Happy hour at Roast Detroit

I tried goat for the first time last week. And I didn't hate it.

Michael Symon's restaurant Roast in downtown Detroit is very meat-centric and their bar menu is no different. One of the items they put on their regular menu is something they call the "roast beast of the day."  So on the happy hour menu, they do a "roast beast of the day taco." Well, my husband and I went to happy hour with a couple of our friends last Friday and we ordered some of our usual favorites: the roast burger (topped with cheese, bacon, and a fried egg, all on an English muffin), rosemary fries, and mac and cheese. But we figured since the roast beast of the day was goat and the taco was only $4, what did we have to lose? So we ordered it. And it wasn't terrible. In fact, it didn't really taste like much. I'd compare it to pork but I think even pork has more flavor.

The goat taco wasn't terrible

So the four of us shared two goat tacos among us, but we also ordered all our usuals mentions above. In fact, I come to Roast just for the burger. It is, without a doubt, the best burger I've ever had in my life. Not only is the meat of exceptional quality, but the golden, dripping yolk from the fried egg makes eating it almost a sensual experience. Whoever thought burgers could be sensual? Well, this one is. I've been encouraged by my husband to "get a room" while eating it. :P

Easily the best burger you'll ever eat

But the best part is, that when you come to happy hour at Roast, the prices are more affordable than the chain restaurant down the street. When I went to dinner there with a friend a few weeks ago, I had a burger, fries, and a beer and I left spending less than $15 for myself. Last weekend when it was four of us, our entire bill, with all the food we consumed (and it was a lot), was $63. For a high-end restaurant, that's almost like they're extorting money out of themselves. If you make a reservation and sit in the dining room at Roast, there's no way just two people are leaving there spending less than what we spent for four of us at the bar during happy hour.  While I enjoy going to Roast for special occasions, I have to say, I've come to prefer the casual, cheap, but equally delicious bar food to the fancy meals prepared in the dining room.

If you ever find yourself in downtown Detroit during happy hour, Roast is the place to be. In fact, I'd encourage you to get there right as happy hour starts or you might find yourself not being able to find a seat at the bar - especially on Fridays.

Our day trip to Cleveland wouldn't be complete without dinner at a Michael Symon restaurant

It's no secret that I adore Michael Symon. That smile. That laugh. That adorably round head.

So when I told my husband I wanted to drive to Cleveland for the day to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I had an ulterior motive: it was also to eat at yet another one of my favorite Iron Chef's restaurants. I have eaten at his Detroit restaurant, Roast, on three different occasions, and each time it was a revelation. I don't just adore Michael Symon the person, I adore his food.

So after spending the afternoon at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, we then proceeded to drive a few miles south to the adorably quaint Tremont neighborhood to have dinner at Lolita. Can I just say how much I was smitten with this neighborhood? The houses were old but well cared for, and small mom and pop run businesses dotted the blocks among the modest, character-filled homes.

When we arrived at Lolita there was already a line out the door of people waiting to get in. Thank goodness we had reservations! But would you expect anything different from a Michael Symon restaurant on a Saturday evening?

You can tell I'm very excited.

Once inside, the space had an industrial yet homey feel. The bar looked into the open kitchen where the chefs, instead of wearing pretentious chef whites, don a much more practical, yet blue collar ensemble of a navy shirt with a baseball cap. Pretty much the exact thing Symon wore when competing in Next Iron Chef, though Symon doesn't need a baseball cap, what with him having no hair and all :)

Inside Lolita

I started my evening with the Lolita bellini which is described as something totally different on the website cocktail menu so I'm trying to remember all that was in it: Champagne, Belgian lambic, lemon, and something else - something with violet in the name... hmmm... well, anyway, whatever it was, it was delicious. Tart and bitter and sweet all at the same time. I had two of them. :)

My husband inside Lolita. I caught him mid-chew.

For an appetizer we decided to try something safe and something daring (I wanted to try two daring dishes, but The Hubs wouldn't go for it). For the safe dish, we ordered braised meatballs. For the daring dish I really wanted to try the roasted bone marrow, but my husband wasn't having any of that, so we decided to go for the crispy pig tails and ears instead. 

The braised meatballs were nothing to write home about. They were good, but not memorable; a dish that I'm sure was put on the menu to appease picky eaters. But can I just say that the crispy pig tails and ears were out of this world? It was the perfect example of what Symon talks about all the time when he refers the need for balance in a dish: a balance of flavors, tastes, and textures. In this dish, the richness of the fennel-onion agrodolce (sweet and sour glaze) was cut into by the tangy pickled chiles, and then of course you have the crisp texture of the pig tails and ears.

For the main dish I ordered the Buccatini which had pulled pork, pancetta, egg yolk and pecorino cheese. 

 Luscious is probably the best word to describe this pasta. I can still remember the tastes and textures of it in my mouth. 

 I also ordered a side of polenta to go with my pasta because I have had the polenta at Roast and it is rich and creamy and wonderfully decadent. The polenta at Lolita, while included the same ingredients, was not as enjoyable as the polenta at Roast. Lolita's version was much more cream-of-wheat-like. It felt like I was eating cereal instead of polenta. The flavor was good, it just didn't feel like a dinner dish to me.

My husband ordered the hanger steak with a Gorgonzola fondue, pickled onions, arugula and tomatoes which he enjoyed despite not being a fan of Gorgonzola cheese.

For dessert we shared the chocolate pot de creme with whipped cream and a salted caramel sauce on top. 

 

It was good, but I thought there was a bit too much salt on the top.  I'm one who usually enjoys a sprinkling of salt over top of a dessert, but this time it was a tad too much.

Overall, Lolita was an enjoyable meal, and if it was the only Michael Symon restaurant I had ever visited, I'm sure it would be one of my favorite restaurant meals, but having eaten at Roast, I'm content knowing that my favorite Michael Symon restaurant resides in my own hometown. 

Ending our enjoyable evening in Celeveland

Still, whether you find yourself in Cleveland or Detroit, I highly recommend making a pilgrimage to one of Michael Symon's eateries:

Cleveland:

Lola

Lolita

BSpot

Detroit:

Roast

Cookbook Review: Michael Symon's Live to Cook

Ever since Michael Symon competed on and won The Next Iron Chef a few years ago, I have been a huge fan - of his cooking, his humor, and his infectious laugh. I admire his unapologetic love for his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio and further love his commitment to his Midwestern roots as evidenced by the choice he made to expand his empire in the downtrodden city of Detroit rather than a foodie hotspot like New York or Las Vegas. A move like that shows he's not just in this business to make money and that gritty places like Cleveland and Detroit that most people disregard and even scoff at are his bread and butter.

I have partaken in two meals at Roast, his Detroit restaurant, and I can tell you that the food is amazing. Just don't consider going if you're a vegetarian. Even salads at Roast are teeming with giant carcasses of meat, as you can see in this "salad" of frisee, crispy pig ear, a poached egg, and giant lardons of bacon that you had to cut through with a steak knife.

Yes, according to Symon, this is a salad.

 So yeah, Symon is clearly a hearty Midwestern boy.

But his cooking philosophy is so much more than just BIG MEAT. What really impressed me about this book is that, given the gargantuan amount of new recipes I try every year and the fact that I know most of the basics of cooking techniques for the home kitchen, this is the first cookbook since I can't remember when that I actually learned something new. You have no idea how much this excited me. I had worried that I had expended all of my learning and that I was doomed to just repeat the same old tired dishes and techniques for the rest of my days.

But alas, Michael Symon came along and shone a light on new and exciting possibilities.

So let me share with you a few tidbits of what I learned in this wonderful compendium of "Symon Says."

First of all, one of the biggest ideas I took away from this book was the need for balance in a dish. Symon says that the main reason dishes fail is not because they taste bad, but because they do not have a balance of flavors and textures. Almost every heavy dish has to have some sort of acid component to try to cut some of that heaviness. This philosopy was made perfectly clear at Roast.


As you can see in this picture, that is a rather large hunk of meat swimming in a rich sauce but to balance out that fatty richness, the dish is then it is topped with a fresh and spicy pickled relish.

OK, so I've been blathering on about the food at Roast, but what's the cookbook actually like? Are the recipes any good and are they easy to follow is what you're probably asking yourself right about now. The answer is yes and yes.

Firstly, I tried his master pickling recipe for onions and will be using it on a regular basis. It is so easy, quick, and perfect for adding that acid component to rich dishes that it's a great have on hand sort of item. In fact, I so loved the pickling recipe that I canned a few jars and gave some to my mother-in-law for her birthday (among other things - I didn't just give her onions!).

And those pickled onions were an extremely important component to the next dish I tried which was the Lola Burger. This is the burger he served at his very first restaurant and continues to put it on the menu at all his other restaurants, including Roast. The first time my husband and I went to Roast he ordered this burger and we ended up trading dishes because it was literally the best burger I'd ever had in my life and the dish I'd ordered was not doing much for me. Since my husband will eat anything, he was gracious enough to switch plates with me.

With the memory of that burger in my mind, I set to work in recreating it in my own kitchen, worried that it wouldn't actually taste as good as it did when I had it at Roast.

But guess what? I needn't have worried about being able to recreate the magic of Roast because it was literally the best burger I've ever made in my entire life.

Try not to drool. I dare you.

So what exactly sends this burger into the stratosphere? Well, it goes back to Symon's philosophy of balance. This burger has bacon, cheddar cheese, pickled onions, dill pickle (which I did not include because I don't like dill pickles), spicy ketchup, and A FRIED EGG - all served on an English muffin instead of a bun. With such a wide variety of flavors and textures, you'd almost think that they would all be competing with each other, but that is not the case. Everything was a perfect symbiosis of flavor and texture as preached by the gospel of Symon.

And let me tell you, I was so enamored with this burger that I forgot about my side dish. I made mashed potatoes to go with it and I literally ignored them. You must understand that Beth ignoring a side dish is NOT NORMAL. I generally like the side dish better than the main course. Not this time. This burger was so good that it was the first thing I thought of when I woke up the next morning. Well, actually, my first thought was, "5:30 I hate you!" But after that it was, "Mmmmm.... that was a good burger I had for dinner last night. I wonder if it would be bad to have burgers for dinner two nights in a row."

So if you haven't already figured it out, I absolutely loved Live to Cook. If you are a jaded home cook like me in need of something fresh and new (and you aren't a vegetarian) then seriously consider giving this book a try. There's so much more I could say about it but given the novella length of this post, I'm going to wrap it up.

All I can say is that whatever "Symon Says" I'm buying!

Michael Symon's Live to Cook
Published: November 2009 by Clarkson Potter
Pages: 256
Genre: Cookery
Audience: Home cooks

Michael Symon's Latest Venture, In Detroit No Less!

Last night, to celebrate my husband's birthday, we decided to try Michael Symon's newest restaurant called Roast. My husband Johnathon likes to watch Iron Chef America on occasion and enjoyed watching Dinner: Impossible when Michael was the host instead of Robert Irvine. So we were quite excited to see that an Iron Chef opened a restaurant here in our ailing city.

Roast is in the Westin Cadillac Book Hotel in downtown Detroit. When you walk into the restaurant, the first thing you notice is what a large space it is. Tables are not crammed together and there is lots of room to walk around without having to play pinball around tables like you generally have to do at many other restaurants. Making the space even larger is a separate bar area that is away from the dining room and even that room is big enough to be its own restaurant. The dining room and bar are decorated with dark woods and amber glass tile accents giving it an intimate feel despite the cavernous space. There is a very large open viewing window into the kitchen (the largest I have ever seen at any restaurant) and because of the acoustics, it's even possible to, on occasion, hear conversations in the kitchen. This must be an extremely difficult pill to swallow for the cooks and chefs given a kitchen staff's general penchant for obscenities (at least that's what anyone who's read Kitchen Confidential would surmise anyway).

When we were seated at our table, the first thing I noticed was how heavy the menus were. Part of them are made of metal and I was constantly worried that I was going to drop it onto my glass of water and end up with a wet lap. While aesthetically pleasing, these large, awkward behemoths made me just a tad nervous.

Our waitress for the evening was very helpful in answering any questions we had about what's on the menu and came by frequently to check on us to see how we were doing. With the restaurant being such a large, open space, the waitstaff are all very visible and easy to spot if you need to flag them down for any reason.

But you're probably waiting for me to talk about the food, aren't you? I resisted the urge to take pictures of the food like I normally do because I just wanted to focus on the meal itself and have a wonderful evening with my husband rather than thinking about what I would later write about it (though in the back of my mind I was thinking that too).

For an appetizer we chose the day's charcuterie selection which consisted of a few things that I could not recall what they were. I remember that there was proscuitto because I love proscuitto, and frankly, a charcuterie plate is not complete without some proscuitto on it. There was also a Tuscan salami and a few other things I could not recall in great detail: a lamb something or other that tasted as if it had a hint of cinnamon in it, a pressed duck something or other that had the texture of a hardened pate with pistachios and cherries running throughout it. There was also some crostini, whole grain mustard, and pickled hot peppers and red onions to complete the plate. I certainly had no cause for complaints about any of the selections on the board, but I did think that $24 was a bit steep for this selection given that I probably could've eaten the whole thing myself (and they price it based on the number of people eating) which is saying a lot considering how little I tend to eat when you compare me to the amount of food my 6'5" husband consumes.

After the appetizer Johnathon was brought out a lobster broth soup with a sea scallop placed in the center. He said it was good, but I'll just have to take his word for it because I hate most seafood and even the smell of the broth made me want to gag. But this has to do with my own aversion to seafood and is not a commentary on the quality of the dish - I want to point that out right away. I chose to order a salad instead of soup and I decided to play it safe this time, choosing a basic green salad with red wine vinaigrette instead of the salad with crispy pig ear that I just couldn't muster the courage to order. I told the waitress that I would be more daring next time. The green salad I ordered, however, was overdressed, so much so that it burned my stomach a bit within a few minutes of finishing it. I'm generally someone who prefers more dressing than less, but I thought this salad was verging on too much. Maybe I should've had the crispy pig ear after all.

When our meal came out, I immediately wished I had ordered what Johnathon had ordered because it not only looked delicious, but it tasted way better than my dish. I ordered the braised short ribs and while it wasn't repulsive by any stretch of the imagination, the sauce was so incredibly rich that I could only eat a few bites before it felt like a lead balloon in my stomach. Johnathon, on the other hand, ordered probably the most delicious burger I have ever tried. It was roasted (because, after all, this restaurant is called Roast) and it came out on an English muffin with bacon, pickled onions, cheddar cheese and a poached egg. I actually ended up eating more of his dinner than mine.

The side dishes that we had with our meal were creamy polenta and rosemary fries. The fries came with the burger, but we had to order the polenta separate because no side dishes accompanied my dinner. When the fries arrived at the table, they came in this very large metal container that almost looked like something DQ uses to make milk shakes, and as soon as it was set down, the aroma of the rosemary was what took these fries from ordinary to extraordinary. Then the polenta was so sweet and creamy that it was like being wrapped in warm comfort with every single bite.

We chose not to get dessert because we were so full, but our next visit we plan on skipping the soup and salad so we can try the beer and pretzels dessert: Guinness ice cream (that's what I said) with chocolate and caramel covered pretzels. Now I don't like Guinness to drink, but I have a feeling it will be surprisingly good as an ice cream. I have been playing with unusual flavors with my ice cream maker this summer (like olive oil and basil) so I'm always game to try something that on paper sounds like it should be abhorrent, but in reality is surprisingly delicious.

My overall impression of Roast is favorable and definitely worth visiting again. There were certainly some selections we made this time that we will be passing up next time, but on the whole, it was an enjoyable experience. Johnathon and I have now eaten at three Iron Chef restaurants (Mario Batali's Otto and Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill are the other two) and I'd have to say that Roast still comes in second to the delights of Batali's Otto in NYC. Still, given the fact that this restaurant is only 30 miles from my house as opposed to Otto which is a two hour flight, there's a higher likelihood that we'll be eating at Roast more often than Otto.