Introducing the 2024 Eater Detroit Award Winners #DetroitFood

Vecino

The Best Restaurant, Best Cafe, and Best Vibes category in Detroit of the year

Each year, the Eater Awards provides editors an opportunity to reflect on what made the best restaurants, bars, food trucks, and otherwise exciting dining experiences across the country.

One theme that objectively cannot be overlooked this year is the rise of Latine cuisine represented in Detroit restaurants. It’s a reflection of a generation of Detroit Mexicans who are forging a new path for the genre, where pre-Hispanic tradition can thrive just as much as a brilliantly curated beverage menu that highlights the beauty of agave spirits. It showcases South American cuisine in a vibey formerly derelict garage in Core City. It’s a Corktown cafe offering subtle Mexican sensibilities, where ethical sourcing is celebrated alongside fancy cafe de olla and souffle egg sandwiches. It’s a multicultural kitchen staff rooted in the Midwest playing with Spanish tradition. In addition to this wave of Latin inspiration, Detroit chefs are continuing the impactful work of reimagining a different way of doing business, one where front and back of the house can thrive, where creatives in the food space are sounding off against the exploitative practices that have historically plagued the restaurant industry and creating menus that are both delicious and good for the planet.

Eater Detroit is pleased to announce the winners of Detroit’s 2024 Eater Awards.

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Vecino: Best New Restaurant

Presented by SevenRooms

Some restaurants feature in-house flour milling to make pasta, source ingredients locally, or butcher their meat for nose-to-tail menu offerings. Vecino makes its own masa for tortillas, totopos, tetelas, sopes, and more maize delicacies. Sporting Detroit’s first heirloom nixtamal program in a restaurant setting, Vecino aims to showcase the full expression of Mexican cuisine beyond street food with a focus on painstaking technique and creativity. Spanish for neighbor, Vecino is the vision of co-owner Adriana Jimenez, born in Mexico City to parents from Jalisco, and raised in metro Detroit where her family ran two casual Mexican restaurants in Waterford Township. She and husband Lukasz Wietrzynski wanted the kitchen to be helmed by a team that would share in her connection to the culture; what they found was a trio of chefs — Ricardo Torres, Stephanie Duran, and Ricardo Mojica — with both technical skills picked up from working in fine dining scenes in Chicago and Mexico City and an intimate familiarity with Mexican culinary traditions.

The team designed a menu that expands the boundaries of what many Detroiters should expect from Mexican cuisine. Crisp tostadas are topped with buttery tuna accented with chipotle aioli and tempered with avocado; the tortillas for the quesadillas are made with blue and white corn and filled with Oaxacan quesillo, epazote, and maitake mushrooms; sopes are crisp on the edges — the ideal vessel for fatty morsels of pork belly, beans, salsa verde, and queso fresco. The salsa macha that comes with the housemade totopos should be bottled and sold in stores all over Detroit for its decadently rich and smoky flavor. The kitchen at Vecino is also equipped with an open hearth where entrees like a half snapper marinated in salsa verde and salsa roja or thick-cut bone-in rib-eye paired with heirloom Mexican recipes like mole Oaxaqueño are endowed with fiery complexity. As for drinks, Vecino focuses on its curated agave spirit collection to inform its cocktail menu, while also emphasizing Mexican winemakers, a rarity for this region. The restaurant serves as both a primer to adventurous diners on the intricacies of Mexican gastronomy and as a space for those in the Mexican diaspora who long for unique expressions of their culture in Detroit.

SevenRooms is the leading CRM, marketing, and operations platform helping hospitality operators increase sales, delight guests, and keep them coming back — automatically.

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Alba: Best Cafe

A Latinx cafe can take many forms. The region’s many panaderias offer a classic drip coffee along with flaky sides of pan dulce, while creative pop-ups like Cafecito Alvarez specialize in lattes flavored with culturally relevant ingredients like horchata, churro, and mazapán, and casual breakfast spots like Jordan’s Family Restaurant make a fantastic cafe de olla. But the most exciting 2024 Detroit development in this genre is Alba, a collaboration of co-owners, San Francisco native and former Milwaukee Caffe manager David Valdez, who was born in Mexico City, and Carlo Liburdi, co-owner of Milwaukee Caffe and Kiesling, who is of Italian heritage. Named after the Spanish word for dawn, Alba is situated on a well-appointed block in Corktown in a space with a subtle, IYKYK Mexican vibe.

The menu’s subheadings are bilingual and beverages offer visitors a taste of tradition and innovation: a refreshing rhubarb-infused iced espresso espritzer; cafe de olla, prepared with drip coffee or as a latte, and flavored with piloncillo, canela, and spice; a cinnamon-puncuated Mexican hot chocolate, reminiscent of a Mexican American childhood. To eat, there’s an egg sandwich featuring a silky souffle egg on a brioche bun with cheddar, chile de árbol aioli, and chives. For the From Friends/De Los Amigos section, you’ll find a rotating selection of sweet treats like mole-infused conchas prepared by local home bakers. The coffee shop gets its beans from Detroit-based Anthology Coffee and also sells bags of beans from a rotating selection of roasters that espouse principles around ethical sourcing and sustainability whenever possible.

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Puma: Best Vibes

Chef Javier Bardauil first impressed Detroit diners with Barda in 2021, offering the city a glimpse into the beauty that is open-fire Argentinian cooking. For his next act, Bardauil merely had to look across the street to a single-story brick building, formerly a mechanic’s garage. With its black interior (accented with moody red lighting), Puma keeps Detroit’s legendary nightlife crowd in mind, while offering a love letter to the cuisines of Latin America, thanks to the talents of chef de cuisine Rosa Montalvo, who is from El Salvador.

Find sandwiches here such as a Uruguayan chivito topped with a fried egg and choripán, a traditional Argentinian pork sausage garnished with fragrant chimichurri, are served on crusty, rustic baguettes. The restaurant also offers a ceviche bar featuring aguachile and vegan ceviche, Ecuadorian empanadas made with plantains and filled with cheese, and a crispy, sharable breaded beef Milanesa cutlet — an entree that speaks to the wave of Italian migration to Argentina in the 19th century. The cocktail program emphasizes the use of Latin American spirits such as pisco or Paraguay’s official drink, yerba mate, used as part of the bar’s refreshing Terere and Tonic cocktail. A DJ booth sits in a corner of the dining room (good for a music city like Detroit) and windows throughout the space open up to allow for an airy, alfresco ambiance during the summer months.

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Street Beet: Best Comeback

Street Beet taps into that nostalgia associated with pulling up to a drive-thru window, but it leaves behind the baggage of animal products. Every item is plant-based from its fluffy breakfast biscuits filled with a peppery sausage patty and ooey gooey vegan American cheese to Crunchywraps filled with walnut chorizo, dairy-free nacho cheese, and cashew sour cream to crispy Chicky sandwiches made of fried tofu, taking inspiration from the Colonel’s secret recipes. Founded in 2018 by Nina Paletta and Meghan Shaw, Street Beet is not new. However, through the years, the pop-up has proved its staying power and played an outsized role in the dining world this year.

After taking a two-year hiatus from their long-term residency at the Cass Corridor spot Third Street Bar, Paletta and Shaw reemerged on the scene with the launch of their first cookbook, Nostalgic Vegan, followed by the return of Street Beet’s pop-ups. In May, the pair joined forces with a handful of others in metro Detroit’s pop-up dining community in calling out Hazel Park’s Framebar over concerns about what they called an exploitative profit split imposed on pop-up operators. In September, Street Beet resumed its residency at Third Street Bar, where visitors can once again indulge in vegan takes on fast-food classics, as well as a brunch service that may include a pop-up shop featuring vintage and handcrafted clothing and rotating live DJ sets. All of this combines to create a fun spot to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon.

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Leña: Best Splurge

Leña, Detroit’s newest exploration of Spanish cuisine, is the place to be if you’re looking for the ultimate splurge in the city — so long as your idea of a splurge includes basking in the midnight summer air of Barcelona while sipping gin tonics and nibbling on succulent hunks of charred octopus. The team that brought Detroit the subterranean speakeasy Shelby to a bank vault in downtown’s Financial District has recreated a breezy night in the Catalan and Basque regions of Spain in Detroit’s ever-changing Brush Park neighborhood.

Spanish for firewood, the centerpiece of Leña is its open kitchen with a hearth fueled by Michigan-sourced oak, cherry, and applewood. The kitchen is led by Takoi and Oak & Reel alum chef Mike Conrad with support from Eater Young Gun (’18) pastry chef Lena Sareini, a two-time semifinalist for the James Beard’s Rising Star Chef of the Year award. Ordering is based on one’s budget and appetite with dishes ranging from tiny pintxos bites to more elaborate a la carte dishes like a half-roast chicken. Bits of Midwest whimsy marry Spanish tradition with early hits like a pile of razor-thin jamón Ibérico accompanied by a bag of Better Made chips. Other recent dishes on the seasonal menu include Moorish spice lamb brochetas, other familiar Spanish hits like a tortilla with leeks and flavored with sofrito, and of course, ample opportunities to indulge in seafood — a hallmark of both regions. As for the bar program, expect traditional Spanish cocktails, sherry, vermouth, and aperitifs — including gin tonics.

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from Eater Detroit - All