The Grille Midtown Worth A Visit; El Barzon Continues To Impress

Jane Slaughter at the Metro Times paid a few visits to El Barzon, the upscale Mexican/Italian restaurant, for her review, and she was pleased with what she found. "Owner Norberto Garita's food is sterling on both his Mexican menu and his Italian, and all the more welcome for being a bit startling...Garita is from Puebla, considered by natives to be a star region of Mexican cuisine. And he worked for eight years, before opening El Barzón in 2006, at tony Il Posto in Southfield, where he mastered the Italian regime." That explains everything diners really need to know about the restaurant, which serves authentic Mexican and authentic Italian side-by-side. She commends both menus as well as the service, though strangely they went all Italian one night and all Mexican the next, which sort of defeats the purpose. What's next? "Although the two styles of cooking are mostly separate now, there's talk of experimenting with fusion. Viva and bravo!"

Sylvia Rector's dish for Great Plates this week at the Detroit Free Press is the Faroe Island salmon at Troy's Northern Lakes Seafood. She claims it's so good that even salmon haters might like it, and "the flavors and textures are wonderfully complementary, and the colors pop." It's specially farmed salmon produced "the Faroe Islands near Iceland, under some of the world's most stringent aquaculture regulations."

Molly Abraham offers her opinion on The Grille Midtown's American fare this week for the Detroit News, and she is very complimentary. She loves that the building is an historic site, and notes that the "e" at the end of "grille" in their name references the car grilles used as decoration, so it's not just to look "fancier". Almost everything is made in house, and while not earth shattering, "The approach is contemporary American, familiar yes, but with many distinctive touches on the single page list." She gives them 3 stars out of 4.
· El Barzón-Twice as nice: West side restaurant mixes Mexican and Italian. [Metro Times]
· Sylvia Rector's Great Plates: Salmon at Northern Lakes Seafood [Freep]
· Distinctive Grille Midtown helps revive a historic site [Detroit News]