Top 5 New Fine Dining Restaurants
Cibo Matto
Taxim
Brown Trout
Sunda
Kith and Kin
—Michael Nagrant

Top 5 New Informal Restaurants
Xoco
Café Senegal
Zebda
Han 202
Jam
—Michael Nagrant Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

In addition to Vernors ginger ale, Joe Louis, Nelson Algren, the MC5 and of course, the automobile, John King books might just be one of the greatest things Detroit has ever offered the world. Located in an old glove factory, this is the bookstore that a city like Chicago should have, but doesn’t. Located at 901 West Lafayette Street, it’s a four-story warehouse that sits a Kirk Gibson home run away from the rusting hulk of old Detroit Tigers stadium, housing 750,000-plus used books and mountains of kitschy and rare ephemera. The twenty-five years of accumulated dust and must, which channel the funk of a grandparent’s basement, draws book hounds, including Jay Leno and Teller of Penn and Teller, from the farthest reaches of the world.

Combing through the cooking and food stacks there a few weeks ago, I located a cool edition of MFK Fisher’s translation of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s “Physiology of Taste” (he of the famous “Iron Chef” opening quote, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”), “La Bonne Table,” a fantastic collection of food and travel writing from children’s author and creator of “Madeline,” Ludwig Bemelmans, and a book with a thin salmon-colored spine that bore the words, “Nelson Algren—America Eats.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

It turns out I like to dabble in Asian and gay porn. Food porn, that is.

In the last few weeks I’ve been slammed with a trove of advanced copies of cookbooks, mostly five-pound coffee-table versions filled with gauzy soft-focus shallow-depth-of-field photography of come-hither canapés and prosaic stories about learning to cook at the feet of mom, grandma or insert-favorite-dead-relative-who-in-reality-almost-killed-you-with-grayish-green-hard-boiled-eggs-and-leaden-fruitcake here.

Out of that stack I plucked out Dan Smith and Steve McDonagh’s, aka The Hearty Boys, “Talk With Your Mouth Full” (release date October 1) and “Iron Chef” Masaharu Morimoto’s “New Art of Japanese Cooking.” Read the rest of this entry »