Whoa! Once I toted up the numbers, I realized the holidays had seriously thrown our household food budget out of whack. The new year demanded financial restraint. Polling acquaintances brought me a boatload of cheap eats ideas–inexpensive restaurants, bargain dishes at more expensive places, happy hours and daily specials, and store deals.
This month I’ve narrowed the suggestions to restaurant options at regular lunch and dinner prices. Certainly not exhaustive and absolutely, unabashedly subjective, consider this list one woman’s tips on where to start your search for a bargain meal.
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I begin at my established lunch favorite: Ypsilanti’s Dos Hermanos, takeout only, where two tamales ($1 each)–pork or cheese and roasted jalapeno for me–and a ripe avocado scooped from the vegetable bin lets me walk out the door only $3 poorer and deliciously happy. Do cheap eats get any better?
Following a colleague’s tip for hot-and-sour soup to San Fu, a Chinese storefront in the South Main Market, I discovered an incredibly inexpensive menu, most dishes selling for less than $10. But those I tried were unmemorable though plentiful, fine if the wallet dictates thriftiness. However, a sample of San Fu’s soup ($3.60/quart) led a friend to champion downtown TK Wu’s version. He was right. For 40c more, TK Wu’s quart of soup was crammed full of vegetables and outstanding flavor–enough, with a couple of eggrolls, to keep two people content.
I could also cross Liberty and tuck myself into a table at Tomukun Noodle Bar, where most of its all-day menu is $10 or less. Some real stand-outs are the tantalizing pork or tempura shrimp buns (two for $6), the Korean seafood and vegetable pancake ($8), and the okonomiyaki ($10), a funkier Japanese cake. Both pancakes are thick, big as a dinner plate, and easily a meal for one. The evening my husband and I shared the two, along with both types of buns, we seriously overate, but each delicious bite demanded another one. Nor can one go wrong with most of Tomukun’s noodle and rice dishes; all are carefully made and ample.
Jerusalem Garden is, of course, a well-known downtown fixture for cheap eats. But did you know about the DIY bargain? $3.50 buys a bag of ten falafel patties. Add some pita bread (40c a piece), a couple of large containers of tabbouli, fattoush, hummus or baba ghanoush ($5-$5.50), and you’ve scored a meal for three to four under $25–extraordinary.
Further afield, I got several tips for Exotic Bakeries and Syrian Cuisine in the Courtyard Shops. I’ve never taken to Arab pies–too much soft white bread dough swallowing up too little filling. Exotic Bakeries’ pies, though, present a better balance, and I enjoyed the spiced chicken roll ($2.97) and spinach-feta round ($3.49). The saffron-y chicken pastilla in puff pastry ($2.26) also came recommended, but they were out the times I visited. Grilled kefta (ground meat lozenges, $2.26 each), are inexpensive, but of the three options–curried chicken, minty turkey or spiced beef–only the first had much flavor or moistness. What I relished most were some of the salads and sides ($8.49 a pound), particularly tiny stewed okra, fried eggplant and peppers, black-eyed pea salad, and roasted cauliflower in creamy tahini dressing.
A caterer friend directed me south to the Broadway Cafe. The menu is very small–six Korean dishes, a cheese steak hoagie, fries, rice, and kimchi. My friend’s recommendation is the hoagie, and the times I visited, the clientele seemed split down the middle, about half ordering Korean, the other the sandwich. Without a doubt, the hoagie ($8.40) is weird–but in a pleasantly welcome junk-food-fix way. Steaming hot, thinly sliced bulgogi beef is loaded on a soft white bun with gooey orange cheese and sauteed onions. Gochujjang, the Korean hot pepper paste, comes on the side, and I advise dosing it liberally over the meat, along with some kimchi. I also tried the chicken bi bim bab ($9.45)–decent, if not laudable–and the wonderfully transliterated soon doo boo or tofu stew ($10.35), a big bowl of soft curds, poached egg, and bits of shrimp and beef in a red pepper-flecked broth. Accompaniments of rice and kimchi made the stew a hearty meal on a frigid winter day.
A better bi bim bab ($9.99)–more generous, with a greater variety of vegetables and more flavorful, tender chicken–is to be had at the west side Bell’s Diner. Another Korean-owned storefront, this long-time restaurant’s huge menu lists inexpensive diner breakfasts ($2.99-$8.99) and lunch favorites ($3.99-$8.99), along with homeland specialties. One of the cheapest diner options–but also, perhaps, an intemperate, if filling, indulgence–is the fried egg sandwich embellished with cheese and pork, presented on a Frisbee-sized disc of hash browns ($4.99).
Down the street from Bell’s is Zingerman’s Roadshow, the trailer sitting alongside the Roadhouse. Its take-out menu features sandwiches not available inside the restaurant or deli–Zingerman’s food at an affordable price. A pit-smoked chicken salad baguette ($6.99) was overstuffed and fresh, if in desperate need of salt. A better sandwich utilized the same chicken salad, augmented with roasted green chiles and Swiss, on grilled Roadhouse bread ($7.99). Really delicious were a vegetarian baguette with roasted tomato tapenade, Creamery goat cheese, and spinach ($6.75), and a Wednesday-only open-face hot meatloaf sandwich ($7.99), even if it could have used more gravy.
For overfilled Zingerman’s Deli-type sandwiches at significantly lower cost, head east to the Carpenter Rd. outlet of the Bread Basket Deli, a southeast Michigan chain (sandwiches $6.99-$16.49). Although the bread isn’t as good, and the sandwich varieties are fewer, much of Bread Basket’s meat comes from the same sources as Zingerman’s–Sy Ginsberg’s United Meat Deli in Detroit and Nueske’s in Wisconsin. Moreover, they offer the option of three filling weights–six or nine ounces or, for U-M linebackers, one pound. I leave it for you to decide how many meals any one of those sandwiches might provide you.
If your lunch preference requires culinary variety served with a few vegetables, proceed to the Village Centre on Oak Valley Dr. The Korean restaurant Arirang has a wonderful list of weekday lunch boxes–divided wooden trays cradling your choice of entree, a meat dumpling, some vegetable tempura, jop chae noodles, a tiny salad and rice ($8.95-$10.95). Unless you avoid chiles, skip the pedestrian katsu (breaded chicken or pork cutlets) and opt for one of the spicier dishes.
Perhaps the most elegant midday option I discovered, though, was at the neighboring Godaiko Japanese restaurant, not usually considered an inexpensive establishment. At lunch time, sitting on the hostess station as you enter, are four display dishes–the kitchen’s daily prix fixe meal ($10.95). After Christmas, feeling a bit chintzy but oversatiated after days of holiday feasting, my husband and I decided to split one special. Even if we were starving, that day’s four courses would have satisfied us; sent out together, we delighted in fish ball soup with a deeply flavored beef broth, light and crispy chicken tempura, delicate tuna roll, and minced salmon and julienned vegetables sauteed and mounded atop rice. At $5.50 a person for a lunch like that, I’d found a clear successor to my tamale standard.
