Spirit of Place

Some restaurants are best suited to the city. Some work best in the country. And then there are the suburbs, where the choice of locations is far fewer, and strip malls and office complexes must do.

Country inns, whether American or European, express themselves in the charm of their surroundings: the drive up a country road, through trees and fields to the inn on the river or lake. In the city, it's the surroundings on the street that lend character to a restaurant. You approach on foot, take in a bookstore here, a jeweler there, people sit at outdoor coffee shops or walk dogs. Together, they are the sum of what makes the urban tableau, the setting in which you choose to dine.

The most romanticized example of city dining is Paris in the 1920s and the cafés, bistros and brasseries of the Left Bank frequented by Albert Camus, Jean- Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway: Les Deux Magots, Brasserie Lipp and Café Flore. Those hangouts succeeded, not only because of good food, but because they became social and cultural centers of a neighborhood that was home to some of the best writers and thinkers of the early 20th century. By contrast, it's an oddity of the American restaurant scene in 2006 that we still don't have much of that middle-range of brasserie dining - places where social activity and eating mingle. The density of city life runs counter to our suburban style of living, which is more spread out than confined.

Where the thick of city life exists here, brasseries work. In Birmingham, 220 Merrill, in the heart of the pedestrian area of the city, fits the model. Zinc Brasserie and Wine Bar in West Bloomfield, and Beverly Hills Grill on Southfield Road have succeeded in suburban locations, despite being accessible only by car, not on foot.

And then there is Café Zola in Ann Arbor, a relatively small city with a real downtown.

Café Zola, even more strongly than the others, reflects the brasserie spirit. It is a true neighborhood restaurant, in a walking part of town, created for casual dining and complete with high energy, lots of noise and a crowd of regular local professionals. Café Zola is not a place to be entertained by some star chef. You go for the character of the place, the welcoming atmosphere and character set by its owners. You also go because the food also happens to be very good.

The "face" of Café Zola is partners-owners Hediye Batu and Alan Zakalik, who are always milling around the restaurant greeting guests and friends, as well as checking tables to ensure all is going well. Batu is from Istanbul, Turkey, and Zakalik is from Szczecin in western Poland, near the German border. She came to the University of Michigan as a student and stayed. He was a political refugee from communist Poland who arrived here in 1971. They met at a party in 1994, by which time he was working as an engineer at EDS and she was completing an M.B.A., with dreams of returning home to run a resort on the Mediterranean.

One of the things they shared was a love of food and eating, and the talk soon turned to joining forces and running a restaurant. But they wanted something different and unusual. They agreed that breakfast in America was fairly limited to eggs and toast. In his native Poland and later in Vienna, Zakalik had enjoyed crepes for breakfast. So, after a trip to San Francisco and a rediscovery of crepes, they settled on that as the theme for their restaurant.

"The idea was to have a Bohemian-style coffee shop," Zakalik says, where they would emphasize good breakfasts based on assorted crepes. Lunch would be secondary. They opened in 1996, after taking over two large storefronts in a row of brick buildings off Main Street.

The interior was stripped down to the brick walls, but the pair kept the high ceilings and black-and-white tile floors from the previous restaurant, the Cracked Crab. A sweeping, molded concrete coffee bar was installed and accent lighting added. Local artists were invited to fill the walls with photographs and paintings.

Zakalik was the chef and chief crepe-maker at both breakfast and lunch. They added some salads and a few sandwiches, and were done by 4 each afternoon. Or so they thought.

"Then as we began developing the menu, things started to grow, and it became more ambitious. It started to reflect what we liked to eat, and our background. Hers is Mediterranean and mine northern European. And the menu just started to grow," Zakalik says.

It wasn't until Café Zola - named for the 19th-century French writer whose era coincided with the emergence of the brasserie - started serving dinner that the coffee shop morphed into a full restaurant.

Today, crepes are still a large part of the daytime menu. Zakalik oversees the cooking in the evening, often stepping up to the stove when needed. The dinner menu is eclectic, ranging from dishes that have a base in Turkey to Argentina, but all done with simple recipes and fresh, high-quality ingredients.

The service can be hectic and occasionally has gaps, mostly because the restaurant is a constant whirl of activity. But then, that's what should be expected of this kind of place. It's not supposed to be fine dining.

Overall, the food is extremely good, far better most times than at surrounding pricier places. For example, I tried a new nearby restaurant where the chef presumably shines and where prices are extremely high. It was offering pan-fried skate wing, which turned out to be disappointing and flat. The skate tasted old and the preparation was rather unimaginative. The following night I had the same fish at Café Zola, but it was vibrant, fresh and had been pan-fried in butter and lemon. Two different worlds, the same ingredients and almost half the price at Café Zola - plus it was sensational.

For an inexpensive, initial check-it-out visit, sit at the bar and make a meal for two out of the antipasto plate and the bruschetta. The antipasto includes a great mix of spiced olives, which are blended and spiced in house, as well as fine sausage and prosciutto, smoked mozzarella and fire-roasted asparagus and artichokes. The bruschetta is made from rustic Italian bread and chopped tomatoes drizzled with olive oil. But from there it diverges to add Scottish smoked salmon from the nationally known fish merchant Tracklement's Smokery, which just happens to be nearby in the Kerrytown Market.

A regular dish not to be missed is the whole fish en papillote, baked in parchment with Asian spices and served with coconut-cilantro rice and butter-sautéed zucchinis. A lot of restaurants serve fish in "the bag," as they like to call it. Yet very few come out tasting as fresh as they do at Café Zola. My bet is that most places overcook it.

There is half of a roasted chicken rubbed in herbs with mashed potatoes, a grilled flat-iron steak, dense Argentine chimichurri sauce (hint: ask for it on the side) and lovely oven-roasted potatoes.

The Kobe beef burger, served with real French fries, is big and wonderful. Available at lunch or dinner, it's double cooked as they are in Belgium, where the best in the world are made, and served in aluminum cylinders. The burger is as close to the real thing as you'll find around Detroit.

Zakalik picks the wines, and if the list is modest in size it does have good and unusual selections, such as Mulderbosch Sauvignon Blanc from South Africa ($24), or Ridge Lytton Springs Zinfandel ($49). What may be the best wine deal anywhere around Detroit are half bottles of Taittinger Champagne for $21. Amazingly, that's about $3 over the retail price, or the equivalent of $42 for a bottle, unheard of in a restaurant.

These occasional bargains and simple, well-prepared food at good prices are what makes eating in restaurants worthwhile.

We Americans pride ourselves on our common sense and abhor pretension, yet we actually cave to pretension in food and wine, and willingly lavish huge amounts of money on mediocre restaurants without questioning what we get. Why are we content to deceive ourselves into believing that if we paid a lot for it, then it must be good?

Café Zola is a relief and a delight, and a welcome contrast to so much hype in the restaurants that surround us.

112 W. Washington, Ann Arbor; 734-769-2020.

This article appears in the November 2006 of Hour Detroit.
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