modern coastline

HEY, BABY, IT'S THE FOURTH OF JULY

2010-07-08T10:26:00.003-04:00

The Fourth of July is an important holiday for rugged patriots like Stavros and me. In fact, any four-day weekend is an important holiday for us. This Independence Day was looked forward to more than ones in years previous because of the very generous invitation of our friend Angelina Langoustine. Remember her?

We got a bit of a late start due to the numerous errands we had to run before we could leave town. It was already a scorcher at noon when we finally got on the road and I pressed the odometer.

“Only a hundred and fifteen miles to go,” said I as we got on the freeway headed east.

Angelina’s parents own a house on a big piece of land in Harbor Beach, which is about 40 minutes from Lexington, in the thumb. Her father’s family owned 80 acres of land there at one time and were prominent members in town. Of course this was not surprising to learn when one casts one’s mind back to the Langoustine home we visited last fall.

This house was not as grand, but the property upon which it sat was a jaw dropper. Angelina told us to look out for a huge old red barn on our left and a homemade sign reading “Moonshadow” on our right.

“This is it,” I informed a slumped-over Stavros, who had finally tired of air drumming to The Kinks and fallen asleep.

We turned down the most perfect wooded, curving driveway anyone has ever carved into the land. It twisted and turned and we drove though light and dark patches for about 200 feet before we came to the house. A Ferrari sat in the driveway and three or four other cars were parked on the gravel beside it.

“Look at that car!” whispered Stavros as we approached the house.

Angelina flung open the door and we met her parents and an aunt and uncle. The house was cool and filled with the sorts of objets d’art we saw at the Romeo house. A column from an Afghan mosque stood next to an Eames lounge chair and ottoman. Fabulous ceramic masks and Fiestaware sat casually on shelves. Folk art of every nationality hung on the walls alongside Angelina’s mother’s paintings and her father’s drawings of cars. A former art school professor, Angelina’s mother is a 65-year-old version of Angelina. Her father, a retired designer for GM, is a tall and elegantly athletic man. They went back to chatting and Angelina showed us to our quarters in the walk-out basement.

Our friends Alice Gabor and Chauncy Drysdale had come up for the weekend too and were stationed out in the boathouse a few feet from the beach. Stavros and I put on our bathing suits and slid open the doorwall and stepped out onto the lawn.

Imagine, if you will, an acre of beautifully soft, green grass, bordered on both sides by tall pines, oaks, bushes, and grasses. Landscaped areas with fancy-looking ceramic planters or a wooden swing and pergola tucked here and there—basically the sort of place you would expect to see in Martha Stewart’s Living. And here we were, my darling Stavros and I, looking at each other in disbelief.

“Come on!” yelled Angelina, as I walked gingerly down the rocky beach to the water.

“I’m trying—it hurts!”

“Where are your WATER SHOES?” she said, sounding very aggrieved.

“What the fuck are ‘water shoes’? You didn’t tell me to bring water shoes!”

“Use those!” she said, pointing to one of a few pair of hideous rubbery perforated slippers.

I slipped them on and walked down the beach. If you are imagining sand, stop. Lake Huron is rock city. Not like how Detroit is Rock City. I mean there are a zillion rocks of all shapes and sizes covering the floor of the lake. It would have been impossible to traverse without the water shoes. Plus the rocks are all covered with a rusty-colored slime that Stavros already managed to smear all over the back of his shorts. I resisted making any feces-related jokes out of respect for Angelina’s hospitality, and tiptoed into the water and we all horsed around for a while.

After about an hour of flopping around on inner tubes and giant, inflatable floaty things, we were ready for dinner. Back at the house, Angelina’s family was preparing to head to the house on the other side of the woods where an aunt and uncle lived. They were holding a small memorial service for Angelina’s father’s cousin, who had died unexpectedly the previous week. We waited for them to leave then the four of us had dinner on the screened-in porch deck (which was twice the size of my living room, only with 20-foot coved wooden ceiling and much nicer furniture). Pine trees and bamboo were on two sides and the view of the yard leading to the beach was on the other. It was so spectacular I forgot about every ounce of stress...

...I’d been holding onto for the last few months and totally relaxed.

An hour or so later, people began returning from the memorial service. Angelina came out to the porch and told us about it, occasionally wiping tears from her eyes. She said they’d spilled his ashes into the lake he’d loved so much and that the sun shone on them as they dispersed, warm waves rolling in to embrace them. I almost cried myself at this description so thank God we decided to go build a bonfire and get drunk.

Stavros, Alice, and Chauncy are all wonderful singers and so they played guitar and sang for our entertainment for hours. Soon it devolved into a request situation.

“Play 'Cathy’s Clown'!” I demanded, gargling more wine.

The bonfire and the wind were keeping the mosquitos away and soon it was after midnight. Angelina’s sister Augusta and her husband Shawn had gone up to the house so the five of us sat staring at the dark lake and the dazzling constellations above. We could see the Milky Way, satellites drifting here and there, a shooting star—I’m not kidding, it was nuts. Angelina told us that the night before, they’d seen a UFO.

Suddenly a very hoarse Stavros interrupted our murmuring.

“What the fuck is that?!” There was fear in his voice and he pointed to the horizon.

We all stood and squinted at the fiery blob at the line that divided earth and sky.

“What is that? What the…is it a bomb? What can that be? Is something on fire? Something’s on fire! What is it!” Stavros went on like this in borderline terror for a few seconds and we all staggered down closer to the water’s edge for a better look. As we watched, the glowing shape took on a circular form and rose higher above the water line. It gained texture and size and finally someone said, “It’s the moon. Oh my God, that’s the moon.”

We stared for what felt like ages. The moon…how had we never seen the moon look like this before? How could we not have known the moon could look like this? Stavros could not get over it. I won’t suggest that he was as…um…moved…as this guy, but only because Stavros was not on acid.

It was around this time that I forgot I was standing amid 5000 large boulders and attempted to turn and cross the beachfront to return to my chaise. I instantly fell down, tripping over a plastic kayak and landing directly on my left shin atop a huge rock. Since it felt like I had broken my leg, we decided that perhaps it was time to pack it in, so Stavros and Angelina and I retired to the basement and Alice and Chauncey left for the boathouse.

The next day was filled with ATV rides, swimming, eating, and cooking. Angelina took me through the trails in the woods on the ATV pointing out geographical highlights (“…and this is where we used to have a bee farm until they all died of a virus…here is the bench I was sitting on when I decided to break up with Ramon….that is my uncle’s cigar-smoking lean-to…etc) and then her father taught me how to drive it, so I took Stavros out and pointed out the same spots.

Angelina became very ill-tempered around this time and cast aspersions on my ability to operate the ATV. A few quick, expertly maneuvered spins around the boathouse and some awesome stunts made her eat her words.

As this day was the actual Fourth of July, there was a barbecue and fireworks show planned. Alice and Chauncy had to leave so Stavros and I took our things to the boathouse and we all had one last dinner together.

More of Angelina’s relatives had shown up so we were up to 11 adults and 3 children at this time. The two youngest kids were 5 and 8, Susannah and Max. Earlier that day, the two of them had been out on the water with us and for a while, Max and I were the sole occupants of the giant floaty thing. We lay on our backs and bobbed around and I said, “Hey Max. You know what pigs do on the Fourth of July?”

“What?”

“They do the in-de-pen-dance.”

He looked at me blankly. “HEY CHICKENS!” he yelled in the direction of Angelina and Alice, then jumped off the giant floaty thing and swam away from me.

After a fabulous dinner of pasta salad, beet salad, cole slaw, hamburgers, chicken, and wine, we all dragged our lawn chairs into position for Angelina’s legendary fireworks display. Next to me sat all the children and beyond them, at the picnic table in front of the firepit, sat their parents. Angelina and her father Crispin were down on the beach setting up. Angelina’s mother Jenna sat alone on a wooden swing behind us.

Shawn, Angelina’s brother in law, was very fussily arranging s’mores for the kids. There was a lot of announcing of rules as to quantity (“Only three s’mores each!”) that I overheard. It turned out Max and Susannah’s cousin was thought to have a weight problem that could be controlled by the withholding of chocolate but with virtual unlimited access to marshmallows and graham crackers. I don’t have kids but this seemed odd. Although this kid was a little busty for 11 so what do I know?

Finally Angelina began lighting the fireworks. These were not your party-store sparklers. These were real, commercial-grade fireworks. Some of them were more impressive than others. The “Peace on Earth” model, for example, was a small cardboard globe on a stand that spun around emitting sparks and “reports,” finally exploding completely. I don’t know what says “Peace on Earth” any more convincingly than total destruction of the planet, do you?

We lay back in our chairs and oohed and aahed appropriately while the kids squirmed and ate marshmallows and Shawn tended to the bonfire, which amounted to a lot of poking and adding of pine branches and tumbleweeds. The additions always resulted in an instant conflagration that temporarily revitalized the fire.

What happened next can be seen here. Skip ahead to about :43 if you’re in a hurry.

Apparently, Shawn had thrown one of the “empty” fireworks boxes into the bonfire. The kids were all rattled after this and Jenna actually returned to the house. Shawn left the picnic table and came and sat next to Stavros, cracking open a beer and muttering, “So much for my father of the year award.” I felt kinda sorry for him.

Angelina and Stavros and I decided that we had to see that moon again so after everyone else went inside, we set up a repeat camp at the picnic table and listened to Angelina’s iPod. Unfortunately, the wind was not very strong that night and the mosquitos went gangbusters on all of us. They could not stop the moon, however, and Angelina told us the story of her recently deceased uncle’s honeymoon canoe trip down the moonbeam with his new bride. This was so romantic and surreal that we all just stared at the beam of light on the waves for a long time.

In the morning, Angelina’s parents left and so she and Stavros and I went out for a farewell brunch at a place they call “Eats” across the street. It’s really called “Let’s Eat Here,” or something equally as strange. Possibly a former farmhouse, it offered two AUCE buffets—soup and salad and breakfast. Angelina and I both got the salad bar and Stavros got breakfast. I attempted to drape my body entirely over the a/c vent next to my chair as it was approaching 125 degrees in the shade that day.

Harbor Beach’s strangest family sat next to us. A man of about 30, a little girl who was about 5, maybe, and a teenaged girl who looked about 16.

The little girl was incessantly slapping at or pinching or grabbing or otherwise hassling the man, all while keeping up a nonstop nonsensical sing-song. Sometimes she inserted the word “blah” in place of all others in a real song, such as “E I E I O.” Example, “Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah!” The man kept wrestling her back into her chair and saying, “Stop it! Stop it!” and she’d squirm away and grab his face or something from his plate and start up a new song. During all this, the teenaged girl sat picking at a platter of chicken strips and fries and reading a hardcover edition of Twilight and totally ignoring them.

Every now and then she would look up with a vacant expression and say nothing. Neither the man nor the child spoke to her, either, although at one point when she was in the restroom, the little girl asked, “Where’s Mommy?” This really freaked me out because I thought the man was the father of the two of them.

It was a lonely affair back at the Langoustine compound. With the parents gone, the house seemed empty and silent. We packed up the car and hugged Angelina. I pressed the odometer again and my darling Stavros and I drove home.

He is still talking about the moon.

STAVROS'S BIRTHDAY -OR- WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE FARM?

2010-06-23T16:47:00.011-04:00

Last week marked the second annual hitting-of-the-thumb by Stavros and Eunice. We decided to beat the weekend crowd and set out at the peak of rush hour on Thursday afternoon, without so much as a bottle of water between us. That afternoon we’d had front-row seats at the Tigers game so we were good and fried as we set out on 696 headed east with every other sweaty, crabby slob in town.

By 6:30 we rumbled down the driveway of the White Feather Motel. This is a favorite spot of mine. It sits in the middle of a really sort of cute trailer park on a bluff overlooking Lake Huron.

The beach there is private and there are a ton of rocks of all sizes to examine, throw, step on awkwardly, stand atop, break in half, or put in your pocket to bring home. Stavros showed off his rock-skipping skills after dinner and they were quite mad. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We checked in after being told by the proprietress that she’d only charge us for a one-bed room if we promised not to mess up the second one.

“Which one you want to sleep in?” asked my dearest, after setting down our bags on the bed farthest from the door.

“This one,” I answered, pointing to the other one, and Stavros immediately whisked the bodily-fluid encrusted cover from atop it and flung it into the corner.

I spread the cover we’d brought from home over the sheets and went into the small bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. The proprietress and her friend were just outside the window grilling and smoking and talking in the grassy yard between the motel and the trailer park.

“Ready?” I asked the now fully supine Stavros, who lay atop the pink bedspread, checking email.

We crossed the yard, nodding hello to the proprietress and her associate as a car pulled up next to ours. As we got in ours, a man got out of the other, leaving a woman inside, smoking and waiting. They looked like the up north biker version of Jack Sprat and his wife. He nodded to the proprietress and continued around the corner to his room. I tried not to think about them but failed.

“Probably forgot his piece,” I said as we backed out, looking away.

Dinner took place at Cadillac House, famous for its…for its being one of three places to eat in Lexington. I ordered the broasted chicken and Stavros had the “Rodeo Burger,” which was a burger with some sort of barbecue sauce and an onion ring or something not at all related to rodeos. I’ve been to a lot of rodeos in Idaho and they don’t have anything like that so I don’t really know what they were talking about.

My broasted chicken was served with what the waitress described as a “real light pilaf” and broccoli. We watched Jeopardy and along with the six or seven other patrons, shouted out the answers. Well, when I say “we,” I mean Stavros. I knew exactly one answer, the title of a Kingsley Amis book. I pretended to think it was a boring show after that but it didn’t stop Stavros from participating.

“KRUSCHEV!” he yelled.

“OREL HERSHISER!” etc.

After dinner we went back to the beach by our motel and threw the aforementioned rocks around, stood on them, stepped on them, put them in our pockets, broke them in half and so on until I became afraid that the sun would go down and we’d be unable to grope our way up the right sandy staircase and get lost in the trailer park. Back in our room, we had a final toast to Stavros’s birthday and settled into the very uncomfortable double bed and turned on the 10” tv. As luck would have it, a marvelously terrible movie was on, Stephen King’s The Langoliers.

I almost felt like it was my birthday!

The next morning was perfect. Stavros even said as much as he stepped outside with our bags. We only had the room for one night so we had to amscray by 10:30.

“It’s perfect!” Stavros declared, as he stepped into the sunshine and I folded the pink blanket and packed up toiletries. “Where is there to have breakfast?” he asked.

“Wimpy’s,” I said.

“Wimpy’s? I don’t want Wimpy’s for breakfast!” he whined.

“Well, I don’t know where else there is. I mean…that’s really all there is.”

“Are you telling me there is only one breakfast place here? What about down that one road?”

“There isn’t anything down there. There might be breakfast at the golf course.”

To humor him I drove to the golf course. There was a big sign advertising lunch starting at 11 AM.

“Lunch,” he grumbled, “I’d rather have lunch anyplace but a golf course.”

“Golf courses have good diners,” I said, although I have been to this particular one and it is gross.

“What is ‘auce’?” I asked, as we drove back toward Wimpy’s and passed an Elk’s Club-type place advertising an “auce breakfast.” It was the second sign I’d seen in Lexington for this mysterious “auce.”

“I don’t know,” said Stavros. “Is there someplace down the other way?”

“Not unless you go way, way down there and then it’s just some shitty little place. Auce must be a kind of fish,” I decided, turning onto the road back toward town.

AUCE

Stavros pulled out his iPhone and after a few seconds announced: “Auce: All U Can Eat.”

“Oh, my God, ‘a kind of fish!’” I said.

“Forget it,” Stavros said in defeat as we passed the corny-looking “A Night To Remember” B & B, “There’s nothing down here.”

One U-turn and two Wimpy’s breakfasts later, we were out on the sidewalk again, the day gaping open before us like an Auce swimming toward a nightcrawler on a hook.

“Let’s go see if we can find the farm,” suggested Stavros.

“Okay!” said I, always up for an adventure, especially it involves farms and country drives.

As a child, Stavros and his family had spent summer vacations at his maternal grandmother’s house north of Lexington. Upon her husband’s death, she’d sold it to a lottery winner and that was the end of the Papanasticiou summers in the thumb. Stavros hadn’t been there for 22 years and was dying to see it. So was I. My childhood in Idaho was spent surrounded by farms and so this felt personal to me, too.

After heading straight up for about 30 minutes, we came to the not-so-prettily-named Snay Road.

“Everything’s German up here,” Stavros told me, consulting his phone for a map. “All these roads have names like that. Look at that house,” he pointed to the right at a strange-looking brick house in a style I’d never seen. “That’s from the mid-1800s, “ he said.

“Weird,” I commented, noticing that we were the only car in any direction.

We bounced along for a few minutes and made a right turn, then peeled our eyes for Abend road. Bear in mind there were no actual road signs. There were small pieces of wood or metal nailed to poles and no particular effort was made to trim trees around them or place them where a passer-by might notice them without much effort. Finally, after turning around and doubling back few times, we found it. I turned and we drove slowly toward what looked like a farm house with a few outbuildings on the other side of the road. I could almost feel Stavros holding his breath.

“This isn’t it. I don’t get it,” he said as we passed a couple dozen cows who all turned to look as we did. I was surprised that they took notice of us. When I was little, my dad (in Idaho, where there are a lot of cows) told me that cows were so dumb that if they were in pain, they knew it hurt, they just didn’t know where. I’m sure he was just being funny, because there was something about the cows all looking up at us, one by one, that made me doubt him. They didn't seem dumb.

We pulled over at the end of the road. Since there was no other vehicle within miles I figured we could hang out there as long as it took for Stavros to get his bearings. He looked around then looked at the map. Then he did it again.

“Let’s turn around.”

We headed past the cows, who all looked up at us again, and bounced in the dust back the way we came. We decided that Abend Road must not go all the way through, and we had to hit it from another street.

Finally, about a mile due east of the Abend Road cows, we spied a lonely looking farmhouse surrounded by barns and tall grasses. There was no actual farm here, that is, no crops, no animals; the land wasn’t even tended to. This had to be it.

The house itself was not the house Stavros remembered. It looked like they had added onto it then covered the whole thing with aluminum siding. In addition, it looked totally abandoned. We got out of the car.

I walked down what used to be the driveway but what was now just part of the overgrowth. Stavros stayed near the car. It was very windy and I could hear a metal clanging somewhere nearby. It was like being in Children of the Corn. I went into the backyard where I saw a well pump. The metal clanging was coming from some corrugated siding on the most derelict looking barn I have ever seen. I was absolutely dying to go inside but was pretty sure Stavros wouldn’t let me and also that there would be corpses inside. So instead I tried to capture the horror of it on film. It’s too windy to hear the clanging.

These are the other barns.

Stavros was pretty shell-shocked when we left. I think he had accepted the fact that his family no longer had the farm, but he wasn’t prepared to find it forgotten and left behind, the old brick house transformed into a modern-day mess of aluminum siding with blankets for curtains and grass up to your hoo-ha all around it.

The ride home seemed much shorter. We stopped at a junky gas station past Port Sanilac for water and listened to the worst country music ever recorded all the way back to Lexington.

On the way up to the farm, I made a reservation at a very nice B & B I’d stayed at before with my family. After humping our stuff up the stairs to our room, we laid down for a while and looked at the pictures of the farm then took a nap.

When we woke up, we were starved. We decided to have dinner at the “fancy” place down by the water called the Smackwater Grille. This place is part of a block of establishments owned by some guy who is clearly the Donald Trump of Lexington. He owns the fancy pizza place at the end, the gourmet food shops in between, and the theater attached, which features such acts as the singer from Santana, tribute bands, and the singer for Santana. They waiter handed us a schedule as he showed us to our wrinkled black tablecloth-covered table. I noticed that there was a Michael Jackson tribute show that evening entitled “What is Bad?” or something.

“We should go to this,” I said excitedly to Stavros, tapping the flyer.

When the waiter arrived with our drinks and we asked how much the show was.

“$35-$50,” he said without batting an eyelash.

“Well,” I laughed, “Okay. Maybe.”

People in Lexington but really be desperate for entertainment. There was one show we really would have liked to have seen, but it had been the previous weekend.

The good news is that the food turned out to be very good. I was surprised, on account of the tablecloth and all. Stavros got a steak:

...and I ordered pasta puttanesca.

Because this is turning out to be the longest post in Modern Coastline history, I will abbreviate the remaining highlights of the trip:

• After-dinner drinks at Cadillac House. There was a strong odor of urine in the air.

• Breakfast at B & B included large sausages and Swedish Pancake, a custardy pie thing.

• When we returned home, we that we missed the most awesomest storm in history and that power had been out at my house for at least 12 hours.

It was a good trip.

A PICKLE VICTORY

2010-05-23T15:38:00.000-04:00

MAE'S: MAEBE NOT

2010-04-20T14:15:00.005-04:00

While never fans of the original Anna’s, Stavros and I were nonetheless anxious to try the new breakfast/lunch place it became following “Anna’s” death.

Mae’s opened weekend before last to mixed reviews from our friends. So this past Sunday, we decided to forego our usual New York Bagel brunch and try it.

We could tell as we approached that not much had been done to the décor. Which is fine; the place was a time capsule of 1955 as it was. It was packed and about eight people stood just inside the door waiting for a table. Normally this is good but since there are a few tables just inside the door, I expect the people sitting there felt a little uncomfortable being surrounded that way. I noticed a fellow we know from a local band and his wife and daughter at the nearest table. I hadn’t seen them at first because they were completely obscured by the crowd of women waiting for a party to leave so they could descend upon their table. I wondered how annoying it would be to try to have breakfast with a bunch of strangers’ crotches a few feet from your face.

Their extremely cute character of a daughter didn’t mind and shoved a fork around a plate of hash brown while bobbing her little head around to Elton John, which was playing very loudly from someplace. Stavros immediately began humming a song by our friend’s band.

“This part is the best part of that whole record," he said to me, “Dungity-dungity-dungity-dungity DUNG DUNG!”

We stood there for about 15 minutes, the soundtrack alternating between Stavros’s personal rendition of our friend’s song and the iPod’s annoying mix. The owners are clearly going for an old-timey Detroit diner feel while still being modern and hip, so the result is CKLW station IDs followed by Motown hit followed by the aforementioned Elton John followed by She’s a Little Runaway followed by Beck.

Finally a two-top opened and we seized it. It was at the back of the restaurant, the very last table, in fact. I should mention that while we stood waiting for a table, at no time did any employee acknowledge us at all. A line for a table is a good problem to have, but they’re going to have to address the interior crowding issue by asking people to wait outside. Allright, so we take the two-top. Right away I’m too cold. The a/c was blasting from someplace directly on us and had I not been wearing a long trench coat, I would have put it back on.

Our waitress delivered the menus and then didn’t come back for a while which gave me time to examine my surroundings.

The place is small, like maybe eight tables, with a counter that has about 12 stools. It’s on a corner and the front and north side are all windows, the front looking out onto Woodward and the north looking out onto a bland office building and some residential Pleasant Ridge homes. The windowsill is lined with little vintage vases into which real flowers are tucked. We had miniature roses and some other thing I couldn’t identify and that had no fragrance at all next to our table. The salt and pepper shakers follow in the Flytrap tradition of being different cute little vintage shakers on each table. We had a cow bisected neatly crosswise.

I discovered the source of the loud music on a shelf over a food prep area behind the counter. There rested an iPod in a Bose dock, which very effectively reproduced the decibel level of at least four speakers ten times its size, all operating at top volume. I like loud music as much as the next hipster but it was too way loud and also the mix was too contrived.

Behind the counter were chalkboards announcing the types of drinks available and also quite a lot of bragging comments about carrying local products. Faygo cans and Better Made bags featured prominently. Which is great, I love both of those things. It just felt, like the music, contrived.

Other intriguing sights included the backs of the grimy couple across from us. They slouched on the stools, her tramp stamp an unrecognizable blotch of India ink bleeding out into crinkles of flab atop her low-slung “Da Nang” brand gray camouflage pants; his tattered and greasy sweatpants hanging in dismal shreds over his flip-flopped feet.

After scrutinizing every inch of these two, I looked to the menu. Regulation breakfast stuff with a surprise or two, like potato pancakes and deep-fried pancake balls of some foreign extraction. I went for the eggs, sausage, hash browns and toast combo and Stavros ordered some type of “platter,” the primary feature of which was French toast. I will say that I was glad to note that Mae’s has chosen to use shredded hash browns versus the “fancy” chopped potato type every single other place in town serves.

So. I know it’s their first week and there are some glitches but I gotta say it took one hell of a long time to get the food. And when it finally came, they had forgotten my hash browns, the very centerpiece of my order.

“Excuse me,” I called to our waitress, who had the unpleasant waitress habit of bestowing upon customers various cheesy terms of endearment.

I told her I was pretty sure hash browns came with my order and she went off to check, then came back and said, “Angel, the ones we have on now are for people who already ordered them, and honestly, it’s going to take way too long to make more.”

“Really?” I said. “What about the potato pancakes?” She ran off to check and I must say that I was really affronted by the lack of hash browns. They do all the cooking right there out in the open so I could see that there was only one or two women making everything to order but hash browns seem like a pretty good thing to just go ahead and make a shitload of.

She came back a minute later after I’d already given up and was glumly eating my burnt eggs and not-very-toasted toast and tossed down a plate of hash browns.

“Turns out yours came with them after all so I stole some, sweetie,” she said.

All my food was totally mediocre. Stavros reported the same thing. They do use bread from Avalon (of course) and I am almost positive the orange juice was fresh squeezed and it was very good, but in general it was like the sort of breakfast you make at home that costs the same and takes just as long. The upside was that we didn’t have to do the dishes, I guess. All in all, I’d have to say that if I overlook the new-business hiccups, which I shall, because it’s to be expected, Mae’s is still not a place I’d choose over my beloved Café Muse or even New York Bagel unless I was really, really dying for shredded hash browns.

To top things off, we had to wait about 20 minutes just to pay. The waitress took forever to bring the check (“Here ya go, hon,”) and then Stavros and I stood at the counter for another—I kid you not—15 minutes trying to get the attention of someone back there who’d accept our credit card.

The problem is that if you’re not paying with cash, you have to go to the front of the counter and wedge yourself between stools to pay. I can’t imagine how long it might have taken had there not been a vacant seat there. It’s the original cash register and I applaud them for trying to keep all the vintagey stuff intact, but it just doesn’t work. Either the waitress has to take the check and ring it up (I vote for this) or they gotta move the register. It was really ridiculous. I know the guys back there were bustin’ ass but my desire to get out of there escalated to such a degree that by the time they rang us up, I felt like I never wanted to go back.

Conclusion: Mae’s—work on it.

INYO ON NOTICE

2010-03-16T14:45:00.005-04:00

The following review, INYO ASS, SERVERS, is by my mother, Bonita Sigmundfreud. I would like to preface her commentary by describing the last and final experience Stavros and I had at this place.

It was the Friday of my first week at my new job and I worked a little late so I drove straight from work to pick up Stavros. We agreed to go Inyo over our preferred nearby Japanese joint, Sakana, for a change of pace. Also, we discovered that our favorite place Sakana is not so favoritey if we get anyone but our friend Delgado Activito as our waiter. We hadn’t been to Inyo for a long time and I can’t remember why other than having a vague memory of being annoyed by their loud and horrible music and also that they had a Victoria’s Secret fashion show on tv the last time we were there. My Japanese urge happens about twice a month and the previous week or so—Valentine’s Day dinner, in fact—we had gone to the fancier and spookier Shiro in Novi.

(Review-within-a-review-within-a-review—Shiro was really fun. It is a giant antebellum mansion that is purportedly haunted. It was once a grand private home and it still feels like you’re at a huge dinner party at someone’s house. After dinner we went upstairs to check out the second floor diners and came upon an unlocked, unmarked door that turned out to lead to the attic. We snuck up in the cold and dark and crept around for a while before scurrying back down and slipping out the door under the disapproving eye of a passing busboy. This is a good place to go if you want to make a big impression. Pulling into the driveway at night and being greeted by a million windows ablaze on the face of a gorgeous old mansion like that is stunning. It’s also really good and not any more expensive than your average suburban sushi joint. There’s a very cozy little bar that was probably a small maid’s bedroom or something tucked behind the staircase—it looks like a train car. It is really perfect for a date.)

Anyway, we entered Inyo the way people normally enter public places—through the front door. In keeping with these people being wrong about everything they do in relation to the concept of service, they installed the hostess station at the back door, and the bartender who greeted us as we walked in acted like we had pulled the Milton Berle of boners by hoping to get seated from the front of the restaurant.

Stavros did not like this at all. We strode to the rear, past the way-too-deep-and-tall booths and were led BACK TO THE FRONT to be seated. I had to turn sideways to squeeze past the chairs of the table next to ours, which was occupied by what looked like a rapper and his posse. They actually had a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in a bucket on the table and appeared not to be eating but rather holding a symposium on public leisure.

Once in my ultra-cramped chair, I realized it had a very pronounced wobbling problem. I did a couple of test-wobbles to make sure it wasn’t going to right itself and finally dragged myself out of it and flagged a passing busboy.

“The chair wobbles,” I said. I began rearranging my chair with the one next to it and told him that it needed to be fixed. He smiled and nodded in the way people do when they don’t exactly speak English but are in the service industry in an English-speaking country.

“My good man,” I began, prepared to deliver a lecture on the importance of even chair legs. Sensing this, he whisked himself off to another part of the restaurant and I took my new chair.

As any first week on a new job is, mine had been trying, and I was very thirsty.

I looked over the wine menu for a millisecond and settled on the second-cheapest Pinot Noir then began scanning the room for our server, who had yet to make him or herself known to us.

Finally the hostess slid into view, clutching the elbow of a 15-year-old boy wearing lipstick. She gave him a shove toward our table and he glided over. What followed was one of the strangest performances by a waiter I have ever experienced.

Firstly, he did not have lipstick on, it turned out, his lips were just very plump and rosy, and he pursed them together a lot and twisted them around so that they appeared on different sides of his face and curled into sneers and basically just slid all over his face like a pair of worms while he spoke. This unsettling phenomena was enhanced by his borderline leering and theatrically seductive looks; lots of eyebrow waggling and peering-through-the-lashes and knowing glances. His voice also traveled on its own meandering road, going from deep-voiced authority to girlish trilling swoon.

“And have we had a chance to look at the menu?”

“Um, actually, I’d like to get a glass of wine first, thanks.” I told him what I wanted and he almost fainted from pleasure.

“Oh, excellent choice!” he hissed in ecstasy, hugging the wine menu to his breast. “I just had that one yesterday and it is—so—delicious. Excellent, excellent!”

“Can I have the menu back…I…might want…”

“Of course, of course!” he cried, handing it back. After remembering to ask Stavros for his order, he fled, leaving us finally able to make eye contact.

“Good grief, what a screwball,” my Stavros said, looking even more like the manliest creature alive.

Within seconds the screwball with the screwy lips was back with drinks. He presented mine as if it was a diamond tiara and I was Elizabeth Taylor.

“Thank you,” said I, pouring the entire glass down my throat at once. “Very good.”

“Have we decided?” he fluttered.

I’ll save some time here and tell you that the food was mediocre and I had to send something back. Old Fluttery Eyes did not offer to bring me a replacement. Instead he looked pityingly at me when I told him I was rejecting it, as if it bespoke an irredeemable flaw within my palate that I could not enjoy waterlogged spinach.

Other annoyances include conversation between the lead rapper and a waitress who was opening yet another bottle of champers for him and his crew. He was temporarily alone at the table, his boyz all scattered about the bar or outside smoking, and he was obviously taking the opportunity to practice his smooth operations.

“And then you just pull out the cork like this…”

“You Japanese?”

“No, I’m actually half Korean and half American…anyway, you pull the cork…”

“You look aright for Korean. You like champagne?”

“Oh, um...hee hee…I don’t really drink..”

“Oh yeah? I bet you like champagne. S’all bubbly…taste real sweet.”

At this juncture I vomited into my handbag and we left. A few weeks later I told my parents the story and what did they do? They raced right out to Inyo.

INYO ASS, SERVERS

By Bonita Sigmundfreud

My husband and I went out to Inyo last Wednesday, March 10^th, for a drink and perhaps dinner. We got there around 5 pm. As usual at that hour, no one was behind the bar and a lone waiter sat and folded napkins at the front window. I sat at one of the window tables while my husband drove around back to find a parking place. A server came and offered me a drink and menus almost immediately, but after my husband came in, found me and sat down, we were ignored—until I looked over at the waiter folding napkins. He at once came to our table, took my husband’s order, and brought a drink.

This is typical Inyo at that hour of the day. The televisions over the bar are on, the music plays, but hardly any staff members are around. Why is there no bartender?

Why do servers habitually gather into a small group to chat at the service area of the bar, while people are sitting and waiting at tables in the front of the place?

It is all the more noticeable because servers are overly attentive to diners, who sit in booths at the back of the restaurant. The problem there is to get through more than three or four bites without someone asking whether everything is all right. The first time, it’s fine, even the second, but the pleasure of being looked after pales quickly afterward.

My impression is that management is not spending enough time at Inyo to know how people are performing their jobs. There is no excuse for leaving the bar unattended for longer than a restroom break during operating hours. Servers clearly realize that customers are waiting for service at the front and ignore them. Hasn’t anyone told them that drinkers frequently turn into diners?

And that tips are calculated with service in mind?

The food is very good and well-priced. But Inyo needs to correct what is becoming a worsening lack of service. The few true professionals there need the support of their colleagues, and customers need reasons to continuing patronizing the place.

GUEST POST--LUCY BLUMPKIN GOES TO ANN ARBOR

2010-03-01T10:00:00.000-05:00

Today's guest post is from Lucy Blumpkin.

Dropped into downtown Ann Arbor after a long hiatus to see a show.

Memories of past dining experiences arose pleasantly as I juggled time and location issues. Many options swirled but one rose to the top like a plump olive in a martini, The Grecian Pizza joint two or three doors down from The Michigan Theater.

Rolling into town, I soon realized what a few months absence could do to a place. All the old standby eateries I recalled from the old days of loafing in Ann Arbor were strangely missing. These landmarks were the foundation of my navigation in the city, and I was soon befuddled as to where I even was. Seva, the veggie haven was still there. But where I knew the Grecian should have been, was literally a new block of architecture. Gone was the brightly lit, linoleum-floored haven that had supplied beers, thin slices and good antipasto before concerts gone by. Gone, in fact, was the pay phone outside that had heard so much of my useless chatter in the days before the pocket tele.

Parking hadn’t changed, and my date Jesse Sheafer drove around for 10 minutes, finding street parking in the residential area near Ann and Thayer. Amazing historic homes being ripped apart by students trying to load kegs in the window. Or so Jesse reasoned based on days visiting friends here as an undergrad.

Walking into town, we searched for a non-franchised establishment. Considering the scandal when Starbucks took over the corner of Liberty and State, the coffee shop now seemed like an old friend with Cosi, Buffalo Wild Wings, Potbelly and the like budding up like a teen blemish.

Then we walked by a cavernous place, all pale wood, high ceilings and sherbet silk fabrics. The delightful menu on the door declaimed it a place where you could relax, feel at home and enjoy food in good company (or something as granola crunchy.) Nuff said, we went in.

The thin, knit capped mild-mannered host may as well have said “Welcome to Ann Arbor” as he led us to a roomy booth with warm lighting and large menus. The next two things that happened were testament that they saw me coming and were prepared. First, we were instantly served large delicious glasses of water with ice. And second, the easy-to-find restroom (below street level, A²style) was delightfully warm.

The large bar area was festooned with students, and my eye instantly registered the sweet potato fries, thus beginning my wish list.

The menu offered interesting subsections such as Small Plates, Sides and Hand Helds along with the usual Entrees and Sandwiches.

Another thin young man walked up and offered his services as our waiter. With his soft manner, he was instantly likable and when he came back later smelling slightly of smoke, I liked him even more.

As is my wont, I made a menu choice then changed my mind several times until the waiter arrived to receive my questions.

“Tell me about the Caribbean Fish Taco’s, are they good?” I began.

“Oh yes, they are very popular at lunch,” he delivered back. This being dinner, I naturally slid the tacos into the maybe category.

“What about the lobster BLT?” I prodded

“We get a quite a few orders for that,” he said ambiguously.

LBLT was dead.

“What other fishy sort of things do you recommend?” I asked as if I were just asanxious as everyone to come to a conclusion.

“The seafood with pasta has this amazing white wine sauce…” he started to say, before I waved him off with disinterest.

“What about the butternut squash ravioli?” I tried.

He brightened, “That’s my absolute favorite thing on the menu.”

I had finally worn him out.

After a few minutes of contemplation to

imply that I had my own mind, I proceeded to order the ravioli.

“Oh, can we have the sweet potato fries as an appetizer?” I said, gratuitously including my partner.

Jesse made an easy getaway, ordering a cob hand-held and a bowl of the tomato bisque.

The soup was the first to arrive, and we explored its basily-garlic goodness, noting its similarity to that of Win Schulers in Marshall, Mich.

The fries did not disappoint, lightly flour-coated and fried to a delightful crispness, served with a creamy red pepper sauce.

Jesse enjoyed his wrap, while eyeing my bumpy brown dish suspiciously.

I sliced into the ravioli pillow brimming with squash, and slid it through the cream picking up walnut pieces and bits of sun-dried tomato along the way. It melted in my mouth. I ate in rapture until sharing occurred to me, but my offer was politely declined.

Knowing I wouldn’t be taking any home I ate too much, having been raised in the clean plate school of dining. I forced a bite on the reluctant Jesse, who humored me, then was more than pleasantly surprised. He too overindulged.

Sava’s posted promise did not disappoint. The experience in fact, gave me a tiny shred of hope that maybe the Ann Arbor I’d feared so changed, was simply evolving, it’s core individuality still intact. The card I grabbed on the way out confirmed my hunch; in addition to the vitals, the card read Life I love you, all is groovy.

Sava’s Cafe

734-623-2233

Yo, friends! Check this out!

2010-02-05T15:35:00.005-05:00

I have just returned from strip-mall soul food at Beans & Cornbread. I was inspired to dine thusly after seeing this latest example of The Horrible Racism That Is Tearing Our Country Apart.

My associate Lucy Blumpkin and I were both virgins to the B & C scene and almost didn’t go following a review from our co-worker Jared Jabozniak, who declared it “unclean”; the food “decent but only because it’s hard to screw that shit up.” I have been to many bad soul food restaurants (and one truly excellent one by which all others are measured) so I disagree with the latter comment but the cleanliness thing worried me.

Visions of the Black History month menu haunted me, however, so we decided to take a chance. I prepared for the worst and when I saw three or four available tables, my heart sank. “Noon on a weekday?” I murmured to Lucy. “This can’t be good.” She ignored me as is her custom and we followed our waitress (“LaToi”) to a booth. It seemed pretty clean to me. I closely examined the table and wall for smeared boogers or greasy fingerprints and finding none, decided Jared is simply a neurotic fag and picked up the menu. LaToi returned to take our drink orders.

“Do you have club soda?” I asked her. They have a full bar in there so I was pretty sure the answer was yes.

“No,” she answered.

I frowned and turned the menu over. I noticed they offered a grape Kool-aid martini.

“Wait—club soda…that’s…we have that.”

“I’d like one, please,” I told her briskly, closing the menu as Lucy humbly requested plain water.

I really wanted fried chicken, grits, and greens. They offered all three but not together. I noticed they had a “smothered” fried chicken served with mashed potatoes and gravy and a picture formed in my mind of a thick blanket of white (shudder!) slop hiding a bumpy mound on a plate. I was going to have to make some inquiries.

LaToi returned with the drinks and also a basket of plain cornbread and mini sweet potato cornbread muffins. Both were still hot and instantly melted the butter Lucy scraped out of the tiny Land-o-Lakes tray. I have to say that they were both totally excellent and I found myself marveling at the miracle of cornmeal. That’s how good it was. It was akin to the simultaneously banal and complex epiphanies experienced most commonly by fans of blotter acid.

After a few minutes, we were ready to order. I took a deep breath and began the negotiations of tailoring their menu to accommodate my whim.

“‘Smothered,’” I said to LaToi, looking deeply into her moist brown eyes. “Does that mean covered with gravy?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Here’s the deal: I don’t want it smothered in gravy, and I also don’t want the mashed potatoes. I want grits. Can I get that?”

“Uhhhh…it’d be…like…three or four dollars to add the grits,” she said.

“Three or four dollars?” I said, feigning confusion and pointing to the words “$1 for substitutions,” on the menu.

“That’s for regular sides,” she said in a matter-of-fact way that told me that even though grits cost about five cents per serving, the irregularity of their “side” status meant they were going to cost more than a dollar.

“Since we have the grits already made,” she went on, “we can still substitute them, though.”

I pondered this briefly. Grits were an accompaniment to at least two other items on the laminated, permanent lunch menu; that is, not a daily special. So, presumably, they were just as “already made” as everything else that was permissible to substitute.

“So, what is it, how many pieces of chicken is it?” I asked her, putting the grits issue aside for the time being.

“You get…a leg and…a…a thigh,” she concluded.

“Can I get a breast?”

“We have wings,” she said obstinately.

“What about breasts?”

“Hmmm…we have wings, and…let’s see, wings and legs and thighs on the lunch menu.”

“So I can’t get a breast instead?”

“We could do two breasts maybe. This is the lunch menu,” she added unnecessarily.

“Okay, well, I can’t eat two. How about just one instead of the leg and thigh?” I emphasized the “and” quite heavily hoping to appeal to her sense of two as being more than one and therefore a sacrifice on my part.

“I don’t think we can do that.” She seemed to be reverting to her earlier rigid “grits” stance so I sighed in a put-upon way and looked back down at the menu.

“We have wings,” she repeated helpfully in case I missed the 10 places wings were offered. Wings with grits, wings with hoppin’ john, wings with shrimp, etc.

“Okay,” I capitulated. “Wings. I’ll get the wings with grits and greens. Thanks.” I shut the menu and looked at Lucy, who was staring raptly at me.

“It’s either the catfish or the shrimp,” she said, looking at LaToi. “Which do you think?”

“Well…I love catfish, you know what catfish is. The other one, I haven’t had it but I’ve seen it and it looks good. If you want somethin’ you know what it is, get the catfish. If you feel like having somethin’ new, get the shrimp.”

Lucy seemed grateful for this rationale and briskly ordered the shrimp with grits.

We discussed ESP and ghosts like all girls do when there are no men present and I examined the other patrons. Everyone was well-dressed. I counted three TVs. The one facing me was showing the Food Network. A lady with too many teeth made what looked like a tomato smoothie in a blender then poured it into a tall, rectangular glass.

Finally LaToi appeared with our food. It did not take an especially long time but I was starving so it felt like an hour. There were four enormous wings heaped on one side of the plate with two small side bowls tucked on the other. Lucy’s was a large bowl of grits topped with slightly blackened shrimp and half-inch cubes of what looked like carmelized ham, if ham can be carmelized. It looked pretty good. She ordered the fried corn side, which was not really fried-looking enough for me.

My greens had shreds of pork throughout and were faintly hot with chili.

The grits were outstanding. The wings, however, were bogue. This could be due to the fact that I don’t like wings. It must be, actually, because the pieces of batter I peeled off were really good. It, too, was faintly hot, and also salty, which is excellent because I love salt.

Lucy reported that hers was very good, and we gave positive reviews to both LaToi and a very dressed-up man I assume was either the owner or manager who stopped by to ask. I did apologize to LaToi for not eating the wings when she took my plate and explained that I don’t really like wings. I know she was thinking, “Then why’d ya order them, ya crazy bitch?” but if she were to cast her mind back to the ordering segment of our visit she might realize she’d bullied me into it. I decided to not to mention this on the "comments" form she gave us with our bill.

Afterward, we stopped at DSW to exchange some shoes for Lucy’s husband and just outside the door I found this shopping list for someone's sleepover party.

WEEKENDS WITH ERNIE

2010-01-18T16:06:00.002-05:00

Ernie’s is a party store in Oak Park. I don’t want to say much more about it, nor do I need to. Watch and marvel at the wonder of Ernie’s. PS Take cash—no credit cards or checks accepted.

PPS I guess I need to say more. Two complaints have flown in already. Well, first of all, you get to customize your sandwich, beginning with the bread. Nothing is toasted so get ready for a wet bread experience. I chose white bread because I am an American and Stavros of course had to order the ethnic option, an onion roll. From there you just tell Ernie what to put on it, or in my case, what not to put on it. There is a $3, a $4, and a $5 version. We went with the expensive choice because we wanted to see what Ernie was made of when he went balls-out. We also tried Better Made's "Wavy" chips which I was not surprised to find were WAY better than Ruffles. Anyway, the sandwiches were good and vinegary, mine was, anyway, because of all the pickles and shit. There was something other than pepper in that shaker, too, because I definitely tasted celery and maybe some seasoned salt. You can tell that is what Ernie considers his special spice. The $5 is a very large sandwich, the kind you can't quite figure out how to get in your mouth. Next time I will get a smaller one. Stavros went back today and got one and said it was much better. If you don't like being chattered to in the manner of Ernie, like my good friend Janis Beaglehole, you should not go there, because he is obviously on fire like this all the time.

FOOD COURT JESTERS

2009-12-14T16:34:00.006-05:00

As the Most Blessedest Day of All Year approaches, it becomes necessary to enter stores, even malls. Or in our case, “Collections.” Yesterday Stavros and I—following a hearty breakfast of Ikea-brand frozen pancakes and my special homemade English muffin breakfast sandwiches—did both.

I believe I have mentioned this assortment of shops before. This is a mall so vast it is on both sides of the same street, as crazy as that sounds! LOL!

We never go over to the south side, though, because it is mostly made up of Neiman-Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. Stavros and I prefer stores like Club Monaco (pronounced Muh-NAH-ko) and Urban Outfitters. If a store doesn’t deafen us with ear-splitting decibels of shitty music, we ain’t going in.

After an hour or so of riding escalators and elevators and dodging ugly teenagers and those people who just suddenly stop walking for no reason when in malls, I was nearly faint from hunger.

“I need soup. Let’s go to the food court,” I told my love.

“Okay,” he replied.

(We were kind of tired by then so the repartee wasn’t as snappy as usual.)

Because the escalators are only placed nearby stores no one wants to go to (the all-candy-apple emporium; the thousand-dollar pen store; the chairs for schizophrenics outlet; etc), we had to take the elevator up to the food court. Normally one wouldn’t view riding an elevator as a negative, but at the Collection, the two elevators are impossibly slow and there are always a couple of hundred meatheads clogging up the entrances and it’s hard to get on one in under a half hour or so. Luck was on our side and one of them was opening just as we approached. There was a lady in a wheelchair accompanied by her husband, a toddler, and a sleeping infant in a stroller. Why can’t they take the stairs? I thought bitterly, as they rolled in, hogging most of the elevator. We forced our way in as a tall girl with a luxurious mane of chestnut hair stood in indecision just outside the doors.

“Come on in!” I said generously, “There’s plenty of room!” Gesturing to the vastness of the elevator, I accidently backhanded the lady in the wheelchair.

“Excuse me,” she mumbled.

“How rude,” I whispered to Stavros, as the brunette finally made up her mind and stepped onto the elevator.

We rode in slow motion up to the second floor. The rear of the elevator is all glass and looks out onto the mall. Stavros and I turned and gazed out at all the holiday mayhem. The photo-with-Santa opportunity at the Collection consists of a much more elaborate setting than the one I visited as a child. Here, Santa lives in a castle. A two-story castle, overflowing with maidens inexplicably dressed in Ren-Faire garb. We peered down at Santa’s throne where a small boy huddled, weeping.

“WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” Stavros suddenly shouted out of the blue, startling the elevator’s other passengers and waking the sleeping baby, who began to wail at once.

“Stavros!” I said, frowning.

“I’m just kidding,” he said, looking exasperated, and the doors opened.

We stepped out and I realized at once that the food court was on the third floor.

“Oh, God,” I said, looking around for an escalator. “Come on.” I took Stavros’s hand and dragged him along, past the underpants for hookers store and the soap made from soybeans shop.

“Whoa,” I cried, once we stepped onto the moving stairs, arms windmilling.

“What’s wrong?” asked Stavros, gripping my wrist.

“I just lost my balance, those hanging things…” I waved in the direction of the giant Christmas puppets suspended from the ceiling, which is about a thousand feet high.

“What are those?” Stavros asked.

“They are…jesters,” I replied.

“Oh.”

Once at the food court, I looked around at the selection. There was a salad place (no), a “Sbarro” (no, I can’t even say that word), a Chinese place, a Zoup!, (no, no) a deli and a place called “Honey Tree” (maybe and no). I hesitantly approached the deli.

“I want soup, what’s the soup?” I asked.

No one responded since I hadn't really directed my question to anyone and then I saw the board: Chicken noodle, matzoh ball, or white bean chicken chili. Chicken noodle sounded safest, so I ordered that, plus a side of pickles. In a flash my order appeared. Everything seemed to be in order except for the old pickles, which I quickly exchanged for new.

We took a table overlooking the parking lot and grimly grey sky. I peeled back the lid of my soup and saw with disappointment that it was the Just broth! version of soup, the kind where they scoop noodles or rice or a matzoh ball in. After I added two salts and two peppers it had a vague flavor, but not very much so I picked up the package of Saltines they provided.

“What the…Stavros! Look at this!” I commanded.

Stavros reached over and took the Saltines from my hand and turned the package over.

“I can’t believe it,” he said.

“Yeah, what is that? Some kind of cost-cutting measure?”

ONE SALTINE. When would you ever want just one Saltine? What the hell sort of a gyp is that?

Well, I’ll tell you, it didn’t make the soup any better at all. To make matters worse, an event I was trying to put out of my mind forever surfaced as I was trying to swallow a large glob of noodles and I nearly threw up. I had to tell Stavros about it; I had to try to expunge the memory.

“When we were in the Apple store….” I began.

Our first stop had been to pick up an item I special ordered for the new phone Stavros gave me for my birthday. Inside the store had been an older lady with an oldish golden retriever who was with a man pulling a large suitcase. The suitcase was unzipped and open when we walked in and I noticed two ugly decorative pillows inside and a large plastic-wrapped item.

He closed the suitcase before I could fully inspect its contents, however, so I turned my attention to the dog, who I had assumed was a seeing-eye dog and unpettable. He wore a vest as those dogs do, but this one, instead of reading, “Don’t pet me!” or whatever they say, said “Pet me! I’m friendly!” so I reached down and gave him the petting of his life. Stavros joined in and we gave him a full-body rubdown for a few minutes until the lady and the suitcase man left the store.

“The dog we were petting…he had a booger or something on his face and it got on my hand,” I continued, retching slightly.

“What? A booger? How do you know? Was it a glob? Or mucus?”

My mind reeled as I relived the sight of the grayish glob glistening wetly on my knuckle. I’d tried to wipe it on my receipt but it dissolved into smaller chunks and just spread around further.

“Yes,” I answered. “It was…mucus.”

“Like this?” He poked at a noodle on the edge of my Styrofoam bowl.

“Don’t.”

“Like this?” He lifted the noodle by its edge and let it flop back down.

“I mean it. Don’t.” I pushed the tray away.

At this point I have to believe that Stavros wanted our relationship to cross the barfing-in-front-of-each-other line, but I had to put my foot down. I stood up and like the gentleman he is, he bussed my tray for me and dropped the jokes.

My stomach back on solid ground, we strode out of the food court and back into the teeming madness.

“Let’s go to SEE.”

“Ok,” I said, knowing full well that my beloved has 20/20 vision.

He tried on a variety of frames with the help of a heavily made-up “associate,” who wanted him to make an appointment for an exam.

“Well….” he hem-hawed, “I’ll come back this week. Do those frames have an item number I can write down?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’ll just enter it into the system for you so when you come in we can find them.”

I could tell by Stavros’s body language (shoulders slumped, chin lowered in despair) that he’d wanted to try to find them online for less.

“Come along, my babboo,” I said, taking his arm, and we strolled out of the Collection and immediately became lost and could not find the car for a half hour.

GUEST POST--TOAST IS TOAST WITH ANDRE AND CINDY

2009-12-03T15:20:00.003-05:00

Today's guest post is from local aesthete and man of arts and letters, Andre Prudhomme.

Thoughts of grand breakfasts swam through our heads as the night of December 1st drew to a close—I had taken a dear friend to Flint to pick up a quantity of good drywall, and neglecting dinner, found myself very hungry by the end of the night. Luckily I’d been able to furnish my insides with a thick morass of stout, but Cindy hadn’t the option to supplement solid food for good beer, so she took to pretzel rods, and we lumbered through the night. Needless to say, upon waking we found ourselves extremely famished.

“Breakfast. Where do you wanna go?”

“Well, it’s either Toast or Sam’s,” Cindy sighed.

We have our regular haunts, but rising after noon, those certain standbys were cut in half. So we found ourselves not thinking too hard, and with these two options.

“Let’s go to Sam's,” Cindy suggested, “You’re hungry, it’d be good.”

“Maybe... No, let’s go to Toast, the coffee...” Coffee is such an intimate part of the morning, and truthfully, the coffee at Sam's is not to standard. Toast became the victor.

As usual, when arriving at Toast, we found the back parking lot to be populated by cars belonging to aloof assholes; their haphazard idea of parking left little room for our little vehicle. Scuttling through the causeway I noticed a sign on the door of the adjacent restaurant giving hours, 4-9 PM, Friday and Saturday. I thought aloud, “My, that place must be fantastic!” Luckily the restaurant held only lunchgoers and not the usual hungover elites in for their weekly shovelful of “The Cure.”

It being a Wednesday we were able to seat ourselves and chose a table under a newly decorated wall, adorned with what must be the Christmas refuse of Anna’s Coffee Shop (God bless her).

We promptly ordered water and coffee and settled in with the menus, I determined to stray from the bacon and gouda omelet, my usual.

As quickly as we received our beverages Cindy commented, “This is going to be a while.”

Already she observed (what I later deduced) to be the waiter, and then a second man in the kitchen, operating the grill and dishwashing duties, taking on even the third task of bussing. The duo was operating the entire establishment.
Of course there was a table of demanding old ladies gumming up the works, so this meager staff (surely determined by some colleague’s “illness”) were already sinking into what seemed a maelstrom of gigantic proportions.

Our server was finally able to make it back for our order (and refill the coffee); Cindy deciding on oatmeal with a side of sausage and I choosing the Farmer’s Omelet, not a profound choice, but a great morning standby. Seeing as it had been nearly 24 hours since I’d eaten, I longed for the gluttonous portion.

As always Cindy was correct in her prediction—we talked of the week’s events, orated wild tales for our salt and pepper shakers (small bears in aprons), and waited for our order.

Finally the hustling server delivered a bowl of grey matter which Cindy immediately deemed “Soupy”; I with my lifelong abstinence of oatmeal couldn’t tell, but the porridge looked awfully drab and tasteless.

More revolting to me was the plateful of breakfast I received: the home fries appeared to be mutated raisins mixed with fried cheese and possibly pancake batter, accompanied by a pile of eggs and sausage lumps. A Farmer’s Omelet houses sausage, green peppers, onions, potatoes, and American cheese—this pile exhibited some vegetable pieces probably frozen around last Christmas (resurrected for this meal) with a portion of cheese lodged at the south end of the omelet, and uncertain trunks of sausage scattered about. As on the side, the potatoes exhibited a small, wrinkled appearance. However, in the omelet these tuberous pieces were at least edible, being soaked in the watery, half cooked egg like brine, which poorly housed this collage.

As soon as I saw that white runoff of the eggs I became appalled, pouring some obscenity across the table and cursing the very nook I had chosen for our repast. The gruel and sausages seemed to appease Cindy, though satisfaction certainly didn’t emanate from her side of the table. I struggled through, leaving a plate of withered potatoes astride a soupy remainder, and a sad side of dry rye on a small plate by the coffee. Yes, as lame as it is, even the toast was subpar.

R.I.P. "ANNA"

2009-12-02T21:23:00.006-05:00

✝

The end of an era.

STANDOFF AT SHILLA

2009-11-30T16:55:00.007-05:00

The first meal Stavros and I ever took together was at a Japanese/Korean joint by my old job in Troy called Shilla. I think Shilla used to be a place called Trini and Carmen’s, where my sister once barfed after too many margaritas when she was still practicing drinking. It’s got a tabletop barbecue scene on one side and a sushi bar on the other. I always eat on the sushi side because I prefer not to have acrid fumes blazing the hair and follicles from my face while I eat. I tricked Stavros into meeting me there on our first quasi-date by pretending that it was equidistant from our workplaces, when in fact it was approximately 1.2 miles from my job and 47 miles from his. With this foundation in place, Shilla is obviously a place we both hold dear.

We hadn’t been there in a while so we decided to go last Saturday evening following a trip to the nearby “Collection.”

NOTE: I would like to preface this story by admitting that neither of us was at our finest after staying up rather late the night before at a party.

At 5 pm, it was already pitch dark. The Shilla sign glowed feebly in the mist and as we approached the drive, I noted only two other cars in the lot. To make matters more sinister, my new phone (birthday present from Stavros) rang as I was setting the parking brake and its unfamiliar ring confused and startled me. There was no name associated with the number, and the voice that barked out at me could have belonged to any one of my male friends.

“How was the party!” it demanded to know.

“Albert?” I tried.

“What?”

“Albert, is this Albert?” I was very puzzled because Albert had been at the party.

“It’s GREGOR!” he shouted in annoyance. I frowned at the phone.

“Oh, well, we are about to walk into a restaurant, can I call you later?”

“I guess,” sniffed Gregor, hanging up.

Stavros was already negotiating our seating with the Japanese hostess as I was replacing my phone in my bag and I saw with horror that she was trying to lead him into the Fume Room.

“UH—NO!” I shouted. They both turned around with stunned expressions.

“May we sit in here?” I gestured calmly to the sushi half of the restaurant.

The hostess nodded demurely and Stavros pivoted and followed without missing a beat.

Apart from the sushi chefs, we were the only people in the room. Those must have been their cars out front. What are they doing taking the choice parking places? I thought bitterly. We sat down and then I immediately got back up to go wash my hands. The music was quite loud in the ladies’ room and was the sort of soft rock normally found in chain discount stores.

There was also an AirWick© Plug-In™ Room Freshener in Apple Pie Spice™ scent that did not lend itself to the surroundings. The bathroom door (I decided to go since I was already in there) was also too close to the toilet and I felt very cramped in the stall. The motorized paper towel machine whirred eerily but nothing came out. I wiped my hands on my pants and went back to the table.

The waiter appeared at once and I ordered a glass of wine. Yes, I know I previously admitted to being hungover but what man among us can cast stones?

“What are you getting?” I demanded.

“The Bo-Bup Gog,” said Stavros, or something like this.

“Allright. I wonder if the udon is good here. Is the udon good here?” I said to the waiter impatiently.

He looked at me with an amused expression I took for insolence.

“Nevermind,” I said. “I’ll take the udon. Does that come with the sides? The little side dishes, the bowls of stuff? Or is that just with entrees? Can you get it with the udon? CAN YOU?!??!” I almost grabbed him by the collar.

“Yes, comes with sides,” he responded.

“Ok, that’s what I’ll have, only NO SHRIMP TEMPURA, got it? Vegetable. Can I get vegetable tempura instead?”

“Vegetable tempura, okay.”

“The Bul-Book Kon,” said Stavros, closing his menu and handing to the waiter.

I fooled around with my new phone for a few minutes and drank my wine.

“Remember when we came here that one time and you told me that story about your uncle, and the swords on the wall?” I asked my glassy-eyed mate.

“What? My uncle? What uncle?”

“Your uncle,” I said. “Something about a sword, there were swords on a wall somewhere.”

He looked baffled. The waited returned and set down six small bowls of pickled salads and gross fish cake slices. Also my udon, sans tempura anything. We started eating at once and the waiter left, then came back a moment later with Stavros’s Bul-Bik Gog, which turned out to be plain boiled beef slices with onions and one lettuce leaf.

My udon was sweet. There were bell pepper slices floating around and the broth was sick with their flavor. I added some kimchee and soy sauce and that helped somewhat.

“What about the tempura?” Stavros asked me.

“I don’t know, I’ll ask. Maybe he thought I didn’t want it at all?” I wondered aloud. “Excuse me!” I said to the waiter, who was lurking down at the end of the sushi bar and watching us.

“Um, I meant that HE will eat my shrimp tempura, not that I didn’t want it…” I lied, pointing at Stavros with my chopsticks. “We DO want that,” I added.
The waiter looked confused.

I looked at Stavros. I was confused, too. I couldn’t really remember what I’d tried to do about the tempura. Did I tell him I wanted the vegetable or that I wanted the shrimp and that I’d give it to Stavros? I read no answer in my beloved’s face.

“Uh…one moment,” the waiter said, and disappeared. Ten seconds later he was back.

“Vegetable is already cooking,” he said, “Cannot change. So sorry.”

“Oh. Okay. I guess I’ll just take the vegetable, then,” I said, looking at Stavros for any further clues. Finding none, I mumbled to the waiter’s back, “Do you think we can have some more kimchee?”

He returned with more kimchee and fled without a word. We ate in silence and kept waiting for the tempura. I didn’t want to ask again. I must have misunderstood something.

A waitress stopped at our table. “Is everything okay?” she asked.

I paused. I could bring up the tempura with her, a new person. I looked at Stavros, who had long since finished his beef and onions, and said, “Do you think we could have another bowl of kimchee?”

ROMEO PEACH FESTIVAL

2009-10-14T16:29:00.006-04:00

I have been so busy for the past several weeks that I almost forgot to post about one of the most exciting events of the summer. I have a few moments now so allow me to share with you the tale of THE ROMEO PEACH FESTIVAL.

My dear friend Angelina Langoustine, who grew up in Romeo, graciously invited me and Stavros to join her at the festival and stay overnight at her parents’ house. She had invited me the previous year, too, but I declined, largely because Romeo seemed unknown and distant. But I have discovered that nearly anything can be endured with Stavros by my side, and in fact many otherwise horrible experiences are made fun by his presence alone, so I figured what the hell?

So one lovely Friday evening, we loaded up the car with provisions and headed north. The plan was to have a dinner party with a handful of other folks then hit the festival. So we brought a salad and some wine and Angelina was providing a big pasta dinner, and the other folks were bringing appetizers.

Romeo wasn’t nearly as far as I thought but the trip included one roundabout so it seemed like we had traveled a great and harrowing distance, which is all I ask for in a getaway. Exiting the freeway deposited us in the center of a very charming little town. There were people crowding every street corner and parents dragging children by the hands down sidewalks and old people eating hot dogs and teenagers shoving each other and tipsy-looking twenty-somethings everywhere you looked. We turned right at the main intersection, which was appropriately located at Main St and something else street, and drove slowly, looking left and right for the Langoustine family house.

I should mention that Starvos and I have similar family backgrounds. Our families are both middle-class working folks from east Detroit. We live modestly. Our parents live modestly. And we are neighbors with Angelina Langoustine, so imagine our surprise when we located the address and pulled up into the driveway of a house that looked like this:

“This explains a lot,” I commented to Stavros, referring to Angelina's surplus of belongings and expensive tastes.

“No shit,” he murmured, mouth hanging open as he took in the property.

Because I wished to appear familiar with this casually wealthy scenario, I headed straight for the back door, where I was sure the kitchen was located.

“Hullo!” I called, in what I hoped was a vaguely British upper-class tone. “We’re here!”

Angelina was at the stove in the vast kitchen, wearing an apron and stirring a pan of browning meat. There were bottles of wine and plates and napkins and silverware out and I could tell she’d been working all afternoon. She turned to greet us, a big smile on her face.

We put the bags down and she took us on a tour of the house. I do not exaggerate when I say that the house I grew up in could fit in their living room. The ceilings were 16 feet high. The floors were inlaid wood in geometric patterns. Stained-glass window panels hung in doorways. Multiple sets of stairs led up, down, zig-zagging into basements and attics. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like growing up in such a house. Turns out I didn’t have to try very hard, because when Angelina led us to her old room, I noticed that both her and her sister’s room, where we were quartered, were virtual shrines to their teenaged selves.

We went back downstairs and people began arriving. Angelina’s anorexically-thin sister and her silent husband. Angelina’s friend the psychiatrist and her husband of 17 years. Mallory and Evan, a couple recently married. Alice and Mark, a boyfriend/girlfriend team who seemed to be experiencing some just-below-the-surface tension. It was a decent mix and everyone was in good spirits and we ate and drank wine and after peach pie and ice cream we walked the couple of blocks to the peach festival.

There was plenty to see on the street even though it was pretty dark. There was an overabundance of teenagers everywhere and they all looked identical. The girls wore way too much eyeliner and the shortest possible shorts with flip-flops. They were also uniformly bronze in a very unnatural way. The boys just looked like douches, the way teenaged boys everywhere look. We passed an old church that had been converted to a halfway house for the mentally impaired.

“Where are they halfway to?” asked Stavros to no one in particular.

Finally we reached the fairgrounds. To call the scene before us idyllic would be accurate, but there was something so alien about the cleanliness and wholesomeness of what we were seeing that Stavros and I both found it a little eerie. We were instantly separated from the rest of our group and began walking from attraction to attraction, trying to figure out how we’d spend our tickets.

First was the fun house, which really was fun. If you’ve never bumbled around a thirty-foot-long mirrored maze chasing a dozen drunks with corn-dog breath, you don’t know what you’re missing. We giggled and bumped our way out of there and headed over to the children’s roller-coaster. This is the sort of roller-coaster on which a new mother might feel secure placing her newborn; a smallish, low-altitude affair with minimal twists and turns. Nonetheless, Stavros and I screamed as if we were in a 747 plunging toward the Earth at a thousand miles an hour.

Next was the legendary Tilt-A-Whirl, a boring, jarring clunker of a ride that I suspect has only survived the festival circuit for so long because of its endearing name.

The best ride was the last one we rode before running out of tickets: Cliff Hanger. This is like that ride with the swings, only instead of swings, it’s got a board you lie on facedown and a bar that comes down to hold you on, so you’re sort of flying, or hang gliding, around in a circle. This was the pinnacle of our whole experience, this five-minute ride. Stavros was in the chair next to me to my right, and I was in the outside chair.

“STAVROS!” I yelled once we took off, and he looked over at me, laughing.

“WE’RE FLYING!” he yelled, and laughed some more.

Around and around we flew, swerving high and low over the faces of people on the ground waiting in line, seeing and hearing the whole fairground in a panorama of short-shorts and blinking lights and grinding gears and Taylor Swift and fallen flip-flops…finally the Cliff Hanger screeched to a stop and we staggered off. The carnies were all South African and mean. You said thanks to them and they looked at you like they wanted to rip your lungs out. We bowed courteously and scurried out the gate to find the rest of the gang in the beer tent.

Once inside the beer tent, I realized that we were in the midst of a giant all-year Romeo high school reunion. Thankfully everyone wanted to repair to a local saloon so we elbowed our way out and walked to a bar. It was during this segment of the evening that some of the couples in our group began to lose the ability to conceal their hostilities with one other, and Stavros and I decided to head back to the Langoustine house for the night.

We slept in Angelina’s sister’s room in twin beds we pushed together, and in the morning, went to a little diner for breakfast. The Romeo-ites were already out in full-blast festival mode so to cap off the trip, we took a quick stroll through the park hoping to catch the pie-eating contest. It was the first Saturday of the month, and so the tornado siren was going off. We had to shout to talk, and as we passed the petting zoo, I noticed all the animals were walking quickly around in a frenzied circle, heads bent low.

“They don’t like the siren!” I yelled to Stavros. “We gotta get out of here! This is freaking me out!”

Suddenly the eerily idyllic nature of the festival began to suggest only one thing to me and that one thing was David Lynch.

We hustled our asses back to the car and hugged Angelina goodbye and got the heck out of there.

It was probably the best night of the summer.

PS For those of you who think that the festival pictures above look a little seedy, it’s because they were actually taken at the Michigan State Fair, which is not in Romeo and is not at all idyllic, unless you grew up in Sarajevo.

CAFE MUSE-1, MEZZA-0

2009-09-01T15:00:00.013-04:00

Couple of things: First, I am annoyed about something. While this is hardly news, I never said it was, so shut up. Here’s what I’m annoyed about. Several months ago on one of our trips to the afore-maligned Café Muse, Stavros and I noticed a new storefront on Royal Oak’s Fifth Street. It looked like it was going to be a fancy restaurant, and because it was called Mezza, I assumed it would be Italian.

Well, guess what, food-eaters? It’s not. It’s middle-eastern. Thank you so much. I can’t tell you how frustrating it’s been trying to find falafel in the state that has the largest Arabic community outside Iraq.

And if this discovery were not crushing enough, let us move on to the menu. The day we noticed Mezza had finally opened, a very nice lady spotted us peering at the menu posted in the window and rushed out to give us one. It’s been in my car for a couple of weeks and I’ve been using it to blot my lipstick. Today I was stuck at a red light for longer than the five seconds that I can tolerate having nothing to do and so I picked it up and glanced over the fare.

We’re finally at the thing I’m annoyed about: Dead center on the menu I see the header “PASTA.” Already I’m pissed—why do they have pasta? It’s Lebanese food! Then I read the brief description underneath and it turns out it’s one of those things where you can “create your own.” In fact, I think it actually says those despicable words, “Create Your Own Pasta!” (Say this with a sing-songy sneer.) The pasta shape is linguini. You can choose either marinara or cream sauce and then scallops, shrimp, or chicken. FOR $15.99! You’re not even paying for the expertise of a chef who’s mastered or even invented a recipe! It’s just some red sauce from a jar on ONE KIND OF PASTA ONLY that costs probably 50 cents a pound and then they throw a handful of chicken slices or shrimp that are worth about $2 and they have the nuts to charge $15.99 for that shit! In a Lebanese place! BURN IN HELL, MEZZA!

All right, now one quick other thing. Maybe you noticed I mentioned we were on our way to Café Muse. Okay, so maybe they had a couple of hiccups when they moved to the larger location. But I gotta admit, Stavros and I go there every weekend and we love it although I am still mad that they don’t have pickles. Call them cornichons, yo.

A few weeks ago on a spectacularly chilly and rainy morning, we were chatted up by one of the owners, David, whom you may recall commented here once in defense of his restaurant. David talks to us all the time, as do the rest of the staff, rather more than previously, in fact, and Stavros and I have considered that this could be a new policy. At any rate, on this particular rainy Saturday, David was preparing the table next to us in a rush and told us that his brother and cousin were in from out of town and would we please say nice things about him.

The brother and the cousin finally arrived, sat down, and were served the special beverage of the past few weeks, raspberry lemonade (which I think is $3—at Mezza, the plain, non-rasberried lemonade is FOUR DOLLARS) and got settled in. Stavros and I smiled at them with the special smugness of people who know the identities of others while their own remains unknown.

At once the cousin presented David with a gift—a painting she’d made just for him to hang in the restaurant. He unwrapped it and I of course craned my neck to see it. What I saw was about on par with a relative-created project any of us has received: a horror. Orange background with Jackson Pollacky swirls of gold puffy paint.

“Ohhhh!” exclaimed David.

“Ohhhh!” exclaimed I, immediately thereafter, as it was obvious I was staring. David’s eyes slid over mine, stopping for a split second to say, “Yes, I see that this is ghastly but she is my cousin” before skidding to a halt on her proud and smiling face.

“I know you like orange!” she beamed.

Well, Stavros and I really felt like one of the family after that. We practically hugged them all before stepping back out into the rain. I considered writing about this episode then but I was afraid David would remember the interaction and figure out who I am. I hope enough time has passed, but if not, David, please do not let on that you know. It’s much more fun this way. XO!

GUEST POST--SCOTIA STOP CHICKEN DINNER

2009-08-31T13:47:00.005-04:00

This episode's guest post comes from Javier Wilhelm, local bon vivant.

Today I woke up and I knew that I wanted my lunch from a party store. I’ve been eating a lot of prepared food from party stores lately, with great success. Typical fare from these places is usually a couple varieties of pizza by the slice, fried chicken, sausages, hot sausages, ribs, and other food. Also potatoes.

A friend of mine tipped me off to the Scotia Stop recently, as they said it was a great little party store. I need a place to buy beer and cigarettes regularly and considering there have been no other local recommendations, I went to the Scotia Stop.

I drove there by car, and when I got there, I went in. I said “Hey!” to the cashier before he even had a chance to say hello to me. I told him, “I am here to get lunch,” and he confidently replied “Oh, we’ve got plenty of that.”

I went over to the “hot food counter” and looked at the food. The problem was that I couldn’t see the food! The glass was completely fogged up by the steaming hot food and various side dishes. The food bin attendant quickly wiped away the food fog, and I could finally see the food. Honestly, I wasn’t that excited, because I knew what to expect.

And I saw what I expected. There was fried chicken, fried chicken wings, and ribs. Then I noticed (what I believe sets Scotia Stop apart from the other party store I went to) is sides. And a combo meal. You can get macaroni mixed with cheese, as well as a cobbler portion of dessert food.

I said I wanted the Chicken Dinner Combo, for $5.99 please. I told him I wanted the macaroni side, instead of the dessert side, and he put it in the styrofoam carry-out tray.

They had three varieties of hot sauce; the man recommended the garlic hot sauce to me because “it is hotter.” I was disappointed to find that they didn’t have any solo cups for
the hot sauce, and that if they did, it would cost me a whole dollar. I decided to fill up my styrofoam carry out container with hot sauce, because everything is just going to get hot sauce on it anyway.

I also bought a 24oz. bottle of Beck’s Beer because that goes good with chicken.

I made it home in a matter of minutes. And upon my arrival, the chicken was at ambient temperature. Which is fine with me; I don’t need hot chicken, really. I was happy to see a large portion of the macaroni along side one half of a large potato; broasted. And also a very light biscuit. The biscuit, however, did not come with butter, so I dipped it in the macaroni and then into the hot sauce so it would have some liquid stuff on it.

The chicken breast was standard, but tasted good. I have always had a hard time getting breast meat off of a fried chicken breast. But that is my fault. Not their fault.

What I was most pleased with was the chicken wings. They are the kind of wings that are not separated into drumettes, wings, and chicken tips, but the kind that they leave all-together, in one piece. That is my favorite kind of chicken wing.

In conclusion, I am very full. I don’t feel sick at all, and that was a huge fucking potato. The men that work there are very pleasant, and I would go back for the wings.

STAVROS ON MAGARITA'S VIA ICHAT

2009-08-14T11:51:00.006-04:00

STAVROS: I had some of the worst mexican food last night
EUNICE: where?
STAVROS: the place on wdwd in berkley
EUNICE: Margaritas's?
STAVROS: yeah, last night, after i left your house
EUNICE: oh...really, you went there? did you eat there? or get carry out
STAVROS: i got carry out
STAVROS: burritos
STAVROS: terrible
STAVROS: threw it out
EUNICE: what made you go there?
STAVROS: i wanted to go to Zumba
STAVROS: and they had *just closed
STAVROS: and so, i took 11 mile up to
STAVROS: worst mexican food ever
EUNICE: yes, i have never really seriously considered going there. it looks awful.
STAVROS: it was awful
STAVROS: had about 4 bites
STAVROS: man
STAVROS: threw it out
STAVROS: and i'll eat anything
STAVROS: the beef was grey
EUNICE: too bad you don't have a picture.
STAVROS: just take a picture of a trash can
STAVROS: surprised i'm not sick

STAVROS AND EUNICE HIT THE THUMB

2009-07-27T17:05:00.014-04:00

This past weekend, Stavros and I travelled to Lexington, a charming little harbor village on the shore of Lake Huron just 18 miles north of Port Huron in the thumb. Whether you're looking for a weekend retreat, a cottage or a retirement home, Lexington is the place for you. Does it seem like I wrote that last bit? I didn’t. I took it from the Lexington website.

I’ve been to Lexington a few times in the past couple of years and Stavros hadn’t been up there for about 20 years. His people used to have a farm up in the thumb and he spent many idyllic summers there, much like my summers in southwestern Idaho, only without all the Mexican gangbangers.

We stayed at a bed & breakfast in town. The house was an 1870 farmhouse with three guest rooms. We stayed in the “Movie Star Room” which had a very nice chenille bedspread, the type that one might expect Jennifer Aniston to have, and a lot of black and white photos of has-beens like Natalie Wood.

Another highlight of the B & B was a room called “Settee.” This is what they say about “Settee” on their website: There is a coffee pot located in the room for early morning convenience. You are welcomed to relax and watch the morning news or read the daily newspaper in your robe on the provided loveseat.

We arrived in town at about 3 PM and immediately went to eat, because I must eat almost continuously. We shared a “pizzette” at a place called Smackwater Jack’s then walked along the breakwall, where we naturally ran into some acquaintence of Stavros’s. We could be rappelling in Brazil and someone Stavros knows would swing by on a rope.

We made our way back up the street and stopped in a few stores. Stavros determined that the attractive people were the out-of-towners and the homely ones were residents. This seemed to reinforce his earlier observation at a gas station in Port Huron: “Say what you will about Detroit….but the farther away you get, the weirder people are.”

We picked up some groceries for the barbecue we were attending later on that evening and returned to the B & B to lie down for while. We ran into the proprietress in the kitchen, who was wrist-deep in what I knew to be “French toast casserole,” because she told me what she’d be serving for Sunday breakfast when I made the reservation. Stavros lay immediately upon the chenille and closed his glorious eyes while I read my book in the nearby chaise and jostled the bed with my foot every time he seemed to be drifting off. Finally, he awoke and we departed for the barbecue at the cottage of some friends of ours. They were up from the Detroit area with their kids; two couples, Pierce and Joanne Nawtee and Krystal and Pete St. Patrick.

The gentlemen had apparently been sampling the contents of the cooler for several hours by the time we arrived. The ladies were busy in the kitchen making salad and mac & cheese for the children. I uncorked my Pinot Grigio and poured three glasses while Stavros trotted out the back door.

“Salud!” I said, as Krystal and Joanne and I touched juice glasses.

I helped Joanne prepare salads and do the dishes then went outside when she got to the “cheese” part of the mac & cheese. There is nothing that smells quite as bad as mac & cheese to me. The guys were standing around the barbecue trying to seem busy when I stepped out the back door. Pierce didn’t put much effort into it and plopped down in a lawn chair, his head lolling backward.

“He’s gone,” murmured Stavros.

“I see that!” said I, smiling brightly at Pierce, who suddenly lifted his head and attempted to focus on us.

We ate and played catch and chased the children and told them some scary lies about what happens to kids that try to go to the beach alone and stuff like that for a few hours. When the s’mores and the sparklers were finally gone, they were sent to bed and the adults gathered around the bonfire. It was very nice, even when the wind changed direction and fully engulfed my person in smoke and flying soot.

This sort of classic summery memory-making went on for maybe another hour and we decided to pack it in. Forgetting nearly everything we’d brought with us, including my sunglasses, the bug spray, and our baseball and mitts, we clambered into the car and bounced down the dark highway the two miles back to town. After the “Zappa Plays Zappa” show, I am all about FZ so we had to listen to “Any Way the Wind Blows” a number of times before I felt we could end the night.

We entered the front door and crept stealthily upstairs to our room. The owners’ room was directly next to ours so we had to be extra quiet. Naturally we both slept like logs and awoke 22 minutes before the official breakfast call. I took a shower and made sure to use some of every product in the bathroom, even going so far as to steal a Biore blackhead remover pad.

We trundled down the stairs and onto the wide front porch, where the B & B’s two other couples were already tucking into breakfast and revealing dull things about themselves to one another.

“Thank God we don’t have to sit with them,” I whispered, as we took the other table.

A margarita glass filled with fruit salad was at each place setting and within seconds, the proprietress rushed out with platters of French toast casserole topped with warm berry sauce and grilled sausage patties. Regular readers of Modern Coastline will not be able to believe the following statement but I assure you it is true: Stavros did not like the French toast casserole. His official explanation was that it “didn’t taste like anything,” but I suspect that it simply didn’t taste like sugar. I thought it was really good, as far as those things go, but the sausage was spectacular. I ate all of my sausage (two large patties) and most of the fruit salad and about half of the giant French toast wedge. The proprietress came to take our plates and looked genuinely hurt that Stavros had left one sausage patty.

“Oh, my God!” I exclaimed enthusiastically as she took my plate. “Those sausages were wonderful! I am just…so full! Aren’t you full?”

“Yes,” Stavros agreed, pushing back from the table and standing up.

“We have a child in Indiana,” commented one of the time machines sitting behind us.

We packed up and left at once. Following a brisk stroll through town, we decided that maybe we weren’t full after all, and we popped into Wimpy’s, Lexington’s famed hole-in the-wall hamburger joint.

We ordered and perused the local “paper,” which was actually more of a pamphlet; a four-page (cover, inside front cover, inside back cover, and back cover) homemade effort. Most of it consisted of ads for real estate agents and rib night at the golf course restaurant, but there was a smattering of “content” also. My favorite part was the joke sent in by a reader about the guy who went to the store to get his wife some tampons but got her string and cotton balls instead to pay her back for getting him loose tobacco and rolling papers instead of a pack of cigarettes the night before. Also I enjoyed the riddle about “I am having lunch with my only sister’s husband’s mother-in-law’s daughter in law. Who am I having lunch with?” (The answer to that one was supposed to be somewhere in the paper but it was not so if you know the answer please tell me.)

“I gotta go the bathroom,” Stavros announced.

While I waited I puzzled over the riddle and stared at the 8-year-old Wimpy’s employed to bus tables wipe counters until Stavros abruptly returned and whispered to me that he hadn’t been able to go because while he was in the bathroom, some man kept rattling the door, trying to get in. I turned around. “Who?” I asked.

“I dunno.”

Two hamburgers (the misshapen blackish sort with greasy fried onions clinging to the surface) and a large chicken fries and order of onion rings later, we were finally really full.

We hoisted our hugely fat selves into the car and made one last tourist stop at the swinging bridge in nearby Croswell, home of Pioneer sugar. I climbed on the bridge and started trying to make it sway.

“Nice Biore blackhead strip,” said Stavros.

My hand flew to my back pocket and felt the edge of the package slipping out.

“You ever use one of those?” he asked. “It’s gross. You leave it on for like, eight, ten minutes, then peel it off and it’s like a forest of blackheads.”

Well, after that special moment, we bade a wistful farewell to Lexington.

And then the drama began.

About 45 minutes into our trip and during the zillionth playing of “Wowie Zowie,” we heard a noise. It was a repetitive sound, the kind of sound that follows the revolution of a tire going about 70 miles an hour. A tire that used to have air inside of it, but no longer does.

“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!” screamed Stavros, “PULL OVER!”

Well, he didn’t curse like that but he did suggest pulling over. So we slowed down and stopped and he got out to examine the suspect wheel. It was indeed flat.

He opened my trunk and fished around under the Tupperware and paperbacks and old sweaters and newspapers and coffee cups, looking for the jack.

“Where’s the jack?” he yelled over the nonstop stream of semis blazing past at 120 miles an hour.

“I don’t have one.”

Well, to make a long, sweaty story short, a very lovely police officer stopped and offered to call a towing associate of his to come help us.

This was terrific because my insurance carrier, to whom I pay a large sum of money for the specific benefit of roadside assistance, chose first to be baffled by my inability to describe my exact coordinates, then to react by putting me on hold for 10-15 minutes.

A tow truck arrived lickety-split and a burly sort changed the tire after being sort of a prick to Stavros when my dear asked a simple question about my being billed. We chalked it up to the distance-from-Detroit thing and let it go.

Forty-five minutes later we were pulling off the freeway on our exit when Stavros received a text message from his next-door-neighbor, Arnie. “'Fuck the cops—Arnie,'” he read aloud. “What does that mean?” He called Arnie back and got voicemail. We decided to drive past his house—maybe there’d been a break in over the weekend? Some sort of crime on their block?

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I bet he was driving by and saw us on the side of the road with that cop.”

Stavros turned and fastened his heavily lashed orbs on me. “My God,” he said. “You’re right.”

Moments later Arnie called and confirmed my guess. He couldn’t believe what a dick the cop was, making us both get out of the car after pulling us over! We all were laughing, whooping, and hollering and high fiving over that one for a while.

ZAPPA PLAYS ZAPPA

2009-07-10T14:35:00.005-04:00

Last night Stavros took me to Zappa Plays Zappa at the Motor City Casino’s Soundboard theater. Neither of us had ever been to a show at Soundboard before, although apparently he has spent quite a lot of time in casinos for gambling purposes. Because of my good breeding and natural aversion to all aspects of life’s underbelly, I was wholly unfamiliar with what to expect but looking forward to a new adventure.

We left slightly early because I fantasized about getting a cocktail at a fancy casino bar while lights flashed and jackpots clanged into buckets and lovely women in sequined gowns threw dice on felt. The glamour factor began to dissipate as we exited the freeway and passed the bombed-out building adjacent to the casino’s parking lot but still I clutched Stavros’s hand in anticipation. As the parking guard pointed us toward the proper entrance, we noted a mid-fiftiesish hippie couple standing just outside smoking. The female squatted like an old Chinese woman waiting for the bus as the man chatted jovially with the black security guard posted at the doors. Both hippies had long, curly gray hair and wore loose tie-dyed outfits.

“That’s about the gist of what you’re gonna see in this show,” Stavros commented, a Zappa fan all his life.

Hmm, I thought, okay, mentally adjusting my image of the artsy, eccentric, brunette, glasses and vintage outfit-wearing audience.

The security guard pointed us up an escalator to the theater. We stepped off into what amounted to a large food court with the theater at one end. At the center was a coffee island. There was a really crummy-looking bar that looked like they lifted it right out of Metro Airport next to a huge dining room. Four middle-aged women sat at a table along the rail in the bar and guffawed their brains out as we passed. They were either drunk or recently released from a mental institution because nothing’s that funny.

“I bet they don’t have Stella,” moaned Stavros glumly, gazing at the scene.

There was a lobby just outside the huge dining room with an “associate” (which is what the casino calls employees, I know, because I saw a lot of doors marked “Associates Only”) stationed at a podium monitoring a long line of people waiting to enter.

“What is that?” I asked Stavros. “What are they waiting for?”

“To get in,” he told me.

“Is it free?” I was amazed.

“No,” he said.

As we rounded the corner, I stared in at the restaurant, wondering what was so tantalizing that people would be willing to stand in line like starving Russians to get in. The place was about a quarter full, so it wasn't like it was at capacity or anything.

“I think it’s all-you-can-eat,” my brilliant Stavros said.

“Ah!” said I, as I watched a man in a trucker’s hat salt a giant bowl of rice.

We approached the cadre of guards and associates standing in a line of defense at the theater’s entrance. We were still a good 12 feet away when one of them announced loudly in our direction: “Five minutes.”

We looked at each other.

“Let’s walk around,” I suggested, and we turned and headed toward the casino itself. We walked through a smelly but well-lighted tunnel with glowing aqua walls to another wing of the building from which noise and lights emanated. Yet another associate stood at the gate of this area.

“IDs,” he commanded blandly.

Stavros and I looked at each other again. This was just too much hassle.

“No, thanks,” we said, and started to turn away.

“You gotta show ID to get in the casino,” he said.

“That’s okay; we’re just killing time till the theater opens,” we said, and left, thwarting his attempts to boss us around.

By the time we got back to Soundboard five minutes had passed. We were required to present our IDs and my handbag for a thorough scouring. I actually had to pass it through a metal detector before spreading it open in all its pantyliner/lip gloss indignity before the glassy eyes of a becornrowed guard.

We strode immediately to the bar just inside the gates to wait for the theater doors to open. The bartender approached us at once and asked to see ID.

“Again?!?” we cried, reaching into our wallets.

“Sorry,” he replied, “What can I getcha?”

“Do you have Stella?” Stavros asked with a challenge in his voice.

“Nope,” said the bartender, with what I felt was a certain pride, “Nothin’ fancy. Bud, Bud Light, Miller, MGD, Corona.”

“Corona,” grumbled Stavros, swiveling toward me on his stool. “It just pisses me off,” he hissed, as the bartender poured his beer into a plastic cup.

“What, baby?” I asked.

“This…beer situation,” he whispered, then: “Can’t I have it in the bottle?” he said in an irritated voice to the bartender.

“Nope!” said the bartender, with the same smugness as before. “What can I get you?” he asked me.

“Um, what kind of…white wine do you have?” I asked fearfully.

“White Zin, Chardonnay, Riesling,” he answered.

“Uh, the Chardonnay,” I said, turning to Stavros and putting my hand on his arm. “It’s okay, baby.”

“It’s going to be like twenty bucks!” he predicted, getting out his charge card.

The bartender returned with my wine. “Thirteen dollars,” he said.

Stavros smiled murderously and slid his card toward the man.

Around this time, people began arriving to the show. And by “people,” I mean men. Middle-aged men. Hippie men, hanging-out-on-the-boat men, lawyer men, all kinda men. Every now and then one of them had his woman along, but for the most part, it was a real sausage-fest.

“See what I mean?” said my Stavros, as he eyed the testosterone pouring past the guards.

We slugged down thirteen bucks’ worth of booze and entered the theater. We were instantly assailed by yet more associates who wanted to see our tickets. After presenting them, we were directed down a flight of stairs to the main floor. It was very dark and spotlights shone from all directions. An associate at the bottom of the stairs led us to our seats. There were bars on both sides of the stage which I thought was very convenient. As we settled into seats one and two in row F, section 150, Stavros noted the projection of Frank Zappa’s face that shone on the back wall of the stage.

“The aspect ratio’s off,” he declared. “Let’s get a drink.”

“May I see your IDs?” the bartender asked.

The show began promptly at 8 PM. The place was almost entirely filled, from what I could tell, with sausages and the occasional roll. One prim-looking woman sat on the main floor just below us with a paperback and a sweater draped over her shoulders. A lone man sat in the chair in front of hers and he excitedly chatted her up until his friends arrived and he was forced to slide down into the last chair in his row, crushed up against the wall. The prim lady’s husband arrived shortly thereafter and handed her a Little Caeser’s mini-pizza and two packages of wet naps. She looked very pleased, although the arrival of the ex-con looking hippie couple who took seats on her other side resulted in the discreet sliding of her own chair four or five inches to the left.

It was a long set, the final 45 minutes or so punctuated by the more or less continuous ear-splitting whistle of a beer-chugging blonde woman in front of us. Sax solo? THWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET! Dweezil Zappa says anything at all? THWEEEEEEEEEEEEET! Xylophone magic? THWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET! There was literally nothing this woman wouldn’t blast her whistlehole over.

Another fun sidebar was the total incompetence of the A/V techs. Particularly whoever was manning the big-screen cameras. Shots abruptly cut from camera A to camera C to camera Z with no apparent logic.

The theater itself was a very good place to see a show once you get through the hundreds of security checkpoints. The sound was great and the seats were really good. It was a little expensive, $50 each, although my dear Stavros paid. It was a wonder that nearly the whole place was filled considering Detroit’s dreadful economic picture. I guess what remains of southeast Michigan’s well-heeled just about fits into a medium-sized auditorium.

As we left, Stavros pointed out that a door emptying out on the sidewalk led directly from the theater, and all the escalatoring and stair-climbing we’d done was just window dressing.

“What?” I said, too tired and Chardonnay-logged to compute.

On the Lodge freeway on the way home, we saw the worst drunk driver ever. He or she was swerving slowly from the slow lane to the passing lane, cruising occasionally in the middle lane for a while before edging into another. I wanted to call the police but Stavros said that we should just let that person die. Actually, he just got onto the Davison and we marveled about it for a minute then changed the subject and went home and went to sleep.

TOWN TAVERN AGAIN--GUEST POST

2009-06-19T12:01:00.009-04:00

Today's post is from my mother, Bonita Sigmundfreud. Please enjoy her delightful recounting of a grim experience.

Our family probably will stop having birthday dinners in restaurants for the rest of the year at least. So far, our luck has been bad. For my birthday last month, we had dinner at Hong Hua and were terribly disappointed; it certainly is not the splendid restaurant it was a few years ago (see my daughter’s review). Last night, for my husband’s annual 29^th birthday, we tried Town Tavern in Royal Oak.

The restaurant is attractive. There are a few patio tables, and, thanks to doors that run the width of the place and are left open in good weather, the tables in front present an illusion of being outside, too. The interior is clean and sleek, the only drawback being the inevitable television set over the bar. (Can we not lose the tv, folks? Please? It is SO ugly.)

We sat at one of the front tables and enjoyed the breeze while we waited for our server, who was wonderful: professional, thoughtful, and prompt with service. Drinks were lovely, wine was lovely. Our waiter brought a basket of hot bread slices dusted with a little parmesan. Delicious. And the chopped salad my daughter and I shared was very nice.

The whole trouble was the entrees. Drill Press’s (daughter’s) buttermilk fried chicken looked terrific, but she said that the breast meat tasted as though it had been thawed, frozen, and then thawed again. I didn’t try it, but it looked dry. She ate very little of it, and believe me she can pack it away.

The commander’s (husband’s) New York strip was medium, which would have been okay, except that he had ordered it medium rare. And it cost twenty-five bucks for eight ounces. The commander sort of picked at it and left it alone. Luckily the asparagus was all right—a little woody, but all right—and he’d had some bread.

My turkey enchiladas were lousy. I think that they must have taken some diced turkey breast from the refrigerator, rolled the meat up into flour tacos which were placed in a small casserole, spotted with a little tasteless salsa and unidentifiable cheese, and zapped in the microwave. Honestly, there was no flavor to the thing, and it was dry. Really dry.

Our waiter apologized, took the enchiladas off the bill, and asked that we come back and sit at one of his tables again so that he can try to make up for the experience. He was a doll. What is so distressing is that we ordered very simple dinners, and the restaurant couldn’t manage them. I will give the place credit for not serving entrees large enough for three normal people, a common problem today.

There is far much too emphasis on style over food in many of Royal Oak’s restaurants and a tiresome tendency to cater to unattractive singles (or would-be singles) crowds. These people are there only to impress each other and arrange sexual liaisons. They do not deserve to be catered to. Food comes first if the place is called a restaurant. If I have to stay in my own kitchen to get good food, something is wrong.

~Bonita Sigmundfreud

LEFTOVERS CRIME SCENE

2009-06-15T16:16:00.002-04:00

This tray of leftovers is in the kitchen at my work right now. The rules around here are that if there is food in the kitchen, it is up for grabs. The food sits out on the counter for hours and hours. I think this started out as some kind of middle-eastern buffet.

A—2/3 of a gnawed-upon pita. Notice it’s mostly wet. Is that grease? Meat juice?

B—Cajun carrot. One of many pieces of thoroughly blackened and dried-out vegetables.

C—A couple of crumbs of chicken. I think. It may be something else.

D—What is this? Correct guess wins a soul kiss from Stavros.

E—Meat. I don’t know what kind but it looks and smells like dog food.

SHITTY PAPER DISCOVERS FAVE WE LOVE LONG TIME

2009-06-10T11:54:00.002-04:00

"Jane Slaughter"

INYO!

2009-06-09T11:52:00.008-04:00

We had been looking forward to the opening of Inyo as much as our ill-fated anticipation of Da Nang (see “THANG LONG”). For months, the signs in the window along Woodward had been taunting us with the promise of a new Asian restaurant. I checked their website every day. Finally there appeared the option to make a reservation, so I put us down for two for last Friday.

Our reservation was for 6:45 because we had plans at 8 to go to the local comedy club. I was kinda nervous that we’d be the only people in the restaurant but I noticed a few other tables occupied by fellow early birds when we walked in. We were greeted by a tall, blonde Russian woman in a stunning black pantsuit. She showed us around so that we could get a feel for the place and choose our seating. In addition to a large bar in the front, tables are lined along the L-shaped northern half of the restaurant with a handful of very cozy, high-backed booths beyond them and a small, dark sushi bar in the rear, although it was a struggle to make note of these things because I was totally mesmerized by the swish-swish of the hostess’s pants in concert with her Slavic sussurations.

We selected a high window table along Woodward so we could keep an eye on the door. And when I say “we,” I mean I exclusively close the table for this reason. I don’t think Stavros cares where we sit as long as there is no heavy a/c blowing in his face. The table was set with red plastic chopsticks and black cloth napkins (chic!) and everything smelled new, new, new. There was the requisite techno music that every Asian restaurant in town (Ronin, Sakana) seems to favor, and two televisions above the half-circle bar, but the atmosphere was nonetheless reasonably pleasant. An abundance of wait staff stood nervously about, and a tallish fellow I presume was the owner hovered between the bar and the door all evening, making fleeting, suspicious eye contact with me, which added an element of intrigue to the evening that I found refreshing.

Our waitress was a very perky and white-toothed Katie. It seems like everyone lately has unnaturally white teeth. It’s very distracting. Anyway, Katie took our drink orders and I was pleased to note a lot of wine by the glass available. Stavros and I looked over the menu and decided to try a bunch of things and share instead of ordering entrees. Most everything on the menu was Japanese, with the exception of a few side dishes (fried rice) and I think two out of three of the poultry entrees (General Tsao’s Chicken, etc). We stuck with the flavors of Nippon for the most part. Here is what we ordered and what we thought:
• Hot and sour seafood soup—Excellent job on the “hot”; not too much white pepper. Could use some more of the “sour,” though.
• Seaweed salad—Good, standard seaweed salad, only served in a martini glass atop three thin lemon slices which made the bottom of the salad very lemony and not so good.
• Agi dashi tofu—Very, very good deep-fried tofu with bonito atop. Only complaint, was supposed to have sauce accompanying, none was provided.
• Ohitashi—Boiled spinach with bonito and dipping sauce. This was great; I have never seen this offered in Detroit and all it needed to be perf was a little soy sauce. (NOTE: We had to ask for soy sauce; none was on the table)
• Fried noodles—This was a $4 side dish that was unexpectedly great. Julienned celery and carrots with bean sprouts and scallions mixed with fried thin egg noodles. See pic here of Stavros with fried noodles and the next item on our list.

• Tempura bowl—Also great. Perfect crispness outside, no greasiness inside. Shrimp, squash, onion…I think that’s it.
• Pickled vegetable roll—Good, nothing crazy but what do you expect with such a pedestrian dish?

I am pleased to report that the ladies’ room is very well done also. In the aforementioned Ronin, I get the distinct feeling they either ran out of money or interest by the time they got to the johns. Junky, dark, and shitty stalls. Inyo may not have a cheesy make-out-on-the-sofa zone with big, open windows, I grant you, but the food’s better and it’s cheaper. It’s also a lot nicer. It’s cleaner. There’s no sleazebag element. Yet, anyway.

Items of note:
1. While I was in the can, the suspiciously spying owner man approached our table and asked Stavros how everything was. I think he waited for me to leave to talk to Stavros alone. Why? I don’t know.
2. The blonde Russian was replaced by a tall black girl in an ill-fitting sari and hideous clunky shoes. Put the blonde back.

Our bill, as you can see here…

…was not that much. You’ll note we each had two drinks, and Stavros’s beers were pints, not the 12-oz versions. I think we’ve spent that much at the Emory (although at the Emory you’d have to combine our bills to come up with a total; see “GALL AT THE EMORY” and “EMORY ON NOTICE”).

We left without dessert (tiramisu and mango something but we were stuffed and we never get dessert but I did ask what it was nonetheless) and went across the street to the comedy club, which was noteworthy only because of my terribly inappropriate attempt to join in the fun of the audience participation of improv. (Was that sentence a bit long and clumsy? Sorry.)

As anyone who has been to one of these things knows, the emcee asks the audience to provide words or scenarios for the comics to work into their acts. Well, as you can see by the bill above, I had two Chenin Blancs at Inyo. I ordered a house white at the comedy club, which turned out to be an especially vile Chardonnay, which I guzzled down quickly to get it over with. I then ordered another one to rinse the rancid taste of the first of one out of my mouth, and the second half of the show began. I should mention that the place was half-empty (optimism varies by locale and temperment; see “CAFÉ HABANA”) and that we were seated at the front table, stage right. So the emcee’s having a hard time generating much enthusiasm from either the boring crowd (a handful of women having a pathetically sedate bachelorette party and a Chinese couple and their underage son who sat in total boozeless silence the whole time) or the performers, who seemed to be going through the motions despite each having profoundly agitating personal problems. I found myself wishing we’d gotten seats in the back so we could slip out. Instead, I guzzled down approximately nine glasses of rotgut Chardonnay in preparation for the nadir of the evening, which can be described thusly: The emcee asks the audience for a three-syllable word beginning with the letter “B.” He keeps talking, apparently describing the part of speech in which this word is used, but my mind was off and running, trying to think of a three-syllable B word.

“BUCHENWALD!” I yell out.

The emcee, who’s standing on the other side of the room, the entirety of the audience between us, glares up from his notes as me and hisses, “I said ‘adjective,’” as all other persons in the room stare poison hate daggers at me.

“BUCHENWALDIAN!” I try again.

At this point, Stavros lays an okay-shut-the-fuck-up hand on my arm and I try to make myself as small, silent, and apologetically posed as possible. Obviously I did not “participate” in the show any more that night, and when it was over, fairly ran to the car. Later I justified my contributions by thinking of the great comedy clubs and comic performances of yore. What kind of stiffs are we growing around here? Reminded me of the time I had the chutzpah to stand up at an Elvis Costello show at Pine Knob and the lady next to me threatened to call security unless I took my seat.

See you at Inyo.

HONG WHA?????

2009-06-08T14:09:00.014-04:00

My mother’s birthday fell on Memorial Day this year and since the only place open was the very bogue Bastone, we decided to hold off on going out to celebrate. Last Thursday was the first night we all had open, and my mother chose Hong Hua of Farmington Hills. When this place opened, I remember them getting a ton of ink and being touted as The Most Exquisite Place Ever so I was intrigued and looking forward to our dinner.

The parking lot was pretty full for 6:30 p.m. “They must have a hella rad bar in there,” I commented to my stepfather as we crossed the parking lot.

“Very good,” he replied, as he does to 99.9% of my remarks.

My mom had made reservations for 7 p.m. and said as much to the host when we walked in. He nodded politely and led us into the front dining room (past a sign reading “Proper Attire Requested.”) “It says ‘requested,’ not ‘required,’” I whispered to my mom.

“Obviously they didn’t see it,” she sniffed, gesturing toward a couple sitting to our right. I glanced down at my own torn dress and said nothing.

The host led us to a booth under a window with its shade fully drawn. I slid in and my mother slid in next to me with her giant handbag between us. “Can we move your bag?” I asked, and she picked it up to hand across the table to my stepfather.

“Let’s sit someplace else,” I suggested, realizing that the booth was just way too small for three people, enormous purse or no enormous purse, plus the unavailable window was making me feel even more trapped. The waitress showed us to a four-top which was much better. We ordered drinks and looked over the menu.

I was expecting something really daring inside, dishes I’d never heard of perhaps. Instead, I was staring down a list of items straight from the door-tag carry-out menu from China Buffet on Wyoming and 7 Mile. The waitress reappeared and we ordered—I got Szechuan Chicken, extra spicy, and a fried tofu in “pepper salt” appetizer—and before she left the table, she placed all our napkins on our laps for us, a step I felt she needn’t have taken as I was not really properly attired, after all.

While we waited, my mother informed me that she and my stepfather had recently instituted some cost-cutting measures. Among them, slicing their $14K annual wine budget in half, and contributing less to their favorite political organizations. As I considered spending $14 thousand dollars on wine each year, I gazed around the restaurant, which did not turn out to have a kickin’ bar at all, it was simply very crowded. I noted that none of the booths had three people in them, and concluded that seating us in one originally had been a slight of some sort but I wasn’t sure what it meant. Something racist, I’m sure. I folded the napkin the waitress had carefully embedded between my thighs and to kill time, went to the ladies’ room.

Hong Hua is laid out like Mickey Mouse’s head. We were in the main room, Mickey’s face, and the bathroom was off one ear. As I passed, I glanced in and saw that everyone in that room was Asian. What, they keep the round-eyes out front? I thought. What’s this about? A waiter carrying a huge tray with circular custardy jello-ish desserts maneuvered around me with a scowl. “Pardon me,” I murmured, “you racist!”

The appetizers had arrived by the time I returned, and I was depressed to note that the “pepper salt” on the fried tofu was neither peppery not salty, nor even in attendance as far as I could detect. There was a bed of pre-minced garlic, the type that comes in a jar, beneath the tofu along with a few pieces of jalepeno, and, failing all else, a small silver pitcher of plum sauce. My stepfather really enjoyed this appetizer, telling us several times that "this sauce is really delicious!"

I don’t even want to talk much about the entrees. My mother ordered some kind of shrimp/chicken in a “bird’s nest,” which turned out not to be the Chinese bird’s nest one normally sees on menus, that is, a real bird’s nest, an exotic delicacy. Instead, it was egg noodles deep-fried into a taco-salad bowl shape. My extra-spicy Szechuan Chicken was passable but I had to ask for a side of chili sauce as the dish itself was about as spicy as half-and-half. My stepfather loved what he ordered, which was some kind of beef with large slices of ginger. And when I say “large,” I mean like the size of a Dorito. He agreed to accept my leftovers to take home in the cheery bag pictured above as I knew I would never finish them.

On the way home, we were assailed by at least 25 motorcyclists racing down 696 at terrifying speeds. Of thematic interest: All bikes were rice-burners.

The best part of the whole evening was this fortune. I love typos!

GROSS

2009-06-03T16:53:00.001-04:00

What the hell is this--a rice sandwich?

CAFE HABANA

2009-06-01T12:07:00.003-04:00

Saturday morning broke crisp and clear. Stavros and I slept late, of course, and finally got up to make coffee at about 9:30. “Hey, I thought you said ‘late,’” you say. “9:30’s not late.” I know, I’m just pretending that we get up really early on weekends and get a bunch of stuff done like normal people. We don’t.

Anyway, before your rude interruption, I believe I was describing waking up and making coffee. As I lay in bed staring at Stavros, I considered breakfast options. I had visions of vegetables, salsa, spiciness. We’ve got to hit the Farmer’s Market, I thought. We should eat in Royal Oak. I remembered my dear friend Janis Beaglehole telling me that Café Habana had a decent brunch. That would fill my spicy hole, I thought, gazing thoughtfully at Stavros’s sleeping form.

Never one to argue, Stavros agreed to my Royal Oak plan. By some miracle, we were able to find a parking place right behind the restaurant as well as the additional blessing of hearing the oddest song in history while parking. It was some country-fried fellow talking about Buddy Holly, and the REAL story of what happened to him. I think. I can’t remember enough of the lyrics to properly Google it. However, it was very strange and anyone who knows what this magnificent number is should please leave the artist and song title in the comments, thank you.

We walked into a half-full room. Or half-empty, depending on your attitude. If you’re a dour son of a bitch, you would have thought the place looked near-empty. I, however, noted simply that all the tables I wanted to occupy were taken and thus the capacity registered at 50% full and 100% assholes for taking all the good tables. So we had to take one on a bit of a riser near the kitchen. This turned out to be okay because at least we had a window and got to watch the swarm of cops who began circling the area about a half hour later. But I digress.

Our waiter, one of two serving the room, was a blandish youth with a vacant expression. He brought us coffee and water and returned a few minutes later to take our order. I’d decided to get one of everything from the “sides” menu, which together would be the equivalent of a basic breakfast at any other restaurant. Eggs, potato, toast, bacon. I asked the waiter what, exactly, was “Cuban toast.” He stuttered, “It’s…it’s toast, just toast, white bread.…” Okay, I told him, put me down for one. I also added a side of black beans and some chili sauce the waiter claimed was “spicy.” Stavros ordered something consisting of eggs, peas, and possibly black beans. He’s far more daring than I.

While we waited for the food to arrive, I browsed idly through a copy of the free Latino newspaper. “Oh, look, Stavros: ‘Elephant Family to Dine on Abandoned Children,’” I translated. Eventually we grew tired of reading foreign news stories and Stavros attempted to hack into the restaurant’s sound system using a nifty iPhone app he downloaded last weekend. After several fruitless attempts, I suggested we resort to the TV-B-Gone, a little universal remote that hooks onto your keyring and turn off any TV within 15 feet or so. “Is that a TV?” I asked, craning my neck to peer around a corner.

Finally the waiter arrived with our brunch. I have to say it looked a lot better than it tasted. The potato component was essentially mashed potatoes with minced onions and shaped into a disc and deep fried. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But it really wasn’t. The inside was too gluey and the outside tasted exactly like onion chips from White Castle. The bacon was slightly undercooked but not as horrifically so as served by those rat-bastards at Café Muse, so I won’t complain too much about it. The “Cuban toast”? It was half a small baguette sliced lengthwise and toasted to point of light crispness, then left unbuttered or in any way adorned. There was no butter on the table so presumably this is the way the Cubans like their toast: dry and tubular. The “spicy” sauce was so bland I was worried that I had blown out my tastebuds on wine the night previous. “Try this,” I said to Stavros, who was having much better luck that I. “It’s good,” he said. “This is all really subtle; I like it.”

Hrrrmph. I tried the black beans. They were good once I added a lot of salt. Oh, I must mention this: At Café Habana, they use those terrible salt grinders. I hate those. That’s too much for tabletop use, in my opinion. I ate what I could, chewing dutifully on the flavorless bread and admiring Stavros’s ruggedly handsome visage. Around this time was when the cops began their siege. One after the other, they passed our window. “I’m going to go see if they need any assistance,” I told Stavros, and got up from the booth, hiked up my jeans, and stepped outside. A lone cruiser crept around the lot we’d parked in, and a couple more rolled slowly past me on 5th Street headed toward Main. I scanned the terrain for guys in ski masks hunched behind dumpsters but failing to see anything except a gaggle of middle-aged women in “Race for the Cure” t-shirts lumbering into a minivan, I went back into the restaurant.

Stavros was in the final round of his eggs-and-peas mess, so I looked around for our waiter. He was over by the restrooms, carrying a broom and dustpan with an odd look of bliss and tranquility on his face. I started to raise a hand but he was obstinately refusing to notice me, even peripherally. I turned around and saw the other waiter sitting in the booth behind us, folding napkins around silverware. “Excuse me, can we get our check, please?” I asked.

He looked around, saw our waiter. “Sure,” he said, getting up and looking irritated and amused at the same time. “He’s…uh, he’s a little under the weather. I think he ate something bad,” he added unnecessarily. Well, that’s just terrif, I thought. Our waiter’s got the shits. Then I recalled the beatific expression on his face, and decided that he was stoned. I felt better, but not a lot, and Stavros paid and we left. Normally I would conclude our story here but one funny thing happened at the Farmer’s Market that I must report.

First of all, I was disappointed to find that the majority of their produce was lettuce. About a million kinds of lettuce. Everything else was only available in embryonic or infantile versions. Of course, moron, you’re thinking. It’s May. The Farmer’s Market isn’t the grocery store. Fine, okay, I forgot. Sue me. Lucky thing, I love lettuce. So we’re wandering around with our lettuce when we bump into some guy he knows.

“Hey, Stavros,” the guy said. I turned around. The guy was with a woman; we smile weakly at each other without speaking.

“We see each other all the time!” the guy continued. I look at Stavros.

“Yeah, we…see each other…from time to time,” Stavros agreed. Well! This is certainly an exhilarating reunion! I take Stavros by the hand and we move toward the Praying Mantids display (“Guaranteed to Fix Your Insect Problem—200 Live Praying Mantids, Should Hatch By July!”).

“That guy never introduces me to his wife,” he grumbled, totally unaware of the strangeness of their conversation. “Don’t get those,” he added, nodding toward the Mantids. I took his hand and we left.

I’m going to go back next weekend for the Mantids.

STAVROS'S HOTDOG MASTERPIECE

2009-06-01T10:24:00.004-04:00

Stavros made these two beauties for dinner last night. The buns were brushed lightly with olive oil, then sprinkled with garlic powder leftover from a "Chex Mix at home" experiment. Then both sides of the inner buns were brushed with Gulden's spicy mustard and ketchup, atop which the Ball Park beef frank was placed along with one pickled green bean, sliced Roma tomato, and a squiggle of yellow mustard. Stavros is a genius.

THINGS GET HOT AT HOME WITH EUNICE AND STAVROS

2009-05-21T10:59:00.003-04:00

Stavros and I had a truly incendiary evening yesterday. It was a beautiful afternoon, and since Stavros’s plans were unexpectedly canceled, we decided to grill. Earlier in the day, I had been to the very expensive Plum Market where I purchased a pound of hot Italian chicken sausage and some corn on the cob, and Stavros loves hot dogs, so I figured I’d make a side of pasta and we’d have a genuine smorgasbord. (“Smorgasbord” is French for “full stomach.”)

We had a preprandial cocktail on the patio and tossed out a box of Carr’s Water Crackers to the squirrels, who had to then run around and dig up chunks of buried brie—a chore but worth it—and chatted about our respective days at work. Stavros is a busy manager for a highly-regarded showbiz firm, and I provide online content for some of America’s leading retailers of GDP-type items. Stavros, all in black, did not even glisten in the early-evening sun as he described his day. I remarked that we would likely soon run out of propane, and with that gripping observation, I turned on the grill and we went into the house to prepare the meat and corn.

I unwrapped the sausage while Stavros took his hot dogs from the freezer and lay them on a plate. I had high hopes for these sausages. Not only did I expect them to be good, I demanded it. My trip to Plum Market had put me in a rotten mood because it wound up being horrifically expensive and so far, not worth it. I originally meant to get lunch—I woke up wanting salad from a salad bar. Perhaps unwise in the season of Swine Flu, but that’s what I wanted and I had had a vague memory of Plum Market having a superior salad bar. So at lunch I drove down to ritzytown and was seduced into buying a few additional things by the subliminal messages in the muzak, among them, these grossly overpriced sausages. The salad bar turned out to be about one thin hair (I was going to say “pussy” instead of thin) better than the one in my cafeteria at work, and the potato chips were revolting—I think they had sugar on them—and cost $1.79, I realized once back at work. So I felt consummately gypped by the entire experience and pinned my salvation on these hot Italian chicken sausages. If they were good, the trip and expense would have been worth it. Capice?

I put the corn and the sausage on the grill and came back inside to make the pasta. Stavros assisted by way of attempting to make out with me constantly. As I filled the coffee pot and set the timer for this morning, I glanced out the kitchen window at the grill, from which huge, poisonous-looking clouds of black smoke were suddenly billowing.

“STAVROS!” I cried, placing the coffee pot on the sideboard. “Look at the grill!”

We raced outside and I yelled, “What do I do?”

“Put the fire out!” yelled back Stavros.

“With the hose?” I asked, in keeping with my new habit of asking the dumbest possible questions.

Without waiting for an answer, I sprang like one of Charlie’s Angels and grabbed the hose, conveniently located apprx. six inches from the smoldering grill, and squatted in front of it, aiming the water into the drip pan, which was fully ablaze from a year’s worth of collected olive oil and assorted lard. I held down the trigger of the spray nozzle and crouched in front of the grill like Jacklyn Smith taking down a rogue pimp and finally the fire died down. I dropped the hose and reached under the grill to turn off the flow of propane from the tank while Stavros extended a delicate hand to turn off the ignition knob.

“Holy shit,” said I.

Stavros opened the grill. The hot Italian chicken sausages had been reduced to anthracite. The corn was still vaguely cornlike, but with a greasy, gray sheen and speckles of soot. Smoke rose in foul breaths and blackened the cobwebs and soffit vents under my eave.

I gotta say, I took this pretty hard. I almost never ruin dinner. Especially by way of a giant fire. Stavros was kind enough to remove the drip pan, which had finally been extinguished, and I dropped the charred remains of the sausage and corn into the garbage. Luckily, Stavros had grilled and removed his hot dogs prior to the fire, so all was not totally lost. Plus we still had the pasta. So I had some pasta, and Stavros had his hot dogs and pasta, and we decided to go for a walk and get an ice cream to make up for the tragic loss of 800 calories.

We live very near each other, Stavros and I, and thus we patronize the same party store. (For those of you not in the Detroit area, “party store” means “liquor store.” Not “balloons and streamers”; booze, etc.) I should also point out that I have lived in the neighborhood for about three times as long as Stavros, which is why what happened next was amusing.

We walked into the party store. I noticed that this evening’s clerks were the two older men, not the twenty-something sons of the proprietor. I approached the ice cream vault and heard, “Hi, Stavros.” I turned around in time to see Stavros raise his hand in a wave and reply, “Hey, Pete.”

Hey, Stavros? Hey, Pete? What’s going on here? Are these two pals on Facebook now or something? Stavros looked quite proud of himself as we wrapped up our purchase, and the minute we were outside I demanded, “How does he know your name!”

“I go there every day,” he said. “He sees my credit card. He started saying, ‘Thanks, Stavros,’ so I asked him his name.”

I didn’t quite buy this and I watched him with suspicion as I ate my Good Humor strawberry shortcake bar.

By the time we got home, there was no lingering smell of grease fire and the evening had somewhat redeemed itself by virtue of the ice cream and the discovery of a 1992 Ford High School yearbook lying the road.

I will not, however, be returning to Plum Market.

DAVIN WHIPPLETHORPE ON CHINA"RUBELLA" RUBY

2009-05-20T15:08:00.002-04:00

Being a huge fan of Amazing Chicken and a frequent take away customer, my friend Ruby and I decided it would be nice to get out and enjoy our dinner at the restaurant. It is usually half occupied when I get my take-aways, but tonight it was fairly packed. Ruby and I get a table directly in front of the Media Awards wall where you can read how many times they’ve won The Metro Times best Chinese restaurant award. Most of the awards are extremely yellowed meaning they must have gotten awards for quite some time.

Our waitress, who was charming in a non-English kind of way, quickly brought us our waters. Ruby ordered the Curry Chicken, yum, with a bowl of egg drop soup, equally yum. I ordered the…guess…the Amazing Chicken and a bowl of hot and sour soup.

Our soup arrives promptly. When at a Chinese restaurant, I immediately grab for the soy sauce as if it’s a bag of money, despite my high blood pressure, which is being controlled with Micardis HCL, anywho, I reach across the table to grab the soy sauce and lo and behold 4 rather small but equally offensive cockroaches run out from behind the soy sauce and run directly across my hand then onto the floor. After 10 seconds of shock expire, I jump up and scream not unlike a girl would do. Everyone in the restaurant drops what they’re doing and it’s all eyes on me. Not a fan of attention, I flipped my wig even more. When the kind Oriental owner came over she had a look on her face as if she’s seen this thousands of times over…and if you’ve been there, you would agree. Not even a sorry, or your meal is on us, crockroash no etra charg.
Too upset to eat I demand to my friend Ruby, who is quite fond of food and overeating in general, to leave immediately. Ruby then asks me if we want to get our food as a take away. I publicly chastised her and asked her how can have the gall to take food home that shared the same surface as a family of cockroaches? I walked out and yelled “FILTHY!”
To this day I still order Amazing Chicken take-away. And chit chat with the owner. I can’t help it.

~ Davin Whipplethorpe

2009-05-15T10:41:00.000-04:00

EMORY ON NOTICE

2009-05-15T10:28:00.003-04:00

Last night Stavros and I had dinner at the Emory and a completely different waitress from the earlier "split check" incident SPLIT OUR CHECK. I thought Stavros was going to punch her for a minute. What is the problem, Emory? We were together in the same booth, no one else present this time...we even shared the goddamned fries! Is it not enough that you insult us with your horrible jukebox and the hidden surcharge on your fake A1? Now you suggest that our couplehood is repeatedly in doubt? You're on notice, Emory. Please note the fate of Cafe Muse.

THANG LONG

2009-05-14T11:48:00.004-04:00

Our bike ride was rained out last Saturday so Stavros and I decided it was a good afternoon to go to the movies and visit our all-time favorite place: Thang Long. It’s the one and only Vietnamese restaurant I’ve ever eaten at (Notice I said “eaten at” and not “been to.” More on this later*.) and I think it is the bomb, as does Stavros, and we are wiling to overlook a number of indiscretions that would place any other restaurant on our permanent “DO NOT CALL” list.

It started to rain on our way there and was steadily spitting down by the time we arrived. I was completely starving, like the kind of starving where every McDonald’s billboard drives you mad with food-lust and the idea of Kentucky Fried Chicken sounds really good. We pulled into a parking place near the front door and I leapt out of the car.

“AAAHHHHHH!”

I was just reaching for the door when I heard the wail bleat from a very aggrieved Stavros. I turned around and he was grimacing and limping around on the sidewalk in front of the car. “Oh, Stavros! Love of my life—what happened?” cried I.

“I twisted my fuckin’ ankle!” he said, and continued his cockeyed walk around on the pavement, trying to alleviate the pain. He moved off the sidewalk and into the vacant parking place next to ours, and at once a car pulled into the space, forcing him back onto the pavement at a rather rapid clip.

“Goddamn it. What’s wrong with my fucking feet?” he asked God, or perhaps he was talking to me. He was referring to the fact that a few weeks earlier, he sustained a mysterious injury to one of his feet—I forget which, it was either the right or the left—that caused him great distress and inconvenience.

We briefly contemplated a later trip to CVS to purchase an ace bandage, came to no conclusion on the topic, and entered Thang Long.

Normally there are only a few tables occupied and we have our choice of seating, but on this day, every booth on the South wall—my preferred location—was full as was the “mezzanine,” (a one-step-up row of tables facing the front window) which is my second choice. The host, a diminutive Asian with possible birth defects, led us to a table on the North wall, and I knew this wouldn’t do. As we know from experience, these tables are unsuitable for all but the most obese persons, as the backs of the benches are approximately 3 ½ feet from the tabletop. So if you don’t have to accommodate an enormous midsection, you must perch on the very edge of the seat in order to reach your food, which hurts my back and also is just generally uncomfortable. Plus it seems kind of windy on that side. Nonetheless, we gamely slid into the booth and just as gamely slid right the hell back out and pointed to the one open table on the North wall that was unoccupied. Yes, I know I said earlier they were all full, but that’s because, frankly, I wasn’t counting the one at the very end of the row because it’s right next to the kitchen and I don’t like it. We walked over to the table, and to our waitress’s confusion, I did not sit, but stood scanning the tableau behind me for a miracle opening. Stavros was already seated on the side facing the front of the restaurant and so finally I surrendered, feeling he’d already suffered enough recently without me dragging him from table to table.

I took my seat and noted the grimy Plexiglas behind him, separating us from the lower 2/3 of the kitchen’s swinging door and whatever was stacked on the bottom shelves of the rack affixed to the wall. I could see some plastic containers stacked haphazardly and a few empty jars. Nothing in this place is too clean so it doesn’t really bear inspecting and with this in mind, I tore my eyes from the dripping hand towel on the top shelf and opened the menu.

“What are you going to get?” I demanded of Stavros immediately. “Are you getting the Hue?” Hue is some kind of spicy beef soup and Stavros orders it every time we eat there.

“Yes,” he said, and I briskly replied, “Alright, maybe I should see if they’ll let me get that one soup in a big bowl. I wonder if it comes that way, or just in a cup. Then we can get that salad, the one with bean sprouts. That seems like it would be enough. Or maybe I could get that one thing, the one with the noodles. We don’t want leftovers. They’ll rot while we’re in the movies. What do you want? Do you want some of the noodles? Maybe I should get that and a cup of the soup. Do you like that salad?”

I kept up this prattle for a good ten minutes until the waitress arrived. I believe she is the matriarch of Thang Long. She is always our waitress. I think a family owns it, and they are the only people who work there. Anyway, she stood at the table, pen poised over her pad and an expectant and slightly mocking look on her face as always.

“Well,” I told her, closing my menu, “After much deliberation, we’ve decided to get what we always get,” and I recited not only my order, but Stavros’s too, as at some point I had made the unconscious decision to steward our luncheon experience due to his injury.

“Wait.” She was confused. “C75 plus Hue? You want crunchy roll?”

“No. No crunchy roll,” I tell her. “Mine comes with one. You can have it.” I direct this last comment at Stavros, who was feebly attempting to protest and break into my dictatorial dictation of our menu.

I think Stavros was beaten down by his ankle pain because he capitulated and allowed me to issue further commands to the waitress. After she read back our order in an obviously annoyed tone, she retreated to the kitchen and I sat back and sipped water, occasionally allowing my eyes to drift around the area behind Stavros. There was a bicycle leaning against the wall next to the restrooms. Whose is that? I wondered, visions of a steamy Asiatic marketplace forming in my mind. Chickens flapping amid the teeming crowds of sweaty brunettes in gray sweatpants and flip flops. Asian men on bicycles wearing those big round straw hats transporting miscellaneous carcasses in baskets hanging from their shoulders.

“Hue. Chicken soup. Salad.” The waitress returned and I was jolted from my reverie. She slammed the bowls on the table and walked away. I noticed Stavros’s soup was a small size, what they call a “cup” at Thang Long.

“You just got the cup?” I asked.

“Yes, this is why I wanted my own crispy rolls,” he said patiently, stirring his soup.

“Oh.”

I felt kinda bad. Poor guy hadn’t gotten a word in edgewise during my attempt to control some portion of our experience. Sitting in that lame booth that was rejected by all other persons in the restaurant had really left me feeling at loose ends.

The rest of lunch passed without incident as I stuffed wad after wad of beansprouts and cabbage and noodles into my piehole. The tabletop before me was scattered with debris. Stavros ate his soup with his usual delicate good manners, and gracefully accepted my crispy roll without complaint as to its singlehood. Finally, we folded our napkins and got up to leave. As I was standing at the cashier’s desk (manned by the matriarch), Stavros limped over to the wall of reviews from local papers.

I took his arm to leave and once we were out, he told me that one of them hadn’t been particularly flattering.

“Located in a derelict strip mall sandwiched between a pregnancy center and a shuttered fast cash shop, Thang Long is best when you stick to the simple fare,” he recited from memory.

Okay, so at this point I should also mention, as a testament to how good this place really is, review be damned—on one of our first trips there, I found what was unmistakably a pubic hair in my “C75.” And we still went back.

* Last fall we noticed a storefront under construction in Clawson promising the imminent arrival of “Da Nang—Authentic Vietnamese Cuisine.” We waited months for them to open. I was in contact via email with the owner. Finally, two months overdue, they opened and we drove down one Saturday afternoon. First, it was overclean and smelled of construction. Not food. Paint and wood and cement. Secondly, there was virtually nothing on the menu but beef, which I do not eat. And third, it was about twice or three times as expensive at Thang Long. We slipped out without ordering anything and drove to Thang Long at once.

GUEST POST--MORE HORROR AT THE EMORY

2009-05-06T12:48:00.003-04:00

Today's post is from celebrity guest columnist Davin Whipplethorpe. Enjoy.

I am having issues with a couple I was staring at like a car wreck, last Monday at The Emory in Ferndale, Mi. They were very fascinating to me as they were very unusual in the persnickety sense. First, the man comes in dressed like a Dandy, and amongst all the empty seats at the bar, sits 2 chairs away from me. I thought, ok, maybe he’s going to try and bum a cigarette or a light from me, a non-smoker. \I then overheard him order a martini with olives from the foxy bartender. As I watched the drink being poured, I noticed the bartender used Smirnoff Vodka to make the martini. Now, you tell me the man couldn’t shell out $2 more for Belvedere or Grey Goose? Shortly thereafter, an overly dressed woman, right out of West Bloomfield if you catch my drift, comes in and sits next to the Dandy Man. She insists to see a food menu as well as a drink menu. She started to ask way too many questions about the ingredients in the food. For Christ’s sake, it’s a bar menu. Anywho, she decides on a house salad and a cup of chicken noodle. The man had a burger, which looked delicious. This is where I begin to get spooked. The woman finally ordered a cabernet to enjoy with her man’s cheap martini. She ordered a house cabernet…a chintzy $5 glass of Salmon Creek poured from those huge liter bottles. She requested to the foxy bartender to bring the bottle over so she can see the label. It’s Salmon Creek! Go to CVS if you want to see the label. The bartender did bring the bottle to her for her approval, all the while looking at me and rolling his eyes. Finally, their food arrives. The man seemed to enjoy his burger that he ate like a normal person would. The woman, on the other hand, would spear a few pieces of salad and then proceed to dip it into her chicken noodle soup. She did this with every bite for at least a half hour. Eventually, she got tired of dipping and just poured the chicken noodle soup over the rest of her salad. I was so flabbergasted by her eating ritual that I couldn’t help but comment to my drinking partner. Probably a bit too loud as she didn’t respond well to the fact that I compared her eating habits to that of a retard. I can tell this by the daggers she shot into me with her eyes.

~ Davin Whipplethorpe

GALL AT THE EMORY

2009-05-01T18:08:00.005-04:00

I forgot to record a stunningly lame experience Stavros and I had last weekend at the Emory.

Normally we wouldn't go there for dinner but it was very sunny and nice out and neither of us had the energy to try to figure out anything exotic. So we took a table near the window and had an average sandwich-based dinner. (There was one incident regarding my suspicion that my request for no mayonnaise on my BLT had been ignored but it turned out only to be butter. Which is still gross because I don't consider butter a condiment.) When we were almost finished, my dear friend Janis Beaglehole and her boyfriend Ronald Pringlefarm showed up with his small daughter Maverick and they took the table next to ours. After having a drink with them and enjoying the charming little girl's drawings and antics, Stavros asked out waitress for the bill. "Just yours?" she asked. "Yes," he answered.

The bill arrived, Stavros paid it, and we left.

The following morning, Janis called me. She said our waitress had come to the table following our departure in a state of distress. It turns out that when she'd asked Stavros if he meant "his" bill, she'd meant his alone. Not mine. His. Nevermind that we'd arrived together, ate together, were clearly TO-GETH-ER...somehow this lady thought we were going dutch, perhaps even leaving seperately, and when he asked for his check, he meant to pay for his own food and drink and leave without me. The waitress apparently told Janis and Ronald that they'd "just have to pay" my tab. After giving it some thought, the waitress apparently changed her mind, which was good because Janis and Ronald were justifiably affronted by the notion, and she told them that because she sees us "all the time" --an overstatement, she sees us sometimes--she would catch us later. Well, this "catching us" concept came to fruition a few days later when I stopped in for a drink. I ordered and was standing at the bar examining my cuticles while I waited for my drink and suddenly she slid onto the bar in front of me and folded her arms on the counter and said "Hi," in a tone of voice Dick Cheney might use when personally strapping Osama Bin Laden to a waterboarding table.

"Hi," I said, well aware of where we were goin' with this. She says, "Did you hear about what happened?"

"Yeah," says I, waving a hand toward the bartender ringing up my drink, "Just add it to my tab."

I see her steathily approach the bartender and watch as a brief caucus takes place. I go sit down. A few minutes later, she appears at the table and kneels before me as if in supplication.

"I can't add that to your tab," she says, "I had to pay for it myself so I need you to give me the money."

"You want me to pay you right now?" I ask, just makin' sure I understand.

"Yes," she says.

"I don't have any cash," I tell her.

"Can you write me a check?"

OK. I'm galled now. I understand that I, or we, owe her this money, but I am beginning to feel hounded. We didn't try to skip out on the tab.

"Um...we'll come by tomorrow and pay it," I say.

Tomorrow is Friday. Stavros and I have dinner at Shilla, which is "just okay," according to local journalist Morticia Baton. Afterward, we go to the Emory as promised for a drink and to pay our tab.

Stavros generously handed over a rough estimate of our payment to the manager, Byron, who indicated that he felt the whole matter was distasteful and also added that if he'd known about it that night, that he'd have had our bill erased entirely.

They do have good pickles there, though.

I like to do things and to go places.

2009-04-30T11:36:00.002-04:00

ANNA'S

2009-04-30T11:27:00.004-04:00

Last weekend we woke up early, and since it was pleasant outside for the first time since, oh, early October, we decided to ride our bikes someplace for breakfast. I haven’t taken my bike out of the garage since sometime in September (there was a large, hammock-like cobweb attaching it to the garage wall which I was able to remove with a pair of gardening shears), and my tires were kinda flat, so we decided to go to the gas station on 9 Mile to get air. Stavros, being the gentleman that he is, immediately announced, “I’ll handle this,” and jumped off his bike to unscrew my nozzles. Now, I don’t want you to get aroused by that visual so let me clarify things: He was just taking the cap off my bike's valve stems. Anyway, because I feel I must supervise every imaginable task, I lorded over Stavros with my hands on my hips and began issuing instructions. He looked up and fixed as steely a gaze as is possible with those eyelashes and said, “I know how to put air in tires.”

Well. I guess he did, because it was much easier to keep up with him afterward. I suggested we go to a mystery spot—a little diner I’d seen all my life but never tried (because it seemed like it had to be gross) called Anna’s on Woodward in Pleasant Ridge. So we wove through PR and stopped our bikes in front and looked in the windows before entering. You don’t want to just march into a place you’ve never been—what if it’s Leprosy Day or something? Anyway, it sure looked cute. It was shotgun-style with tables running the length along the windows and a bar on the other side. The tables were formica and chrome with turquoise leather chairs and a bunch of porcelain knick-knacks and plants and shit were on the long windowsill. It looked totally charming. I couldn’t figure out why no one was in there. So we walked in and noticed two things at once. First, it wasn’t entirely empty; there was an older man sitting at the counter having coffee and talking to the ancient woman behind the bar, and second, the place smelled God-awful. It hit us the second we walked in the door. It was like getting smacked in the face with an old man’s underpants. Medicinal, unclean, moldy, ill. I mean, every gross smell you associate with the severely elderly in one noxious inhalation. Still, perhaps we’d get used to it. We were already inside, after all, so it was worth a shot.

We took the seat nearest the door and I went to wash my hands while Stavros sat down. The old lady took no notice of us, and I heard the man at the bar say something to her about sausages, and her phlegmy reply, “You know sausages are gonna take a while,” which I thought might be her way of trying to talk him out of it. I felt a rising panic as I washed my hands so I’m afraid I can’t even describe the bathroom. I was preoccupied with getting out of there. It couldn’t be any good. People would be there. The grill and the appliances hadn’t looked clean at all, from what I glimpsed on my way to the can. Did she even maintain proper refrigeration? I left the bathroom fretting, and passed Stavros, who was about to enter the same room. “There’s only the one, honey,” I heard the old lady say. We made brief eye contact and I sent the telepathic message: “WE MUST GET OUT.”

When I returned to the table, I saw that “Anna,” which is who the old lady must be, had brought us water. I took a sip, noticing that it was obviously tap water, and old-tasting tap water, like it had been poured a couple of days ago, and there was no ice in it. Okay, I don’t have to have ice. I opened the menu and read the breakfast offerings. The left side had numbered dishes, and odd, old-timey prices. Like “#1—Cereal, coffee, and toast: $3.65” People go to a restaurant for cereal, coffee, and toast? As I looked for the regulation eggs & bacon plate, I heard “Anna” begin to cough. It sounded like she was trying to dislodge a bowl of gravy from her lungs. I looked up from the menu and thought, Okay, this is where I get off. The smell of the place wasn’t abating, either. It was stronger. Suddenly everything lost its charm. The ’50s cigarette machine in the corner. The pristine, time-capsule look of the place. The quaint menu. I turned to look for Stavros and as he approached, I saw the cash register behind him. “CASH ONLY,” it read. “NO CREDIT, NO CHECKS.”

“Stavros,” I said in a loud monotone, “They only take cash. I guess we will have to go someplace else.” I stood up.

“That’s too bad,” he said in an equally loud monotone, and without breaking his stride, walked past our table and out the door.

Once outside we hopped on our bikes and didn’t say anything until we were a half-block away. And then we laughed all the way to the Flytrap where Stavros ordered—SHOCKER THEATER—the waffles.

My good friend Anastasia Galoreski tells me that she goes to Anna’s once a month with her friend the lawyer because he loves it. This particular lawyer is also deeply enamored of Jayne Mansfield, however, so I wasn’t a bit surprised. She also told me that the woman behind the bar isn’t called Anna, her name is something else—Anna was her mother or something—and Anastasia said that she believes the old lady would be happier if no one ever came in. That explains the whole sausages-are-gonna-take-a-while comment, I thought. We figure she’ll die soon (sorry, with that cough, the next customer to walk into that joint is gonna be the Grim Reaper) and some hipster will take it over. Glad the mystery of Anna’s is over at least.

EMERGENCY BATHROOM AT THE BONGO ROOM

2009-04-29T11:45:00.002-04:00

Forget my bullshit promises about Chicago. The most interesting thing that happened was when I tried to enter the emergency bathroom at a place called The Bongo Room. I don’t know what kind of horseshit the waitress was trying to pull when she pointed toward what looked like a closet door right in the middle of the restaurant floor in response to my “Where’s the bathroom?” I thought it was weird that they’d have a john right there next to a table, and I was kinda wondering why the lady with the baby agreed to sit there, also, leaning on the wall behind the door was a couple of brooms and mops and a chair, so when I tried to go in, I could only open the door about six inches. Trouper that I am, I turned sideways and attempted to wedge myself in and had one thigh fully through the gap when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see a nice Hispanic busboy who was smiling—and not in friendliness, I assure you, this guy was laughing at me—and gesturing down a nearby hallway to a PROPER SET OF RESTROOMS. So thanks, asshole lady at the Bongo Room. I bet your Bongoing days are numbered. The food was okay, of course Stavros liked it because they had apple-cinnamon waffles with cherry-maple compote or something like that. One other quick thing about this “Bongo Room”—they open at 9AM and not a second earlier. This means that even if there is a line of people outside the door and the wind is howling up your hoo-ha and it’s 8:58 and the wait staff are all standing around picking their noses just inside the door and staring at you, they’re not letting you in.

A Non-Referendum on Chicago

2009-04-12T19:44:00.002-04:00

There is no doubt that this shimmering city should rise above every midwestern metropolis for no other reason than the sheer fucking nightmare that traversing it is. More later.

2009-04-08T10:35:00.000-04:00

Cafe Muse

2009-04-08T09:39:00.022-04:00

Before they moved down the block to a larger space, Stavros and I really liked Cafe Muse. Their new location, next to the vulgarly named "Chaud Jeans," however, has been nothing but disappointment after disappointment.

Our last and probably final visit took place last Saturday. We arrived at about 11:30, prime weekend breakfast/brunch time. There were several people crowded into the vestibule and not knowing if they were all in the same party, I marched ahead of them to give my name to the hostess. No employee of Cafe Muse took the least notice of me and instead seated four people who'd been at the front of the line. Finally the hostess returned and two women who'd been next in line stepped forward and informed me that excuse me, I think we were before you. You think? Really, I thought there was a breach in the time-space continuum and we were before you but appeared to arrive later. Well, I was embarrassed and said that I'd only been trying to give our name to the hostess but I don't think they even heard me. How was I supposed to know all those people weren't all part of some overlarge mass breakfasting group? At any rate, it's a good thing they were before us because they got a little table just in front of the vestibule that I've had before and it's really too close to the tables around it which disturbs me. Besides, I wanted the high-top in front of the window that we've never been able to get. Actually it's not in front of the window, two "comfy" chairs and a little table are in front of the window and the table is about five feet from the window. This puzzled me, because when and by whom would that area be used? Why not put another table there? They clearly have no aversion to closeness and jamming people in next to each other at Cafe Muse. Another thing that gave me the willies was the busboy's attention to polishing our table before we took it. I don't mean wiping down. I mean polishing. I thought I was watching Kustom Kar Kommandos the way this fellow was making love to the tabletop.

We sat down and coffee and ginger ale (for me) was ordered and we looked at the daily menu. Cafe Muse has its regular all-the-time menu, then a daily list of special dishes. I didn't feel like having breakfast, plus the last few times we'd been in my toast wasn't toasted and the bacon was on the alive side, so I ordered the turkey burger, which of course I had to ask for sans avocado (bogue, bogue, bogue!). It was supposed to come with "tomato vinaigrette," of which I was naturally suspicious, but I assumed it would be on the side so I held my tongue on that account. The waitress inexplicably asked if I wanted ketchup or mustard, which in retrospect I guess was her way of letting me know they were out of the dressing, because there was none when it arrived. But anyway, I'm skipping ahead. I told her I'd like yellow mustard please. I have have to be sure to say yellow mustard in restaurants because they so often try to fancy the joint up by giving you Dijon, which is good in salad dressing and spaetzle and stuff but not on a sandwich, for God's sake. Gross. I also requested the chips versus the daily salad on the side, because the daily salad was something like barley with pieces of fruit in it or some sweet concoction that sounded revolting. I also asked for a pickle and was told that they have no pickles at Cafe Muse. Stavros ordered the French toast with some kind of fruit. He likes pancakes and things like that but I can't eat anything sweet in the morning. And on the weekend I consider it morning until about 2PM.

Our drinks arrived, brought by a very stoned-seeming waiter. He had a look of bliss that one doesn't see often on the face of one in the service industry. Come to think of it, he was also the table polisher. Hm. Normally I don't order pop but I daresay I am capable of detecting carbonation, and this ginger ale, I'm sorry to report, contained none. I decided to drink it anyway because I felt that by barging to the head of the line then making all sorts of demands regarding the preparation of the turkey burger hadn't endeared me to any of the staff. Also Stavros asked for water when we ordered and I assumed that the request had registered with the waitress and that its arrival was imminent should I choose to eschew entirely the ginger ale. Well, guess what, ladies and gentlemen? No water was brought. Waitresses and waiters (I will not say "servers") milled hither and nigh but none would look in our direction despite Stavros's vain attempts to catch someone's eye.

In our ongoing waterlessness, we drank our drinks and commented on the surroundings. Stavros is particularly smug about a blow-up of a wine bottle label bearing the word "Chateau" followed by his last name, Papanastasiou, which hangs framed in the vestibule. "I can't believe they don't have pickles. What kind of a place doesn't have pickles?" I asked him.

"Maybe because pickles aren't French," said Stavros. French? I thought. What's that got to do with it? Then it dawned on me that Cafe Muse was trying to be a French place. It certainly accounted for the "Chateau Papanastasiou" wine label and the gaudy curtains hanging in the vestibule. "Perhaps," I replied.

Finally the food arrived. No water, of course, and Stavros repeated his request. "Sure," said the waitress before disappearing into the teeming mass of waitstaff attending to the every whim of all other patrons, including the two guttersnipes who'd had the gall the insinuate that I'd been trying to cut ahead of them. Those two, I happened to notice, ordered three sandwiches. Well, maybe they split two orders and had three plates but still. It didn't look good.

I was initially pleased to note the absence of the mysterious "tomato vinaigrette," but upon removing the top bun of the burger, saw with dismay that the lettuce atop was coated in a creamy-looking substance that may or may not have contained cream or (shudder) mayonnaise. With the tip of my knife, I edged the slimy greens off the burger and flipped the two tomato slices over and over to be sure none of the matter had contaminated them as well. They looked clean so I slathered a healthy amount of yellow mustard on the bun and assembled the burger. I'm not gonna say it was horrible, but it was pretty dry and flavorless. Those who prefer beef burgers will likely claim that such is the nature of poultry burgers but I have made them at home a million times and it's really not that hard to make them juicy and flavorful. This one bore all the hallmarks of being pulled directly from the package and grilled till it was Cajun (i.e., burnt and dried up). Still, it was edible. The chips turned out to be of the very thick salt & pepper variety (French-style, perhaps) and provided excellent relief from the blandness of the burger.

Stavros seemed displeased with his fruity French toast as well. "Taste this," he commanded, spearing a triangle of what looked like pineapple. The look on his face didn't scream "IT'S SO DELICIOUS," so I said no, and he didn't press it, his manners being slightly better than mine when it comes to criticizing food while still in the restaurant.

We paid the bill and vowed never to return. And not that I need tell you, but the water never came.

TOWN TAVERN

2009-04-07T13:35:00.001-04:00

Stavros and I had an early Friday dinner at Royal Oak's Town Tavern recently. It was fairly crowded for 6:30, but once inside, we realized it was because everyone in there was old. Or they had kids. Or they were dining exclusively on booze. Nonetheless, the room was pleasantly full, and aside from the odor of fish that greeted us as soon as we opened the doors, the room itself was quite nice-looking and well laid out. Booths in the middle, high-tops in front and low tables in the middle and along the walls. We chose a high-top for two along a mirrored wall because Stavros likes to look at himself frequently.

The waitstaff were upon us at once, which was nice because Stavros and I were very thirsty. The day's specials, all fish (which accounted for the parfum de poisson), were written on two blackboards, one thirty feet away behind some hostessy-types, and one on the wall next to the mirror reflecting Stavros's undeniably striking visage, which I was able to read aloud to him by contorting my body into a spiral and leaning backward slightly.

Since I am so picky, I chose the one entree I wouldn't have to decimate to make edible, the pan-seared turkey. Stavros ordered the grilled swordfish. We both asked for the house chopped salad. When the drinks had been brought, so too was a bread basket. "Crazy Bread," pronounced Stavros, and I peered into the deep wire basket and saw that yep, it was basically Crazy Bread, albeit short Crazy Bread. Since I hate cheese I was put off but Stavros ate a piece and didn't make a face or anything so I assume it was decent.

Within moments of ordering, possibly fewer than five, the waitress returned with the salads. I was pretty startled as the quickness, and said so, and she quipped, "Well, that's what we're pretty much known for!" I wondered about this, since the Town Tavern didn't strike me as the sort of place to go if you're in some ass-on-fire rush, but maybe the idea of a super-hasty dinner appeals to their clientele. So we ate the salad. It was as advertised: chopped. Chopped Romaine, chopped red onion, chopped cucumber, and chopped tomato. All very tiny pieces in a mustardy vinaigrette. Oh, and garbanzo beans. It was good, but the plate was chilled, which I hate. I understand most people want salad that will freeze their fillings (don't they?) but I happen to prefer something a little closer to room temperature, and since everything is done at breakneck speed at the Town Tavern, I hardly think a room-temp plate would interfere with a raw vegetable experience. Especially since there was about one cup of salad on the plate. How long could it take to eat? Anyway, it was still good. I just have a thing about a chilled plate.

The entrees arrived as soon as the salads were whisked away (surprise!). They certainly looked nice. Stavros's grilled swordfish was atop a pile of stir-fried bok choy and a spoonful of some kind of pineapple salsa was on top of the fish. Three lumps of deep-fried basmati rice/coconut fritters sat adjacent. I asked for a small bite of the fish and of course some blackish vein or something came off on the piece I took and frankly, that was enough to put me off, but I tried it anyway. It was a bit dry. The coconut fritter was decent--mildly sweet and squishy on the inside and crunchy on the outside. Stavros remarked that the fish was indeed dry all over and the whole affair could have used more of the "sauce."

My turkey was not exactly what I'd had in mind. When you think "pan-seared turkey breast," don't you think of some nice thin fillet, maybe with some brown skin? That's what I thought. But no. It was three or four thick triangles of breast meat that had been sauteed, skinless, and presented around a glob of mashed potatoes (which were VERY good with bits of fresh sage rampant) and a tablespoon of tart, fresh cranberry relish, which was also good and I don't normally like cranberry sauce. On top of the turkey being a bit of a drag, the "gravy" was an abomination. I understand that "pan-searing" these great skinless chunks will result in zero juice from which to make gravy, but it can be managed. What curled in a big gelatinous C around the perimeter of half my plate was like half-melted caramel-colored jello of no discernable flavor. Actually I thought it tasted vaguely of my ultimate food nemesis, cheese, but I know there could have been none present. Stavros agreed that it was vile. I finished before he and I have to tell you now that the waitress committed what I consider to be the biggest sin in food service: She tried to take my plate away when Stavros was still eating. I wouldn't let her. Don't do that! I know you're in a hellsapoppin' big hurry to get us out of there so you can race someone else through dinner, but leave my goddamned plate on the table until everyone is finished! No one wants to be the only person left eating.

We did not order dessert but I believe they had the standard four chocolate things. They did also have Ray's ice cream in special flavors, maybe daily. I think the night we were there it was coffee. Sick!

Other items of note:

• The ladies' room was pretty nice and clean

• I don't think they allow smoking