Feasting our eyes (and our bellies) on a Detroit weekend

No recipe this week. Just a little food for thought from a short road trip.

WE WERE IN DETROIT LAST WEEKEND, visiting our daughter and her boyfriend. As always, it was a feast on many levels. And in many places. This Anthony Bourdain mural is in Flint, Michigan. It was painted in 2019 by Krystal Cooke and was commissioned by Rodney Ott, owner of the Loft bar below it and a big fan of Bourdain.

Flint is rich with murals created by artists from all over. So is Detroit. Every time we visit, one thing we do is drive and walk around looking at murals. Even when we’re not specifically doing that, we keep happening on new or new-to-us ones.

One of our favorite places to explore for wall art is Eastern Market, a sprawling farmers market that has been around since the late 1800s. When Marion was a child, her family shopped at the market every Saturday; our visits spark lots of memories for her.

As we said here after another Detroit visit years ago, “the streets surrounding Eastern Market have long been—and still are, in many cases—home to warehouses, distributors and processing plants for produce, meats and other food products.” They’ve also become home to restaurants, shops and bars. And covered with exceptional murals by artists from around the world. Some are beautifully random, such as this one.

Others are uniquely Detroit, speaking to its strength, its resiliency, its beauty. One we failed to capture proclaims NOTHING STOPS DETROIT. And this one says “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”

Detroit is a big-hearted, welcoming city. We feel it every time we are there, a sense of if you’re here, you must be okay. When Rosa Parks and her family moved there in 1957, the city embraced her. She lived there the rest of her life. Fittingly, the main local bus station is named for her, the Rosa Parks Transit Center. This Rosa Parks mural in Eastern Market was painted in 2019 by Montreal-based artist Kevin Ledo.

Of course, some of the wall painting in Eastern Market is of a much more practical nature. Like this on Kaps Wholesale foods, which opened in 1981.

And as always, we ate well. Late night Middle Eastern food from Corn on the Corner, the food truck that inspired our Lebanese labneh sandwich recipe. Egg sandwiches with “jammy yolks” from the walk-up window of Iggy’s Eggies in downtown Detroit. Delicious Mexican dinners from another walk-up window, at Soriano’s in Flint. More Middle Eastern food from one of our favorites, Boostan Cafe in Hamtramck. Nigerian food from the cleverly named Fork In Nigeria food truck on Detroit’s historic Avenue of Fashion. Also, as Marion said, the weekend was a “festival of donut and donut adjacent snacks—we had donuts from Dawn Donuts in Flint, then Greek style donuts (very like beignets) and then puff-puffs from the Nigerian food truck, another beignet variation that is a little denser.”

Next week, we hope to be back with a new recipe. See you then.