Sam and Maggie Idriss opened Idriss Meat Market in half of the former Golam Produce on Packard near Platt. Owner Golam Khan is “leaving for Bengal. His mother is very sick,” Sam says, explaining Golam’s sudden and permanent closure. (Down the block, Goodies produce store remains open as usual.)
Sam Idriss knows his meat. He’s been a butcher for twenty-four years, working at Berry & Sons Islamic Slaughterhouse in Detroit’s Eastern Market for the last seventeen. The all-halal meat counter he operates with his wife, Maggie, has goat, chicken, lamb, beef, and fish, as well as hamburger patties, marinated kebabs, and ready-to-cook shawarma. On the market’s second day open, Maggie advised a customer: “Come back tomorrow, and we’ll have the garlic sauce” to accompany the kabobs she was buying. “Grilling is best,” said Maggie’s sister (who declined to give her name), wrapping them up, but “oven or stove top is OK too.”
The sisters said the garlic sauce is made with “garlic, lemon, olive oil, egg yolk.” One wanted to say it’s used like mayonnaise, but the other shook her head: “We eat it with pickles too,” which they will eventually sell. “And if you like mushrooms, add them. They’re good!” The next day they did have the fluffy white garlic sauce, as promised.
Sam says he will also eventually be making “basterma. It’s kind of like New York strip steak, wrapped up with spices and dried for days.” Like beef jerky? “Yes! That’s it!”
Sam inherited a lot of Golam’s spices and groceries and has a small selection of fresh produce too, as well as a box of dried whole lemons–“We use them for flavor. Throw them in rice,” he advises.
Idriss Meat Market, 3150 Packard, 973-8486. Daily 10 a.m-8 p.m. No website.
—
Next door to Idriss, a former pizza shop will soon reopen as Once Upon a Grill (subtitled “home of the KatiRoll”). Idriss says he doesn’t know much about it other than it’s a Pakistani restaurant. Signs promise “dum biryana, haleem, nahari.” (He adds that the other half of the former Golam will be taken by “a pharmacist,” though he doesn’t have details on that either.)
As usual, stand anywhere on the block, and you can see micro-changes. A sign at Banfield’s announces that the bar is now open for breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays. Across the street, Achilles, whose bright red awning says “Breakfast Lunch Dinner,” actually stopped serving dinner two years ago. Owner Stavros Malaveci, who bought the diner nine years ago, says he made the change “because I have a life and a family, and I’d like to spend some time with them.” He also doesn’t make fresh-squeezed orange juice in the afternoons, but in the morning you can get a whopping twelve-ounce dose of it for $3.29 while watching the oranges plop to their doom through a little conveyer belt.
