Shiraz Grill: Persian in Unexpected Places

Shiraz Grille is not far from where I grew up - set back in the parking lot, a little off the corner of Breton and 28th Street in Grand Rapids. It's a nice neighborhood, but not a glamorous location. Shiraz has many things. Curb appeal is not one of them.

The interior is well appointed, but also a little awkward, maybe twice as large as it needs to be for any of the crowds I've seen. Bigger is not always better; the nights I've visited have never been more than 50% full - making the lively crowd there for dinner seem a little isolated.

What Shriaz lacks in ambiance it makes up for in taste. Beautifully presented, the food Shiraz puts out is ambitious and absolutely on point, with surprising flourishes and attention to detail.

I've started with a few different things, but the Shirazi Salad is the name of the game here. This is going to be a seriously intense meal - so best to start light, and with mint. The salad - tomato, cucumber, parsley and a simple, fresh mint vinaigrette - leaves you perked up for what's to come. If you end up getting a soup (they vary, I've never had a bad one), you get these little slices of a yeasted flat bread - not altogether dissimilar from the bread pillows at Sultan's in Lansing. The soups are good. The bread is dynamite. My recommendation: Get the Shirazi Salad, and ask for a few pieces of the dynamite toast.

After that, rhe feel of the place starts to warm up - the soul of Shiraz is invisible until you start to eat.

Out comes a little chef's treat - something small and artful, and generally involving a scallion. Wait staff here are attentive, in sync with the kitchen, and no sooner have you polished off the treat, then other pieces start to arrive.

The presentation is not lavish, but it's precise and beautiful for both of the entree styles - Khoreshes (stews) and Kabobs. Both are impressive, but I found the Gheymeh Bodemjon Khoresh particularly lovely. Braised beef works its way through cinnamon, lentils and tomato to come away both deeply savory and complex, with tastes that unfold one-by-one with each bite. I love spices like that - where the taste is tied up in timing of the flavors. Kabobs, well spiced by any measure, lack the depth of the Khoreshes, but are beautifully done. I am especially fond of the Chicken Koubide, a ground, spiced chicken, far superior to the simple tender chicken breast. Basically, you want the kitchen at Shiraz to do as much as possible to the food that you're eating. They do miraculous things.

This goes for the rice as well, where you can get one of a handful of variations. Favorite: Shirin Pol, where barberries and almonds work with the saffron into a tart, almost sweet rice; amazing with the sharper flavors of the entrees.

By the end of the meal, enveloped in the warmth of the food, the coldness of the place is totally evaporated. Shiraz is an ambitious place - not perfect, but pretty damn good - and I sincerely hope they draw in the crowds that they merit.

Grateful: Austin to Boston Foodswap and a New Friend

It's late on a Monday night, and I'm sipping coffee from a brand new Dunkin Donuts mug, thinking how happy I am to be part of an expanding network of food communities.

The latest expansion, and the source of the mug, is through the Austin to Boston Gift Swap, lovingly organized by the Austin Food Blogger Alliance and the Boston Food Bloggers. I was lucky enough to be matched up with the exceptionally thoughtful and interesting Kat Lynch, a blogger and soon-to-be-dietician. Kat is super inspiring - she runs; she lives her dreams; she makes nut butters at home. And she sends awesome gifts.

#ATXBOS: What I Received

Kat's box was stuffed with red-wrapped packages, each topped by a different iconic map of Boston and each containing little treasures, all packed together. Four of the cutest chocolate mice you could imagine, made by Burdick Chocolate in Harvard Square, peeked out of a squat mason jar. A signed picture book, adored by my 6-year old, told the story of Zachary's magic baseball and the Red Sox game it came from. Nut butter, full and fresh and wholesome came with a little note welcoming my family to some of the good stuff to come out of the Eating the Week kitchen. And my Dunkin mug, the one I'm drinking from now, showed up begging to be filled with good coffee. I am lucky to know Kat, and lucky to have gotten to know her better through the Boston goodies we've so enjoyed having in our home (and in our bellies)

#ATXBOS: What I Gave

It's a hard business figuring out what encapsulates Austin food. Breakfast tacos just don't travel that well, and Salt Lick rubs are not particularly useful to a vegetarian. Luckily, I am married to a woman of truly astounding creative inspiration, and together Tracy and I pulled (and stitched) together a box for Kat and her family. Round Rock Honey, from the farmers market near our house seemed like a good place to start; a little bottle of concentrated Austin wildflowers. And pecans, which, at least for me, suggest walks through Hyde Park in the summer, the nuts so plentiful that they crunch underfoot. It's not Austin without the Longhorns, and it's not a Christmas box if there's not chocolate, so Lamme's Candies Longhorns went in next, both dark and milk varieties. Then there's the Texas Olive Ranch Olive Oil, not from Austin, but from a little South of here, which I hadn't planned on at all, but which was just so suprising and lush when I encountered it at the Farmers Market that it had to make it in. Finally, in went a custom hand-made waitress-apron from Fair Morning Blue. Doesn't get much more local than that, since FairMorningBlue is Tracy's Etsy shop, with production facilities in our dining room.

I love being part of this community of food, love seeing the passion and openness that people on both sides of the exchange have given. I love the chance this process gave for some real collaboration with Tracy - who in addition to making the apron was the woman behind the camera for all these photos and the fingers behind the packaging. And I love that I got a chance to make a connection with someone living and working and writing out East. I travel every week, but rarely do I get to see into the life of the locals. This experience gave me a little taste of that. For all of these things, I'm grateful. Thank you to the AFBA, to Kat, and to Tracy for  making the Grubbus/Eating The Week swap such a pleasure.

Delicious Comes in a Box: La Boite Cafe (CLOSED)

La Boite was selling dynamite pastries out of a shipping container before shipping container construction was cool. They've recently expanded to two boxes - one on South Lamar a few blocks south of the Highball, and the other on Congress, just across the street from the Capitol.

First off, the container. Not the easiest thing to heat or cool, shipping containers are otherwise near zero footprint - there's millions of them floating around out there, retired from their original gig, now quietly rusting and taking up space. La Boite was at the vangaurd of a movement to upcycle these containers, and founded on the idea that you could sell good food out of a beautiful, if compact space without using up a bucket load of finite resources. The box places them in the middle ground of the trailer food scene - La Boite is not going anywhere in a hurry, but they're also not exactly brick and mortar establishment. Austin, meet pop up food.

The container is cool, but it's just, well, a box. The good stuff is the baked goods therein. For La Boite, that means baked goods from Barrie Cullinan. "Wait", you ask, "THE Barrie Cullinan? The one who was named one of the 10 best bakers in the country by Bon Appetit?" Yes. That Barrie Cullinan. La Boite is one of a very few outposts in town where you can get her goods, and they come in a very small, but very tasty selection. The standouts for me are the almond croissants and the macarons. The croissants are covered with powdered sugar and slivered almonds, and sport a million layers of butteriness inside. They hint of marzipan, and there is the faintist suggestion of a filling, but the essence of these are scented air and butter. The macarons are bolder than others I've had around town, almost iridescent in both color and flavor. When they have fruit flavors, you get a jolt of concentrated, jam-like essence. When it's salted caramel (like they had today), the salt is on equal footing with the sweet, balancing a huge amount of flavor. The salted caramel and chipotle chocolate were my faves of the current crop. The pastries are less fussy and more subtle than the also-amazing but totally-different Baguette et Chocolate, but they are on the same scale of delicious. They also make lovely sandwiches, and a handful of other pastries that rotate in and out, but to me the love is in the croissant. OK: Truth be told, I am a little nervous about a eating a sandwich from a place that has no kitchen, but people tell me they're awesome.

Coffee is good, but relative to nearby knock-your-socks-off options like Medici and Once Over Coffee, not a reason for a visit. The beans are from local roaster Casa Brasil, and they've developed a custom Mexican blend in part based on the limited carbon footprint compared to shipping beans from further away. I like the sentiment, but they'd do better with a nice pour-over rig or a french press set up and some fresh ground Cuvee.

In a town where empty lots were filled with food trucks, and are now starting to empty all over again as the trailers start to falter, I hope La Boite sticks around. It's a place that, despite its mobility, feels rooted in Austin in the simple goodness of the food, the optimism of the environmental mission, and the strong link to the local food community.

Worth noting: There's amazing stuff being done with shipping containers all over now (like this gorgeous house, or the pop-up retail mall in London, or, somewhat less amazing, the proposed Seattle Starbucks).

It Was a Dark Knight: Dinner at the Knight Cap

Nestled between a dive bar and a strip club and across from the minor league ball park, The Knight Cap, in their own words, are purveyors of Liquids and Solids for Beefeaters. It says so. Right on their sign.

Walk in, and you are enveloped in a tiny dark cave of overstuffed vinyl booths and table top candles. The ambiance suggests a dive bar all dressed up for a big night out. Everything is clean, and in good repair, but shows no other indication of being touched since the place opened in 1969. In short: this place is a bucket load of awesome.

There are maybe a dozen tables, and a few stools at the bar. Despite its pint size, we were still greeted warmly by the maitre d', who took our coats, the bus boy, who placed the napkins upon our laps, and our young waitress, who very, very slowly told us about the innovations the bar was capable of. I thought she was fantastic, but my table compatriots were wishing for a little more speed.

Disclaimer: pictures on this post are of suspect quality due to the dark-of-night interior.

We asked for a wine list, and received a scrap book. I'm not making this up. On some pages there were wine labels with prices and notes. On others, cut out pictures of wine bottles entire. And here's where things start to get a little interesting: the scrap book is full of really fantastic wines. Stag's Leap. Cakebread. Jordan. Silver Oak. Mt. Veeder. Page after page after page. All big names, high productions, but these are not wines you expect when you walk in the door.

The food is similarly ambitious. We started with crayfish hush puppies. A little under-spiced, and a little over-dense, but engaging anyway, clearly fresh, with big chunks of crayfish, and a serious crunch. The gelatinous sauce that accompanied them had a little kick to it, but was too goopy to take seriously.

The soups that followed the hush puppies were, to me, highlight of the meal. I had a gumbo, rich and spicy and fabulous. The spice wasn't subtle exactly, a giant wallop of louisana hot, but the texture and the flavors in the gumbo were just dead on. Andouille sausage for the win.

The salads - and I use the term "salad" loosely here - were not as impressive. More accurately, this was a plate of crumbled bacon atop a small lake of dressing, alongside cucumbers. I love my dressing and my bacon as much as the next guy, but this was overkill.

The menu is classic fancy when it comes to entrees - mostly variations on lobsters and steaks. Not cheap, but not all that far off from other places in town that go for this kind of fare. Filet Mignon was a beautiful cut of meat, well prepared and completely unadorned. The texture was a little grainier than some of the silky smooth filets I've had before, but it was tender and cooked a perfect medium rare. By this point, I was too stuffed to finish the potato or the mushrooms that arrived on the side, but they made a nice visual.

I've had better steaks, and far better salads, even, on occasion, better gumbo; but this food, spiced with the historical brilliance of the experience, is among the best I've had in Lansing.

Killer Doughnuts. Perfect Apples. A Little Shlock. Robinette's.

On a brilliant blue-sky day just after Thanksgiving, my extended family and I loaded ourselves into a couple of Subarus and made our way to the institution that is Robinette's Apple Haus, on the far north side of Grand Rapids. Robinette's has been serving fresh cider and doughnuts since 1973, and the family has been growing apples since 1911.

Today, Robinette's has spread into a small empire: a barn-sized gift shop selling all manner of occasionally charming schlock; a winery; store-branded popcorn, salad dressings, candies, and syrups; a bread bakery; a fudge-emporium. Throughout, there are constant signs of a place that has grown by addition without edit, to the point that there are no less than 11 typefaces featured on the signage at the front entrance. It's a kind of down-home country chaos that has an edge of interstate-tourist-shop overload.

But the core of the operation, at least as far as I'm concerned, is still apples, cider and doughnuts.

Apples started the ball rolling here, and they are still to die for. Like just about any other produce, apples are best when recently harvested, never trucked, and grown by people who have been growing them for generations. I bought a 1/2 peck of the best Braeburns I've ever eaten, a whole different class of rich and sweet and tart than the Braeburns that make their way here from New Zealand. They've got a half-dozen varietals, all 8 bucks for a half peck. A steal.

The apples not pretty enough to make their way into the retail or wholesale side of the business make their way into cider the old fashioned way, mashed and then squeezed between wooden pallets by an enormous, bright red press. I remember seeing this press in action on school field trip some elementary school year, and I remember that it was 30 feet tall and very scary. It turns out, returning now, that it's not. But it's still pretty damn intimidating. Cider is served in the store hot or cold, totally unadorned, and with all the sweet richness of the apples they grow. It may be the blend, or the freshness, but this is really extraordinary cider.

And the doughnuts. They make a few types, but there's just the one that's worth the time: the cinnamon-sugar. These are cake doughnuts, with all the delicate crumb and moistness that good cake doughnuts have, but they are so light and airy that they eat almost as if they are yeasted and raised, rolled in sugar and cinnamon. If you manage to get one while they are hot, they will change your life, waking you in the middle of the night with intense unrequited longing. Room temp, they're really good, but the brilliance dims a bit.

So three things that totally steal the show. Three amazing successes, exactly the same as they've been forever: apples, cider, doughnuts. And that's where my sizable love for this place ends: the expansions are something to be endured and ignored if possible: the fudge contains as many chemicals and as much corn syrup as something you might pick up at the grocery store; the chocolate icing on the doughnuts comes from a bucket shipped in from who-knows-where. I don't know about the salad dressings or the popcorn - they may very well be brilliant - but to me they chip away at the simple supremacy of the apple-cider-doughnut trinity.

All that extra stuff doesn't kill Robinettes for me. In point of fact, in barely puts a dent in it. Put the distractions out of mind for a bit, get yourself geared up for some serious country charm, partake in the glorious trinity of sweet-autumn goodness in a place that feels like they could have invented it.

The Gilmorazation of Grand Rapids: Red Jet Cafe

The Gilmore Collection has taken root in West Michigan, slowly expanding an empire of upscale restaurants in gorgeous renovated settings, and adding a cosmopolitan sheen to a town that's been steadily reinventing itself for decades. Their restaurants are not the best in town, and I don't think they ever set out to be. But they are near the top of the heap, predictable, generally well managed, and heavily invested in getting the details right.

Red Jet Cafe is in the middle of the Gilmore pack - somewhere between the placid elegance of Rose's and the corporate-edgy Bobarinos. Like many of the other buildings in the collection, Red Jet is renovation project. History here is a little murky, but near as I can tell, this was built as a bank sometime in the early part of the last century, was converted over to the Creston Library in the 60s or 70s, and in 2007 began life as Red Ball Jet Cafe. Legal protests from the remnants of the Red Ball Jets athletic shoe company forced a name change in 2009, when it dropped the Ball and gained the name it currently holds. The building is gorgeous and modern against a backdrop of early 20th century elegance.

Red Jet sports an interesting menu - there's a lot to do with coffee, and breakfast, and wood fired pizzas, and smoothies, and crepes, some of which are on the menu, and some which aren't. And also salads. And booze. To add to the confusion, the sign still says Red Ball, and the web site says Red Jet Coffeehouse. I love all of these things, but even so, there's a lack of identity to this place that is less than ideal - it's as if the menu was designed by a committee filled equally with society types and neighborhood hipsters.

That said, what they do here, they do over the top, and they do it well. The smoothies are excellent - more like milkshakes than anything, but I'm not arguing. My eldest daughter ordered a crepe that would make the French cringe, but was very tasty - filled with scrambled eggs, sausage, maple syrup, and mozzarella. French toast here means a block of custard-coated brioche, covered in berries, drenched in Michigan maple syrup. The pizza I ordered was also well-executed, if a little less showy, with a crust that gave general appearances of being made in house and a subtle, fresh sauce. The one real miss was the arugla/artichoke dip. The dip: awesome. The bagel chips provided for dipping: sad. Would have loved a fresh sliced baguette instead.

Service was spotty, and a bit slow, but the waitstaff was friendly and engaging when they showed up. A little  trouble remembering to bring the check, but given the beautiful spread of the space, and the breeze on a Grand Rapids summer afternoon, waiting was not such a painful experience.

I have seen some anger directed at Gilmore for his particular brand of corporate shellac, but I think the good here far outweighs the bad. These are good restaurants, a preservation of Grand Rapids history, and a strong benchmark against which other local restaurants will be measured.

 

85%: The Peached Tortilla

The Twitterverse has a lot of good things to say about the Peached Tortilla. People swear allegiance to the Bahn Mi slider. They seek it out in whatever office complex parking lot it has paused. They speak of the reinvention of the taco. All that is to say that perhaps my experience was tainted by the sky-high expectations that kind of press creates. Because my experience was, in word, awful.

Not everything was bad. The Truck itself is cute, with an ambitious asian/mexican fusion menu and combos cleverly constructed to encourage experimentation. The people are efficient but friendly, and they seem like they have the routine down cold.

Beyond that, things started to fall apart. The "speciality lemonade" promised hand made goodness mixed with seasonal fruit. It delivered the distinct chalky aftertaste I have only ever tasted with the powdered crap we used to mix with water and call lemonade when I was a kid. My wife and I each took a sip, looked at each other, and said at the same time: "Countrytime."

Bad lemonade isn't easily forgivable, but this place has legions of fans. We soldiered on. The food arrived, again with great promise and flourish in presentation. We had Chicken Satay tacos, BBQ Brisket tacos, Bahn Mi sliders, and a little basket of fries. The tacos were well proportioned and sported neatly applied wiggles of a couple of different sauces. But at the first bite, there were signs of trouble. The meat in all three items was luke-warm, raising big red "keep the hot stuff hot" flags in my head. The brisket was pulled into dry clumps under the thin, sweet sauce. The "creamy coleslaw" that accompanied it was matchstick carrots and thinly sliced cabbage. Despite a pretty awesome corn tortilla, the combination was so bland and off temperature that it was nearly inedible. The Bahn Mi slider suffered even more from temperature problems and sported essentially the same construction as the brisket taco, with the carrot slaw re-purposed to provide a little asian spark. And again, those matchstick carrots showed up on the sizable chunks of barely marinated chicken that was trying to sneak by as Satay. This was the worst of the mess, the kind of  weak Thai flavors that live in those little jarred bottles of curry paste at the grocery store. The fries were floppy - nice to look at, but limp and unblanched.

Tracy summed it up best on departure. When I asked her what she thought she said "I 85% hated it. 15% I just didn't like very much." Here's to hoping it was an off day, or an off order, but I won't be back to find out.

Side note: while beginning to lose faith in the Food Truck movement, I am not giving up yet: The Jalopy and The Evil Wiener rock hard enough to carry the load for them all.