The Place Where We Live

…A great local bakery downtown.

There are a few great bakeries where you can get pasteries and cakes. Baker Boy on Dunbar Road is my personal favorite for its donuts, specifically the gigantic apple fritters they sell at a really good price! I recommend it over Tim Horton’s any day!

No, the kind of place I’m dreaming of would be a nice little storefront bakery that makes fresh crusty artisan type breads. The kind you tear off in chunks and would never dream of buttering! They could even sell their bread to the local restaurants and cafes downtown.

I have a friend in Boston who is a baker. His wife is originally from Monroe. He works at a place called Hi-rise Bread Company in Cambridge. One of the best things about Hi-Rise is that you can watch the bakers work the dough as you sit and eat.  My favorite is an olive bread that they make. They also have the best sandwiches! Granted, they are a little pricey. But it’s in Cambridge Massachuestts so I suppose people there are willing to pay a little more and I know I’m willing to splurge a little more when I’m on vacation. They also make their own granola and jam and sell beer brewed at a local microbrewery in Nantucket call Cisco Brewing Company.

I know there’ve been a few local bakeries in Monroe at different points in time. I remember there being a River Raisin Patisserie downtown when I was in highschool. There was also Liparato’s bakery in Detroit Beach for a long time, but I think it’s gone now.

I wonder why these places never seemed to pan (or shoud I say pain?) out? Any ideas? Maybe I can convince my friends to move back to Monroe and open up a bakery. I know her mom would thank me! Then I could  have olive bread any day of the week and she’d get to see her grandchild more often! Okay, now I’m really dreaming

 

 

dolce vi·ta(vt, -tä) Italian

n. A luxurious, self-indulgent way of life.

su·shi (ssh) Japanese

n.Cold cooked rice dressed with vinegar that is shaped into bite-sized pieces and topped with raw or cooked fish, or formed into a roll with fish, egg, or vegetables and wrapped in seaweed.

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Do these two phrases combined sound like an oxymoron to you? If so, prepare to be surprised. Dolce Vita, the Italian restaurant in Monroe, has opened a sushi bar.Sushi at an Italian restaurant? I’m sorry…, sushi in Monroe? I have to admit, I was surprised too, on both accounts But, believe it or not, Dolce Vita has done it and they’ve done it well. Now, for those of you who are completely disgusted by the idea of sushi, regardless of where you buy it…well I won’t spend my blogging time trying to convince you otherwise. Okay I will. Try it. Please…just once. You can even buy sushi without raw fish in it.So, My husband and I decided to try the sushi bar at Dolce Vita. The restaurant was busy which was expected for a Friday night. We asked to be seated at the sushi bar and to our surprise we were seated right away. (Was I naive to assume that people in Monroe would be lined up to try sushi at an Italian restuarant?)

Now, there are two things to keep in mind if you visit the sushi bar at Dolce Vita.

First, the sushi bar is pushed right up against their regular cocktail bar and is a bit lower to the ground than the regular bar. This can be awkward if you’re sitting at the sushi bar and someone else is at the regular bar having a drink. Let’s just say you end up in the eyeline of said drinker’s posterior.

Second, since the sushi bar is IN THE BAR, it also happens to be in the smoking section. But if you can get past this detail you’d probably be very happy sitting at the sushi bar and getting the full sushi bar experience. If not, don’t worry, you can always ask for a sushi menu at a regular table in the non-smoking seciton.We started with the seaweed salad. Again, like sushi, not nearly as repulsive as it may sound. Lots of sesame and vinigar flavor. Completely makes you forget about the fact that you’re eating seaweed. I love it. As far as the sushi itself, we kept it simple: one tuna roll, one salmon roll, one spicy tuna roll and one smoked salmon roll. We did this because,

1. We were hungry, these are our favorites and we wanted to make sure we were getting something we knew we’d enjoy eating. and

2. We figured it be better to start simple and then decide how much we liked the sushithere before getting more adventerous.

One of my biggest concerns about going to a sushi bar at an Italian restuarant was that I’d end up with food envy. I worried that I’d be eating my tuna roll when a plate of egg plant parmasan would whisk by in a waitress’ hand and I’d seriously reconsider the food choice I’d made. But I didn’t. The food was good. I was genuinely satisfied (and full) after my meal.

The best part of the evening was an encounter that represented the type melding of cultures that was happening there. As we were eating, a woman who I assumed was an walked up with an older gentleman . As she introduced him to the sushi bar and explained the variety of offerings, she eased back and forth between english and italian as she was explaining it to him. Descriptions of spider and california rolls were interspersed with italian words like “Salmone” and “tonno.”

To me the melding of cultures occuring there was wassomething more. Comfort food meets adventure. Fellini meets…Kurosawa. Will it work? Although we were the only people sitting at the sushi bar itself, the sushi chef was always busy with a steady stream of orders indicating that people in Monroe are definitely willing to try it. In any case, I was proud of the fact that someone in Monroe was daring enough to open a sushi bar… and was even bolder to do it in an Italian restaurant!

Wow!

It’s amazing to me how rapidly the blogging world moves.

To sum it all up… I just met with Dan at the Monroe Evening News yesterday to talk about my blog.  I recieved my password and  got my account set up today and bam!…an announcement about my blog was posted on the Monroe Evening News website today even though I have written nothing yet.

So, I wanted to write something now so as to not leave everyone hanging. This is, of course assuming that all of you blog readers out there are waiting with baited breath for what I have to say. But I won’t flatter myself and make that assumption.

In short, this blog is a chronicle of my ongoing exploration of the cool local things Monroe has to offer.

At this point I’ll leave it at that.  Well..is the suspense killing you?