While I avoid casual chain restaurants like the plague, sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do. When stuck at an airport, your choices are limited. It’s typically a case of “least of all evils”. At DTW, I was given the illustrious choices of tgi friday’s, ruby tuesday, mcdonald’s, champps (where they allow smoking!?!??), cheeburger cheeburger, and a few other sandwich type shops, most of which were starting to close by the time I showed up. While I like cheeburger, cheeburger, the one at the airport was like a stripped down version, and it scared me off a bit. And the sandwich shops, those are always the pre-made ones, where the sandwiches have been sitting there for who knows how long! So really, what was I supposed to do? At that point, it was just a toss up between tgi and ruby, and for whatever reason, tgi mcscratchy’s won out.

I started out with a house salad and a virgin strawberry daiquiri. The salad wasn’t half bad. I haven’t been to a tgi friday’s for at least ten years, and I didn’t remember anything from it. The salad is nothing special, but I did like their vinaigrette dressing. This little fruit slushy was pretty darn tasty and refreshing too.

This is an airport restaurant, so it’s a stripped down version of a regular tgi’s with a limited menu. I got the dragonfire chicken, which is a grilled chicken breast glazed with a kung pao sauce and topped with pineapple pico de gallo,served over stir–fried brown rice, along side mandarin oranges and broccoli. Really, this was pretty good! The chicken was quite good, although the sauce was a bit too much on the gingery side for my liking. I didn’t bite into any ginger hunks, thank goodness, but the ginger flavor was a bit too strong. The sauce and the pico added just enough spice. The rice was pretty good, even though it was on the overcooked and mushy side. The mandarin oranges were from a can, so they couldn’t really go wrong there, and the broccoli was great! They were steamed just right, and not mushy at all. They still had some firmness. All in all, this sure beat a big mac!

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!