Detroit, Day 1

I’ve been to Detroit a few times and have seen every museum there that I need to visit. Raj has no interest in museums. So when we went to Detroit for the weekend two weeks ago, we had two goals: food and football. Before going on, a special massive thanks to Raj for taking a break from his normal 95% vegetarian lifestyle and for rocking an automobile with GPS to make a spectacular two-day event possible.

Megabus was awesome once again, getting me to Detroit in just under 6 hours, which included a 20 minute break at a truck stop. A car would have been about an hour faster, but I don’t have one. And if I did, it would have cost me more than the $18 bus fare in gas money. I got to Detroit just before 3 in the afternoon on Saturday. I left my hotel at 6:30 in the morning on Monday. In the less than two days in between, I tried pizza from six different places, burgers from five (4 were sliders), bought some excellent candy in Canada where I also made my first visit to Tim Horton’s, and went to the Lions game.

Coney Islands

Raj, who drove in from Cleveland, picked me up at the bus station and we went a mile away to taste a duo of chili dogs.

There may well be no food that Detroiters love more than their chili dogs, which they inexplicably call Coney Islands. These things are all over the city and I don’t fully understand why. They’re not bad – all beef hot dogs in a natural casing and covered with a chili that’s typically made from beef heart – but they’re not too exciting. Perhaps it’s one of those things you need to be raised on to truly crave. The two oldest purveyors in Detroit, Lafayette Coney Island and American Coney Island, were started by two brothers, are fierce rivals, and are right next door to each other so we tried both.

There are fierce loyalists for each place amongst Detroiters. I ate half a dog from each place within three minutes of one another and I can say this: anyone who tells you there’s a major difference between the two is a goddamned liar. Oh, and anyone who tells you either place is must-stop when in Detroit is wrong. Well, they’re kind of right because any culinary tour of Detroit has to include a Coney Island for the sake of thoroughness. But anyone who says you need to try one because they’re delicious is deeply confused.

Buddy’s

The next stop was in Hamtramck to check out the original location of Buddy’s, a classic Detroit pizzeria. For those unaware, Detroit has it’s own style of pizza, one with a thick crust similar to Sicilian or sheet pan pizza, but one that is crisper thanks to some extra fat of some sort worked into the recipe.

Before getting to Buddy’s at around 4:00 in the afternoon, the hot dogs were all I’d eaten all day as I was saving myself for Detroit. I worried that my hunger was playing tricks on me when the pizza arrived because it looked absolutely sensational. It was no mirage; this pizza was outstanding.

The sauce was a little sparse for my tastes and the sausage was merely average, but everything else about the pizza was outstanding. Great crust, loads of cheese, and some extra special greasiness made it every single bit as good as it looks.

Detroit style pizzas are sold in two sizes, four squares and 8 squares. Since there were only two of us, we got the smaller size, but I think if I were to return with 4 people, I’d get two smalls rather than a large. The reason? Every single piece on the smaller pizzas are from a corner, which means they have two sides that get the extra crunch and chew that comes from touching the edge of the pan.

Loui’s

As we continued north on our way to our hotel, the sweet ass Red Roof Inn in Troy, MI ($91 for two nights, including tax!), we stopped off at Loui’s, a second famous purveyor of Detroit style pizza. Check out the awesome decor:

The place is decorated with old wine bottles, the menus look like they haven’t been updated for years, the seats are covered in sweet pleather, and on a Saturday night in the winter, the line was out the door by 5:30. Guess why?

Because the pizza is absolutely exceptional. It had all of the positives of Buddy’s and none of the negatives. There was plenty of sauce and we got pepperoni, which is much more popular in Detroit than Chicago.

It was a mess, but it was a sensational mess. The cheese is not mozzarella, but rather a secret blend that is a shade tangy. It really was a flawless pizza; and definitely one of the best I ate all year.

What really catapulted Loui’s past Buddy’s was the crust, which was chewier, crispier, and greasier than Buddy’s. Every style of pizza has one place that makes it better than anyone else and I’m convinced that for Detroit style, that place is Loui’s.

Bray’s

Detroit has a great tradition of sliders, a food that in Chicago is only available at White Castle. Understand that when I say sliders, I mean traditional thin pieces of crap beef steamed into oblivious and covered with grilled onions and served on a soft, soft roll.

Bray’s is about a block from Loui’s and with that donkey statue on the roof, there was no way I was going to miss it. Unfortunately, the statue may signify what the meat is made out of. More likely, the jackass represents any customer who goes into the place. Everything about this slider was crap. The meat and onions were overcooked and devoid of flavor and the bun was stale. Fortunately, the rest of the sliders I had in Detroit were considerably better.

Oh, Canada!

Completely full of pizza, the night still young, and only one meal remaining, Raj and I had to figure out something to do. We were both recovering from colds, so drinking was out. And as tempting as it was to lie down in the hotel, we willed ourselves out. With nothing we could think of to do in Detroit, we decided to head south (yes, south) to Canada! This idea turned out to be stupid and brilliant.

Stupid, because the line to get into Canada took us about 45 minutes, giving us just about half an hour in Windsor before we had to head back. Brilliant because, in addition to checking out Tim Horton’s (good coffee, mediocre doughnuts) and a Canadian casino, I got to indulge in some awesome candy. See, due to its membership in the Commonwealth, Canada gets access to British candies. Mass produced candy in England is substantially superior to the American equivalent. Canadians also have Macintosh, a toffee I’ve been infatuated with since I first went to summer camp in the Boundary Waters.

The Mars, which is actually much more like our Milky Way, was multiple times better than what we get here in the U.S. All of the flavors, the chocolate, the caramel and especially the nougat, are all significantly more intense and natural-tasting than what we get. Similarly, the Werther’s toffee is richer and and substantially creamier than the American version. But the biggest star of the candy portion of my adventure was the strawberry “yogurt & fruit” candy that’s also made by Storck, the company that makes Werther’s. This hard candy tastes like a bowl of fresh strawberries and cream. Next time I’m in Canada, I’ll be getting multiple bags of this stuff.

Back to the USA

Remember that 45 minute wait to get into Canada? The wait to get back to the U.S. was about two minutes. There was literally one car in front of us and there were 3 or 4 open lanes. After successfully answering the border guard’s trick questions (what state is your car registered in?), we headed to Forest Grill, the restaurant I’d been dreaming of since I first made plans to go to Detroit months ago.

Chef Brian Polcyn is on the national map thanks to his mastery of charcuterie. He is the co-author of the book, Charcuterie, although his co-author Michael Ruhlman is largely referred to as the author for reasons I don’t understand. We don’t, after all, refer to the translator of Homer as being by the translator rather than Homer. I digress. The charcuterie plate comes with three meats, selected by the chef. One of them was cured pork shoulder that was really lightly seasoned. It was exceptionally tender, but not what I was hoping for from the master. Same goes for the paprika-spiced Hungarian salami. But the pork confit, friend and served with tomato confit, was worth the price of the while platter. It was one of those things you eat and are just amazed at how good food can be.

Almost as delicious as the pork confit/tomato confit combination was the lobster, apple and pancetta risotto. I’m not even that big of a risotto fan; I almost never order it. But the combination of flavors forced me to get it and I don’t regret a thing. I ate a little over half of it that night even though I was full beyond belief, and finished it off the next morning when it was even better.

I also had pizza and a burger at Forest Grill, but you’ll have to wait for the reviews on Serious Eats to hear about them. In the meantime, here’s a preview:

One more stop

From the “are you freaking kidding me files” comes one final stop. There’d been so much talk of sliders that we had to stop at Hunter House Hamburgers, one of the best places in town, on the way back to the hotel from the restaurant. It was awesome and because it too will be part of a future Serious Eats post, I will only offer you a preview:

This entry was posted on Monday, December 27th, 2010 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Food, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.