I was in a random town about an hour outside of Detroit, where the food choices are between Arby’s, McDonald’s, or Coney Island. I wasn’t feeling that, so I took a short drive to Ann Arbor to check out one of America’s finest college towns. It’s adorable and so studious. Roaming around, I ended up at Mercy’s. It’s brand new, and part of a hotel. It’s a french restaurant, with burmese and other asian influences. Sounds interesting, huh? Ok, so I have to start with this bread. It was like simply amazing. It was just thin slices of some sourdough bread. Super crusty on the outside, super dense and lovely on the inside. They get it from Chicago. Where is this bread from? Because I could eat this all day. Looks like every day ordinary bread, tastes like nirvana.

I started with the Mercy’s Steamed Dumplings. They’re made with ground dumplings, which makes them a bit more healthy. When they come out, they bring out the bamboo steamer and then put them on a plate for you. They’re served with ginger soy and spicy chili dipping sauces. This means they put some dumpling sauce in a bowl and squeeze some sriracha in another bowl. These were pretty good, but the innards also had pieces of water chestnuts in them, which made the insides sometimes crunchy. I actually do not like water chestnuts at all, especially their texture, so that part of the dumplings, I did not care for.

I also added the Asian Slaw as a side to my entree. It was a blend of Napa cabbage, red pepper, green onion, and corn in a sesame ginger vinaigrette. I absolutely loved this. I’m a huge sucker for super crunchy cabbage based salads. I can’t get enough! I could have eaten a giant bowl of this as my main course. They’re really fancy about presentation too. It was served in a little fried wonton skin basket.

My entree was the Coriander Dusted Sea Scallops. Large scallops are served with jasmine confetti rice cake, citrus ginger beurre blanc, orange curry coconut glacé, balsamic paint, and green beans. That’s a lot of fancy words. The scallops were great, but I wasn’t necessarily crazy about the citrus ginger buerre blanc they slathered on top of them. But they were cooked well, seared on the outside, pretty raw in the middle. The rice was not very good. It was heavy on coconut milk and fairly flavorless. The balsamic paint was a dramatic touch to the dish itself, and I loved the green beans.

The service was ok. The food took forever to come out. And there weren’t very many people there, so I don’t know what was up. Maybe they’re just still trying to figure it out, as they’ve only been open for a little while. Or maybe they’re just slow. This place is a fancier and more expensive alternative, in an otherwise college dining scene, where your only options are sandwiches, wings, or burgers.

I had to travel to Michigan this week. So flying into Detroit and heading westward, my research led me to Shiro in nearby Novi, MI.

This restaurant is in a mansion. Seriously folks, “historic Rogers Mansion”. I’ve never been to a japanese/sushi place this fanciful before. There’s a giant grand staircase in the middle, and tons of original details. The bathroom was nuts. It had crazy original colorful tiles and a weird sink fauce with hot, cold, and ice knobs.

I was seriously feeling the need for some greens, so I got the shiro salad, which is the typical japanese salad with the ginger dressing. It was nothing exciting, but the dressing was decent. The place is pretty big, and there’s a big sushi bar and a separate booze bar as well.

I also got the sunomono salad. Why did I get two salads? No idea. Actually, I like sunomono because there’s usually tons of cucumbers, and I was really wanting some cucumbers. But this was much more heavy on the seaweed salad side, and of course the octopus. It was a beautiful salad, but nothing exciting here either. There were only a bit of cucumber sticks, and it just didn’t do it for me. I should have skipped it.

This was some of the most attractive sushi that I have eaten in a long time. They put tons of effort in presentation here, and it shows. It’s beautiful, and tasty too!

They have a large selection of rolls, some of them typical, and some of them crazy. They take things to the extreme here. I ordered a couple of the spicy rolls. Instead of the fish being made spicy, their definition of spicy is to squirt a spicy mayo on top of any roll. Everything tasted fine, but it was a bit on the heavy side. They go a little overboard with the squirting.

For whatever reason, maybe this is something they typically do, they gave me a couple pieces of one of their special rolls for free. It was a roll with all kinds of stuff in the middle, and then topped with salmon, and then blowtorched! Sometimes, watching your food being made can be partly entertainment. These little suckers were good, and are probably good for people who may be afraid of raw fish. It was also a bit on the sweet side, so probably also a safer dish. All in all, a nice dinner in the middle of nowhere, in a random mansion. If ever around Novi, MI, stop by!

He’s been talking about it for years and years, but it finally happened. My uncle is retired! My aunt planned, and well schemed, a surprise retirement party. And it went off beautifully. Snowy weather and flight delays added a few wrinkles to the surprise, but otherwise, he was truly surprised! And of course, there was tons of good food! No one slaved for days on the food. Instead, it was catered! Shrimp cocktail. I love any party with shrimp cocktail!
Asian style mini meatballs. What makes the asian? Because they used sweet chili sauce in it. What an easy and brilliant idea.
Little mini spanakopita in the front. These weren’t that good. The mushroom cups in the back? Good! Actually, great. And this is coming from a girl who doesn’t really like mushrooms.

For a main dish, we had beef tenderloin with a mushroom gravy. This was the best entree of the evening.
Another entree was lemon chicken. I didn’t try this, but I heard this wasn’t that great. So I’m glad that I skipped it. The other entree was a veggie lasagna. A big vat of lasagna isn’t that photogenic. It was fairly tasty though. I would have preferred that the veggies weren’t so crunchy.
Rice pilaf. Not a favorite. Good, but there were chunks of crunchy bits in here.
Grilled veggies. I’m not sure what was in here, but there was definitely carrots, carrots, and carrots. There may have been a sweet potato, but I’m not that sure.
My favorite dish of the entire night was the salad. The mixed greens was nothing special, but it was what what was on top that blew everything out of the water. Candied walnuts, dried cherries, and an amazing balsamic syrup type of dressing. I could have just eaten a giant bowl of this and been stupid happy. This is my dream salad, because it’s like candy! I need to figure out how to make a dressing like that. Because well, I love candy! We also had mocha cake from the korean bakery. And everybody loved it! It was a fabulous party… happy retirement!