Tag Archives: Michigan
Chicago Road Trip
In spring 2012, my alma mater, the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) at the University of Michigan, printed two pieces I wrote after interviewing Chicago chefs and U-M alumni Rick Bayless and Stephanie Izard. They’re both being re-published here with permission of LSA Magazine.
If you have but one day in Chicago this summer, I can think of no finer way to spend it than lunching at Bayless’ XOCO and having dinner at Izard’s Girl and the Goat.
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After graduating from the College of LSA, chef Rick Bayless spent years in Mexico studying the language, the people, the food. The knowledge he brought back to the United States helped change the landscape of cuisine as we know it. The linguistics major-turned-culinary-giant gave us a seat at the table to discuss his salad days – then and now.
Chef Rick Bayless (’75, M.A.) is every bit as infatuated with Mexican cuisine today as he was in 1987 when he opened Frontera Grill in Chicago and released his first book, Authentic Mexican: Regional Cooking from the Heart of Mexico. “I can look at something I discovered 30 years ago and understand it now in such an intimate way that I could never have done at the very beginning,” he says. “That sense of deepening discovery is what keeps me going every day.”
A recent winner of Bravo’s television program Top Chef: Masters and an unquestioned legend of Chicago’s now vibrant food scene, Bayless is as big a celebrity chef as anyone in the United States. It’s hard to imagine North Clark Street without his trio of restaurants or store shelves without his salsas, but he didn’t begin his career looking to be famous. Or even to cook.
“I was really interested in the relationship between language and culture,” he says of his college years spent studying Spanish and Latin American culture. After living in Mexico with his family as a teenager, Bayless became an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma. He spent two summers in an applied linguistics program and learned how to enter communities that lacked a written language, learn and interpret their spoken words, and ultimately understand that culture through their stories.
He followed the program’s director to LSA’s Department of Linguistics, where he began several years of doctoral work. But he found more than just scholarly interests awaiting him in Ann Arbor.
“I fell in with this group of students… we didn’t have any money at all, but we were all super into food,” Bayless recalls. “I didn’t even understand how unique the food community of Ann Arbor was then, but it was centered around the farmers’ market.” He and his friends would buy their fresh ingredients in Kerrytown and at Eastern Market in Detroit, meeting and interacting with farmers, a practice reminiscent of the everyday life he’d experienced in Mexico.
These linguistics students prepared food together regularly, exploring different cuisines from a myriad of cultures. Bayless started catering. He taught local cooking classes. Then he had an epiphany: “I was at least as interested in the relationship between culture and food as I was culture and language.”
That’s when the future James Beard National Chef of the Year stopped work on his dissertation and immersed himself in the food of Mexico.
Throughout the early 1980s, Bayless lived and traveled in Mexico with his wife, Deann Bayless (’71, ’78 M.U.S.), utilizing his academic experience to construct Authentic Mexican. Each recipe was studied using the same research methodology he learned at Michigan: He prepared each dish with three different families or cooks to grasp every nuance, every approach, every ingredient. The result was more than a cookbook; it became a comprehensive look at the cuisine of Mexico as an expression of regional culture as well as an influential guide to a burgeoning American food scene that was slowly awakening from a decade or two of hibernation.
Upon returning to the United States, Bayless found himself in the midst of a dormant food culture dominated by commoditized products and corporate wholesalers – a stark contrast to his childhood.
“I’m a child of the ’60s. I made my first compost pile when I was 16. I made salt-rising bread,” he recalls. “I went with my father to the market in Oklahoma City… and the farmers would bring their stuff and we’d buy from the farmers,” Bayless remembers. “And then, that all went away and it just went to a commercial commodity market. We never had face-to-face contact with the people who were growing our food anymore. And I had a sense of loss about that.”
A do-it-yourselfer raised in a family of restaurateurs living amongst small farmers in Oklahoma, he couldn’t abide the lack of local food he found as he began his culinary career.
So Bayless set out to do things differently. He describes his first experience as a chef engaging Chicago-area farmers: “One of the things I wanted to do was put something local on our menu…. We opened in March, and May is when we have our short, local strawberry season… so I went down to the commercial market…. And they all said, ‘No one would carry those. They’re terrible.’ Well, they’re terrible only if you’re thinking of them as a commodity. They’re phenomenal if you’re thinking of them as flavor.”
Literally laughed out of the market by wholesalers, Rick and Deann drove twice per week to farmer stands outside the city to acquire those local berries for desserts. Beyond the superior flavor, the chef regained a connection to farmers in a way he hadn’t experienced since childhood. And he became increasingly grateful for it.
When Bayless talks about food, he looks and sounds as much like a professor of art history as he does a master of the culinary arts. His conference room at Frontera doubles as a library, its 10-foot walls lined with volumes on every conceivable culinary topic, ranging from French sauces to chocolate to Mexican culture to gardening. And, indeed, he broaches the subject of food as any intellectual might – that is, from every conceivable angle: flavor, art, community engagement, eco-friendliness.
Thus it’s perhaps unsurprising that his consistently calm demeanor elevates to a passionate tone when discussing the interrelated nature of his customers, his farmers, and his food.
“I have always seen restaurants – and I guess it’s because I grew up in a family-style restaurant—as creating community,” he says in describing his family’s approach to business. Along with those childhood trips meeting farmers, the notion of community has shaped his work.
“I’m an accidental organic farming champion,” he notes. “What I learned was that the people that cared most about what they were growing also cared most about the earth…. [Farmers] taught me about the interconnectedness of what I do as a living.” His holistic view of soil’s role in the food he serves his customers has led him to value sustainability. “If it’s local and sustainable, it’s part of that sense of community. It’s not just in putting money in the pocket of the farmer, but it’s protecting our environment that allows us all to thrive.”
Committed past the point of mere rhetoric or marketing, Bayless has maintained a laser-like focus: 25 years since he first ferreted out local strawberries, he has continued to push the boundaries of how local, sustainable food can be used. “The thing about food is that the more you’re around it, the deeper you can go,” he says.
During the late summer, 100 percent of his tomatoes and tomatillos are Chicago-raised. Even Tortas Frontera, his O’Hare Airport-based eatery, lists from where the food is sourced. His Frontera Farmer Foundation raised $180,000 last summer in support of local farms, and he’s a board member at the local Green City Market, the lone Chicago-area market dedicated solely to local, sustainable foods.
“With the strength of our local agricultural system, our food is different, and it allows a uniquely Chicago perspective on traditional Mexican flavor,” he says. So he strives to employ it often, noting that what he serves isn’t always what one might find in Oaxaca or the Yucatan. Rather, he asks himself, “How do you get local flavor on the plate without messing with the traditional soul that you find in Mexican kitchens?”
Bayless grows some of those Mexican-inspired ingredients on Frontera’s eco-friendly rooftop garden and at his own home. The only common ingredient that doesn’t occasionally come from Chicago-area farmers is dried chiles because, as he says, “the flavors just can’t be duplicated, and… we’re into making delicious food.”
In contrast to the many celebrity chefs leaving their hometowns, opening restaurants in Vegas or eating strange foods on cable television for shock value, Bayless’ three primary restaurants and offices are on a single block, and he’s entering the eighth season of Mexico – One Plate at a Time, airing locally in Chicago or on various PBS stations and often costarring his daughter.
When he does leave Chicago, it’s usually to visit other countries to study new cuisine and other cultures, and to enhance the culinary creativity on display at his restaurants.
“You can learn things that reflect back into your food, other techniques, and other ingredients that will open your mind to different flavor possibilities,” he observes. “Anything is open to us as long as it has the spirit of the Mexican kitchen.”
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Chef Stephanie Izard has won Top Chef, not to mention a host of awards for her new Chicago restaurant, Girl and the Goat, but her food is neither haughty nor highbrow. Izard studies “common food” and elevates it, with a culinary result that’s like Izard herself – genuine and clever.
Soaked in syrupy lemon dressing, Chef Stephanie Izard’s eggplant is an eyeopening revelation. Eye-opening because it is a dessert; a revelation because it is the perfect acidic counterpoint to other elements on my plate: pork-fat doughnuts, ham streusel, caramelized figs, and a honey yogurt. Soft, crunchy, fatty, sweet, salty, and tart – it is an embodiment of Izard’s “make your whole mouth happy” philosophy.
The meals she prepares under that banner have garnered her and Girl and the Goat – the Chicago restaurant she opened in 2010 – national acclaim. Izard was a celebrity already, having won season four of Bravo’s wildly popular Top Chef, but it’s her work since, as chef and co-owner at the Goat, that have catapulted her to true stardom. Capturing rave reviews from the Chicago Tribune and Saveur magazine as well as a prestigious James Beard nomination, she was named a Food and Wine Best New Chef in 2011.
“If you could see me when I was on stage getting my award for that in New York, I had a gigantic perma-grin the entire time,” she recalls.
That’s hardly surprising: Izard’s a veritable ball of energy, talking fast, laughing a lot, and infusing every inch of her sizeable restaurant with every ounce of her sizeable persona. “I just wanted to take what I love about dining – which is hanging out with friends, usually quite a few drinks—and that’s why this place has a party vibe. Big fun with lots of energy.”
The space fosters that attitude with ample seating and high ceilings that echo with hundreds of voices, and a soundtrack that ranges from Johnny Cash to the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Regina Spektor. The bar is packed with tourists and regulars alike, and the atmosphere spawns conversation from the moment the front door opens.
Seated at the far end of that very bar, I was quickly befriended by a 40-something professional Chicagoan awaiting some friends. Within 45 minutes, I was sharing my cauliflower with pickled peppers and mint – portions at Girl and the Goat are naturally designed for sharing with friends both old and new – and she was sharing her goat chorizo flatbread.
The shareable, approachable food is just as driven by Izard’s demeanor as the palpable friendliness imbued throughout the dining room. Signature dishes like roasted pig face, a dramatically more interesting variation on traditional head cheese, elevate comfort food and ostensibly simple ingredients to haute cuisine, without even a hint of the snobbery that sometimes pervades the restaurant world.
“I’ve been lucky and have eaten at some amazing restaurants,” says Izard, “and I enjoy it, but I don’t enjoy the stuffiness of it.I just don’t think one has to come hand in hand with the other.” She adds, “I’ve definitely always been anti-pretense.”
That attitude is exemplified in her thorough, hands-on approach. Izard doesn’t just prepare a meal; she studies each component of it. Before opening the Goat, she took the time to visit local farms, getting to know the farmers and learning everything from how the animals are treated to how goat cheese is made. “Now [the farmers are] my friends. I call them up, we hang out,” she says. Izard contracts with farms “where we liked the farmers themselves and respect what they’re doing. We only get animals from farms where we know they’re raised properly.”
Her commitment to that depth of understanding extends to every aspect of the restaurant, which includes having an inhouse baker and butcher. She’s explored an interest in beer (the lone piece of art in the restaurant features a girl, a goat, and dancing beer bottles) by visiting Indiana’s Three Floyds Brewing and by actually making beer with Chicago-based Goose Island. “I’ve gotten to brew beer a couple times. I don’t think it’s anything I could do by myself, but it’s really cool to know more about it. And we make our own wine in Walla Walla (Washington). We make our own cheese. I just kind of want to learn how to do everything.”
Izard’s curiosity about food began early at her childhood home in Connecticut, where her parents enjoyed a wide range of cuisine. She earned a sociology degree from LSA in 1998, and if there were any hint at her future, it lay in evenings out with friends.”We would go through and order all these different beers, and I remember [learning] about it and thinking, “this is cool.'”
After graduation, she enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu in Arizona, where she learned the skills that later took her to several acclaimed Chicago establishments before opening her first restaurant, Scylla, in 2006. Despite rave reviews, she opted to close in 2008, not long after which she joined Top Chef. The prize money helped pave the way to her current endeavor.
From day one, Izard has insisted on staff sharing her excitement for their ingredients, drinks, and food.
“We interviewed over 1,000 people,” she says, “and we’ve interviewed people who worked at some of the best restaurants in the city, and I’m like ‘yeah, you’re a great server, but still, you’re not getting it. You need to have the enthusiasm, and you need to want to make someone feel comfortable as soon as they walk in the door.'”
Izard’s a master at lending that sense of comfort to her patrons: Sitting at the bar, looking toward the kitchen, I could see fans approaching her to say hi or take pictures, which often end up on the restaurant’s website. She’s become widely known for being one of the most sociable “celebrity chefs” in the country, someone who hasn’t changed as a result of her fame.”Even if I’m sick at the store and a fan comes up, I’m still going to talk to them. [Some chefs] get annoyed by people… but someone coming up to you and saying they love you? I mean, that’s pretty nice. Be happy about it.”
That connection with her devotees achieved new heights last summer when Izard launched a fundraiser for Share Our Strength, an organization fighting childhood hunger: “We’re doing these benefit dinners called Supper at Steph’s where I invite eight strangers into my house and cook dinner for them, and my staff said, ‘Seriously, Stephanie, what if they look through your underwear drawer?’ And I’m like, well, they’ll look through my underwear drawer. I don’t care.”
She’s laughing as a cook brings her a spoon covered in ginger dressing destined for the crunchy raw kohlrabi salad. “As long as I’m not in the bathroom, they’re supposed to bring me a taste.”
Izard’s well-known for carrying her upbeat persona and positive demeanor into the kitchen, a place notorious for hot tempers and demeaning attitudes. “I think that my cooks genuinely enjoy coming to work. Of course, they’re often hungover and tired and don’t really want to get here in the morning. But we have fun. We sing and dance all day. Having someone yell at me doesn’t make me want to work harder for them, it makes me want to have them not be around anymore.”
That’s not idle talk. The restaurant’s open kitchen allows patrons to peer inside. “You can see all the cooks smiling and enjoying each other’s company, which I just think is so important. If you’re putting out food that’s supposed to have all this love in it and you’re pissed off, it’s probably not going to taste as good.”
Her cooks must have an awful lot of love, because the lengthy menu is delicious from top to bottom. In her inimitable style, she doesn’t overthink it. “If I try too hard to make new menu items – like, all right, I must make a new fish dish this week, then it never works. So for me, it’s waiting to see if something just hits and something clicks. Like if I walk in the cooler and see some vegetable next to another one, and I’m like, ‘Yeah!'” That revelation explains her cross-cultural influences – for example, Izard’s crudo, an Italian-inspired raw fish dish, puts buttery Pacific hiramasa under bits of pork belly, Peruvian chiles, and caperberries.
That culinary creativity is showcased in Girl in the Kitchen, a book of recipes from her home kitchen released last October. She toured all winter to support the cookbook, while simultaneously planning her version of a classic diner, which she’s calling The Little Goat. She’s constantly busy, but she admits that’s how she likes it. “I’ve always been really driven and want to be as successful as possible. And I’m hoping to retire in 10 years, so I’ve got a lot to do.”
Making Good Food Work
Conferences are generally about listening. At good conferences, one listens and learns. At bad conferences, one listens a bit and then watches the person one seat away play Angry Birds. Either way, “participants” are largely passive, absorbing knowledge through digesting lectures, presentations, and panel discussions.
Making Good Food Work was different.
Designed as a participatory conference, hosted in Detroit on April 19 through April 21, and organized by Neighborhood Noodle founder and Michigan State University Ph.D. student Jess Daniel, Making Good Food Work (MGFW) brought together food entrepreneurs, business owners, farmers, and other experts to work on projects and ideas that could shape the future of regional food systems.
While participants came from all over the country, not just Michigan, MGFW still felt like a Detroit event: After all, only in our uncommonly small, familiar community could an amateur like me learn about an event this specialized and actually attend alongside practitioners with interesting ideas for viable food alternatives.
The conference was purported on its website to be “a creative incubation laboratory, designed for doers.” After three days of working, talking, typing, thinking, collaborating, researching, and writing, I was exhausted. No Angry Birds, no checking email during lectures, no sitting in the back of the room bored. Just work.
Designed for doers, indeed.
Projects & Personalities
Things began in the ballroom of Detroit’s Atheneum Hotel exactly as one might expect: Introductory remarks, a few well-orchestrated exercises designed to break the ice, and plenty of hotel coffee. Where things began to diverge from the norm was when we really dug into this “incubation laboratory” concept.
Thirteen team leaders – all who previously had submitted business concepts, ideas for white papers, and projects of all sorts – took to the stage to pitch their initiatives. Each hoped his or her project would resonate with the right people, drawing them to participate in actually developing those initiatives over the next two days.
The 200 attendees split themselves into these teams to begin work. There were a set of teams dedicated to issues – creating toolkits for general use across the country, for example – but among the seven teams working on defined businesses, hubs, and co-ops were:
- COLORS of Detroit, a soon-to-be worker-owned restaurant in Harmonie Park that’s an extension of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC), which helps train restaurant workers for better positions in the industry. The restaurant will be both a training environment and a working restaurant featuring local foods.
- Delridge Produce Cooperative, a neighborhood food co-op that provides fresh, locally sourced, sustainable food to under-served, generally lower income residents in southwest Seattle
- The Arcadia Center, an effort to bring local, sustainably raised food to people via a mobile market near D.C in Alexandria
- Colorado Schools Food Hub, a project in which healthy, local food ends up in school lunches
As a newcomer to food systems discussions but a seasoned practitioner of the black art known as marketing, I chose to work with COLORS since they were looking to draw customers and attention to their restaurant, due to open this fall.
Brief introductions were all I needed to see I’d be working with an interesting team: Angela Newsom from Detroit Evolution was experienced in the local food market and insightful with regards to the Detroit customer base. Channon Mondoux of the Eclectic Kitchen in Kalamazoo was a chef, educator, and businessperson. Brother Barry Crumbley served as a farmer, activist, and food policy advisor. Kathe Piede worked at a co-op outside New York. Add to that another half dozen event planners, community organizers, and community garden workers.
Led by Minsu Longiaru, the project leader, and Cheryl Danley from Michigan State, our team facilitator, we had a great group. I didn’t get much exposure to other teams, but if they were anywhere near as diverse and brilliant as the folks I met, I’m sure every project leader went home with a suitcase full of ideas.
Before we really started to discuss the project and our team leader’s goals, though, we were treated to lunch – and a few guest speakers.
Dr. Kathleen Merrigan is the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and as one of the keynotes, she talked generally about the importance of local food systems and some of the challenges the effort faces. She has been the person behind “Know your Farmer, Know your Food,” which illustrated to me a sad truth about our government and our food. Merrigan clearly has been an advocate for alternative food systems, but she also noted – mostly when answering pointed questions from an expert audience – that there are times when the USDA is obligated to allow certain foods (e.g., genetically modified alfalfa) to market unless it meets very strict legal criteria.
What went unsaid was that none of those problems will ever change until the massive amounts of money invested by companies ranging from Monsanto to McDonald’s gets out of government.
After Merrigan finished her interactions with the crowd, Senator Debbie Stabenow delivered a thoroughly generic address and left without taking any questions. It was nice of her to show support for real food, but as it turned out, the extra half hour would have been helpful in working on our projects.
We closed the first day defining some parameters for our project with COLORS, including the need to create a marketing plan.
Getting to Work
Obviously, one of the advantages of being a marketing guy was that I had a few consulting documents and marketing plans I could use as templates. I pulled one out and started re-writing it with COLORS in mind, incorporating the ideas generated by my teammates as I went along. 10 pages, 20 pages, 30 pages. We were machines.
Something that should have been immediately obvious eventually struck me as the discussion evolved: We all shared a love of good, honest, real food. Admittedly, my interests have been rooted in hedonism and an intellectual love of the historical and cultural aspects of cuisine, tea, wine, beer, et cetera. And theirs were rooted more in economics, social justice, policy, agriculture, and business.
Nonetheless, that shared love should elicit smiles from anyone interested in food – because it illustrates something that I think a lot of people don’t understand about food as a hobby or even as a profession.
Specifically, being a “foodie” isn’t just about watching Iron Chef; it’s about understanding and intellectualizing something vital to our existence. I might be more interested in reading about famed bartender Jerry Thomas than I am about the particulars of what House resolution is up for a vote or what the latest heirloom seed protected by the government might be, but at the core, it’s more or less all the same. It’s recognizing that there’s more to food than swinging through a drive-thru and shoveling fries into one’s face.
Hobbies and jobs are ways of focusing our minds, challenging ourselves. Food is a necessity. And a business. And a hobby. And an area of public debate. And a key component of every culture. It touches everything around us. So in many respects, is there any more interesting, holistic hobby? Is it any surprise that being a “foodie” has become so popular?
From the most basic cooks to those with a library of historical food texts, anyone can relate to some component of food.
So working with the COLORS team became a real pleasure as we dug into not merely our task but our shared passion. I learned a lot, and the second night, a big group of us went to Slows BBQ to hang out.
But mostly, we worked.
Some of us left the group for an hour or two to chat with experts or to attend workshops on topics like packaging, food hub start-ups, and finding capital for new food businesses. But more or less, we dug in around a table, talking, thinking, and typing. Two days later, we had a 30-page marketing plan, an event planning guide, a concept for empowering workers to promote COLORS via social media, and a host of other ideas.
Winning: The COLORS of Money
What some of us didn’t realize was that there were financial awards available. Our facilitator, Cheryl, did a fantastic job of guiding some answers to questions that would be judged by a panel on the third day, and Minsu worked with the team on a presentation that highlighted our accomplishments.
We were thrilled to see the results: COLORS won second place among the judges and also won the “people’s choice” award, the combined total for which nearly doubled Minsu’s initial marketing budget.
Obviously, I was pleased to see such tangible results for the project we worked on – but there were other amazing ideas presented that day.
The Delridge Produce Co-op mentioned earlier elected to move to a stand-based concept to lower costs and put together a plan to make it happen for the residents of southwest Seattle. The Farm to School Hub in Colorado is launching two pilot projects aimed at 14 school districts and over 100,000 children served real food. The Village Marketplace in Los Angeles (pictured below) learned how to scale their business up and clearly received very practical advice regarding equipment and processes to make the expansion sustainable while paying a very decent living wage to their soon-to-be new employees.
So here was my big takeaway: Living up to it’s name, the conference proved that it is indeed possible to make good food work.
As a society, we may be limited by the bureaucracy and lobbyist-fueled big agro machine that wants us to eat genetically engineered corn-fed beef burgers on corn-based bread and wash it down with a corn syrup laden drink. But as individuals, we all have interests and ideas. And we have the power to choose to act on those interests and ideas. Not everyone can open a community kitchen or a food hub or a stand at a farmer’s market. But anyone can shop at one, volunteer for one, support one.
So make good food work for you. It’s not always simple, but it’s never all that hard.
Pssst. I Don’t Like Oberon.
Not the King of the Faeries. The beer. I don’t like the beer.
Today, Monday the 28th, marked the release of Bell’s Oberon, which has become such an event that bars in Michigan hold Oberon parties, tapping the kegs at midnight — almost as though beer geeks were waiting in line for the latest Justin Beiber album.
I imagine it might seem needlessly contrarian to pick on such a widely loved beer on such a widely loved day, but someone has to mention the obvious: Oberon is one of Bell’s worst beers.
Yes, it’s citrusy. Yes, you can put an orange peel in it. Yes, it’s a wheat beer with a summery flair.
I care not a lick.
Because Oberon isn’t actually refreshing or subtle or graceful or any of the things I look for in a summer beer. It’s rather the opposite: heavy, sweet, overly hopped, yeasty on the finish. Give me a Kapuziner Weissbier or a Ayinger Weisse over Oberon any day of the week. These are beers that have stood the test of time, recipes refined to be more elegant platforms for the esters and phenols that make that uniquely fruity, spicy flavor that I enjoy in a real wheat beer.
Oberon has none of that. It’s simply better than most bad beer.
Of course, you’d never know that from the excitement over today’s release and the catchy signs that Bell’s has printed over the last half decade. Watching the hysteria, you’d think each bottle contained a personal invitation to come party with Beyonce and Jay-Z. But it doesn’t. It’s just beer. And not even great beer. As Todd pointed out on Twitter earlier today, Oberon is generally occupying a tap handle that could be occupied by a better Bell’s product — anything from the Amber to Two-Hearted would be preferable in my book — and that’s a shame, because Bell’s makes some fine beer. Just not this one.
I’m anti-hype, and I’m anti-Oberon. But not the King of the Faeries. Just the beer.
No Place Like Home
A little more than a week ago, I was at Ten Bells in New York, sipping on a fantastic Paolo Bea Sagrantino di Montefalco Secco. It’s one of the most delicious, surprising, flavorful wines I’ve had in the past few months. At the moment, I was so thankful to be in Manhattan, drinking this amazing thing that isn’t to my knowledge available anywhere in Michigan. I kept marveling — at drinks when visiting Pegu Club and Death & Company, at food when visiting Momofuku and Kyo Ya.
But arriving home this past weekend, I was so thankful to be home. I’m convinced that the relief isn’t just because home is where you hang your hat. It’s because I like home — I like Michigan, I like Detroit, I like Ferndale.
While traveling, domestically or abroad, is an awesome experience, the midwesterner in me digs my flat, reasonably priced parcel of Michigan earth, hanging out in my basketball shorts drinking my own wine, making my own food, and not worrying about bumping into any one of 900 people around me on the sidewalk.
I’m not sure why I felt compelled to post that here, but it was such a potent emotional reaction for me arriving home that it seemed to deserve a shout out.
Lab: More Eventuality than Experiment
Needing a cup of tea a few weeks back, I hopped into a new cafe in Ann Arbor and quickly sucked down a cup of Bao Zhong. The tea, a light Taiwanese oolong, had a delightful fruit sweetness, enough so that one might have thought it had been dried with flower blossoms. Most other tea-friendly cafes in Ann Arbor either serve their tea in over-stuffed bags or brew their tea so long or so hot as to leech all the bitter tannins into the first cup.
That was my first introduction to Lab Cafe. Today, I decided on a whim to give it a more thoughtful visit.
A “friend” of the cafe standing on my side of the counter — a regular customer or off-hours employee, I’d guess — recommended a zucchini muffin. I asked where it was from, and the gentleman behind the register, Toby, replied that it was from a bakery in Kerrytown affiliated with Sparrow Market. Anticipating my next question, he followed with, “I don’t know exactly what’s in it; they keep it a secret. But it’s really quite good, and we get them fresh every morning.” The long strands of green vegetable protruding from the top indicated he was telling the truth, and the giant orange hunks of carrot embedded in the cake made by the same folks counted as a second “yea” vote in my mind.
The poured me a chai as well, which was spicier than some and less sweet than most. And I asked about the yogurt. He claimed that they made it there every day, “Well except for the milk. We don’t have cows, of course.” Having just had some less-than-natural yogurt at another place in town, I pressed him a bit and he also commented that the yogurt is sweetened only with pure sugar, no syrups or additives. I tried the four flavors — taro, honeydew, chocolate, and original — and all were delicious, especially the taro.
They serve Intelligentsia coffee, which had previously been favorably described to me by Gourmet Underground member and Great Lakes Coffee roastmaster, James Cadariu. I’m not a coffee drinker, so I can’t comment yet as to the quality of their work, but if the other products are any indication, I’m sure it’s marvelous.
Walking into the cafe is a bit like stepping out of the midwest — very minimalistic industrial design with plywood chairs, bright green accents, white countertops, and short movie clips projected over the wall where the typical Starbucks customer may be looking for a menu. But it’s nonetheless quite warm-feeling. The menus are adorned with instructional clip art (a little outlined French Press for coffee, et cetera) that I’m positive my wife would find adorable, and the floor-to-ceiling windows allow for a ton of natural light.
Coffee, tea, and yogurt cafes ranging from relatively full-service operations like Lab to tiny stands that are little more than closets with self-serve yogurt handles have been a “thing” in a number of cities, especially in places along the California coast, for a while now. So despite the experimental name, Lab is just an extension of that age-old rule that everything reaches the midwest 3-8 years after it hits the coasts.
But regardless, for those of us who work or live in Ann Arbor, it’s a nice mid-day treat, and for other Michiganders looking to occupy a Saturday, Lab might fit nicely into a stroll through the U-M Museum of Art and around the streets of Ann Arbor.
The Boston Cooler, a Detroit Original
In the city where Fred Sanders is credited with inventing the ice cream soda, pharmacist and founder of America’s oldest soft drink, James Vernor, took it one step further with the Boston Cooler. Originally a mixture of sweet cream and spicy, tickle-your-nose Vernor’s ginger soda, the drink eventually morphed into a thick, vanilla ice cream-based blended shake that is still available at Detroit-area Dairy Queens and independent ice cream parlors.
Vernor operated a drug store and soda fountain on Woodward Avenue near what is now known as the Boston-Edison historic district, the main thoroughfare being Boston Boulevard, hence the seemingly disconnected name. Though houses weren’t built and occupied in the area until the early 1900s, the mixture of vanilla ice cream and Vernor’s ginger soda was popular as far back as 1880.
As the name suggests, a Boston Cooler is fantastic on a hot summer day when you might want the weight of plain ice cream balanced out with the mild heat of ginger soda. But it’s plenty good enough as a year round treat. Enjoy one with another Detroit original named for somewhere else – the Coney Island hot dog.
Baudelaire Eyo
My co-blogger and venerable restaurant reviewer Todd will soon have published a column about Jolly Pumpkin’s new storefront brewpub in Ann Arbor. In anticipation of his moutherwatering wordsmithing, I thought it appropriate to post a few notes about a unique beer being served up at that location.
A Weekend in Chippewa County
There’s a marked change in atmosphere where I-75 narrows somewhere north of Bay City. Farmland gives way to mixed hardwood and evergreen, M-23 separates off to the east taking a good portion of RV traffic with it, and gone are the concrete walls that divide road from country.
You’re up north.
Last spring a fire raged across the jack pine forest near Grayling, the sole habitat of the endangered Kirtland’s Warbler. The jack pine is a pioneer species, its small, hard cones opening only when exposed to the heat of flames, thus renewing a matured forest no longer useful to the birds. This is the natural order of things, though a few area homeowners no doubt complained of the nuisance. Today, blackened trunks of the dead stands of trees are still visible from the highway even at dusk while racing north at 75 mph. But it’s no more a graveyard than the rows of brown and dry corn stalks found further south that will be turned back into the soil. The earth eventually swallows itself one way or another.
Farther up flows the Indian River, part of the inland waterway that connects Lake Michigan to Lake Huron and also the range boundary of a small elk herd that still manages to roam the northern Lower Peninsula despite an abundance of predators gamboling about on four-wheelers. Beyond the river, forest, beyond the forest, the Mackinac Bridge, lights strung high along the topmost suspension cable a signpost for sailors traveling the straights both east and westbound.
Crossing the straights of Mackinac by bridge can either be a leisurely coast during mild weather or, when the wind is blowing across the span, a white-knuckled fright fest with every gust. In any case, I never fail to think about the unfortunate fate of Leslie Anne Pluhar and how her memory will forever be tied to a 1987 Yugo that was blown like a leaf to the depths below. It is said that divers searching for Leslie’s body found a junkyard’s worth of vehicles resting on the lakebed. Meanwhile, area Ford dealerships had a run on the new Explorer SUV.
The first thing my seven-year-old daughter, Audra, bid farewell to upon leaving for home after a long weekend in the UP were the dirt roads. I learned the hard way a few years back after a vacation near Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore that a low-slung family wagon was not the most appropriate vehicle for the area. It took three days to lose a piece of the nose and the entire undercarriage engine guard. I drive slower now and avoid the larger stones. If it weren’t for dirt roads there wouldn’t be anywhere to go. We stayed at a house on Piatt Lake, miles and miles of dirt roads back from M-123. Two-tracks and logging trails branch off in all directions. These are fun to explore though treacherous for owners of low-slung family wagons. Naturally, cell towers are not priority in a county with a population lower than the average inner-ring Detroit suburb.
Getting around late at night in the UP requires a different set of navigation skills. Driving directions may include mileage between dirt roads and spotting landmarks like a Smokey Bear sign or the little house with the candle in the window. When you eventually reach your destination it’s handy to have a bottle of whisky nearby. The glass to pour it in is optional.
We awoke Friday morning to a frigid wind blowing hard from the northeast and whipping up a small froth on Piatt Lake. Eager to begin our exploration we made a pot of coffee and a large breakfast of sausage gravy, scrambled eggs and fried potatoes. Soon after breakfast we headed north toward Whitefish Point.
Essentially fictional, the village of Whitefish Point is nevertheless known as the cranberry capital of Michigan. Presumably due to the one, century old cranberry bog two miles down Cemetery Road. The point itself is a compound of museum buildings commemorating the hundreds of ships Lake Superior has swallowed over the years. The main building houses artifacts recovered from wrecks near the point. There are photos and paintings and plaques detailing the last minutes of sailor’s lives. Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is piped into the room. It’s all very reverent and sad. There’s a boathouse, the lighthouse keeper’s quarters, the lighthouse, a snack shop, and a gift shop with all the requisite mementos that people require when they travel to see far away things of interest.
A platform leads over the dunes and onto a coast where time falls away into the surf. Whole trunks of cedar, red pine and birch lay bleached and gray, some with their roots still intact, some forty feet in length, swept in from the Canadian shore and strewn about as if they were twigs. The northeast wind howls here, forcing white-capped rollers five and six feet high to break over flat stone disks of blue and orange that line the margin. Further in, sand the color of the stones drifts against the bones of trees making patterns only nature can. I stand and look where I’ve been as waves of sand obliterate my footprints in minutes as if I were never there.
Three fingers Riley roams these shores. Once a sailor on a doomed freighter heading east with a load of ore, Riley’s body washed ashore near the point and soon froze in the surf ice. A young Coast Guard Petty Officer on duty after the wreck was charged with exhuming poor Riley from his wintry tomb. While chopping through the ice with an ax he unintentionally removed a finger. Nowadays, in the half-light of dusk, Riley searches on.
We escaped the ghosts of the point and headed into Paradise for a whitefish dinner. The wind had eased and a cold rain began to fall. We stopped at the IGA and picked up six packs of Bell’s Two Hearted Ale and Wisconsin’s Stevens Point Brewery Belgian White Ale. One advantage of vacationing in the Eastern UP near where the Two Hearted River flows into Lake Superior is that just about every convenience store and gas station has a six pack of Bell’s for sale. Back at the house I donned my rain gear and roamed the woods with my Labrador, Ginger, until dark, and then relaxed fireside with a few bottles of beer.
A steady rain continued through the morning and eventually eased into sporadic drizzle. After a couple of hours of tossing Ginger’s ball into the lake we drove to the lower falls of the Tahquamenon River. Tannins leached from the cedar and hemlock swamps that drain into the Tahquamenon River color the water amber. Besides being the second largest waterfall east of the Mississippi, the river is perhaps best known from the epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha.
And thus sailed my Hiawatha
Down the rushing Taquamenaw,
Sailed through all its bends and windings,
Sailed through all its deeps and shallows,
While his friend, the strong man, Kwasind,
Swam the deeps, the shallows waded.Up and down the river went they,
In and out among its islands,
Cleared its bed of root and sand-bar,
Dragged the dead trees from its channel,
Made its passage safe and certain,
Made a pathway for the people,
From its springs among the mountains,
To the waters of Pauwating,
To the bay of Taquamenaw.
A boardwalk and a couple of overlooks allow access to two of the five lower falls. From here you can hike a moderately challenging four miles to the upper falls (we conquered this several years ago). There’s also a loop that runs to the campground and along the entry road back to the gift shop. As we studied the trail map Audra went exploring a small stream that coursed down the high banks and under the boardwalk. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her foot slip into the ankle deep water getting a good soaker. She looked around to see if anyone noticed and casually shook the water off her foot and began leading the short but rigorous trail, skirting deep ravines, marching steadily forth beneath the trees.
The trails at the upper falls are paved and terminate at stairs that lead down to two outlooks, one at the brink of the falls, the other downriver. Signs indicate there are about 200 steps between both outlooks. We lost track before those counts could be verified. We suspect the signs are short by a step or two dozen. At any rate, climbing all those stairs made us thirsty. Fortunately for us, rebuilt on the site that was once logging camp #33, and adjacent to the upper falls parking lot, is a log complex containing a souvenir shop and Tahquamenon Falls Brewery & Pub. We settled in for a couple pints of balanced and tasty Falls Tannin Red Ale and whitefish sandwiches to refuel for one last hike.
Just north of the Tahquamenon lies a vast stretch of peat bog. A trailhead two miles down a rutted two track near the lower falls allows access to a network of hiking trails traversing this strange and beautiful ecology. This is moose country. Always the adventurer, Audra discovered a small foot trail that led to a narrow boardwalk over a quaking bog. A quaking bog is formed by a layer of peat about 18 inches thick that rests on top of water. It feels something like a water bed. Growing over this layer of peat are lichens, bright green and blood red mosses, and hundreds of pitcher plants. Another half mile stroll took us to Clark Lake. In the quiet of early evening we felt as if we were the only humans on earth. Not one of us wished to leave this place of peaceful beauty.
Our last night on Piatt Lake I stayed up late hanging around the fire and drinking from a growler of Falls Tannin Red Ale. Unseen animals rummaged in the brush. I wanted to get drunk by roasting the heart of my enemy on a stick and howling into the night but since I had no heart to roast I simply finished the growler and the rest of the Two Hearted besides. In a dim way I felt the sap running through the trees and the pull of the moon on my blood. Here I stood on a piece of country that can change a person, the details of which become a part of him and endure through all the small tragedies of routine. This is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
The next morning we headed south toward home. Obligatory smoked whitefish was procured from a tiny smokehouse in St. Ignace. I splurged on a bag of beef jerky that Ginger promptly crawled into the front seat and ate while we ordered coffee and other goods at the fudgemaker’s in Mackinaw City. After one last stop at Mackinaw Pastie and Cookie Company for a half-dozen frozen pasties the north was behind us but in no way forgotten.
Enjoying the apple harvest
Apple harvest is our favorite time of year. Not only do we ferment several gallons of unpasteurized apple juice from local orchards into cider to drink in the winter, there are all sorts of deals on bulk apples at Detroit’s Eastern Market. This Saturday we purchased a mixed bushel of Granny Smith and Northern Spy for $5 and got the dehydrator cranking.
Wash them good. We like tart apples for drying.
Slice them thick and sprinkle with a little ground cinnamon.
Store them with the rest of your Michigan harvest. They make a fantastic and healthy snack.
