As a janitor, I like my supper like I like my humor: clean. It’s harder than it looks. It’s less about Scrubbing Bubbles and swirling Old Dutch cleanser than it is about removing everything that doesn’t belong there. My motto: “Take out the papers and the trash, or you don’t get no spendin’ cash.”
An editor will tell you the same thing: The challenge is conciseness -- taking out every yakety-yak word that doesn’t add meaning and move the damn thing along. (“Brevity is the soul of wit.”)
Cleanliness might be next to godliness in the adage, but in our historic city by the bay it’s at the northwest corner of Washington and Center. MI Table, the new farm-to-table offering in the stripped down and renovated Crapo (or Legacy) Building, joins its neighbors a block east at the Public House and two blocks west at Tavern 101 in the trend toward clean, bright, spare, glass-encased bistros with authentic, local, natural menu items. (Now if they could just put something green and relaxing at the northeast corner of Center and Saginaw, where the Red Lion used to be. Yeah, that’d be great.)
This trend toward “clean and green in design and cuisine” has migrated with nomadic service staff at least as far as our reborn downtown, advancing west from Concord, Mass., where Thoreau attempted “to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will not offend the imagination” at his one-man Woodstock on Walden. (I suppose that, if you dropped in on Thoreau on the weekend, it would be BYO.)
I wasn’t sure if MI Table would be to my taste. I was weaned, as it were, on dark, loud, hot, smoky, shmear-playing, raucous, nine-ball-in-the-corner, accordion-squeezing burger bars in the South End. Those are still my favorites: Barney’s, Bishop’s. Tapped the teat at Tubby’s, so to speak.
But what if you took away all the to-do of the dark, loud, hot, crowded, Trivia Tuesday, smoky, cheeseburger-and-fries, Chevy second shift shop rat, Jimmy Buffett karaoke,
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| Karen the daytime bartender at MI Table |
Turns out, what’s left is a great time, as witness a recent midweek, midday, mid-autumn visit to MI Table with Harry and the G-man, thanks to our charming and expert bartender, Karen. The familiar scent of sugar beets refining in the crisp northeast breeze hastened me inside.
The G-man and Harry are being kept alive by bio-technology and farm-to-organ substances. The G-man has lost some weight and looks good. He’s leading the autumn clean-up at Pine Ridge Cemetery, where he is in ongoing rehearsal for the “Alas, poor Yorick” speech. If the Bay City Players ever revive “Hamlet,” he’ll be cast-to-type as Yorick, but just the skull.
Newly equipped with Bluetooth hearing aids, their adjustable volume powered by an app on his smartphone, Harry had just returned from a family visit to Las Vegas. His was a tale of two cities: A fancy hotel on the strip, where merely opening your hotel room's fridge will run you $75, and downtown, where a great meal at Binion’s might top out in the high single digits.
In cuisine, setting is everything. Nothing tastes better than a hot dog at the ballpark. Well, almost nothing. I suppose it depends on the hot dog. And the ballpark.
And so it is at MI Table, where a less-is-more vibe prevails, bathed in southern and eastern
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| The clean interior |
- Each appointed item is beautiful in itself: a Petoskey stone, a shard of copper, or rock, plant, or mineral native to Michigan, encased in the unifying circular bar.
- Each item relates to another: the copper hanging light fixtures to the copper-framed seats, the black-uniformed staff to the black paper straws.
- A mezzanine features comfortable armchairs and sofas, complementing a spare Amish table overlooking the red art deco curve of the former Kresge building. There’s your clash of styles.
- And all the items unite in a pristine design, including the cleanest (unisex) restroom I have ever secretly inspected in my long and storied career as a research-based janitor.
- Whoever named a drink Tahquamenon Phenomenon is wasting her talent on menus and should hoof it to Hollywood, where fortune awaits. That drink goes down faster than the Edmund Fitzgerald.
- Karen presented my Forest Green pizza ($13) as though she were introducing me to my prom date’s father. It was slimmed-down perfection (the pizza, not the prom
date), featuring wild mushrooms, spinach, tomatoes, wild garlic and well-appointed microgreens. The tomatoes tasted like they had competed for the honor in both swimsuit and evening gown. Kudos to the kitchen on taming both the mushrooms and garlic.
Door to old bank vault - The menu features dishes that try real hard and do their best not to offend anyone: pescatarian, vegetarian, vegan and gluten free. I don’t eat meat, but I might eat certain fish, just to even the score. They know who they are.
- One of Harry’s drinks arrived minus the advertised rosemary sprig garnish. Karen apologized for the rift in trust, noting that the herb was not in season. Really, Karen? Not in season? What are we -- a lowing herd? A madding crowd?
Our charming and informative hostess and MI Table’s owner Amberlyn Hales promises to do it up right for the holidays.
Every happy patron says, “I’ll be back.” Truth is, I felt so at home at MI Table, I was sorry I had to leave. And now that I’m 70, I realize that I will be then, too.
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See the hairy guy’s report on MI Table: Joe Louis Punch, Star Chicken Shotgun, Purple Gang and a restroom game (but no more oxtail)
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