Foodie Central

I'd been to Zingerman's once before: I remembered coffee in pint glasses and a sense of stress. Nothing has changed. Entering the deli, an unprepossessing brick building that opens like some wild pop-up book into a tiny space jammed floor to ceiling with bread, cheese, cured meats, prepared salads, olive oils, coffees, and other specialty items, you suddenly understand what Imelda Marcos must have felt like on entering a shoe store. Interest in food quickly goes from acute to terminal here. Negotiating the sandwich menu alone could take half an hour, if you actually took the time to read all the ingredients meticulously listed for every sandwich. No noun will do without an adjective, it seems, and no story may be left untold. The kitsch faux hand lettering doesn't make things any easier. None of the three dozen or more sandwiches listed seemed to include serano ham, several of which were hanging from the ceiling nearby. I would have done almost anything for a couple slices of it, in any form, but I was afraid to ask, lest I get drawn into a protracted discussion of the various grades and sources and cuts, abrading my memory of how casually the stuff is treated in Spain, the barman in the little place I frequented dabbing the butt-end of each dangling ham with a heel of bread as they sweated into the night. So much of the magic of food for me is bound up in its original context, where it is treated as impossibly common. A decade later I remember the cafe con leche at an unremarkable little bar in Granada not only because it was one of the best cups of coffee I've ever had, but because the barman was so utterly nonchalant in making it, as if coffee like this could be had anywhere.

There's no question they do a lot of things extremely well here: apricot rugelach was second only to my mother's, and a round French pastry I'd never heard of was so exquisitely constructed that its near-absence of flavor and moisture somehow became a virtue. The coffee, a "single-origin" variety, made me wonder why lattes were invented. (And they offered to rinse my travel mug with hot water and give me a 10% discount for bringing it.) The prices would be outrageous except that everything really is made with great care and top-notch ingredients. A loaf of rye bread I'd purchased on my previous visit, some seven years ago, still haunts me.

Yet there's a lot of things to hate about the place, like their "guide to good eating," which comes in both book form for purchase and little placards all over the store for free, as in "seven keys to a good olive oil..." Call me old-fashioned, but I've never considered taste something to be taught. There used to be a joke about the price of a Rolls-Royce: "if you have to ask, you can't afford it." If you need someone to tell you what's worth eating, why are you eating it? My sandwich included more packaging than a meal at McDonald's; I'll be using the napkins alone for weeks. The menu bears little if any relation to the seasons: for all the grandstanding about milk produced at different times of year yielding different cheeses, my sandwich featured a hank of romaine lettuce, about as far from Michigan in February as one can get. Next door at the farmer's market, the "Brinery" offered red and white sauerkraut, pickles, and other fermented treats, while inside Zingerman's, sandwich after sandwich was adorned with the same old lettuce and tomatoes that hadn't been available locally for almost six months. If the point is to re-create standard sandwiches in higher-quality form, they've certainly succeeded, but if the goal is to create some set of new, ingredients-first delicacies, imagination is lacking.

I was in a pickle, both literally and figuratively: I was offered a choice, with my sandwich, of a garlic-brined sour pickle or an unseasoned new pickle. I chose the new, which was excellent, but I don't want to have to choose. There's a line beyond which gourmet sensibilities crumble into neuroses, and Zingerman's seems to nudge, if not hurtle, people straight over it. Everything is extraordinarily good, and extraordinarily complicated. Talking about food becomes more important than eating it. I spent ten minutes with a bubbly young cheesemonger comparing goat cheeses, trying to strike a balance between "gooey," "aged," "chalky," and "goaty," only to end up with something less satisfying than what I've found at Whole Foods. She was knowledgeable enough, but the process became more a war of vocabularies and predilections--her book-sanctioned terminology vs. my casual one, her inculcation into farm philosophies vs. my recollections of French markets--than a tasting.

Yet in a sense Zingerman's must not be judged for itself, but for how far askance it dares to look at the mainstream American food world. Ten minutes away is Potbelly Sandwich Works, a "gourmet" fast food chain which produces pitiful shadows of what used to be served at any decent deli. It's a marvel that two such ostensibly similar, yet essentially different, places can coexist within less than a mile. Potbelly is cheaper than Zingerman's, but not by much. And there's plenty of fuss on offer at Potbelly too, yet it leads only to mediocrity and monotony. So as much as I chafe under the weight of overwritten captions and gratuitous options at Zingerman's, I can only cheer the extent to which they've raised awareness of the subtleties that make food more than filler for shrinkwrap and styrofoam: "raw milk," "acorn-fed ham," "wild yeast," and so on. Somewhere behind all the jargon are many wonderful meals the rest of the country has forgotten. Yes, right here in Michigan, we have a thing or two to teach New York and San Francisco about eating. Ann Arbor is carrying the epicurean fire back, however pretentiously, to the gastronomic capitals.