Food

Sit back, grab your Chop Sticks and enjoy my first review: Beijing Kitchen at 345 State St. in Grand Rapids. It's not quite downtown, it's not quite Heritage Hill and it's not quite your oridinary $4.99 chinese buffet.

Before I wax poetic about a $4.99 buffet that includes free Faygo pop (but not Diet Coke. Faygo only!), ice cream, passable chinese food and a cable news channel I've never seen before, we should stop and examine what really makes for a good chinese buffet. Price plays a role here, as does the sheer number of choices. But ask yourself this: Are you ever really going to try all 50+ chinese options at your local buffet? If you have, then seek medical attention immediately. If you're more like me, however, and you're there to have 2 or 3 plates of slightly-above-average, grade-b chicken over a heaping mound of fried rice then skip the 911-call and read on.

Brian's five keys to a successful Chinese Buffet experience

1. Cheap enough that you don't have to think twice about going
2. Enough choices to prevent necessary "doubling up" in one meal
3. Food is hot.
4. Crispy breaded stuff
   
5. General Tso's Chicken

Number 5 is key for many of my friends, so let's start there. General Tso's chicken at the Beijing Kitchen is really more like slightly-spicy sweet and sour chicken. But did you like it, you're asking. Hell yes. The chicken was crispy, there was enough spice to make me want more, and the news channel blaring over my shoulder was distracting enough that I didnt' notice the similarities between the sauce on my General Tso's and the sweet-n-sour sauce on the plate across the table from me.

As for the rest of the buffet, there's just something endearing about the Model-T qualities of it all. You want ice-cream? Sure, you can have any flavor you want as long as its strawberry. You want pop? Stick to the Faygo or risk the wrath of the owners.

What matters in the end is this: For $4.99 you get a good (enough) meal, go home happy, and smell like chinese food all day long. It's the gift that keeps on giving, and I'm done shopping for this week.

I grew up outside of Detroit. There, falafel, hummus (not humus, dammit) and tabouleh are food staples. If you haven't had a Fatoush by the time you're in 1st grade, there's probably something wrong with your parents (check on that, please).

So it was, in the early 90s as I adjusted to living in West Michigan, that I discovered one of my very few complaints about West Michigan life: The sheer dearth of quality ethnic restaurants. Kalamazoo was great for gourmet breakfast, but a good Gyro was a scarcity (save for Theo and Stacy's) and a anyone searching for quality middle-eastern fare was even more dissapointed (though I understand things have improved slightly in the last year or two).

I spent 8 years in Kalamazoo, pining for trips to La Shish and wishing Hella's would open a West Michigan extension so I could get a decent Greek meal (though my Greek friends tell me Hella's isn't that great either).

Flash forward to 2005. We moved from Kalamazoo to Grand Rapids which is a vastly larger metro area. For the size of the town, I still maintain Grand Rapids is rather bland when it comes to dining options, but there are a few oases in this desert (not dessert, dammit) full of Olive O'Chilibee's Roadhouse and Grille.

Osta's Lebanese Cuisine on Wealthy Street in the supposedly-arrogant East Grand Rapids is one such oasis. First off, it's tiny. There are maybe 10 tables in this place. Don't let that dissuade you from visiting. Osta's appears to do as much carry-out business as it does sit-down so the food is fresh, the service is supurb and while it may not be La Shish (my personal gold standard for Middle Eastern food), it's damn good (and 130+ miles closer than the nearest La Shish, I might add).

If you go, I recommend trying the Labnee as an appetizer. This is not something I've tried anywhere else, but on a warm day this might be manna from heaven. It's a chilled cheese+mint+cucumber dip into which you sink wedges of pita. I could eat it until I passed out, and I came close last night. With my Labnee I had a Falafel sandwich (Megan had a Chicken Tawook) which was better than Sam's Kitchen on Kalamazoo Ave. (which is saying something) and certainly held its own against falafel I've had around the midwest.

In short, it's worth the trip to enjoy some good, garlic-laden lebanese food. Your stomach will thank you.

The Silver Cactus Grill can be summed up in one word: different. This is fitting, as this charming Mexican establishment calls Eastown, a neighborhood that prides itself on being different, its home.

So what's different you ask? Well for starters, it's authenticity. Sure, the west side of town has several outstanding, authentic Mexican restaurants to its credit. The east side of town, to the best of my knowledge, had none, until the Silver Cactus Grill opened.

Next up, its digs. For some reason I've yet to fully comprehend, most authentic Mexican restaurants in West Michigan are dives to one degree or another. Even Little Mexico, which I love dearly, feels like it was last decorated 20+ years ago. Silver Cactus, on the other hand is an unexpected combination of a vintage Art Deco building, lofty ceilings, exposed brick and furnishings that look like they come from Ikea. In short, it's a modern urban restaurant.

Finally, the menu. It looks great, but when I was there (May 5th) they had something even better: An all-you-care-to-eat Taco Bar. Not just tacos, but 4 meat selections, corn and flour tortillas, a few sauces and several choices of topings (including gobs of fresh Cilantro and Pico de Gallo). I had 8 tacos in all...each as tasty as the last. We also enjoyed some chips and salsa (average at best, actually) and a few samples of pineapple with chili-powder and deep-fried chips-with-cinnammon.

If the rest of the food is as good as the taco bar, we're all in for a treat. I'll be back to try this place again.

I'm generally wary of places that titled themselves Shoppes. When said shoppe isn't really a shop (but rather, a restaurant) I'm even less likely to enter with a completely open mind.

Fortunately for me, I'd already heard of Ye Olde Omlette Shoppe (actually it's just "The" Omlette Shoppe... but if you're going to be a "Shoppe" you should also be "Ye Olde"). Several years ago, I even tried one of their famous (in Traverse City at least) cinnamon rolls.

Lest you think I'm harping on the overused, Olde-English "E" on the end of hardly-quaint suburban shopping (or eating) establishment titles, I'll get into the place itself. Ye Olde Omlette Shoppe is very yellow. The decor is an odd (but enjoyable?) blend of faux antiques you might find in a store like Pepperberry (if you're a veteran Uptown GR shopper). The restaurant is considerably smaller than I thought it would be, which explains the constant crowd waiting for a table.

The food is great. My mexican omlette had Chorizo, hot peppers, plenty of scrambled egg and some great homemade (somehwere, at least) marble rye bread. I've had better breakfasts (Food Dance Cafe and Cosmo's Cucina, both in Kalamazoo) and I've paid less to eat ($26+tip for two of us), but all things considered this expands to 4 the number of places in GR I've eaten great breakfast.

The hashbrowns were pretty standard, but good. The omlette was standard, but perfectly prepared, and our server was friendly (even offering to babysit our children....now that's what I call service). All in all, it's not necessarily a remarkable place to eat, but they used obviously fresh ingredients, the prices were fair (for EGR at least) and we were in an out in less than an hour (which is good when you've got a baby with you, trust me).

One kicker: They have some great cherry-flavored coffee (after all, this is a Traverse City eatery). I'm a sucker for great coffee, and sometimes that's enough to get me in one door as opposed to another.

The ten best restaurants for breakfast according to me:

1. Food Dance Cafe (Kalamazoo, MAP)
2. Cosmo's Cucina (Kalamazoo, MAP)
3. Wolfgang's (Eastown GR, MAP)
4. Dee Lite (Grand Haven, MAP)
5. Morningstar Cafe (Grand Haven, MAP)
   
6. Omlette Shoppe (Breton Village GR, MAP)
7. Cherie Inn (Midtown GR, MAP)
8. Round's Restaurant (Traverse City, MAP)
9. Brandywine Inn (Eastown GR, MAP)
10. Julliana's (Kalamazoo, MAP)