."

Right now that's it from the garden, Tennis says, but the tomatoes, okra and pole beans will be coming in soon.

My friend and I start strategizing jointly on the veggies and meats we both want to try. Germon wanders in from a back door. He has long gray hair, a long gray beard and knobby knees poking out between well-worn shorts and work boots. He's a big dude who trims trees for a living when he's not barbecuing ribs and curing pastrami.

Pastrami?

"Get the sandwich," he tells us.

Tennis suggests we wander around the property while she prepares our lunch. We check out the barbecue pit, which is dormant, awaiting a shipment of ribs and chickens. We wander through a fence into the garden, where climbing vines are heavy with cucumbers, tomato plants are 5 feet tall and knobby with green fruit, and a tree hangs low with golf-ball-size pears on each branch.

"Good timing," Tennis calls from the kitchen when she hears the door snap shut. She comes out holding two identical plates of everything we ordered, split for easy sharing, right down to the halved sandwich. Collards, field peas, that cheesy squash casserole and rib tips round out the selection. She returns with hot squares of corn bread dotted with jalapeño from the garden.

As we bliss out over these plates, we look at the things crammed into the bookshelf. A mechanic's guide to Reagan-era Chryslers, a Bobby Flay cookbook, a clamshell container covered in ink drawings that we assume contains crayons but fear may be a to-go order someone neglected.

The food is really good. Tennis seasons with a little sweet, a little spicy, a little salt. I can't recall ever having better field peas. That pastrami sandwich is a spicy, smoky glory. The tea is strong and just sweet enough to cut the astringency, but no more. Both plates come garnished with a house-cured dill pickle and a wedge of the ripest pineapple.

Germon comes for a visit and tells us the background of the building. For years it was a gas station, then for more years it was a joint called Bill's Grocery that was a barbecue as well as the local bootlegger that served beer illegally on Sundays before the owner was busted. Germon and Tennis bought the place five years ago.

"People still come on Sundays looking for beer," he muses.

But others, like us, have read about this place in local publications and, though it is a bit far and remote, come to check it out. We leave with a jar of dill pickles and a menu and promise to return.

Nowheresville? How wrong we were. Garden Produce & Country Store is somewhere real. Somewhere inimitable. The anti-concept.

Open daily. 567 Stephenson Road, Stone Mountain. 770-413-0338.