The Union

“Hello. I am the Uber Driver,” Kenneth said, as he unrolled the driver-side window of his tiny silver car.

 “Is Sarena here?”

I waved hello. Six minutes later we found ourselves a block away from The Union Cabaret & Bar. Kenneth didn’t really know where he was going, but it was ok. The walk in this fall air was refreshing, and only a few minutes long.The Union, as it is called by most in the area, is a red bricked building with large windows wrapped around the front, and stained glass along the upper rim. The words “Union” look painted on the windows to give the place a funky feel, even at first glance. After being outside in the chilly breeze, we were met with a wave of warmth once we walking inside.

The Storefront of The Union

Immediately we took in the sights. The restaurant’s rich yellows and reds in the décor was comforting. Stained glass lined the top of the windows, which I imagine would let golden sunlight inside on sunnier days. Their warm lighting and mix of low and high top tables gave the restaurant a relaxing, come as you are feel. The stage for performances had lush red curtains that felt right at home, with arm chairs lining the pit.  

The hostess lead up to a high top table near the front window. There were five other parties in the restaurant, and a handful of folks at the bar, which seems common for restaurants at 6pm midweek. I glanced at the drink menu - they have an extensive beer assortment and unique cocktails to choose from. If I did not have to go to work immediately following this meal I would’ve have ordered a drink.

Taylor, our waitress, came by and explained how the restaurant works. They have live jazz, blues, and funk performances on Thursday through Sunday nights by mostly local talent, which is one of their ways of fostering community. The Union is said to be where “food, drinks, friends, and music meet”.  Something I learned is that on Thursday nights, students from Western’s music department perform at this venue. Little did I know that Western’s Jazz department is more decorated that Juilliard’s! This seems like a great opportunity to get out of the K bubble!

First to arrive were our appetizers. We ordered Gator Balls, Rib Tips, and Portobello Fries for the table. Our waitress, Taylor, highly recommended the Portobello Fries, claiming that she doesn’t even like mushrooms but finds herself craving this dish.

Top: Portobello Fries
Right: Gator Balls
Left: Rib Tips

The Portobello Fries are parmesan-fennel breaded Portobello mushroom strips, served with curried mustard sauce. I reached across the table and picked up the five inch fry. I can eat my weight in fries. I’ve been known to scarf down French fries, sweet potato fries, and zucchini fries. I was excited to see this take on the French fry. Having not had fennel before, I assumed that it would fry the same way something with oil or fat would fry. I was wrong. Instead of coming out golden and airy, the breading was grainy and heavy. The mushroom inside was very elastic, making it hard to chew. The mushroom didn’t have much of a taste. The squishy texture was hard to move past. The curried mustard sauce was a beautiful golden yellow, but didn’t add anything to the dish, in my opinion. The only good thing about this appetizer was the cheese they sprinkled on top.

I left the Portobello Fries with a bad taste in my mouth, but moved on to the Gator Balls. Quite honestly, they looked beautiful. Blackened alligator, grit, jalapeño bacon, and smoked gouda, cornbread fritters served hot with a side of bistro sauce made up this dish. Sitting on a bed of lettuce with a red powder dusting the tops of the brown spheres. They were fluffy, easy to cut with the side of my fork, they had the looks and texture of falafel. Inside they were a soft yellow color. The Alligator appeared to be ground up inside the ball. I hesitantly put some of the bistro sauce on the ball and took a bite. I expected to come away with a rubbery taste in my mouth. I was happily mistaken, and flavors like bacon and crabmeat popped in my mouth. Despite having jalapeño bacon, I didn’t experience much heat, which I am okay with because I don’t handle spices very well. I wish we had an entrée of Gator Balls, actually. Having five split between four people felt incomplete. Next time, we’ll put in two orders.

The Rib Tips, which were a pound of dry rubbed pork rib tips served with a six pack of sauces, were mouth-watering. They were very tender, feeling like they melted in my mouth, and were seasoned nicely. This was an excuse to taste all of the sauces they offered. Ordered by heat level, they had Apple Jack, Kansas City, Memphis, Stout, and Chipotle. My least favorite sauce was Stout, but that very well could be due to my dislike of beer in general. I expected Chipotle, being level 5, to have a kick of heat. I’d compare the taste to the pizza sauce in the Lunchables I had as a kid, meaning nothing special. The favorites of my table were Memphis and Kansas City, which were more sweet than bitter, and was a nice addition to the rib tips. I appreciated that we had more options that a typical barbeque sauce, because it allowed us to explore various flavors. The only downside to the rib tips was that some pieces of cartilage were served, and they lacked flavor and the texture was similar to the Portobello mushrooms. We ate the entire pound of meat though, minus the cartilage.

All in all, the Gator Balls and Rip Tips took the edge off of our hunger in a delicious way. The Portobello Fries were a bust. Unfortunately, we had to cut out of the restaurant early because one of the folks I dined with had to pick up a work shift, so we took our entrees to go. No doubt some of the magic was lost when we had to eat in the first year residence hall rather than in the restaurant, but the food spoke for itself even after being placed in to-go boxes.

I ordered the Green Tomato BLT, which was cornmeal dusted- fried green tomatoes, thick sliced bacon, lettuce, and old-fashion mayo on toasted sourdough bread. I love fried green tomatoes. The breading added a nice crunch and the flavors from the tomato popped in my mouth. It added a nice texture to the BLT. The Bacon itself was crispy and melted in my mouth. The fat much appreciated. I sometimes forget that I have braces, and realized when trying to eat this that my teeth were sensitive to the hardness of the toasted sourdough. Still, I trucked through and had a pretty good BLT.

The Dirty South Burger with Sweet Potato Fries

I also tasted one of their most popular burgers, called The Dirty South Burger. A Grilled to order steak burger served on a brioche bun with jalapeno bacon, smoked chipotle jack cheese, alligator, crawfish, spicy remoulade, lettuce, tomato, and onion. This one packed some heat the released after my last bite. A reminder that food is something to savor, I think. This spice was not too bad. If you are familiar with Indian cuisine I’d say it would match to a medium spice there. Again, I think I enjoyed the Alligator because it was not distinguishable as I’d imagine it to be, it having a similar texture to the Crawfish. The colors of this meal were just as gorgeous to look at as they were to eat. Everything tasted crisp and fresh. The brioche bun was toasted to a nice brown, and fluffy. The burger itself was stacked very high.  

The sweet potato fries were good, but nothing to write home about. They could have been seasoned more – I don’t think they were seasoned at all, actually. On the other hand, their regular fries were heavily salted, something I was not prepared for. They served cornbread muffins with red pepper flakes. Had they been buttered, and a bit less dry, I would have been in heaven. The cornbread I am used to is fluffy and moist, although I realize that this might not be true to Southern cornbread tradition.

The Union really does feel like a venue where community meets through delicious eats and live music. The meats are tender, the sauces are sweet, and the space is inviting. I highly recommend you check this place out on your next visit to Downtown Kalamazoo. Just don’t have the Portobello Fries. 

Restaurant Review Assumptions and Expectations

I chose to go to a place in downtown Kalamazoo called The Union Cabaret & Bar. Folks call it The Union for short. This restaurant also has a full bar and often hosts live performances by local and small touring musicians in multiple genres. While walking through downtown Kalamazoo, I've been attracted to this restaurant before but never had the opportunity to go inside. They have funky gold lettering spelling out 'Union' on their storefront that draws me in.

Price is a factor I am very aware of right now, and so I've decided to try an array of the small plate appetizer options on this trip, rather than trying to get a taste of their entire menu. I was considering going to a pub, because those prices are typically pretty inexpensive, but I am familiar with bar fare, and at The Union I am able to take some risks in what I choose to eat.

They have items like Gator Balls, which consist of blackened alligator, grit, jalapeno bacon topped with smoked gouda and cornbread fritters, all served hot with a side of bistro sauce. Never in my life have I had Alligator before, and this description leads me to believe it is an experience I don't want to miss out on. Personally, I am not sure if I can handle the amount of heat this dish will pack, but I'll taste it and find out!

In regards to this alligator dish, it brings Hessler's piece, "A Rat in My Soup" to mind. To think a rat can be clean makes sense, but was something I haven't encountered. To think people eat alligator quite a bit in America makes sense, too, but I am nervous to do so myself. I am from South East, Michigan. I have lived in two different Metro Detroit suburbs all my life until coming to college. My family eats a lot of chicken and beef, and we have occasionally had lamb. This will be a new experience for me.

I"m thinking of the movie "The Waterboy" and how Adam Sandler ate rats and gators a lot, and enjoyed them. I was revolted. I think that was because they didn't have much artistry in how the food was prepared. They looked the same before they were cooked as they did after, but charred. Now I assume that The Union will take care in how they present this dish, and every dish they serve, as they are among one of more popular restaurants in downtown Kalamazoo. They claim to serve foods from the great states like Kansas, Texas, and The Carolinas. All places with lots of barbeque, a style of cooking that I haven't had much of.

I hope to be pleasantly surprised, although I am pretty apprehensive about the levels of heat in their cooking. I am excited to try a new place with some friends, either way.

CYOA Hannah Hart

My Drunk Kitchen is a series by Hannah Hart - a 30 year old you tube personality who got her start filming herself in the kitchen making simple foods while drinking. Her videos are filmed with puns, self-mockery, and stories of her life which bring reflection and advice. There is something very genuine that comes across in her work. Maybe it is because she enters into these recipes with little to no planning, and so she always seems to improvise and use what she has on hand.

In one of her earlier video, one can see just how humbly she got her start. This episode is where she tried to make Ice Cream at home. She ends this by taking some from the freezer, except it is store bought. While this adventure into ice cream failed, Hart notes that "You should never be ashamed of yourself... or who you want to become".

I appreciate this message a lot. I think something that one can take away from My Drunk Kitchen in general is the message to treat yourself with care, but also to not take yourself too seriously. She has fun in the kitchen, and that is clear from the get-go.

Over the five plus years that MDK has been operating, she has found quite the following. So much so, that she made a cook book. This, much like her videos, is filled with easy to prepare recipes that young people can readily make, and advice from her lived experiences on how to treat yourself and others.

In my presentation, we will see a brief overview of her career and book, while also looking to her more polished works. We will watch the following video where she is filming with the acclaimed chef, Jamie Oliver, as they class-up one of her dishes from her book, called The Hartwich.

Thanks!

Melted Reese’s Cups

“Do you want ice cream? Because I want good ice cream… and when I say good I mean good ice cream,” my mom asks me while resting in a cocoon of blankets on her queen sized bed. This isn’t even a question. Yes, I want ice cream.

My mom is an ice cream snob. I guess I am too, by association. She loves Michigan-made, full fat, simply crafted ice cream. Usually that meant from brands like Oberweis or Guernsey. She only likes vanilla with chocolate chips from Guernsey. None of this “Vanilla Bean” crap, she says. From Oberweis, simple chocolate is her fix. So she loves this $6 a pop ice cream, but just as easily will eat a Big Mac. I’m so much like her in that way. Tiramisu does it for me just as well as Little Debbie Swiss Rolls most days. My mom taught me that there aren’t many problems that food can’t make better.

People around me keep dying, and when someone gets sick or dies, you send them casseroles. Or if you are my mom, you send casseroles or brownies and eat expensive ice cream in your bed. She showed me how to bake our love (or heartache… or guilt) at 350 degrees before neatly covering it in tin foil. When we didn’t have time to make things from scratch, or from the box to be quite honest, we bought things from Meijer. We made sure it looked homemade, mostly through how we packaged them. We did the same thing one year for Christmas, putting stacks of fancy Meijer Bakery treats in Mason jars with delicate ribbon, done assembly-line style with me, my youngest brother, Mike, and my mom. The food was so thoughtful, but in the same stroke utterly thought-less. I mean, casseroles don’t have the power to end world hunger, to find my love, or to fix my family. It’s all just food. A casserole is a casserole is a casserole.

But the gesture still means something. I remember we sent cut-n-bake cookies to our neighbor across the street when his wife died. Well, my mom put them on a nice plate and wrapped it up with the shiny aluminum foil before telling me to give it to him. I don’t remember how old I was, but I felt so small. We sent brownies to Mrs. Garra when she fell, maybe ten years back. We sent her some more when she fell for again. I guess we like routine. It gives us something to do.    

We want ice cream, so I bike to Meijer with Michael. He is fourteen and has a fade. He has a shoe collection like no other and thinks he is cool because he rides a penny board. He is cool, but not because of the penny board. Mike snapchats a girl named Rachel a lot, but swears they aren’t anything special. After a 10 minute walk, or five minute bike ride from our house, we find ourselves in downtown Birmingham, yet another affluent part of Southeast Michigan. Affluent meaning an overwhelming amount of rich, white folk. We are not rich, white folk. We see moms in Lulu Lemon yoga pants with designer handbags and Chanel sunglasses buying things like fresh fruits and organic, gluten-free waffles.

I wonder where the real people are. I want to see a mom with no makeup and a lopsided ponytail plus three kids being jerks to each other. I want to see a dad freaking out in front of the tampons with his fourteen year old daughter on the phone. I want to see a kid wandering the aisles eating a bag of chips they ripped open. I want to see my old middle school Spanish teacher, Professora Snyder, buying cheap wine in her sweatpants. She seemed like the type to have boxed wine in her desk at school. We were the problem class.

I remember the house we had when I was in middle school, before we moved here. I lived there for fourteen years of my life, in our old house on Kingsmill Drive. It was me, my mom, my four brothers and my dog living together. My dad was there, too, before we moved. That house, the one with the overgrown bushes and the chipped blushing pink brick, saw a lot of decay. My brothers would always leave their pumpkins out long after Halloween, back when they had enough care to carve them. They said they were feeding the squirrels, but the jack-o-lantern faces caved in and turned to mush on our front stoop. These waning gourds sat for weeks and weeks, crumpling into itself and turning from orange to brown to black, all before the snow came. We always kept the seeds, telling ourselves we’d bake them to eat later. We never baked them to eat later.

 They’d end up thrown somewhere in our backyard to waste. I dreamt of a pumpkin patch taking root under the swing set by the abandoned baseballs and knee-high weeds. Our house wasn’t taken care of the way suburban homes are supposed to, or so I gathered. We got a lot of urgent letters from the Homeowners Association, but we didn’t have time to deal with any of it. Our weeds were hard to tame, the grass liked to play dead, and our address numbers were not-quite centered by the doorbell. My brothers and I hated gardening. When our mom told us to get gloves and pull weeds, I tended to help out for maybe twenty minutes before coming inside to make lemonade for my brothers. That’s what good sisters did. Good sisters who also hated yard work, I mean.

The glass pitcher felt heavy in my hands. Then again my hands always seemed too small. Our family didn’t keep fresh fruit usually, so Country Time Lemonade was our go-to. I filled the pitcher three quarters of the way high with cold water, then dumped in four and a half, sometimes five spoons full of the pastel yellow powder. Our wooden mixing spoon was a little short. I felt cool water on my fingers as I mixed up the drink, the wood turning a deeper tan with the water. I added sugar to taste. Puckered lips told me it was too bitter, so I added a spoonful of sugar. We’d have to water it down, it was sickly sweet. I can’t tell anymore which is worse. 

         

You know, maybe this life is really just one big casserole: full of flavor but sometimes just too much to consume, made up of indistinguishable chaos. But you can find comfort here, amid all the crazy. And most times, even bad casseroles are still good. Hard lives are still lived. And life is supposedly a gift. Like the Reese’s cups my mom put in my backpack before school: even melted ones are still good.   

Recipes As Love. Recipes As Spectacle

One line from M.K. Fisher’s piece “The Secret Ingredient” was especially powerful to me: “we are so conditioned to the threat of the Secret Ingredient, and the acceptance of trickery, that even honesty has become suspect when we are brash enough to ask for recipes” (105). It spoke to something bigger than simple ingredients, I think, but then again I’m an introspective kind of thinker. While a recipe is literally a list of ingredients along with the process of how to put them all together to create a certain dish, they tell you something about how a person likes to be. Some people memorize them, others keep them in a box by the stove, and still others don’t have the time or care to know them. It also speaks to family life and tradition. My mom one year ordered Thanksgiving dinner all from Meijer. All we had to do was heat things up. It was good, but it felt impersonal that year. As if we were just going through the motions. Food is also ritual. Some say food is spiritual. I know some days, I’d come home and my mom would be making Gulab Jamin (Goo-lob Jah-men) on the stove. This is an Indian sweet, which is basically a donut hole that is a bit smaller than a baseball. Drenched in a brown syrup, and heated up – It tastes like home, and quiet nights in with my mom and I sitting on the couch, and cavities at the dentist office. Gulab Jamin is surely a ritual with me and my mom. One reserved for hard days, or when we need a taste of indulgence to get away without leaving our house. My mom loves through food – more butter the better, more sugar the sweeter.  

Coming back to Fisher’s piece, he notes how secret ingredients are generally perceived, saying that folks expect the “threat” of what it may hold, and assume recipes shared bluntly are not to be trusted. What does this mean? Perhaps it means that realness, raw vulnerability, is reserved for certain people in our lives. It, like secret ingredients, are typically off-limits for the public. For example, in one episode of Spongebob, they are obsessed with the concept of secret ingredients. The owner of the restaurant where Spongebob works, Mr. Krabs, tasks Spongebob with keeping the recipe safe. Safe meaning hidden. After a lot of shenanigans occurs to find the recipe and learn the secret ingredient, one finds that there is not a secret ingredient at all. The idea or the mystery was the ingredient in the first place. This goes to show, in a strange way, just how much, in Fisher’s words, “… even honesty has become suspect”  - Mr. Krabs felt saying there was a secret ingredient, putting up that mask, made people want Krabby Patties more than if they were to say exactly what was in the beef. Interesting.  

How To Be Good

Sarena Brown

Secret Ingredients Reflection

I especially appreciated Tony Bourdain’s piece, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” in our reading. While this is due in part to being familiar with his work, I also enjoy how he tells stories. I was interested from his first line: “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay”. There is so much tension packed into this opening statement. So much privilege and pain. It tells me that every single ingredient has a traumatic past, yet all have the potential to be transformed into something great.

This idea brought me back to a chapter of A Cook’s Tour when Bourdain talked us through the ordeal with the pig. Remember how at first, he was squeamish and guilty, but after seeing what care was put into catching, slaughtering, and preparing the pork, he grew to respect the practice, bringing a new sense of responsibility to the kitchen. I agree with him when he noted that good food, in most cases, is inherently gruesome. A life has to end to create food as a means of sustenance, or indulgence. Any way you slice it, something has to die, and someone has to kill it. When dealing with life, death is inevitable, but both can be done with care. Even when talking about vegetarians, plant life has to be planted and harvested, a process that isn’t always done gently in respects to Mother Earth.

Moreover, I think a good life, like good eats, is inherently traumatic. Nobody gets out alive, or so it goes. And life's challenges bring forth possibilities for change and for new developments. Even if your life is relatively easy (whatever that means), there is pain in being a part of this world, just as there is pain in being born, growing up, and growing old. Andrea Gibson once said this beautifully in one of their poems: “I asked the sun about the big bang. The sun said, it hurts to become”. It all hurts. But on the other side of our pain things will be different. I won’t say better because that word is subjective, but just know it won’t stay the same.

Bourdain ends this piece with a simple sentence, “I have come home”. He describes working in a kitchen as chaos, where you have to wear many hats at once and fly by the seat of your pants. Even in these fast paced scenes, you find a deep sense of camaraderie. You’d have to, working in hot kitchens with tempers running high in close-proximity to one another. I’m happy this piece ends here, at a place of belonging. That is really all we want out of life I think, to find out where home really is. 

Memoir Draft: Title TBD

Sarena Brown

When someone dies, sad people send you casseroles. Lots of casseroles… lasagna, too. The same goes for when your mom is in the hospital and your dad has no idea what he is doing when there are four kids to look after and household to run.

In the spring of 2012, that was us. Concerned friends and neighbors dropped off cookies, brownies, and more green bean casseroles than I’ve seen in my life, because we were kids and my dad was my dad and my mom was out of commission for some time. The food was so thoughtful, but in the same stroke utterly thought-less. I mean, casseroles don’t have the power to free my mom from illness, to find my love, or to fix my family. It’s all just food. A casserole is a casserole is a casserole.

Our freezer was overwhelmed with Pyrex containers and dishes covered in tin foil. We had to eat something from our new-found hoard every single day to make room. Of course I was most concerned with the double chocolate chunk brownies, but I can’t recall the tastes. I only remember how nauseous I was each time I remembered that mom wasn’t here right now. Dad couldn’t pull off being Mr. Mom for much longer. He wasn’t around much then, or maybe I had gotten so good at make-believing he wasn’t there that he actually went poof? Not likely.

All I know for sure is that his food sucked then and sucks now. He makes three signature dishes on rotation. Well, four if you count the 69 cent Ramen packages. Five if you count “Chicken of The Sea” canned Tuna.  Wait, I remember we used to have midnight snacks a lot, just him and me. His PB & J toast with extra butter always hit the spot. I can’t remember the last time we did something like that, where we enjoyed each other’s company and nothing was forced. Must have been before ninth grade, at least. Must have been before I knew him to be anything other than My Cool Dad™.  

Where he is concerned, my brothers are and have always been around. It was hard to have quality time with a parent when you’ve got four brothers and none of you have social lives outside of playing catch in the front yard. It is alright, though. I like it better that way, with my brothers here. They normally talk with pops about baseball and working out as I let my mind wander. It makes his food less terrible, being all in my thoughts. I’m a day-dreamer, you see. Kind of like my mom, but maybe more starry-eyed. I romanticize things too much, or so I’ve been told... things that don’t need romanticizing, like the musty smell of old books or the texture of burnt grilled cheese or my mother being in the fucking hospital. Spoiler alert: she was okay. She is doing okay right now.

You see I’ve been thinking about death. My mom’s father, we call him Dadu. So this weekend he was mid-flight, flying through Denver when he had an arrhythmia. I don’t know exactly what that means, other than his heart beat went out of whack and so they diverted the plane. He was taken to the University of Colorado Hospital, which is apparently very good. My mom said there was something off about his heart valves? I don’t know for sure, but last night he had a procedure to get a pacemaker. I don’t know how it went. I don’t know if he is stable. I think he is. I hope he is. He can’t just die, you know, with no warming.

Like, no thanks Mother Nature because that isn’t how life is supposed to end. The dream is to die in bed peacefully surrounded by your family and the people you love, even if you in life were hard to love. Dadu is hard to love. He is abusive and volatile, and sexist and a little racist, but he is still family and doesn’t need to die just yet.

I remember being in middle school when he’d come through the front door of my mom’s house on Saturday mornings, holding Burger King Breakfasts for us kids. He is typically an angry, tense man, but on these mornings his tiny smirk would light up the entire house. I still crave the croissant sandwiches with egg, sausage and cheese. Sometimes they’d surprise me by not burning the croissant. And there is something special about the orange juice cartons. It took forever to poke through the hole with my thumb. There is something about that thick red straw, and the tiny tater tot rounds that pop so quickly into your mouth. You don’t realize you’ve eaten all of them before they’re gone.    

You don’t realize what you had until it’s gone. Fuck. I guess that is life. You see I’ve been thinking about death. Hence the condolence casseroles. Then my mom and the tangent about my dad. Then thinking about what has been really eating me; Dadu possibly dying. Sometimes in the middle of the night fear takes over, and all I am is afraid. Not of death but of waiting for it to happen, and for the aftertaste. One day everyone I love, everyone I’ve seen, is going to die. I’m not okay with that. Maybe that is why my dad has found and lost god more times than I can count. Maybe that is why I’m not looking for Him.

Maybe this life is really just one big casserole: full of flavor but sometimes just too much to consume, made up of indistinguishable chaos. But you can find comfort in all the motion. And most times, even bad casseroles are still good. Hard lives are still lived. And life is supposedly a gift. Like the Reese’s cups my mom put in my backpack before school. Even melted ones are still good.