Offbeat Eats

Well, after a four day weekend in Lower, Slower Delaware, it was time for us to head home. However, heading home meant heading back to the Philadelphia Airport, so we used the opportunity to try a few places on the way back. The first was Helen’s Sausage House in Smyrna, DE, but it turned out they were only open through lunch, and we got there about 15 minutes too late. So we headed on up to the greater Philly area, and decided to check out Victory Brewing Company’s brewpub in Downingtown, PA. I’m always a little hesitant when it comes to brewpubs run by up and coming breweries, because it’s hard to focus on both the brewery and a brewpub and do both right. Most (but not all) of the places I’ve been only manage to have enough focus to keep the brewery going, and what usually seems to happen is that really high ambitions are set for the brewpub, but there’s just not enough effort to make the brewpub as good as the beer. I’ve run into this a lot of times, having experiences some particularly disappointing meals at other brewery brewpubs (like Stone and Harpoon, to name two). There are some exceptions, but mostly those are places like Long Trail in Vermont that don’t really try to be fancy: they set a reasonable goal (“we’re selling burgers and fries”) and do that well, instead of getting fancy. But things started off pretty decently. The first challenge with Victory is getting there in the first place. With our goal being to get there around happy hour, we had quite a bit of traffic facing us coming up from Delaware. Once we got to Downingtown, however, it was relatively easy to find the industrial park where the brewery and brewpub are located. However, the signage in the park isn’t the greatest, so expect to spend a bit of time wandering around the area looking for the brewpub (a note to other seekers: it’s in the southwest corner of the area).

After a nice day at Cape Henlopen swimming at the beach and riding loaner bikes around, we decided that it was time for an early dinner. Since Carol had never experienced Maryland-style crabs before (somehow, our attempts at this on previous visits kept getting thwarted), so this time we made it a point to go find a crab place. Which is actually a bit hard to do, if you were in the situation we were: returning from the beach, looking for some decent crabs and beer without spending a lot of money. After reading a bunch of reviews, we ended up at Lazy Susan’s on the Coastal Highway in Lewes. Well, Lazy Susan’s is definitely a “crab joint”, one of those places that’s primarily decorated with random seashore kitsch, with picnic tables (inside even) covered with paper for the inevitable mess. The beer list isn’t terribly impressive, but the beers were cheap ($2 each), and the waitress quite friendly, so we grabbed a nice table by the window and looked over the offerings…

I always enjoyed sub sandwiches growing up. Some meat, veggies, and cheese on a good Italian sub roll, and I’m ready to go. It’s really not a difficult concept, but as I’ve learned in my many years living in different states, and traveling around, there’s actually an art form to making a decent sub. It’s an art hasn’t been discovered everywhere, since several places I’ve lived (Michigan, Tennessee, and Minnesota, in particular) had items called subs, that while often decent, weren’t really in the same category as a proper Italian sub. The meat wouldn’t be right (Oscar Meyer ham does not a good sub make). And most importantly, a good sub also requires the right bread (and half of my challenge of making my own subs has been finding decent bread!). For a good sub, however, the best action is the middle eastern seaboard. New Jersey is well-recognized as having good shops, as are Pennsylvania (see my recent review on Tony Luke’s; one thing the Italian-American bakers of Philly can do is a good roll) and Maryland. But the real gem is Delaware, and the home of truly good subs, IMHO, is actually Wilmington, Delaware. Wilmington is choc-a-bloc little Italian-run sub shops, and it’s really hard to get a bad sub in that city. Unfortunately, I didn’t stop in Wilmington this trip. But luckily, Capriotti’s, one of Wilmington’s best-regarded sub shops, has an outpost in Rehoboth Beach…

Every once in a while I find a place that I’m absolutely sure that I’ve already reviewed on Offbeat Eats, but when I was looking at the site archives, I realized that I haven’t actually reviewed any places in Rehoboth Beach, despite several visits here in the last few years. So I guess this trip I’ve got to remedy that. I’ll start with one of my Rehoboth Beach favorites: Fractured Prune Donuts. Fractured Prune is an Ocean City, MD based donut chain that’s been around since the 1970s (the funky name has a backstory, the original location was on land once owned by a Prunella Shriek, who was a woman athlete renowned for her frequent injuries, and was thus called “Fractured Prunella”)…

After we finished up in Philly (including a visit to the very pleasant Morris Arboretum, and an attempt to visit Earth Brewing in Mt Airy that was foiled by them taking some vacation time), we decided to head down to Rehoboth Beach. Along the way, we passed right by Newark, Delaware, so we decided to stop by and check out Iron Hill Brewery. I’ve always had a soft spot for Newark (I actually lived there as a kid from 1974 to 1980), but it’s had a lot of turnover in the 30 years (!) since I lived there. The Gino’s where we’d get chicken and “Gino Giant” burgers is long gone, as are most of the other businesses I remember (although one of my father’s two favorite diners, the Post House, is still alive and well, although Jimmy’s Diner down the way is, sadly, now a Cheeburger Cheeburger). However, one excellent addition to downtown Newark in the mid-90s was a brewery. Since 1996, Iron Hill Brewery has been running a successful brewpub.

As just about everyone in the country is aware of, Philly is home to one of the nation’s most iconic sandwiches: the cheesesteak. A proper cheesesteak requires the right ingredients and preparation: the right roll (Amoroso’s), the right meat (real meat, not meat product) grilled and chopped, cheese (whiz or provolone), and toppings (onions and peppers), properly assembled on the roll. I love a good cheesesteak… done right, it’s a great sandwich, and the one that Philly’s most famous for. It’s also the second best sandwich to be had in Philly. Which leads to the obvious question: what’s the best sandwich in Philly? That would be the roast pork. A close cousin to the cheesesteak, the roast pork sandwich starts with the same bread (the well-loved Amoroso roll), but replaces the grilled cheese with copious slices of fresh-roasted pork loin. But there are several places that are well-known and well-regarded as purveyors of roast pork sandwiches, including John’s Roast Pork (a James Beard award winner), DiNic’s in the Reading Terminal, and Tony Luke’s (nestled under the highway by the Walt Whitman Bridge). So when our trip to Delaware started with our arrival in Philly, we decided to duck over to Tony Luke’s for an early lunch.

(Closed) Well, after completing a relatively enjoyable visit to Southeast Michigan, we headed back home to New Hampshire. We decided upon landing that we were relatively hungry, so decided to check out a place that had been on my hit list for a while: Republic Cafe. Republic is another example of what’s becoming a pretty common concept these days in the food world: a brasserie that focuses on showcasing local foods and beverages. Built in the classic “Parisian Cafe” model, it’s basically a long and narrow establishment with a large bar and kitchen on the left, and some seating on the right (booths and high tops). Everything about the place is a bit funky, our table had a funky brass lamp on it, our water was served to us in an old Patron bottle, and a major feature of the restaurant space is a large specials chalkboard…

(Closed) After a day driving around the Detroit neighborhoods and suburbs, including Corktown, New Center, Hamtramck, and Dearborn, we decided we wanted a light meal to tide us over for dinner. One place that caught my eye was an converted White Tower burger stand in Dearborn that was simply labeled “Hamburgers”. As I’ve discussed previously, the Detroit area is filled with all sorts of converted or knockoff White Castle of White Tower locations, most of which are still serving up burgers of some kind (usually sliders), although I’ve seen a few that were turned into Greek diners as well…

An interesting aspect of Detroit that a lot of people overlook is the wide number of ethnic enclaves the area has. Some are fairly obvious, such as the semi-Polish Hamtramck, or the well-known Greektown. Others aren’t as familiar to out-of-towners, such as Dearborn (long-time home to a rather substantial Middle-Eastern population). And, indeed, one of the things that I like about Detroit is that it’s a good place to go for Mexican food. Where? Mexicantown! Yes, Detroit has a Mexican enclave! Nestled in next to the more famous Corktown neighborhood (former home of Tiger Stadium, and home for the hulking derelict of Michigan Central Station), Mexican Town is oddly shaped and hard to define. The main thoroughfares of Mexicantown are Bagley and Vernor, but the neighborhood itself is approximately bounded by the Fisher Freeway and Fort St on the South, Clark Park on the West, St Anne on the East, and the Michigan Central railyard on the north (feel free to argue this one, I’m interested in hearing other interpretations of the boundaries…). But Vernor and Bagley are where most of the food interest is. Among these streets are dozens of Mexican restaurants (most of them still vaguely authentic, albeit many of them also catering to the Chi-Chi’s crowd), tortilla factories (indeed, the smell of baking masa is one of the ways you can tell you are in Mexicantown), vibrant murals in Spanish, and more than a few Hispanic grocery stores. It’s certainly an interesting neighborhood to explore, with many good restaurants. One of these (but not the only one) is Taqueria Lupitas.

One of the things I rather enjoy about the Detroit area is that the food scene still has a strong independent “slider” presence. Yeah, you know, sliders, those little hamburgers served on small greasy buns with the onions? Chances are, if you’ve had one recently, it was at White Castle (in the North) or Krystal (in the South). But in addition to these well known chains, there are still several places in the country (Hackensack, NJ, for example) where various independent operators and small chains are still churning out classic sliders, and doing it will a quality no longer seen at White Castle or Krystal. Detroit is one of these areas. Within the greater Detroit metro are are literally dozens of little slider shops, including Brayz (Hazel Park), Telway (Madison Heights and Detroit), Bates (Livonia and Farmington Hills), Bray’s (Westland), Greene’s (Farmington), Hunter House (Birmingham)… the list goes on. While I’ve long wished to do a “slider tour of Detroit” (ever since I did my review of Bates Hamburgers in Livonia way back in 2006), I haven’t yet been able to assemble the time and stomach space (and Costco-sized supply of antacid) that such a venture requires. But I have been trying to pick them off as opportunity allows, and a visit to the Detroit Zoo conveniently allowed us to duck over to adjacent Madison Heights to try Telway again…