Miles Above the Curve - Fork in the Road

Fork in the Road, or FitR, as they call themselves, approaches food in ways no other place in Lansing can touch. Locally grown produce, house-cured bacon, pasture-raised eggs, world-class coffee. These are details you just can't get anywhere else in these parts - at least not until you hit Ann Arbor or Grand Rapids.

The menu is small - mostly made up of comfort-food favorites, done up fancy and built by hand. They have tots, but they are not what you think they are. These are house-made, grated potato infused with sundried tomato, basil, garlic and a hickory smoked cheese - so while the presentation recalls tater tots, the taste is a million times bigger. The fried chicken is exceptionally tender, with interesting spikes of heat, tartness and sweetness from the drizzled sauces and honey. Grits are gorgeously textured and oozing with sharp cheese. The veggie tacos are a stunning balance of tartness from little sections of lime and tomatillo, earthiness from carmelized onion, substance from the fresh house-made flour tortillas, and creaminess from the queso fresco. This is a taco that would work anywhere - that would be a standout in Austin - to find it here is a happy moment indeed. Desserts (especially the pots de creme and the bread pudding) are great, and the coffee is on a different planet from the chains that dominate here. Serious eating opportunities.

Fried Berry Pie, Fried Chicken, Tater Tots, Bread Pudding

The menu also has a few duds - the chili is passable, but too sweet and bland; and the Ballin' Ass Tacos are a one-note drone compared to the orchestra of the veggie version - chorizo is very tough to get right, and in these tacos, it overwhelms everything around it, including the outstanding homemade tortillas.

The place itself is slowly transforming from a neglected storefront to an urban garden oasis, with a fantastic mural splayed across the wall, and tomato plants and herbs growing in every sqaure inch of available dirt. The interior is straight up diner - not modern diner, not fancy diner - just diner, but it's cozy and clean and a perfect backdrop for the surprising sophistication of the food.

Being this far above the local curve has it's pitfalls - it's easy to let things slide a bit when no one is a close second. A year into its life, FitR is not immune to occasionally dialing it in. I've visited when the pork shoulder was too dry, the grits a little underspiced, but I've never been in when it has been anything less than the most food-centric, sustainable, ambitious, creative cuisine for miles and miles in any direction.

Grilled Nectarine (with Pots de Creme), Trout, Tomato and Mural, Grits, More Tomato, Veggie Taco

It Was a Dark Knight: Dinner at the Knight Cap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comfort Food in East Lansing: What Up Dawg?

There are a couple of places that are important to scout out in a new city: ice cream, doughnuts, and chicago dogs. These things are my comfort food. It would be nice if my comfort food was apples, bran muffin and wheat grass, but such is life.


Today: East Lansing Chicago Dogs at What Up Dawg, a start-up hole-in-the-wall a couple of blocks from Campus on M.A.C Ave. Though easy to miss walking by, once inside, What Up Dawg is a surprisingly put-together little space. It's sparse and modern, with dark concrete floors and halogen lighting. Not that this is elgant modern, by any stretch - there are giant flat screens, loud college music, and that faint smell of stale beer that permeates just about every one of these kind of places in College Towns. Windows look out over MAC Avenue, always bustling with the life of the town.

The menu is simple - Sausage, Hot Dogs, Fries, Beer. This is good. You want your Chicago Dogs made with the kind of single-minded focus the Sport Pepper and the Celery Salt demands

And that brings me to the innovation of What Up Dawg. I say that carefully. Innovating on Chicago Dogs is risky business. There are ingedients, and these ingredients can be amped up in size or quality, but in my experience, any attempt to modify past that detracts from the true nature of the dog. Until now. What Up Dawg. CHOPS the sport peppers. It rocks. The bite of the pepper is more evenly distributed, and eliminates the rolling sport pepper, one of the main challenges of Chicago Dog consumption.

The non Chicago Dog parts of the menu hold up well. Fries are crispy, fresh cut and a rusty reddish color when they come out. Sausages are local and juicy. The beer selection is decent, and includes my favorite go-to Michigan Brew, Bells.

Comfort Food in East Lansing. One Down. Two to go.

Sushi Hiding in the Strangest of Places: Maru Rocks Okemos

Lansing is a long way from the ocean. And a suburb of Lansing is the last place on earth I expected to find innovative, beautifully executed, piercingly fresh, creatively presented sushi. But I did.

Maru takes up a hidden corner of a non-descript strip mall. You could be in the parking lot and still not find it. But ho-hum disappears the minute you open the door. The ceiling rises a good 30 feet over the bar, the wall covered in an enormous wave-like bas-relief sculpture. The tiny space unfolds in a range of tricky little twists and turns - full of natural light and simple modern lines.

Take your seat, and the wait staff appear. I don't know where they get the wait staff here, honestly. This was my third visit, and each time, the service at this place has run at a different level than anywhere else in town. Crisp, earnest, intelligent, present.

The menu is a bit of a shock as well. This is not a sushi-deluxe+salad-with-ginger-dressing+miso soup kind of a place. This is full on ala-carte, and the carte is pretty wild. Case in point: the best roll I've had here is the Sexy Bacon, featuring ultra crisp thick sliced bacon alongside cucumber, asparagus, crab and shredded seaweed. This last time my little group started with the ceviche. Like the bacon, this is sushi re-imagined - a cylinder of rice, topped with brunoise tomato, topped with creme fraiche, topped with roe, surrounded by tuna, surrounded by enormous wonton wrapper chips. With a lime. It works.

We followed the ceviche with the big-daddy Omakase - bascially carte blanche for the chef to send us whatever he felt like sending us. First: a delicate salad topped with just a little smidge of escolar. Haven't had much escolar? Neither had I, since it's essentially banned from most parts of the world due to some iffy digestive consequences if eaten in large amounts. But it's here, and it's unbelievably rich and silky.

Next round was what I can only describe as jalepeno poppers. Together with the ceviche, it was a neat little riff on what tex mex would be if it were made by sushi chefs. I can't quite tell what all was in these. Definitely jalepeno, definitely something killer tasty and related to cream cheese, definitely something with a little kick. All of this, sparsely tempura battered and fried. Again - lots and lots going on here, and it came together well.

Nigiri and Sashami followed: tuna, halibut, escolar and octopus with little cucumber salads. Excellent, but not perfect. The octopus especially was a little tougher than I would have liked. And word to the wise: go for escolar on the salad, but skip the sashimi. Delicious? Yep. But not worth the pain. Trust me on this one.

Then came the rolls. The first round was a neat little package, mostly veggies with thin strips of tuna and salmon. Beautifully presented, this would have been an ideal way to end. In fact, we ended with round two of the rolls, which was the one place I think the meal really went astray. Oversize, with salmon tempura and a dab of cream cheese, these were an altogether too heavy finish for a meal drenched in light. Still - all in all a brilliant meal, and hands down the most innovative, creative culinary work I've seen anywhere near here. Given that this is virtually the only place in Lansing with a wait at 7:30 on a weekday, I'm not the only one that's made the discovery.

More photos of Maru are up on Grubbus's Facebook Home 

Sultan's: Taste Over Glitz in a Lansing Strip Mall

When I walked to my elementary school in winter, I used to hold my breath. I was convinced that the steam I exhaled was a limited quantity, that I might run out of it if I was too careless. This is basically the same reason I don't spend more time at Sultans that I already do. I don't want to run out of the pleasure of it.

Sultans occupies the back corner of My Favorite Parking Lot, and has a sort of neglected charm. Where Chapelure and Sansu are slick, up-to-the-minute establishments, Sultan's is a little dated and a little dusty. But what it lacks in glitz, it makes up for in taste.

Start with the cocktails. Or rather, start with the absence of cocktails. Sultan's is a no-alcohol establishment. Instead of mixed drinks, there's mixed juices, all fresh squeezed. I generally opt for the Sunset - strawberries, apple juice, grapefruit juice, and honey. This is not a smoothie - it's juice, light, frothy, and sweet, and it compliments the middle-eastern tang of the marinades and sauces nicely.

And then with the rolls. If you're lucky. The rolls are these little pillows of bread, so airy, they're nearly hollow. They are addictive, which is a bad thing, since they often run out, leaving late-comers with dry, bland triangles of pita bread. The first time I encountered the pita, I nearly cried.

And then with the massive quantity of goodness that constitutes a Sultan's entree. I ususally stick with the chicken kabobs - grilled until they're almost crispy, and full of some fantastic marinade that I can't even start to figure out. Skip the tzatziki-like sauce (it's sort of bland), but make haste for the rice and the grilled tomato. I've also had the kibbeh (heavenly) and the schwarma (so-so). The Kabob, though, that's my go-to dish.

The hummus and tabbouleh, both beautiful, are overkill. It looks like you might want a little extra bit when you're checking out the menu, but once the bread comes out and the food starts piling up, you realize that this is not a place you'll leave hungry.

It should be noted that I found this place through its cousin downtown, a complete dive that goes by the same name. If the strip-mall Sultan's is a little dusty, the downtown one is downright meager. Of course, the food is amazing there too, and the place is packed to the door every lunch hour. A couple more food finds to add to the Lansing repertoire.

Chapelure: The Sweet Side of My Favorite Parking Lot in Lansing

My days of the endless back and forth to Tallahassee have been replaced by endless days back and forth to Lansing, Michigan. I miss Tally, but Lansing has it's own charm. As I write this, large soft snowflakes are curling their way down outside. You don't get this in Tallahassee.

When it comes to food, the two towns have a lot more in common: Wendy's recently took home top prize for Chili in the Lansing city magazine.

This makes Chapelure all the more fabulous to find, nestled in the back corner of a parking lot that also includes the best Sushi and the best Middle Eastern food I've come across here (it's a really good parking lot). Windows stretch across the whole length of the cafe, especially pretty on a night like this when the warm light of the pendant lamps contrast with the view of the snow falling outside.

The inside is dominated by a glass case full of stunning cakes - drizzled with chocolate, topped with fruit, covered in slivered almonds. They advertise themselves as sort of Asian/French

fusion, but it all seems pretty straight up French to me. I guess they've got a lot of loose leaf tea. That's kind of Asian.

It's a hard thing to narrow yourself down faced with case like that, but I managed to get myself all the way to an order of mocha layer cake. As it was handed to me across the counter with a giant mug of black coffee, the woman working here said to me - "it's butter cream, and it's a little chilled now - best to wait a minute before you eat it." Good sign. I love being told to wait before I eat something. Every time that happens a fairy gets her wings and Burger King cries.

I waited as long as I could (not very long) and dug in. Cake: moist and tender, with an exceptionally fine crumb. Frosting. OMG. Frosting was amazing - just a hint of mocha and as silky as any I remember. The slice was, thankfully, small. I'd have eaten more, but why? The joy at the end of a mountain of cake is blunted. The first few bites is the key, when you get transported a little by the balance of sugar and silk. And maybe a little lost in the depth of the fresh, almost grassy coffee.

I picked up a loyalty card when I stopped in. It's one point for every dollar you spend. When you hit 500 - free 6" cake. I have some confidence that there is a free cake in my future.