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The latest media look at chefs serving imaginative, affordable fare at Hamtramck dive bars has off-putting flavors -- in the prose, not on the plates.
Culinary creativity comes off well in an article this week at a Vice magazine "channel" called Munchies, but not so the city and its residents -- even though it's by a writer-photographer who lives there, Tom Perkins.
Detroit's two-square-mile neighbor is portrayed as "a semi-damaged city of irregular beauty and patched-up everything that can feel like a vast, living surrealist museum."
Vice's article by a local writer was posted Jan. 25.
He refers to neighbors as "off-the-boat Yemenis, Bosnians and Bangladeshis" and adds:
About the only downside is that, with few exceptions, they’re the only groups opening new restaurants. Over the last few years, deciding where to eat out in Hamtramck began to feel like looking in a fridge that’s empty except for a few Tupperware containers filled with leftovers.
The pop-ups saved us from that.
Catch that? Young chefs "saved us" from "leftovers."
Perkins, a freelance writer and former artisanal pickle producer who just became dining editor at Metro Times, quotes the man running weekend brunches at Kelly's Bar on Holbrook:
“There’s a lack of food options in the immediate area,” says Boboville chef Blair Wills. “There are a ton of bars and a food culture here, but all the restaurants are more ‘ethnic’ food. The pop-ups are diversifying it."
Yes, condescension drips as thickly as the béchamel sauce atop Wills' Croque Madame brunch selection, but less appealingly.
The roundup with shouts to nine Hamtramck dining pop-ups is a reworked, slightly longer version of a more straightforward piece by Perkins last month at Model D.
Writing for a local audience, Perkins is less edgy snarky and quotes the mayor on her city's scrappy resilience:
Making something special on a tight budget is a truly Hamtramck approach, says Mayor Karen Majewski.
"It speaks to Hamtramck's population, which may not have a lot of money to invest in a business or storefront, but has a lot of talent, imagination, creativity, and ideas," she says. "That's one of the strengths of our city."
At the New York-based national publication, by contrast, readers hear from a chef claiming "a lack of food options."
We learned about Vice's article from a critical Facebook post by Detroit Free Press restaurant critic and food writer Mark Kurlyandchik.
