Restaurant Week Special: Rolling Deep with the Michigan Stats Department

Karry Lu  

As a first year grad student, my diet can most accurately be represented by this slightly modified infographic:

Luckily, Restaurant Week in Ann Arbor offers a brief respite from the usual carb-loaded and precisely memorized happy hour specials. Armed with a freshly deposited GSI stipend and the lack of Friday classes, I, as well as a bunch of other students in my department lured by the opportunity to be real adults, scheduled a classy dinner at The Earle, a venerable French restaurant located on West Washington near Main Street.

Restaurant Week primer: participating restaurants offer multi-course lunch or dinner menus at fixed prices, allowing patrons to sample their signature dishes (or whatever’s still sitting in the walk-in and needs to be sold in the next 48 hours) at a discount. I’ve done this before in New York, Chicago and DC, and it can be hit or miss unless you do your research. Still, given that my track record with the Ann Arbor dining scene almost exclusively involves $9 Indian buffets and various noodle-centered establishments, I thought this would be a good chance to see how hard this town can bring it.

First thoughts: The Earle is massive. It is almost certainly the largest restaurant I’ve set foot in, and more closely resembles the catacombs of a minor Roman emperor than a place where people go for dining and celebrating. At this moment I’d also like to give props to our servers who graciously allowed us to push a bunch of tables together to accommodate all sixteen of us. As everyone knows, stats students are a traditionally rowdy bunch.

For this restaurant week, the Earle offered a three-course dinner with a choice of two appetizers, six entrées, and six desserts. The cannellini bean and escarole (the poor man’s kale) spicy tomato soup, which was my chosen starter, did not earn much comment or distinction. It was perfectly serviceable, I liked the Parmesan on top, but it was clearly just something to whet the appetite for the main course. For me, that was the boneless duck breast in a sauce of apples, cider, and brown sugar, with rum raisins and potato-turnip purée. I was conflicted about this dish; the duck was properly juicy and tender, but I could’ve done with a sauce that wasn’t so sickly sweet and one-dimensional. Call me crazy, but dumping apples, cider, and brown sugar in the same dish seems like overkill. Also disappointing was the lack of crispy, salty skin, which is usually my favorite part of duck breast and would’ve certainly supplied the needed textural and taste contrast. I was more or less satisfied in the end, but this really was the one that got away; we could’ve had so much more.

I should take a moment to say that yes, because we are sophisticated motherfuckers, we did indulge in a bit of wine to accompany our red-meat heavy entrées. More specifically, one of my dining companions and I split a bottle of Terra Alta Cataregia 2004 “Gran Reserva,” which was chosen solely on the basis of its sub-$30 price tag, and that one wine tasting I went to three years ago where the lady might’ve mentioned something about Spanish wines being undervalued. Verdict: slightly ponderous, subtle blackcurrant and stone fruit undertones, with a chewy oaky finish and hints of vanilla and honeysuckle on the nose, which is pretty much what I say about all red wines that don’t smell like barnyard and burnt moss. Still, it was a very acceptable sipping wine, and a perfect enhancement to a night of enlightened conversation between intellectual peers (topics included white people not knowing about beef wellington, actresses we think are hot, R syntax…probably).

Naturally, there was room left for dessert. A plurality of the table chose the dark chocolate cheesecake, and I was no exception. It wasn’t overly sweet, which I like, because it meant they used quality chocolate, but it was almost too rich and heavy, and by the end I felt like I had a few bites too many. Given the choice again, I might opt for my neighbor’s crème brûlée. It’s hard to go wrong with a caramelized sugar crust.