Food Makers and Entrepreneurs Leading the Charge

Detroit’s food entrepreneurs are at the apex of the food revolution going on in the city. Nothing seems as contagious as the excitement they have for their products, their business and the change they see happening day to day in Detroit. Detroit is a great city for nurturing small businesses: lots of available space, cheap startup costs and a ton of encouragement from the food community, the media and the public at large. At Eastern Market not long ago, one or two food makers sampled and sold their products on Saturdays. Now there are forty or more. And growth is real and happening. Detroit’s McClure’s Pickles went from a home kitchen operation to a twelve-thousand-square-foot plant in the city.

Detroit has a long history of people making and selling food, going back to the Wyandot Indians processing maple sap into sugar. Detroit is in a northern climate; consequently, to eat anything that might spoil all year, Detroiters preserved a good portion of their food. Common techniques included canning, salting, pickling, curing and smoking food. Detroiters have long enjoyed pickled vegetables, fish, oysters and even pickled meat; pickled passenger pigeon breast meat was not an uncommon food in the nineteenth century. Other processed food included smoked whitefish and lake trout. Jams and jellies have been produced for centuries in Detroit. The city’s original sixty-foot French pear trees grew small fruit that was intended not for eating fresh but for preserving and enjoying in the off season.

As the Irish started to arrive in the 1840s, the classic “finnan haddie,” a salted and smoked haddock, began to appear in Detroit restaurants. Sausage making was done by early French Detroiters but really took off when German and Polish immigrants poured into the city after the Civil War; traditional sausages, such as bratwurst, knackwurst, blutwurst and Polish kielbasa, are still made fresh in Hamtramck. Today, sausage making is finding a new generation of craftsmen, such as Corridor Sausage at Eastern Market, which is expanding the flavors and ingredients like tomatillo, chilies, cocoa nibs, raisins, sesame, lemon grass and ginger.

It is said that the overly cooked and salty canned vegetables common on our grandmothers’ dinner tables killed Detroiters’ interest in eating vegetables, but today’s new food entrepreneurs are putting out some incredible food in the city and generating a lot of attention.

LACTO AT THE BRINERY

David Klingenberger, the chief fermenting officer (CFO), and his crew, Clayton Smith and Gregory Hart, stay busy putting Middle Eastern–style, thinly sliced brined turnips into jars. They are mildly sour, garlicky, colored pink with beet juice and especially delicious with hummus, a Middle Eastern tradition. But other Brinery customers, such as Weber’s Inn in Ann Arbor, put them on their hamburgers like pickles.

The Brinery is a concept that emerged out of the local food traditions of southeastern Michigan courtesy of David Klingenberger. As he explained, “I have been fermenting since before the turn of the century.” He was born in Michigan and moved to California, where he grew up, but he knew that the Heartland (in this case Michigan) was calling. He returned and has lived and worked at Tantre Farm just outside Ann Arbor. Tantre is a well-established producer in the local organic food movement of this region. Klingenberger loves local vegetables and organic farming as much as fermenting, and the entire Brinery team comes from this same experience and philosophy. It was while working at Tantre that Klingenberger first started developing skills, knowledge and love for this ancient art of fermenting raw vegetables.

He’s the kind of guy who gets very excited talking about sauerkraut. The Brinery offers about twenty different fermented products, such as Korean kimchi, pickles and tempeh—an Indonesian food made from cooked and fermented soybeans. It has been in business for five years, and each year, its volume has doubled. Its goal for the coming year is to produce forty barrels of brined vegetables.

Fermenting may be the simplest food processing known, explained Klingenberger. It was the way farmers could use up bumper crops of cabbage or cucumbers, and it kept everyone fed during cold months. The process is called lacto fermentation. It requires no refrigeration, electricity or special treatments; after all, most people fermented vegetables in their homes one hundred years ago. The Brinery puts local vegetables like carrots, beets, turnips and shredded green cabbage in large neoprene barrels and pours in the brine, which is their recipe of water, sea salt and flavorings such as garlic, fresh ginger, bay leaf, peppers, spices, herbs and seasonings. The barrels are lidded but opened slightly to allow the release of gas as the vegetables ferment. After some days, it’s over. That’s it. One of the Brinery’s most popular products, called Storm Cloud Zapper, is a dark magenta sauerkraut made with cabbage, beets, ginger and sea salt. The sauerkraut is crunchy, lightly sour and excellent on a sausage, hotdogs and cold meats or simply eaten alone.

Adding to Klingenberger’s enthusiasm is that his products are good for you. His company slogan is “Stimulating your inner economy.” As his website explains, raw lacto-fermented vegetables are rich in lactobacteria, similar to yogurt, and have many health benefits, such as aiding digestion and boosting the immune system.

The Brinery products are used by restaurants in Detroit, such as Green Dot Stables, Great Lakes Coffee Roasting Company and Zingerman’s, and sold throughout the region, but they can be bought at the Eastern Market in Detroit.

FROM RESTAURANTS TO SAUSAGES

“Sausages are a vessel for flavor,” said Will Branch, co-owner of Corridor Sausage. He and his business partner Zachery Klein began Corridor Sausage in 2009 after several years of experimenting and learning the secrets of producing great sausage and charcuteries.

Branch is thirty-three years old, a 2002 graduate of Michigan State University with a degree in English. “I figured I’d open a bookstore or video store,” he laughed, reminiscing about his early career dreams.

Food has always been a part of his life: half his family is Chinese, so enjoying food and restaurants were part of his upbringing. He went to Schoolcraft Community College for professional cooking and soon worked in New York City to learn from the best. He came back to Michigan, working in restaurants with Zachary Klein, and it was while in the restaurants that the two began making and serving their own sausage on menus.

“Long, late hours drove us out of the restaurant business,” Branch said. “But actually, the sausage making hours are just as long, but it’s different.”

They began making sausage in Midtown Detroit—formerly known as the Cass Corridor, hence the name Corridor Sausage—but they have recently moved to Eastern Market, where they now occupy a two-story building with 8,500 square feet for making, packaging, freezing and storing their products. The new commercial location will provide plenty of space for new equipment and allow the company to quintuple its production within the next year, which is its plan.

One of the biggest learning experiences for Branch has been the extraordinary amount of regulation and requirements to produce meat products. Currently, sausages from Corridor are available through four farmers markets and about twenty-four restaurants. To sell through distributors and at retail locations, such as groceries, they need to be USDA certified. They recently received this certification after months and months of work. The label on the packages also must be approved by the USDA. The USDA’s book on label regulations is 112 pages long, according to Branch; it is so complicated and arcane that it required him to hire outside “expediters,” or label experts, to get through the regulatory language and comply with the USDA. In addition, the company must have an office set aside in the building for a USDA inspector, who can arrive at any time on any day of production. Branch recalled hours of communications on phrases for their label such as “Vietnamese style.”

But regulations aside, their sausage is in high demand and growing beyond Detroit to Chicago and Cleveland. A big buyer of products is the restaurant at Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn. Ford Field, home of the Detroit Lions, will feature Corridor Sausage as part of an all-Detroit food section that includes Slows Bar-B-Q and Detroit microbrewed beers.

Branch added, “Right now, we are making only fresh sausage. It’s enough. We make twelve varieties. The most popular is ‘Vietnamese Recipe Chicken Sausage.’”

Corridor Sausage’s reputation is in its high-quality protein: the meat uses no hormones and no antibiotics and is organically raised from small-scale producers. “We use no spices and no dried herbs—everything is fresh.” For instance, Corridor’s Vietnamese Recipe Chicken Sausage includes lemongrass, lime leaf, wild ginger, Thai chilies, shallots and cilantro.

When chefs and restaurants describe Corridor Sausage product, they use words like “bright” or “popping,” meaning fresh, intense, alive and flavorful. “Other sausage companies use premixed and bagged combinations of spices, which they buy from suppliers to make Italian sausage or bratwurst. We never do that. Each ingredient is tasted separately; if a batch of juniper berries is not ‘popping’ with aroma and flavor, I throw them out and search for some that are,” said Branch. But that’s the difference between an excellent small-batch producer like Corridor and stuff most people think is good sausage. Come to Eastern Market and try some real sausage.

Or you can find it on Corridor Sausage’s new food truck, the Grindhouse, which can be located throughout the area by checking online.

SUCCESS WITH GRANDMA’S PICKLE RECIPE

For many people, completing a doctoral degree in physiology from Wayne State Medical School and earning a bachelor’s degree in classical guitar might seem like greater accomplishments than making pickles, but that’s not how Joe McClure sees it. Perhaps Joe realizes that he and his brother, Bob (who is also a comedy writer and an actor), have accomplished something of true greatness with their business: they have made a really, really good pickle.

“We didn’t apprentice,” Joe said, smiling. “But I wish we had; it would have saved us a lot of time.”

McClure’s is actually a family affair run by the two McClure brothers—Joe, who is thirty-two, and Bob, thirty-four. Their father and mother also provide help. The pickle recipe and passion goes back to the McClure brothers’ childhood. In 2006, using their great-grandmother Lala’s recipe, they started McClure’s Pickles after years of making pickles in their tiny Michigan kitchen with guidance from a grandfather and parents.

The business began in Brooklyn, where the McClures made pickles and delivered them in their own van throughout New York to restaurants and well-known gourmet food stores like Murray’s Cheese.

To find more production space, they split the company between Brooklyn and Detroit; Bob stayed in Brooklyn to market the company, develop new products and handle the large national and international accounts, while Joe took over production in Detroit.

Joe added, “I think small-batch food products in Detroit are every bit as good as any in the country. Detroit is just smaller. Brooklyn also gets a lot of attention from media in New York City. It’s just harder to get media to come out this way. So it works out with part of the operation in Brooklyn and the other part in Detroit.”

At the time they decided to make the pickles and other products in Detroit, Joe was in graduate school at Wayne State, and production was two times per week. The pickles were in demand, and the production soon expanded to four and then five days per week. They now operate a large plant of about twelve thousand square feet with eighteen people on the edge of Hamtramck. Joe processes four thousand pounds of cucumbers per day, which yields 2,500 to 3,500 jars of pickles. Pickle production begins at five o’clock in the morning and ends before lunch.

“Some companies pickle anything—vegetables, watermelon rinds, you name it. Which is fine. But we decided to limit the variety to protect the quality of that recipe. We didn’t want to dilute our product line.” They do make other products, like pickle relish and a very popular bloody mary mix. “It is essentially tomato juice with our pickling brine and a bit of pepper. That’s it. We tried it and offered it to friends, and they said, ‘You’ve got to sell this stuff!’ so we do. We’re excited because it is being sold as a mixer for fans at the Detroit Lions football games.”

They also offer pickled flavored crinkle-cut potato chips, a concept they developed with the classic Detroit potato chip maker Better Made.

“Things are really going great right now. We just signed with Whole Foods across the country. Southern-based Kroger stores and Meijer is getting with us. Locally, Russell Street Deli is now selling our pickles, and the Detroit Lions food service is offering our drink mix. Of course, we sell at Eastern Market, where we meet more and more local food producers. It’s really pretty exciting. It’s also fun.”

EATING LOCAL AT THE DETROIT LIONS GAMES

Lions fans are a puzzle. Even after decades of losing seasons and no Super Bowl playoff ever, the fans still come in droves to Ford Field on Opening Day, cheerful, smiling, optimistic and happy to be walking on Brush Street in front of the stadium on a beautiful September Sunday dressed in Honolulu blue jerseys. They also come hungry.

Food service at Ford Field is handled by the Levy Restaurants, which has placed Joe Nadir in charge of it as executive chef. One might assume that the job of feeding so many people at a football game is basically logistical—making sure beer doesn’t run out, catsup dispensers are full and hotdogs are hot. But Joe Nadir is from Detroit and is a real chef. He and his team at Levy were not going to settle for logistics. They decided that it was time to turn Ford Field into a celebration of Detroit’s food scene.

Detroit Lions’ fans now consume Detroit’s local food, beer and more featured at Ford Field during the games.

Ben Manges, the Lions’ director of communications, said, “It’s a way for our fans to not only experience a Detroit football game but to experience Detroit through all these vendors and concession stands.”

You can find food from Metro Detroit from the food trucks on Brush Street to Michigan’s craft beers, American Coney Island, Pegasus and Billy Sims BBQ, as well as Slows Bar-B-Q on the general concourse. On the club level, you will find gelato from Zingerman’s Creamery, Russell Street Deli, a second stand for Slows Bar-B-Q, Corridor Sausage, Sugar House Cocktails and bloody marys at McClure’s Pickles.

JOE NADER ON DETROIT’S FOOD SCENE

Executive Chef Joe Nader of Levy Restaurants feeds sixty-five thousand football fans, 132 luxury suites, five mini restaurants and forty concession stands when the Detroit Lions play at Ford Field. He’s a Detroiter who, like many up-and-coming young college graduates, left the city after graduating. “Everybody with talent left Detroit; there was no platform for talents in here,” Nader said.

After a degree in philosophy from Eastern Michigan University, he switched to culinary training; his parents come from Italian and Lebanese heritage, which he describes as “Mediterranean,” where food and dining was a crucial feature of growing up for Nader. “I think a lot of the problems families have today are linked to the fact that too many families do not sit down and share meals anymore.”

He went out to California, where he constantly talked up the greatness of Detroit and its food, to the point that his exhausted friends said, “If it’s so great, what are you doing here? Why don’t you move back?”

“So, I did,” Nader said with a smile and a shrug. And he’s not regretted a moment. He worked in Ann Arbor at Sweet Lorraine’s and for Main Street Venture’s Gratzi, and then he hooked up with sports concessionaire Levy Restaurants and spent some time in Chicago before transferring to the Detroit Lions. He was promoted to run the operation at Ford Field as executive chef in 2006. Nader conceded that his duties at a professional football stadium are as much logistics as supervising cuisine, but he stays deeply involved in the food scene of Detroit. He finds time to run occasional pop-up restaurants with two other chefs called Detroit Three:

It’s strictly for charity. I stay connected. Food is my roots…Living in Chicago really opened my eyes to their food scene. I think Chicago might be the best food city in the country right now. The difference of Detroit and Chicago is that what happens food wise in Chicago happens in the city. In Detroit, it happens in the suburbs: Ferndale, Royal Oak, Ann Arbor, Plymouth and others. Detroit has always been a great food city. We built the middle class in Detroit, and people had money to eat out. Detroit has a history of great restaurants: the London Chop House, Jimmy Schmidt’s Rattlesnake Club and the Golden Mushroom to name just a few. We have a proud past and awesome traditions. But, Detroit has been all about the past. Now it’s happening in the city today. Talent is staying here. Talent is coming from other parts of the country to work here. Not just food—in a lot of creative fields.

Nader and his team at the Detroit Lions have decided to introduce an all-Detroit food to spread the word. “It’s not just to promote Detroit—the food and drinks that we feature are excellent. The knowledge and talent of Detroit food makers is among the best in the country. My job is easy finding these people.”

He continued, “It’s a small community of people who help each other out, who taste each other’s stuff and support one another, who are friends and want to see everyone succeed. It’s like early days of rock bands, before fame and money changes things: just regular folks doing their thing from the Woodbridge Pub, Sugar House, Phil Cooley’s Slows Bar-B-Q and so many others.”

Nader admitted that defining Detroit food as distinct cuisine is probably not doable, but it is the access to local sources that defines the current food movement. “You can drive twenty-five miles to reach farms and suppliers of today’s great food…I’m really excited,” he said, smiling.

DETROIT’S FOOD TRUCKS

Food trucks were slow to start in Detroit. In fairness, other cities have also struggled with how to deal with food trucks. The issues usually fall into two areas: first, how to maintain and monitor safe sanitation on a truck that roams from place to place, sometimes out of the jurisdiction of the city health inspectors, and second, how the city can be fair to brick and mortar restaurants, which see the food trucks as unfair competition with no commitment to their neighborhood. About two years ago, the very first efforts came up against a city bureaucracy and regulatory departments that seemed more determined to squelch the idea of mobile restaurants.

An early food truck, El Guapo, hit the streets in July 2011 after co-owner Anthony Curis spent a year working with the City of Detroit to get proper licensing, paving the way for other would-be mobile eateries to come. He claims to have made more than sixty visits to city hall to change the rules. Regulations restricted what trucks could sell—originally only hotdogs and bagged potato chips and pretzels. To protect brick and mortar restaurants, the city regulations also restricted where you could park the truck; at first, you couldn’t park anywhere near crowds of people. The city health department was also unsure about the sanitation but eventually came around.

Under pressure, the city rethought its position, and now Detroit has a thriving food truck industry with more than twenty trucks roaming Detroit and the suburbs. Some of the common trucks found in downtown and Midtown and at the Eastern Market on Saturdays and almost any event, both public and private within a forty-mile radius, include Ned’s Travel Burgers, Green Zebra Truck, Beignets 2 Go, El Guapo, Mac Shack, Grindhouse, Two Guys, Jacques Tacos, Concrete Cuisine, Mama’s Tacos, Dago Joe’s, Treat Dreams and a vegan truck run by Debra Levantrosser called Shimmy Shack.

Food trucks now abound in Detroit, such as the “Shimmy Shack,” offering vegan dishes and parked outside Ford Field on football Sundays.

Debra parks her truck outside Ford Field for Detroit Lions football games. Along with selling vegan dishes, Debra, dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, does an occasional shimmy to attract attention. Is there a harder sell than vegan food at a pro football game? “Bill Ford [one of the owners of the Detroit Lions] is a vegan. That’s one of the reasons I got this spot,” she noted.

The Shimmy Shack specializes in southwest burgers, sweet potato and white potato fries and chocolate shakes. If you’ve never had vegan, Debra recommends the fries. “You’ll be back for more.”

Other truck offerings go quite a ways beyond the soggy hotdogs from a wheeled hotdog stand. El Guapo offers pork belly confit, spicy shrimp, deep-fried tofu and short ribs. Green Zebra’s most popular sandwich is bacon and tomato jam grilled cheese. Grindhouse provides chorizo poutine and Hungarian fried pizza. Mac Shack offers versions of mac and cheese, including “Cheech’s Trip,” “The Bacon Made Me Do It,” “Dune Climber” and even deep-fried mac and cheese balls, called “Amaze Balls,” served with a choice of ranch, marinara or buffalo sauces.

Beyond having good food, success depends on having your truck where hungry people can find you. This is done through continuous use of social media; for example, El Guapo has more than three thousand followers on Twitter. Others follow suit.

Will Branch of Corridor Sausage Company is a co-owner of the Grindhouse food truck, which employs seven people. “Everything is location dependent,” he said. “It’s a completely different business model than a restaurant. When we are gone for a few days catering a private banquet, people wonder if we’ve gone out of business.”

Part of the appeal of the food truck is the relatively low startup costs. Dan Gearig, who was a partner of El Guapo and other food trucks, has begun a new venture, Red Beard Customs. He saw the need of custom-building food trucks for would-be vendors; Grindhouse was his first customer. Gearing has estimated that startup costs for rolling kitchens can run from $20,000 to $130,000. He estimates that about $65,000 is a good point to build a really solid food truck business. Not cheap for many, but cheaper than a full traditional restaurant kitchen, with far fewer risks. A path some startups have taken begins with a pop-up restaurant, follows with a food truck and then moves into a traditional restaurant—all the while building a menu, learning skills, growing markets and managing risk.

Others are following the opposite path. Green Dot Stables restaurant in the outskirts of Corktown is now working on its own food truck to offer its popular sliders and sides throughout the city.

DETROIT’S ORIGINAL FOOD TRUCKS: TACO TRUCKS

Before Detroit had food trucks, the Southwest side had its own version of them called taco trucks. These guys are not offering deep-fried tofu skins or rabbit confit. This is real street food—cheap, a little greasy, wrapped in foil and sold in paper bags, but authentic and delicious. Detroit has about ten trucks on and off at various parking lot locales, most along or near Vernor, the narrow but lively street that runs the length of Mexicantown.

The trucks park in open parking lots and do a brisk business during lunchtime. The tacos are almost always excellent and very cheap at $1.25 each. They are small, so about four makes up a good lunch.

The El Tacquito truck is in a parking lot next to a Church’s Chicken at Vernor and Military Streets. Tacos are delicious at El Tacquito, with corn tortilla (flour is offered), jalapeños, grilled onions, cilantro and a wide variety of traditional meat fillings—pollo (grilled chicken), al pastor (marinated pork) and asada (grilled beef) are all great. But in real Mexican taco fashion, you can also go native and try fillings like tripe, tongue, beef head, beef maw and more.