Detroit Part 3: Coneys

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one thing I was looking forward to doing in Detroit was trying out some Coneys, especially since the two places that will be featured on the forthcoming Food Wars episode, Lafayette Coney Island and American Coney Island, are right next to each other and only a few blocks from the hotel where we stayed. (By the way, the new Doubletree is quite nice.)

We didn't make it to either place the first night we were there, but the second night, after some adult beverages, we decided to give it a whirl. The bartender at the last bar of the night, Pappy's (also recommended), recommended Lafayette, so that's where we headed. I ordered (if I recall correctly) a loose meat coney, pictured here:


Excellent, excellent post-drinking food, though that practically goes without saying. Tasty hot dog, tasty chili, mustard, raw onions, what could be bad?

Of course, intrepid culinary explorers that we are, we decided we couldn't let the night end without doing a compare-and-contrast at American while Lafayette was fresh in our mind. For the sake of consistency, I ordered the same thing, pictured here:


After a few bites and a pause to consider, the natural question was asked: which did we like better? As luck would have it (since we we wouldn't want to have to split up on subsequent trips), a consensus was reached: American was the winner of our personal food war. We thought the casing had more snap (though both are natural casings, we're told), and the chili had a better flavor. (Chopped raw onion and plain yellow mustard can't and didn't really vary much from one another.) Once that had been determined, it seemed only natural to return to American, and return we did for our remaining two nights in the city.

One more photo (this time taken with an actual camera, rather than the camera on my phone) of a pair of coneys at American:


But really, it's a hot dog with chili on it; you can't go wrong at either place, nor, presumably, at other places around Michigan that make the same thing.

Detroit Part 2: Beer and Pizza and Beer

As I mentioned in my previous post, we went to a Red Wings game the first night we were in Detroit. We'd enjoyed some good beer with dinner, and it would've been a shame not to keep that going at the game, so keep it going we did.

Now, Detroit is practically in Canada, and one of the nice things about that proximity is that there's no shortage of Canadian beer. In particular, at Joe Louis Arena you can get 24-ounce cans of Molson XXX. If you're not familiar with this fine product (which isn't available everywhere in the USA), it's Molson's strongest offering at 7.3% alcohol by volume. It doesn't really taste the best (it's on the sweet side, if I recall correctly), but, like Samuel L. Jackson beer, it'll get ya drunk! (Or, if you prefer, like Uncle Jemima's Pure Mash Liquor, you'll get bent just as fast as possible.) So... mmmm mmmm good.

Another stop we made while we were in Detroit was for Chicago-style deep dish pizza at Pizza Papalis in Greektown. Those really thick pizzas (they're practically casseroles, they're so deep) take a while to cook, so they have a clever ordering system. First you put your name in for a table. While you're waiting for a table, you go to the pizza counter and put in an order for your pizza and they give you a receipt for your order. Once your table opens up, you give the server that receipt so that s/he knows to bring your pizza to you, and also order anything other than pizza. While you're (still) waiting for your pizza (which takes about 40 minutes), they bring you your other food (we shared a salad, which was probably a good idea), and then the guest of honor arrives and is devoured. Here's a picture (not mine):



The pizza (bacon cheeseburger pizza) was delicious, and tremendously food-coma-inducing. Chicago-style pizza: not really the same food product as New York-style pizza, but still good.

Later that same night, we also stopped at the Detroit Beer Company, a brewpub with some good house-made beers. I was still pretty stuffed from the pizza so I didn't have too much, but everything was tasty, and the decor was classic brewpub, with the tanks visible there and all that good stuff. I also snapped this picture, part of a bigger photo on the wall showing (if I'm not mistaken) a party celebrating the repeal of prohibition:


People and dogs agree: beer is awesome.

Detroit Part 1: BBQ

My friends and I arrived in Detroit on Wednesday afternoon April 7th, and had tickets to see the Red Wings game that evening. Rather than eat arena food, we decided to find a restaurant for a pregame meal. Slow's Bar-B-Q had been recommended, and sounded nice and filling, so we figured we'd give it a try. It was about 5pm when we arrived, and I thought that would be early enough to get a table without much delay, but apparently it's a popular pregame destination and we had about a half hour wait for our table. While waiting, we had a chance to sample from a great variety of Michigan beers available on tap; I particularly enjoyed Bell's Oberon.

Once we were seated and had a chance to peruse the menu, I decided on "The Big Three," a combination of pulled pork, pulled chicken, and sliced brisket. The table had five different BBQ sauces, (if I recall correctly) sweet, spicy, apple, mustard, and North Carolina-style vinegar, and I thought this would be a good way to experiment with all of them. The entree included two sides, and I went with mac + cheese and coleslaw. The order wasn't cheap ($17.95 isn't, for instance, significantly less than you'd pay for a three-meat combo at Dinosaur BBQ here in NYC), but everything was tasty and the portions were generous. Here's the mac and cheese, which was, by the way, perhaps the best I've ever had:



And this is how much meat was left after I was getting close to full and decided to take a picture:



Everything was, as I said, very good; the brisket was, perhaps, not as good as at Hill Country, but I enjoy when there are a variety of different sauces and you get to try out different tastes in one order. Most of us had leftovers, if I recall correctly, and it was a shame our hotel room didn't have a refrigerator so that we could have brought them back with us. No big deal, though, as we definitely all had our fill of meat.

Overall, definitely a place I'd recommend to future Detroit visitors, and a great example of how someone who's interested in urban renewal can take an old building in a drab area and turn it into something exciting.

Dear Washington DC,

It doesn't matter how big the slices are, pizza does not have provolone cheese on it.

Love,
Everyone else

P.S. Oh shit, Katz's and Second Avenue Deli do battle over pastrami next week. I was wondering what they would pick to do an episode in New York, and this seems like a great choice. Send a salami to your boy in the army, because it's ON.

Chicken and Rice Interlude

Yes, yes, I know, Detroit, but in the meantime:

So yesterday evening, after work, I met up with some friends at Rattle 'n' Hum on 33rd Street. (Incidentally, if you're in NYC and like beer, they've got a cask ale festival going on this weekend that's definitely worth your while.) Due to a variety of other circumstances, by the time we were done at the bar it was about 11:15pm, and I hadn't eaten anything since about 2pm, so some food was called for. Being that I was up in that direction, and also that I was with a friend in town for business and staying at a hotel up on 54th, I decided a trip up to the chicken and rice carts on 53rd was in order.

For those of you who might not be aware, the corner of 53rd Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan is something of a nexus for halal food carts. This is especially due to one particular cart on the southwest corner of the intersection that serves from 8pm to 4am and gets crazy long lines (and where the food is reputedly so good that one time a guy got killed for cutting in line), but there are a number of other carts in the area for people who don't want to brave the line.

Well, I was hungry, and my friend had to be up early, and we didn't want to brave the line. However, having done my research (or, well, having read someone else's research on the matter), I had an idea of a shortcut. According to Midtown Lunch, there's another cart on the southeast corner of the same intersection that's there through the day and into the evening, but not as late, that serves the same food. Seeing that cart, with the same bags pictured in the linked Midtown Lunch article, that's where we went. $6 gets you a nicely sized tin of rice topped with chicken, some shredded lettuce, and a few small slices of pita. The bag also included two cups of white sauce and two (much smaller) cups of hot sauce, though there were bins containing these cups and you could take more if you wanted.

Rather than eating outside, we took the quick walk across the street to my friend's hotel and ate there. We dug into our meals (my late dinner, my friend's midnight snack), and... well, I hate to say it, but, eh. I didn't honestly think it was any better than what I sometimes get for lunch for $5 at my regular truck that's at the corner of Broadway and Cedar Street during the day. (It's the one that's a repurposed Frito-Lay truck, if you're looking for it.) The chicken and the rice both were good enough, but I didn't think they had a whole lot of flavor to them. The shredded lettuce was shredded lettuce, inoffensive but not really adding anything to the dish. (In contrast, my regular truck mixes some onions and peppers in with the meat, and the veggies on the side will typically also involve some tomato and cucumber.) The slices of pita were a nice touch, I suppose. The redeeming feature, if anything, was the hot sauce: it is really hot. Like, clear your sinuses, make your eyes water (or maybe that was the pollen allergies), have to mix it in with the rice and the white sauce, kind of hot. And that was just from one of the two little cups!

Now, there's a chance that the cart we went to isn't actually still the same food as the one with the long line. The Midtown Lunch article is from about three years ago, and the famous cart's website (yes, it has a website) doesn't say anything about the cart on the southeast corner, though it does make sure to point out that the cart that's on the southwest corner during the day (the famous cart doesn't arrive until about 7pm) is not the same food. Next time I'm up in that neighborhood at night, maybe I'll wait in line at the famous cart and see if perhaps I really did eat the wrong stuff, but at this point I'm not getting my hopes up.

Detroit Preview

I got back from Detroit on Sunday afternoon and, due to a combination of factors, haven't had a chance to compose my thoughts or even sort through my pictures. In the meantime, here's a quick look at what's ahead:

• Tasty BBQ
• Food coma-inducing pizza
• Coneys
• Beer
• More beer

And maybe also a few initial thoughts on the city itself. Detroit is... bleak. There's a lot of empty space (read: surface parking lots galore), and a lot of empty buildings. Nobody appears to live in the city; I don't think I saw any supermarkets or clothing stores or laundromats or others of that sort of thing that serve local residents. (OK, maybe in Greektown, but not in most of the parts of the city where I visited.) As a result, while there are plenty of people around the city for events (e.g., Tigers opening day last Friday, the Frozen Four), at night there don't seem to be many people around. I don't think I felt unsafe, but I wouldn't want to be walking around alone at night either. If the city is going to improve, that needs to change. There need to be reasons for people to want to live in the city, and there need to be ways for commuters to get into the city (read: better transit options) that don't require the vast oceans of parking lots that make the city seem so bleak. (The Detroit People Mover is nice for getting you around, but not for getting into and out of the city.) If that were the case, that empty space could then be turned into something a bit more vibrant.

OK, but this isn't an urban planning blog; go read Planetizen or Streetsblog if that's your cup of tea. This is about food and drinks. So, I think if the urban renewal I was alluding to above were to happen, Detroit has the makings of a good food scene. Some of these empty buildings that I mentioned above could be converted into interesting dining spaces; I'll have pictures from one such conversion later on. There's a heterogeneous population, an airport bringing visitors to town, good meat available. We ate some good food, and like I said, if Detroit heads in the right direction (which isn't a given, of course), there could be more out there.

A Lot of Information In One Hour

This week's episode of No Reservations was a special on cooking technique, featuring input from some big names in the food world. The show opened with Tony doing a quick demo on proper knife technique (you know, so you don't cut your thumb off). We saw Dave Pasternack of Esca (phenomenal restaurant, BTW) demonstrating how to boil and serve a lobster, legendary cookbook author Jacques Pépin showing the simple technique of making an omelette, Scott Conant of Scarpetta teaching a simple recipe for pasta and fresh tomato sauce, zillion-Michelin-starred Thomas Keller working through his well-known simple roast chicken technique, Laurent Tourondel of the BLT family of restaurants cooking a lovely bacon cheeseburger, and Les Halles chef Carlos Morales (note: don't use an "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google search, because the most famous person of that name is apparently a gay porn actor) cooking french fries and then a steak (number one mistake Tony says most people make: not letting the steak rest for a few minutes before cutting it) complete with grill marks. Interspersed between the various other segments, in a bunch of shorter bits, Tony showed us how to cook beef bourguignon, including prepping each of the ingredients and then the cooking process. The episode concluded with Tony and Carlos eating what they had cooked and talking a bit about cooking and restaurant eating. Definitely worth a watch if you ever do your own cooking.

Pork Chops

I'm sorry, but I just don't think I could ever keep Kosher. Not when a pork chop, rubbed with salt and pepper and oregano and garlic powder and cooked simply (I used a George Foreman grill because I'm lazy, but you could just as easily use a grill pan or something like that) is so darn tasty.










Serve it up with a simple salad:



And that's what we call dinner!

Jucy Lucy

So Food Wars was in Minneapolis this week, to taste test the Jucy Lucy. I was in Minneapolis about... a year and a half now, I guess, and sampled the Jucy Lucy at Matt's Bar, one of the two restaurants featured on Food Wars (both of which claim to have invented the delicious concoction).

This post really could use a picture in order to illustrate the deliciousness of the Jucy Lucy, so I'm going to borrow one from Wikipedia:



Let me tell you, it was a glorious experience. The cheese is inside the burger! I mean, how great is that? I've tried to make that for myself, but it never works, so I appreciate the technique in addition to the great taste. I didn't get to go to the 5-8 Club, the other contender for the best Jucy Lucy, but I'll be back in the Twin Cities about a year from now, so I'll have to do my own taste test. (If you're curious, Matt's Bar was pronounced the winner, with the Minnesota Vikings' mascot casting the deciding vote.)

No Detroit episode before my trip next week, but no matter - we're going to eat some hot dogs regardless!

Then What Is It For, Exactly?

It's Passover. As such, I bought a box of matzah at the Key Food on my way home from work on Tuesday. ("Matzah"? "Matzoh"? "Matzo"? Firefox's built-in spell-check likes only the latter two, but I like the first one and that's what I'm sticking with.) It's Streit's, a perfectly cromulent brand of matzah to be buying, I thought. (I mean, their website domain name has "matzo" in it.) The ingredients are flour and water, just like the ingredients are supposed to be. (I bought whole wheat matzah, because I think you're generally better off eating whole bread products when possible, so technically the ingredients were "whole wheat flour" and water, but that's splitting hairs.) Looked great. Brought it home, ate some matzah. (In the form of matzah pizza, because it's awesome, but again, besides the point.) Last night I looked at the side of the box and what did I see? "Not for Passover use."

...

What?