Bastone, Royal Oak, Michigan

Todd and I celebrated our friend, John's, Memorial Weekend visit by dining with him at one of my local favorites, Bastone. Having opened around two years ago in a '30s-era building on Main, Bastone is a stylish, noisy, Belgian-style brasserie, specializing in European fare and house-brewed beers. Todd and I each began with a pint of the evening's special beer, a Belgian brown that has become of one my personal favorites to date, while John had a glass of the house Chardonnay. We shared a cheese plate, featuring an aged gruyere, a creamy blue, and some other unidentified, but still tasty, third. Usually, my immediate move is to order their classic steamed mussels and pomme frites, but I opted for a different direction, with a bowl of hearty, bacon-laden potato-leek soup, accompanied by a plate of crisp-fried artichoke hearts. Todd opted for the fish and chips, a departure from his usual order of seafood "waterzooi," a traditional Belgian seafood stew. John ordered one of Bastone's popular "tartes," a crispy pizza topped with bacon, herbs, and caramelized onions. As always, Bastone did not fail to satisfy, and will therefore remain toward the top of my list of local dining faves. Photo from michiganmenu.com

Maria's Front Room, Ferndale, Michigan

During a long week of not being able to cook due to some minor construction at home, Todd and I headed out for a quiet dinner last Thursday at Maria's Front Room, a Ferndale mainstay on 9 Mile. It's a totally old school Italian restaurant, complete with plastic vines weaving through trellises, faux stone-paneled walls, and travel posters of Sicily. Don't get me wrong--it all adds to the homey charm of the place. However, the best thing about Maria's is its menu. With typical Italian restaurant fare--speidini, fried calamari, linguini with clam sauce, garlic bread--Maria's does a terrific job of transporting you back to the days before manufactured, taste-free chain restaurants like Olive Garden and Papa Vino's took over the American restaurant stage. We each ordered a glass of the house-made red wine--if I understand correctly, while Maria's does not have a liquor license, they are still permitted to make their own wine. We then shared a classic Caesar Salad--dressing good, lettuce crisp, but dock a couple of points for soggy croutons. Then, after a recent, POOR pizza experience at neighboring Como's Restaurant, we opted for Maria's round, thin-crust pizza with broccoli, artichoke hearts, black olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and mushrooms. Props for the VERY fresh veggies, unlike Como's bits of frozen spinach and canned mushrooms. We finished dinner by sharing a HUGE cannoli, with its crispy shell, overflowing with ricotta cream. Dock another point for garnishing with chocolate chips in place of the traditional crushed pistachios. Aside from that, however, it was heaven. We left in the midst of an evening deluge, satisfyingly full from another wonderful meal at Maria's. Photo from AOL CityGuide restaurant review

Forks, Spoons, and Filipinos

Apparently, pigs know how to eat with a fork and spoon. Or, so says an elementary school principal in Montreal, Canada. Seven-year-old Luc Cagadoc has found himself at the center of an international brouhaha, involving a recent incident in which he was reprimanded by a lunch monitor at school for eating in the customary Filipino style, with a fork and a spoon.

When his mother, a recent immigrant from the Philippines, called the principal to complain, he replied, "If your son eats like a pig he has to go to another table because this is the way we do it and how we're going to do it every time."

Now, supposedly, Luc has been disciplined previously for disruptive behavior, so I'm not 100% certain that the "pig" comment was because of the way he eats or the way he may act up in the lunch room. But according to Luc's mother, the principal told her that, in Canada, one should "eat the way Canadians eat"--and that has led to a wave of protests across the ocean from Canada to the Philippines. The apparent comparison of Filipinos to pigs has raised an uproar among Filipinos in both hemispheres, and it doesn't seem to be letting up anytime soon.

Schools have such bigger problems to deal with, that this whole incident is utterly ridiculous. Given that ketchup is now considered a vegetable by school lunch terms, they need to quit worrying about how kids eat and focus more on what they eat.

Click the link below for the full story:

http://www.westislandchronicle.com/pages/article.php?noArticle=6063