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.

Food Wars

Recently, the Travel Channel debuted a new show called Food Wars. During the course of an episode of the show, host Camille Ford (who is quite telegenic, it must be said; par for the course for this sort of show, I suppose) travels to a city having a cuisine that's a local specialty and two top-rated establishments serving that specialty. She visits each establishment, speaks with its owner and learns about its history and its method of preparing the cuisine. She also speaks to some of the most passionate fans of each establishment. The owners meet, and the terms of a taste test are agreed upon: the location, as well as the specific item to be judged (e.g., for the episode about fried chicken, the leg was selected). Then a blind taste test is conducted with five panelists trying the selected item: a designated "super fan" of each establishment, as well as three local personalities. The panelists vote, and a winner is determined. It's great TV, except for the fact that I always end up craving whatever it is they're eating by the end of the episode. In short, I'm not sure whether I want Camille Ford's job or whether I want to marry her.

Anyway, so the first episode of Food Wars was filmed in the bustling metropolis of Buffalo, New York, where, as we all know, the local specialty is wings. I can say, without hesitation, that I love wings. I could eat them all the time if they weren't fried and coated in delicious, spicy, buttery sauce, but if they weren't fried and the sauce weren't buttery, they wouldn't be nearly so good. (Trust me, I've tried.) It's quite the dilemma.

Moving on, Buffalo is, of course, the home of the wing. The wing, as we know it, originated at the Anchor Bar; the story of its creation is told better elsewhere, so I won't attempt to rehash it here. A few years ago, not long after college, my friend Mike was living and working in Buffalo, and during the course of a weekend trip to visit him, I was able try the wings at both the Anchor Bar and at Duff's, the other establishment featured on Food Wars. (For some reason, while their franchise locations in Toronto have a website, the original Buffalo location doesn't, so I'm sending you to Yelp instead.) Before that trip, I had heard of the Anchor Bar as the place where wings were created, but wasn't familiar with Duff's; fortunately, Mike, living in the area, knew that both were worth trying. To shorten the story a bit: since that weekend, I've gone to Duff's every time I've been back to Buffalo, but haven't been back to the Anchor Bar, so I was quite pleased to see that Duff's was declared the winner on the Buffalo episode of Food Wars.

Since the premiere, Food Wars has also done episodes in Chicago (Chicago-style beef sandwiches; I wonder whether maybe they had too hard a time narrowing it down to two places serving Chicago-style pizza or Chicago-style hot dogs, both of which would sooner come to my mind), Pittsburg (the one in Kansas, not the one in Pennsylvania, for fried chicken), and Lockhart, Texas (for barbecue). I don't have much familiarity with any of the places they went, though one of the places in the Texas episode, Kreuz Market (pronounced like the word "rights" with a K on the front of it) is the inspiration for Hill Country, one of my favorite BBQ restaurants here in New York. I do know they've got an upcoming episode in Detroit to eat at coney islands, which I hope airs soon since I'm going to be in Detroit in a few weeks. Definitely a show worth keeping an eye on.