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Chef-owner Kate Williams (Facebook photo)
Freelance writer Rebecca Flint-Marx gushes over the Lady of the House, a restaurant at Trumbull and Bagley in Detroit's Corktown that Detroit native Kate Williams opened in September.
Flint-Marx, who is also a food editor at San Francisco Magazine, writes in Sunday's New York Times travel section:
Much of Ms. Williams’ produce comes from urban farms, her house gin was created in collaboration with Detroit City Distillery and her tables and bar shelves were made by a local artist.
A sense of resourcefulness pervades her cooking, which incorporates so-called ugly foods — ingredients that would have otherwise been discarded for purely aesthetic reasons — and whole-animal butchery. “Chef is passionate about no waste,” our server informed us. “You’ll notice at the end of the night that we only have one compost bucket.”
We didn’t, largely because there was so much else that demanded our attention. Namely, there was the food, which is served on old-fashioned china and could be described as seasonal-voluptuous: roast chicken for four; mighty slabs of mushroom toast smeared with homemade ricotta; crisp-creamy roasted cauliflower served in a puddle of parmesan sauce; a trio of scallops, fat as tuffets, plopped on a bed of polenta cooked in whey; and a sardine tin full of lethally rich shrimp butter, tinted scarlet with a dusting of Aleppo pepper and accompanied by toasted rye-sourdough bread.
