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From Canada To Cajun Country, The Best Things I Ate And Drank In My 2017 Travels

This article is more than 6 years old.

Micheline Maynard

The more I travel around North America in 2017, the more I'm convinced that good food and beverages have spread way beyond the East and West Coasts.

You're just as likely to find a good cup of coffee in Windsor, Ontario, as you are in Vancouver. And you needn't stand in line in Manhattan, when some of America's best cinnamon rolls are being baked in Nashville.

So, here's my list of the best things I ate and drank in my 2017 travels. I hope when you're traveling around the country, that you'll forgo room service and go out to track them down.

Best barbecue. Smoque, in Chicago, is my barbecue gold standard. I've never tasted better brisket than the kind they smoke in their original location on Pulaski Avenue.

But Smoque now has another outlet, in the Revival Food Hall. It sits in the shadow of the Sears Tower (yes, I know it's officially something else, but we'll always think of it as the Sears Tower), a quick walk from Union Station.

That Smoque location serves an amazing smoked turkey sandwich. It's a perfect lunch, lighter than the beef and pork based entrees, and big enough to split with someone if you are feeling generous. You can also ask for turkey meat to go, and chop it up later to put on a salad.

While I deliberately went out to hunt down Smoque's newest location, I stumbled upon a second barbecue source by accident in Alabama.

Headed south from Nashville to Birmingham, I got off Interstate 65, became lost looking for someplace else, and found the Old Gin House Barbeque in Elkmont, Alabama.

I like white barbecue, but you can rarely find a good version up north, so when I saw the option for a barbecue chicken sandwich with white sauce, I snagged one. I wish I'd gotten two.

The white sauce was just tangy enough, not cloying, and the sandwich was generous, but still manageable (no food coma allowed while cruising the highway). Plus, the price was amazing: $2.99 for my sandwich.

"The Gin" as fans call it, was out of biscuits when I pulled up, but they offer them with everything from country ham to tenderloin and fried chicken, and the most expensive is $2.79.

Best sandwich. While we're talking about sandwiches, I have to mention a 2017 discovery: the Turkey Reuben at Knight's Steakhouse in Ann Arbor, Mich., my hometown. I hesitate to even mention Knight's. It's a townie spot, they don't advertise, and they specialize primarily in big cuts of meat.

Now, the Turkey Reuben is nothing new in the Midwest and elsewhere. As you might guess, it substitutes turkey for the corned beef usually served on a Reuben, and cole slaw for the sauerkraut.

Even though I obviously love turkey, I somehow dragged my heels over trying one, maybe fearing the sloppiness factor. But when our favorite waitress, Laura, recommended it, I decided to plunge in.

Trust me: this Turkey Reuben is worth the paper napkins. When served immediately from the kitchen, it's a warm comfort concoction. Knight's kindly leaves the thousand island dressing on the side, which helps cut down on the mess. Upon first glance, the sandwich seemed too big to finish. On second thought, I did.

Best appetizer. My secret at many fine dining places around the country is to assemble a meal out of several small plates. One, it's often cheaper, and two, I get to try more things.

At DTB (it stands for Down The Bayou) in New Orleans, I discovered an appetizer that I'd make as my main course. It's the Mushroom Boudin Balls that are served as a starter. Boudin, as you may know, is ubiquitous across Louisiana. It's a loosely packed sausage usually made with pork, rice, seasonings and sometimes vegetables.

I like regular boudin, but as a minimal red meat and pork eater, I usually have only a little bit. I easily cleaned my mushroom boudin plate. The mushroom balls have a texture that mimics actual boudin, but they're not as heavy, and they are accompanied by smoked mayo (I'm not sure how to smoke mayo, but I'd leave it to these experts).

It would be a fun starter to sneak up on a non-vegetable eater to get their reaction. And if they don't want to finish it, I will.

Best Middle Eastern. Let's stay in New Orleans for the next two categories. I am a huge fan of Al-Ameer, the Dearborn, Mich., Lebanese restaurant that won a James Beard Award in 2015 as an American classic. The staff could not be nicer, and the food is always generous and scrumptious.

A thousand miles away, Al-Ameer has some competition. On Sunday nights, Simone Reggie, the owner of Simone's Market, has been offering her own menu of Middle Eastern specialties that she calls Leba-Cajun.

Reggie's menu includes all the classic Lebanese dishes she ate growing up, like grape leaves, hummus and tabouli. But she also makes the dish called Sheikh il Meshee, an eggplant casserole that you won't find many places.

When I sat at the counter in her bustling market, I felt like I'd been transported back to Dearborn. Now that Shaya is no longer run by its founder, Alon Shaya, and his executive chef Zachary Engel, a winner of FORBES' 30-under-30, Simone's Market has become the place for the best Middle Eastern food in town.

Best Pasta. New Orleans has branched far out from its traditional Cajun and Creole cuisine. It's so multi-cultural now that you'll find some of the best pasta in an Asian fusion restaurant, run by a chef with Sicilian roots.

Maypop has won universal praise for its innovative food, inspired by the Chinese dishes that owner Michael Gulotta loved as a kid. And, he's made New Orleans aware of the wonders of dim sum, which he serves on Saturdays and Sundays.

But, Maypop also does a terrific job with pasta dishes, especially those featuring its noodles made in house.

Last summer, Gulotta served a pasta dish of semolina fusilli with Royal red shrimp and an intensely flavorful, old-school tomato sauce. It had a new-school twist of a dollop of hollandaise to make it creamy, much like you might add some chevre to marinara.

Even though I took home leftovers, they didn't make it until midnight.

Best cinnamon rolls. Let's move from savory to sweet. I am a connoisseur of cinnamon rolls. They are one of the first things I remember my mother baking when I was a child. I've taken a cinnamon roll class at King Arthur Flour in Norwich, Vermont. Whenever a menu says, "homemade cinnamon rolls," I'm there.

This year, the best cinnamon rolls I found were the individual pan of cinnamon rolls -- yes, pan -- at Marsh House Restaurant in the Nashville neighborhood called The Gulch.

Marsh House has had a little bit of a bumpy history. It was supposed to be John Besh's much-heralded foray north from New Orleans, but, not surprisingly, Besh's name is nowhere to be found any more on the Marsh House website.

The cinnamon rolls, thankfully, appear to still be on the menu. When I had breakfast there, they came four in a pan, and even if you share there, it's doubtful that you'll be able to finish more than one.

That's okay, because they warm up nicely, and are perfect for dunking in a cup of Keurig coffee from your hotel machine the next morning. Or later the same day.

Marsh House also has amazing biscuits, too, overshadowed by those at Biscuit Love around the corner, but still worth sampling.

Best doughnut. One of my favorite stories in 2017 was about an old Ann Arbor favorite, Washtenaw Dairy. It decided to take a gamble last spring on delivering doughnuts across town, and found itself with a wild success on its hands. (Deliveries now are being handled by Uber Eats, which just set up shop in town.)

I've eaten plenty of $3 doughnuts, from Boston to New York, Chicago to San Francisco. The doughnuts at Washtenaw Dairy as as good as any of them, and they only cost 70 cents each. Once in a while, the shop over estimates its doughnut demand, and you can snap up a dozen for $4.

Think of that, dear reader: 12 doughnuts for what a fancy big city place will charge you for a single doughnut that might not be as good.

To be sure, Washtenaw Dairy's doughnuts are smaller, but they're fried crispy, and the guys have been having fun with doughnut flavors and icings. This fall, they tried a combination vanilla and chocolate frosted doughnut that would have been a respectable entry on The Great British Bake Off.

Washtenaw Dairy has been open since 1934. Lots of us have been going there all our lives. And if the quality of their doughnuts stays this high, there will be plenty more generations to enjoy them.

Best coffee. There was a lot of coffee news in 2017, with beloved brands like Blue Bottle being bought by big names such as Nestle, which also owns Caribou and Peet's.

And, I plowed my way through Starbucks' lineup of gimmick drinks, from the Christmas Tree Frappuccino to the Unicorn.

But there are still lots of independent coffee places in the U.S., as well as in Canada. The best coffee I had in 2017 was in Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit.

It sometimes gets derided as a gritty industrial town, but it is the cleanest, friendliest gritty industrial town you'll ever see.

Windsor's cool quotient has been leaping in recent years, thanks in part to merchants who appeal to residents' appreciation of good food and drink.

One of those places is the Anchor Coffee House, which has two branches, one on Huron Church Street on the city's west side and another in the Walkerville neighborhood.

I was at the Walkerville spot on a recent Sunday, and told a friend I would just like to live there. It's a relaxed space, with communal tables and big plate glass windows. There's a glass case of delicious baked goods, some locally made pottery from The Pottery Cupboard, and above all, the coffee.

I like their cortado, a mix of espresso and warm milk, served in a glass, and accompanied by raw sugar cubes. It doesn't have lavender-infused syrup, another trend I spotted in 2017. Just the basics.

Pop over, if you have business in Detroit (it's about 10 minutes from the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel), take a deep breath and relax. Maybe add a molasses cookie embossed with a gingerbread man.

As I discovered in 2017, little things can be just delicious as the fancy ones.

 

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