Shiraz Grill: Persian in Unexpected Places

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gilmorazation of Grand Rapids: Red Jet Cafe

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Making Maple Syrup: Sugarbush Revisited

It's Spring in Michigan. And by Spring, I mean the snow is only sporadic, and sometimes it's kind of sunny. That blustery combination of cold nights and not-quite-as-cold days can be a little jarring for an Austinite, but it's perfect for Sugar Maples. Those few weeks when the sap is flowing and the sugar house is all fired up is Sugarbush. My first time through was a long, long time ago, when I was 11 and going to school at Blandford, on the north side of Grand Rapids. Last month, I brought the whole family up to the very same spot. It's still going strong.

Maple syrup gets it start as sap. It's extracted, traditionally, by way of a small hole drilled an inch or so into the tree, into which a small metal tube is tapped, off of which hangs a big bucket, into which the sap drips. When I think of sap, I think of the tarry sticky stuff that comes out of pine trees. This is totally different. It's water, more or less, with just slightest hint of sugary goodness.

Little known fact: sap is totally delicious. Actually, maple syrup anywhere in the process from sap to syrup to maple sugar candy is delicious. When I was doing this for real, as a 6th grader, I used to take surreptitious slurps of the stuff between trees.

The buckets hang there, collecting sap, drip by drip by drip. To watch the sap flow, it seems like it would take weeks to get an appreciable amount, but they drip drip on, and in a few hours the buckets start to visibly fill. Every day or so, the  buckets are collected, consolidated, and hauled back up the sugar house.

I love the sugar house. Even just the name rocks. At Blandford, the sugar house is totally cutting edge, circa 1890. It's not particularly high capacity, but it's totally high drama. The buckets, now emptied into still larger containers, are emptied into a trough in the back of the sugarhouse. They pass through a filter, and into a shallow metal tub, separated into a dozen different channels, atop a seriously roaring fire. As the water is boiled off, over the course of several hours, the sap slowly thickens into syrup. Measurement comes by way of a thermometer-like device that measures sugar solids, but you can see the difference just looking - sap is clear at the start, and golden at the finish.

In all, 40 gallons of sap make a single gallon of syrup. Early harvest, when the sugar is in higher concentration, yields the light colored extra-fancy grade A syrup. As the season wanes - just a few weeks later, there's less sugar in sap, meaning a longer time over the fire. That extra time means extra carmelized sugars, hence the darker color. Me? I'm a grade B guy all the way. Better flavor.

If you keep boiling after syrup you get the absolute primo treat of my childhood - maple sugar candy. The flavors in these things will knock you flat - rich and almost buttery, with a slight woody tinge from the open fire.

I don't know if my kids will take home the same memories I've stored away since my time at Blandford, but I'm glad they got a taste.

Sugarbush is over this year, but the candy's still available at the Blandford General Store.

MadCap Coffee - Grand Rapids Enters the Big Leagues

In what's quickly becoming a school-vacation tradition, I brought the family along to work with me this week. Rather than camp out in Lansing, where my client is, we picked up a room in Grand Rapids. Nothing against Lansing, which is kind of a neat place in it's own right, but Grand Rapids just has a lot more going on.

One of best things Grand Rapids has going on is some seriously bad-ass coffee at MadCap, downtown. Some seriously bad-ass US Barista Jam first-place regional finishing single origin espresso custom built pour over rig super-sweet latte art coffee. The place was packed, too. Grand Rapids has come a long way since I was last hanging out downtown.

A lot of things give MadCap major street cred - the beans are directly sourced and roasted in house. (The roaster is housed in the basement of the shop, visible through a cleverly designed cutout in the floor). Coffee is ground and brewed for each cup, one at a time, in a very, very slick custom made pour over station. The latte art is gorgeous.

With the girls sipping hot chocolates in the two last available seats (they both said the hot chocolates were better than Intelligentsia, which is saying something), Tracy and I chatted with the baristas. They're deeply committed to making this work, and you can see it in the way the whole place comes together. It's not a high budget enterprise exactly - the tables and chairs are all stock Ikea, the slick wood veneer lamp shades are coming a little loose in the corners, and the roaster looks like it could put out 10 lbs at a time, tops - but they've invested where it counts: skilled people, top-notch machinery, and hands-on international sourcing of some really good beans.

But the thing that matters most is in the cup, and MadCap does this on par with the best places I've been - my single-origin shot was powerfully tart, and a little sweet - reminiscent of Stumptown more than anything else. And the lattes, where that tartness was softened by the milk but punchy enough to still show through, were spectacular. I work an hour from here, but this is coffee I might be willing to drive 60 miles to get my hands on.