[Real Detroit] The Dish

Black Cherry Vanilla Ice Cream Float at Moo Cluck Moo, made with creamy Calder's ice cream and natural Black Cherry soda

-HOLY DUCK: Monk. The new concept just opened last week in the Bastone complex in downtown Royal Oak in what was formerly Café Habana. Same owners, same chef and an even Belgian-ier version of sister restaurant/brewery Bastone. Think: burger with foie gras, goat cheese and pancetta. Duck fat fries with four different kinds of house-made mayo. Pork belly waffle sandwiches. And 38 bottles of Belgian beer on the wall.

-Hard rawker fans of 101.1 WRIF can now enjoy their very own signature beer. Made in Detroit by Detroiters for Detroiters, WRIF Lager, a collaboration with Detroit's Atwater Brewery, is a light traditional German-style lager. Geared towards the Every Man, the beer's tagline is "Word hard, play hard." Find it on tap at Atwater, CJ Mahoney's in Troy, State Bar in Detroit, the Blarney Stone in Berkley and Albert's on the Alley in Garden City.

Read more.

The Week We Ate (The EID Week in Review)

Welcome to Good Burger, home of the Good Burger.

A good burger inside a gas station? Good Burger in Dearborn is serving up all fresh, never-frozen products including buns from local bakeries, condiments and sauces made in-house, and hand-cut fries and onion rings. The catch? It's inside a BP gas station. Check your prejudices at the pump; gourmet gas station food might be the next big thing in the Motor City. [Dearborn Patch]

Detroit Restaurant Week Spring 2013 starts this Friday; check out all the menus online and make your reservations! [DRW]

Welcome to the Gilbert Era. [Freep]

In case you missed it:
-Go pantsless in Detroit [EID]
-U MAD CHICAGO? [HuffPo]
-The new-old Urban Bean Co. (re)opens this week in Capitol Park [Model D]
-The man who makes the best Manhattan in the country has left Roast for the rosier pastures of corporate mixology [EID]
-Here's a throwback Hot List for National Grilled Cheese month [EID]

In addition to saving the city/destroying the city/simply providing another grocery shopping option in the city (depending on your perspective), Whole Foods will also have an indoor/outdoor cafe and WiFi. [WF FB]

Monk Beer Bar opens today in Royal Oak in the former Cafe Habana space with an even Belgian-ier theme than its sister restaurant/brewpub Bastone. [Royal Oak Patch]

Thrillist took a trip to Trinosophes and enjoyed the baked goods from The Red Hook, the coffee from the Just Coffee co-op in Wisconsin, the old bar from Saint Andrew's Hall, and everything else inside this 4-in-1 venue (including the promise of future pizza party pop-ups!). [Thrillist]

Nefertiti Harris will open Tarot + Tea in West Village this May. The entrepreneur and spiritualist looks forward to continue serving her community spiritually as she so often does socially at Textures by Nefertiti. [UIX]

Beer and food trucks. Again and again and again. (The takeaway here: Ned's TravelBurger is debuting a new food truck.) [Thrillist]

"Urban pioneer," in a literal sense. Peck Produce in Detroit's Boston-Edison neighborhood is getting ready for spring. [Model D]

Got pork? Pig + Whiskey happens July 19-21. [P+W FB]

How far it is we've come when graffiti, once the scourge of public spaces, is now commissioned as an aesthetically-pleasing alternative to ongoing construction (later to be auctioned for education fundraising). Nicely done, Toast Birmingham. [Birmingham Patch]

At some point last week I reached the "I'm really fucking sick of people stealing my shit" professional breaking point and Click on Detroit got the brunt of it. Thanks to them for addressing and correcting their error. [Click on Detroit]

A2 Gastro Boy has your latest and greatest on A2, even if he does it for him and not me. Sighs. [A2GB]

Well, this was inevitable. A2's Selma Cafe could be forced to shut down for various code violations. [A2 Chronicle]

Throughout the next 12-18 months, all Caribou Coffee locations in Michigan will either be closed or converted to Peet's Coffee + Tea (the OG of second-wave coffee shops), which are owned by the same parent company. Though not implicitly stated, it looks like Biggby Coffee is winning the Michigan market with their Double Diabetes Bear Lattes(TM). [Freep]

Here is a Detroit Institute of Bagels progress shot. [DIB FB]

This just in: Halo Burger is super-late to the Twitter party. It's like, at this point, just go ahead and wait for it to be replaced with Vine. [Detroit News]

Beerie

Well hello ESPN, thanks for noticing our awesome craft beer offerings at Comerica Park! [ESPN]

Motor City Brewing Works is ready to see their name (or at least their beer) on Broadway! [Detroit News]

Atwater Brewery is going through some major expansions, which includes "Atwater in the Park," a brewpub in Grosse Pointe Park slated to open this fall, as well as a major increase in production with a new facility and the addition of a micro-distillery. [BeerPulse]

Paste Magazine puts Shorts Brewing Company on their list of weird beers. Twice. [Paste]

The Week We Ate (The EID Week in Review)

BUT DID HE GET FREE PARKING????

Yesterday was truly an historic day. "A staggering defeat...for the former mayor," says Jim Schaefer of the Detroit Free Press in their live blog announcing the verdict of Former Mayor and Convicted Felon Kwame Kleptocrat Kilpatrick's corruption trial. This was the day that Detroiters made it clear that we're taking our city back. It was the equivalent of the moon landing and the day Kennedy was shot for Detroit citizens, as all of us will remember exactly where we were when Kwame was found guilty on 24 counts. This was also the day that Ferndale's city council finally acquiesced to Ferndalians' incessant whining about a 25-cent-per-hour parking rate increase and decided to roll back the rates to the much more community-friendly 50 cents per hour AND continue offer free parking until March 24. WE TOTALLY WON, YOU GUYS. [Freep / Lower Ferndale's Parking Rates FB]

Chef James Rigato of The Root Restaurant and Bar is the only Michigan Chef nominated for Food + Wine's People's Best New Chef Award for the Great Lakes Region. 1 of 10 in the Great Lakes Region, 1 of 100 in the US. Show your support for the local food movement; a vote for James is a vote for Michigan! [F+W]

Awrey Bakeries, LLC is here to stay. Unlike Kwame. [MLive]

Where to go for St. Patrick's Day in Detroit? All of these places. [Visit Detroit]

Plus Mudgie's special St. Pat's menu is available through March 17. [Mudgie's]

And Bastone's goes until the 24th. [Bastone]

So guess who decided to talk to Crain's Detroit Business after all? David Overton, Detroit native and CEO of The Cheesecake Factory (which has its roots in Detroit), explains why Novi, why now, and why it took them so long to come home. [Crain's]

New Food Network show produced by Gordon Ramsay and hosted by Tyler Florence is now casting; local teams with pre-existing relationships battle it out for their own restaurant space inside a Michigan mall which they will get rent-free for a year. [RO Patch]

So now both Barrio AND the Hamilton Room are closed; apparently it's just getting too hard to be a nightclub in Birmingham. But never fear, the former owner is a partner in the new venture taking over the old Sangria space in Royal Oak, because Royal Oak is A-OK with nightclub douchebaggery! [Downtown Publications]

One of Mila Kunis's favorite places to eat while staying in metro Detroit to film Oz The Great and Powerful was Ronin Sushi. So there you go. Go there and you just MIGHT be putting your mouth on the same silverware that touched Mila Kunis's and, like, 700,000 other people's. But Mila Kunis! [My Fox]

Bruce Campbell's chin made an appearance at Tom's Oyster Bar in Royal Oak. [Tom's FB]

Atwater Brewery has been in a very (very) slow process of expanding over the past several years, with a whole lot of best laid plans falling through in between. Now it seems like they're about to (finally) explode, not with just expansions but with a brewpub in Grosse Pointe Park - another project spearheaded by the Cotton family, who are pretty much re-building that area themselves - and plans for a distillery operating by the end of 2014. [Crain's]

For those of you who like to piss and moan that Zingerman's Delicatessen et.al. is too expensive, shut up. For the love of God and Jesus and Allah and Obama and Jehovah/Elohim/Adonai, just shut up already. [RH Reality Check]

The official grand opening of Sauced at Go Comedy! Improv Theater was Sunday featuring lots of Guinness-ified food stuffs. [Thrillist]

B. Nektar in Ferndale has added jobs and a second location. [Metromode]

The Dunch Club is back in biz every Thursday 2-8 p.m. [Dunch Club FB]

Oh good, someone else repurposed this press release. eat ... catering and chef services in Ann Arbor has expanded their menu offerings! [AnnArbor.com]

Somewhere on the Facebooks I made a comment about the coming craft-beer-MEETS-craft-cocktail craze. (Wouldn't it be nice if you could search your own FB history?) Anyway, so the Daily Mail UK has confirmed: yes, beer cocktails are indeed becoming A Thing. [Daily Mail UK]

Historic preservation and adaptive reuse projects are talked about a lot in Detroit, but Oakland County isn't slacking either. Here OC Preservation Architect Ron Campbell talks about different projects going on around the county and why historic preservation is better all around, with shout-outs to Vinsetta Garage and Clarkston Union Bar + Kitchen. [Prosper]

Auburns Hills is working hard at establishing their own downtown Main Street community, and the cozy modern American Elwell Grill is part of that development. [Prosper]

Noam Kimelman isn't trying to "save" Detroit, but he is trying to get more healthful food options in the locations where Detroiters often grab quick snacks on the go: gas stations, convenience stores and the like. While others quibble over the definition of "food desert," Kimelman actually did something about it: hence, Fresh Corner Cafe was born. [UIX]

Tony Wisne Sabina, the uncompromising founder of Tribute and Epoch Hospitality Group, died at age 48 last week. May her legacy not die with her. [Crain's]

Detroit's iconic Sydney Boggs candies (which went bankrupt and closed in 2002) are reborn at Berkley's Sydney Boggs Sweet Essentials, run by long-time Boggs candy makers. [Prosper]

Miscellaneous
~Taco Bell's Cool Ranch Doritos Taco Loco is as real as gonorrhea. [Daily Finance]
~We've been abiding for 15 years now. [CNN]
~Of interest to Detroit/Brooklyn comparisons; this is what it means to be "the new Brooklyn." (Do you see a little bit of Detroit in this already?) [Esquire]
~Pyongyang has threatened to end a 60-year armistice with South Korea, which would likely lead to imminent war. Meanwhile, in New York, a judge says to Mayor Bloomberg "Let my sodas go." [Guardian / Death + Taxes]
~Staged or not, this is the best photo bomb in all of history. [106.9 WRQK FB]

[HOT LIST] Detroit Beer Week 2012

The fourth annual Detroit Beer Week launches today and since I'm really anal about having events listings in one easy-to-find place as a quick and easy resource for anyone who is interested, here are all of the coordinating Beer Week events that have so far been announced.

Also, 313ale, the official beer of Detroit Beer Week, is back this year at several participating DBW venues. The first kegs will be tapped tonight at 5:01 p.m. (1701 military time, the year Detroit was founded). 313ale is a 100% Michigan session IPA (a collaboration brew between several local brewers and the DBW team using hops grown in St. Clair Shores).

Big Tent Revival at One-Eyed Betty's
Thursday 10/18, 9:30 p.m.
There will be live music with Jennifer Westwood and the Waycross Georgia Farmboys and local brews like Detroit Bohemian, Rochester Mills Mills Pils, and Arcadia Starboard Stout on tap.

Atwater Block Tap Takeover
Friday 10/19, 4 p.m.
Atwater is taking over the block! This Friday Atwater (Block) Brewery will be taking over the taps of two of their neighbors on Joseph Campau, first with a happy hour tap takeover at The Rattlesnake Club from 4 to 7 p.m., then Andrews on the Corner from 7 p.m. to close.

Tashmoo on the Road: Blocktoberfest at Atwater Brewery
Saturday 10/20, 12:00 p.m.
Saturday's 15th Anniversary Bloktoberfest party with Tashmoo Biergarten will feature food from Corridor Sausage Co., Porktown Sausage, Treat Dreams, Avalon International Breads, and Peoples Pierogi Collective. Atwater will also be releasing their Dunkel as a celebration of 15 years of making German-style beers (or, as the cool kids now say, biers).

New Belgium Tap Takeover at One-Eyed Betty's
Monday 10/22
The brewery with the best marketing strategy in possibly the country will officially start making kegs available in the Michigan market on Monday, and to celebrate Betty's is hosting a New Belgium tap takeover featuring popular New Belgium brews Fat Tire, Ranger, Triple, Shift, and the highly allocated Lips of Faith Series (a line of craft beers that celebrate experimental recipes and unique collaborations) including Biere de Mars, Peach Porch Lounger, Cocoa Mole and La Folie.

DBW Complement/Contrast Beer Dinner at Kuhnhenn Brewing Co.
Tuesday 10/23, 6:30 p.m.

Theme: The Egg

Chicken, duck, quail, ostrich, fish, pterodactyl; the common theme of this dinner is egg. Each dish will feature egg in its preparation, and then be served with two beers, showing the complementary and contrasting flavors between beer and food. Owner John Lowman and Chef Brian Pierce from the Wrought Iron Grill in Owosso are bringing their culinary show on the road. Taste their delicious creations alongside the award-winning beers of Bret and Eric Kuhnhenn of Kuhnhenn Brewery in Warren. Enjoy a Fluffer Session IPA as a reception beer, before heading down a road of gastronomic exploration.

Course 1 - Ceviche
w/ Tangerine Wit and Penetration Porter

Course 2 - Scotch Quail Egg
w/ 9 (Nine) and White Devil

Course 3 - Curried Deviled Egg
w/ DRIPA and Anneliese Amber

Course 4 - Smothered NY Strip
w/ Export Stout and Aldebaron

Course 5 - Creme Brulee Bread Pudding
w/ Creme Brulee Java Stout and Play in the Hay

Reception Begins at 6:30 pm
Tickets are $55 - pay in advance or on the day of the event.
Dinner seating is strictly limited to 70 guests - RSVP today at 586-979-8361.

93.9 The River Live Music Session and Beer Ranger at One-Eyed Betty's
Wednesday 10/24, 4 p.m.
Live music and New Belgium's beer rangers from 6 to 8 p.m. with tastings and swag.

Hit the Bricks! BRIK Red Red Brick Bike Ride (starting at Nancy Whiskey)
Wednesday 10/24, 5 p.m.
This event starts with a bike tour of the city's brick streets brought to you by BRIK RED beer, a fine product of MillKing It Productions. Meet at Nancy Whiskey at 5ish -- the ride departs at 5:30 p.m. sharp and will attempt to get 12 or so miles of bricks (and maybe a couple BRIKs) in before the sun sets at 6:30 p.m. No skinny tires, no skinny jeans, no skinny lattes, no cost to ride but you must be responsible for your own bike and well-being. Don't have a bike? Rent one from Wheelhouse Detroit.

Afterwards hang out at Nancy Whiskey for some beer can chicken and the Orbitsuns.

Bell's Takeover at Green Dot Stables
Wednesday 10/24, 5 p.m.
David Munro is busy this week. Bell's is hosting an event at Green Dot Stables, owned by one of the nicest guys in Detroit and located in one of the most stylish neighborhoods IN THE WORLD. On draft: This One Goes to 11, Hopsoulution,  Cherry Stout,  Golden Rye Pale Ale.  In bottles: Two Hearted, Double Cream Stout.

Motor City Bike and Brew Tour with Motor City Brew Tours
Wednesday 10/24, 5:30 p.m.
Learn about Detroit's brewing past and present with Motor City Brew Tours. You will see former brewery sites in downtown Detroit and bike by the new generation of breweries. This is a 9-mile tour route for all biking abilities. Ticket includes guided bike tour with support staff, historical overview at each brewery site, two Atwater beers and pizza. Please note - "BYOB" - Bring Your Own Bike. Tickets $29.99 each; space is limited.

Bell's Tap Takeover at Foran's Grand Trunk Pub
Friday 10/26, 3 p.m.
Featuring:
Black Note Stout 11.5% ABV
This One Goes to 11 Ale 11% ABV
Sparkling Ale 9.0% ABV
Golden Rye Ale 6% ABV
Deb's Red Ale 5.8% ABV
Hell Hath No Fury Ale 7.7% ABV
Cherry Stout 7.0% ABV
Special Double Cream Stout 6.1% ABV
Hopsoulution Ale 8% ABV
Oatmeal Stout 7% ABV
Best Brown Ale 5.8% ABV
Oberon Ale 5.8% ABV
Pale Ale 5.2% ABV
Two Hearted Ale 7% ABV

4th Annual Michigan Brewers Guild Detroit Fall Beer Festival
Friday and Saturday 10/26-10/27
You don't actually need me to explain this, do you? Saturday is sold out but as of THIS SECOND there are still tickets left for Friday. And here is the beer list.