Hidden in the pubs and restaurants and tiny kitchens, with odd hours and hoards of hungry people trying to get in are a few select people who make specialty food in Athens stand out.

Some went to culinary school, others did not. Many buy local and believe in ‘real’ ingredients. And all attribute their success to spending a few solid years doing tremendous amounts of research about the food they cook.

And all of them, like an army of people clad in Dickies work pants and flame retardant shoes, spend their days and nights working their hardest to make excellent food.

Food that feeds a town and a University.

The doughnut man

Clark Williams, resident doughnut maker at Ike & Jane, dedicates 10 hours between 2 a.m. and noon every weekday to create the store’s sugary treats. Photo by PARKER FEIERBACH

At 6 a.m. the parking lot of Ike & Jane — the doughnut shop and bakery on Prince Avenue — is quiet. The whirring of cars as they roll by seems silent, shifts change at Athens Regional and drivers pass by with expressions on their faces as dim and bleary as early-morning sky.

The sugary smell of rising dough envelops the place. Bringing passerby, if they’re awake enough to notice, all the joy of being a child again diving hands-first into a cotton candy machine.

Music blares unrecognizably through the glass windows and the only lights on are from the kitchen, tucked behind the gleaming glass display cases.

They open at 6:30 a.m., but for William Clark, Ike & Jane’s week-time doughnut maker who spends his morning making up to 90 dozen doughnuts a night, the morning starts at 2 a.m.

Photo by PARKER FEIERBACH

By the time the bakery opens, Clark dances around the register setting out trays of cupcakes and heaping pans full of doughnuts in all shapes, colors and sizes. A chocolate smile is drizzled on a doughnut dusted in yellow sprinkles, apple fritters sit warm and lumpy. He looks busy, but comfortable in his blue work shirt and pants, which are both covered in a healthy dusting of flour.

As he finishes his shift, Clark will greet the early morning regulars and around noon he will pick up his daughter from preschool. He said after they play a while and she will have a nap — maybe he will too.

‘Wing monster’

Before he started working at Copper Creek Brewing Company on East Washington Street, head chef Chris Hawk had never tasted a chicken wing.

Chris Hawk had not tasted a chicken wing before coming to Copper Creek, where his recipes are now so popular that Hawk comes in five hours early on wing nights. Photo by PARKER FEIERBACH

Hopping from upscale restaurants on Lake Oconee to restaurants in town, he said he never ate or cooked wings. But three years ago, when he took over at Copper Creek, he faced the challenge of turning up the heat on their then-dwindling wing night.

“It was really slow and they weren’t selling very many wings, and they were like, ‘Hey we’re just doing it this way, you’re smart, you can figure it out,’” Hawk said. “So I just did my research, did my homework and came up with my own way and it worked and it definitely caught on and has turned in to this huge chicken wing monster that we’ve got now. “

With a restaurant packed with people at the bar, in the booths, on the porch and in line waiting for tables on Thursdays for wings, needless to say, Hawk has been successful. So successful that Hawk said he comes in five hours early on Thursday to prepare enough wings to feed the “monster.”

“We open at 4 p.m. and we have to get here at 10 a.m. to start getting ready, it is a monster, just for wing night,” he said.

For the wings, Hawk offers six sauces that he crafts himself: mild, hot and extra hot variations of his own buffalo sauce, teriyaki, barbeque and sweet chile.

“I like the buffalo sauce flavor, those are always good,” he said. “It’s sweet chile, it’s an usual spin on a hot wing, it’s a Chinese sweet chile sauce basically, a little sweet and spicy, it’s different than your honey buffalo sauce — it’s a whole different flavor profile.”

Hawk said he hopes to expand his flavor profile to include a seasonal wing sauce, hopefully one incorporating beer, an ingredient he already utilizes to flavor other items on the menu.

“I use a lot of beer. I only use house brews. Like the demi-glace that we have for our medallions has a good couple of pints of our porter or stout, whatever we have on tap that’s our darkest,” he said. “I had cooked with beer in the past, but it was something I really had to kind of teach myself and figure out the best way to do it when I came here.”

For a chef who has relied on himself to learn a lot of things, Hawk developed confidence and keeps changing the menu, most recently this summer.

“I’ve changed the menu twice,” he said. “Each time it feels like everything is getting tighter and tighter like it needs to be, like an actual brew pub or gastropub or whatever you want to call it.”

As for the wings, Hawk said the secret is not in the sauce, but in the wing itself. Copper Creek fries their wings, under Hawk’s guidance, so that they’re not battered, but still crispy.

“If you don’t batter them, it’s really difficult to get them crispy. I know other places in town don’t batter them, but they’re not nearly as crispy,” he said, “So that’s my secret, that I figured out. There’s a trick that I do.”

All things to all people

A lot of people run on South Lumpkin Street, patter past the salons and apartments and eventually past two restaurants nestled between Earth Fare and Yoforia.

Chuck Ramsey’s commitment to “fine dining in a casual neighborhood” and emphasis on local ingredients has helped to put Five Points area on the Athens culinary map. Photo by PARKER FEIERBACH

Like roommates, 5 & 10 and the Royal Peasant put Five Points on the map as a prime dinner location in Athens.

Chuck Ramsey, part-owner and chef at 5 & 10, also spends a lot of time in Five Points — countless hours answering phones, making prep lists and cooking. Open for 10 years now, his restaurant offers up contemporary southern food.

He calls it, “fine dining in a casual neighborhood,” and as he wanders in to the 5 & 10 dining room to talk about it, the restaurant reflects that. Crowded with tables and chairs topped with white tablecloths, the dining room mixes an upscale feel with the comfort of a living room. Cookbooks line the built in shelves on the walls and a couch invites guests to take a load off while waiting for a table.

Ramsey said what makes 5 & 10 truly special is its commitment to buying local.

“I think 5 & 10, along with restaurants like the National and Farm 255 sort of set the standard for dining in Athens,” he said. “We made a commitment to supporting as much of our local farmers and producers as we can throughout the years.”

Vegetables come from around Athens and their low country frogmore stew, which Ramsey said is the restaurant’s most well-known dish, includes Georgia shrimp. Roughly 50 percent of the food, Ramsey said, is purchased locally.

“You know your farmers, you know the product. You can go to their farms, you can see the vegetables growing, you can meet the animals that either help produce those vegetables or that you end up eating,” he said. “I think it’s very important to have a connection with the food that you make.”

What Ramsey, his business partner Hugh Acheson and their staff do with local Southern food makes their food distinct and the flavors close to home.

“We try to respect the ingredients for what they are without cooking them to death,” he said. “Southern cooking a lot of times gets a bad rap for cooking everything in to submission. We try not to do that.”

With positive reviews from Zagat and Atlanta magazine in 2010 and 2011, the thumbs ups continue to roll in for Acheson and Ramsey’s modern take on Southern cooking.

But Ramsey hopes to remind people that at its core, 5 & 10 remains a neighborhood restaurant.

“I think we sometimes have the undeserved reputation of being the ‘white tablecloth’ fine-dining restaurant in-town special-occasion place,” Ramsey said. “But it really is, at heart, a casual neighborhood restaurant. You can come in jeans and a T-shirt, you don’t have to be dressed up.”

5 & 10’s menu is continually changing and prices vary. Ramsey said the prices don’t cater to anyone, not the college crowd or family in for dinner, but reflect the quality of the food.

“We have plenty of things on the menu that are not expensive at all,” Ramsey said. “And to an extent, we try to be all things to all people.”

In the pub

Across the pond from the contemporary Southern food, diners need only trek across the parking lot to the Royal Peasant  whose head chef Luke Harvey has been serving up British pub fare since the restaurant opened three years ago.

A well-stocked bar and simple menu are staples of The Royal Peasant, Athens’ own English pub, where Luke Harvey makes his mark in the restaurant’s small kitchen. Photo by EVAN STICHLER

Known for it’s well-stocked beer selection and as a prime spot to catch a Barclay’s Premier League soccer match, the small restaurant has also established itself with a small menu of specialty dishes straight from England.

“We didn’t see anyone doing anything quite like this is town,” Harvey said. “The owner spent some time in England a few years ago and thought well, if we can bring this idea back to the States. Keep it small, keep it simple, make it really good.”

And small it is. The tiny kitchen wedged next to the bathroom, Harvey said, fits at most two people. Normally manned by one person, often by Harvey himself, the kitchen barely has storage.

Harvey said that storage problem serves as a double-edged sword. Though it’s challenging to cook in such a small space, lacking the ability to store canned goods keeps him committed to using all fresh ingredients.

“We try to keep it simple, everything is made from scratch and literally, I’ve worked in a lot of restaurants and what actually makes it to the table and what’s actually being made in the kitchen, there’s a lot of lost in translation there,” Harvey said. “By that I mean, there’s a lot of canned products, all the pre-made food. I try to avoid all of that because the reality is you don’t have to spend a huge amount of money to make good food, you just have to know what you’re doing.”

The prices at The Royal Peasant reflect Harvey’s commitment to not spending a huge amount of money, as most menu items do not top $10. Harvey also said that even though the restaurant has daily specials, with such a set menu of standards, customers are starting to know the menu well enough to customize their orders.

“A lot of restaurants are hurting right now, so we’re grateful. We’ve been open for almost three years,” Harvey said. “And after the two-year point that’s when you see business drop off historically, because you’re not the new kid on the block anymore. But it’s still very, very good.”

Though he says he does not have much time to interact with the customers because there’s always something going on in the kitchen, every once in a while a customer will ask how someone from America makes good British food.

“I get a lot of feedback from the wait staff and I would say 99 times out of 100, we’re right on,” Harvey said. “Like our bangers and mash, I’ve had English people say it’s the best they’ve ever had, better than back home.”

Simple and sweet

As Harvey, Ramsey and Hawk leave their kitchens, Clark arrives at his to start his night of doughnut-forging.

With an array of specialty chefs in Athens, Ike & Jane serves as the icing on top. Or rather the sprinkles. For Clark, his work in the kitchen is not to serve the Athens culinary community — just the neighborhood.

“I don’t want to say we don’t contribute to the culinary community,” he said, as he waved to the early morning guests coming in the restaurant. “I want to say it’s more the community we contribute to. We’re a meeting place.”

He trails off to greet the regulars who know his work from eating it day in and day out.

For Clark, watching him interact and exchange smiles with guests after a long night of baking, is what seems to make him a specialty chef is not just that he makes doughnuts and pastries, but that he puts special effort in to serving his customers.

“I’d say my favorite thing about the job is the freedom to do whatever I’d like to every morning, doughnut wise,” Clark said. “I get to make things that people will come in and say, ‘Look at that! That’s crazy,’ or, ‘I want one of those, I’ve been thinking about it all night,’ or ‘I want one to start to cure my hangover.’”

When asked what inspires him to cook, he said simply, “hunger.” “Generally I either cook or bake what I’m in the mood for. I try to temper my mood with what’s right and what’s selling and what they’ve been getting,” Clark said. “I always try to come up with something new every day. Today the doughnut I’ve never made before is the one with graham crackers and peanut butter and it’s got a little caramel and chocolate drizzled on it.”

The caramel, by the way, is house made with real sugar, cream, butter and a pinch of sea salt.

For different folks

Some say that in each person is a tiny universe unto itself. For Athens residents, visitors and University students, specialty food in Athens becomes a world of its own.

For some, a slice of pizza from Little Italy defines Athens. For others, the holy trio of 5 & 10, the National and Farm 255 make Athens a food Mecca.

Regardless of taste or preference, Clark, Hawk, Ramsey and Harvey share one common recipe: research, hard work and a commitment to providing the community with food they are passionate about.

Whether a doughnut, a Southern delicacy, bangers and mash or something braised in house-brewed beer, there’s no shortage of specialty food in Athens. These chefs will continue making Athens delicious day in and day out, in small kitchens and large kitchens, one plate at a time.