For the Christmas Holiday, Carol was spending her break with her brother’s family in the Detroit Metro area, and at the last minute I managed to rearrange my schedule and join them for part of the visit. Among the various holiday activities with the extended family, when I’m in Detroit I try to get together with my college friend Brian (the relatively rare example of an actual Detroit resident, versus the more usual “Detroit Metro” resident), this time for brunch. For a “brunch”, I usually like to go over to Selden Standard, but this was a bit of a last minute concept and Selden was booked solid, so instead, we decided to check out a spot Brian had enjoyed before, Cork & Gabel in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood.
For the restaurant itself, while I’d never actually been in Cork & Gabel before, I’d passed by it several times (I’ve been to the neighboring Two James Spirits, and thought to myself “I should check them out at some point”. Cork & Gable itself is an odd building that’s been various businesses over the years (originally a roller rink, I remember when this was an Earl Schieb car planting business). Inside, it’s even more interesting. Mostly, they’ve converted it back to the original open volume that the place had when it was a roller rink, with a large front bar at one end an the open kitchen at the other. There’s a lot of random decorative details around the place, however, like the stein collection (visible here above the kitchen), an Easy-Bake oven, and old carriage lights.
A straight-forward, moderately-garnished Spicy Bloody Mary. Good combination of spice and tomato flavors, and the garnish wasn’t over the top, the wedge of salami being just enough of an extra garnish to be enjoyable and not excessive. If you do like excess, you can check out their Ultimate Bloody Mary, which has a small egg sandwich on the skewer as well, but I’m going to stick with my belief that over-garnished Bloody Marys (and the related over-the-top garnished milkshakes) are abominations. But with the simpler garnish, this Spicy Mary really was a great accompaniment to any of their savory breakfasts.
I wanted to try Cork & Gabel’s schnitzel breakfast sandwich, but if there was one big hallmark for my 2025 dining (of which this is one of my last 2025 reviews), this was the year of places being out of menu items, and Cork & Gabel’s schnitzel was one of the unexpected outages. So I changed tack, and instead did the crispy pork belly ciabatta, which was 72 hour slow cooked pork belly, lightly tossed in hot sauce, with arugula, Hollandaise, medium fried egg. Really, almost all of the disappointment of not getting a schnitzel evaporated after my first bite, since this was a very good pork belly, with a consistency about halfway between ham and bacon, and a nice little sear on it, that combined with the ciabatta roll, a perfectly still-runny egg, and some fresh greens made for a very enjoyable breakfast sandwich.
Carol, meanwhile, got the Chorizo Ranchero Bowl, with chorizo, house Ranchero sauce, two eggs, tortilla strips, and cilantro lime cream. Honestly, this was a rather good breakfast bowl, with the eggs nicely prepared and the flavors balanced. The chorizo was a bit more flavorful than usual, and I suspect that’s because Corktown is immediately adjacent to Mexican Town, and they’ve probably got a good supplier (indeed, one of our stops after Cork & Cabel was Busy Bee Market over in Mexican Town).
While I’m disappointed that I couldn’t try the schnitzel (the lunch and dinner menus at Cork & Gabel lean towards German, so I had high expectations), the crispy pork belly sandwich was no slouch. Between that, and Corktown having a lot more worth checking out in recent years, means I’m likely to come back at some point.
