What draws me to takeout food is, of course, the lure of carrying it home, where husband and dogs await, along with comfy clothes, a crackling fire, a bottle of wine minus an exorbitant restaurant markup, maybe a movie or favorite TV show and, best of all, no real preparation or cleanup. With all those advantages, I can hardly complain if the food isn’t stellar, but when it does shine, I’m almost giddily satisfied. Two new carryout shops, Eat and Seoul Street, offer some tasty opportunities for decadent at-home eating.

Eat, a catering company and food cart purveyor, recently opened a charmingly decorated brick-and-mortar establishment on Packard south of Stadium. Blake Reetz, the chef, and Helen Harding, friendly Jill-of-all-trades, produce a list of sandwiches and salads and a changing roster of entrees, soups, sides, and homey desserts. For the most part, the carryout menu consists of what an ambitious and knowledgeable home cook might ­prepare—herb-­marinated roast chicken, pot roast, pork confit, fruit pies—recognizable but not boring, using quality, often local, ingredients.

Though the menu changes, Reetz clearly excels at braising and slow cooking, so I suggest giving those types of dishes ample consideration. The pork confit sandwich offered in mid-winter was outstanding: the meat succulent, the flavor concentrated, the lemony mustard gremolata cutting the richness. My husband thought the sandwich a bit dry, and, although I enjoyed it as presented, I wouldn’t have objected to a bit of garlicky aioli spread on the onion bun. (The wonderful bun, by the way, is a roll from Detroit’s Avalon Bakery, and it certainly gives any Zingerman’s Bakehouse product a run for its money.) Another meat-on-a-roll sandwich, the signature Korean barbecue beef (a braised brisket flavored with sesame and soy and paired with daikon kimchi), also proved excellent.

One afternoon we had our heart set on a Sloppy Yusuf, a Moroccan-spiced lamb version of the American joe, but Eat had run out of the sandwich, so we consoled ourselves with two grilled options—­chicken salad and eggplant. Eat’s version of the classic chicken salad was particularly flavorful, the meat tender and moist. I found the tomato jam on the eggplant sandwich a bit too sweet, but my husband disagreed, and the goat cheese certainly tempered the confection-y quality. We agreed that spicy arugula rather than innocuous lettuce would have improved the sandwich. Grilling the farm bread that held together both sandwiches was a nice touch and cemented my conversion to Avalon bread.

That lunch we rounded out our sandwiches with a roasted vegetable salad, an agreeable medley of roots on greens with goat cheese and balsamic vinaigrette, and a tahini sweet potato salad. For us sweet potato fans, the latter salad, delicate and utterly delicious, provided the meal’s highlight, with lemon zest and herbs lightening the husky sesame seed dressing.

Of the rotating soups and entrées that we tried, the best were the long-cooked meat ones. Brisket pot roast with carrots, potatoes, and horseradish sauce was exactly the dish we craved on a winter evening. Venison stew featured tender, if under-seasoned, meat. Lack of salt in all quarters plagued a lackluster roast chicken with mushroom spaetzle, though on another evening when we ordered the spaetzle as a side studded with bits of pork confit, it couldn’t have pleased us more. Pasta puttanesca disappointed—very tomatoey but without the zing of substantial garlic, capers, anchovies, hot pepper, and olives. And a Moroccan vegetable tagine of chickpeas, root vegetables, currants, and kale suffered from serious undercooking (who likes crunchy parsnips?), under-salting, and under-spicing. Sopa de lima, a Mexican tomato and chicken soup flavored with lime, again lacked seasoning, but the creamy parsnip-potato soup delivered on all fronts.

Desserts also change constantly but feature primarily pies and cookies. A chocolate chip cookie was typical of its class, an unusual sesame butter cookie much more intriguing. I’m not a pumpkin pie fan, but Eat offered a pleasant version with a light, flaky crust, the hardest element to get right. How many of us regularly make dessert anymore? With Eat’s choices, you can finish your take-out dinner with a pleasant homey sweet.

On the other side of town and at the opposite end of the carryout spectrum sits Seoul Street, a Korean joint on Plymouth Road next door to Brewer’s gas station. Hidden behind Panera and Qdoba, the storefront is easy to miss but worth searching for. The raison d’être of Seoul Street is Korean fried chicken, a popular bar staple in its home country that’s now sweeping immigrant communities in this one.

Most meat eaters find fried chicken, like bacon, irresistible. The Korean-style version, though, doesn’t resemble Southern fried. One, the pieces aren’t soaked in spiced buttermilk or brined in a salty solution; the meat is essentially unseasoned. Two, the coating isn’t thick and crunchy but light and crispy. The pieces receive a light dredging and two slow fryings that render the skin a papery, crackling-crisp shroud. Finally, the Korean version obtains added flavor with an optional glaze—soy garlic or hot and spicy—brushed on after frying. My brother, who favors the opulence of Southern fried chicken, didn’t appreciate Seoul Street’s poultry. My crew of girlfriends and I, though, enjoyed the chicken. The meat, fresh Bell & Evans pieces, was juicy and clean tasting, and the skin, with the hot and spicy glaze, a delicious contrast. However, stripping off the crust, as one of my overzealous health-conscious friends did, pretty much nullifies the reason for eating fried chicken.

Seoul Street offers wings, breast strips, thighs, and drumsticks, alone or in combos, and to my mind the thighs or drumsticks offer the best ratio of succulent meat to crispy coating. Wings, too, are good, but since the strips don’t have any skin, the coating doesn’t stay crispy, and white meat is always less flavorful. The soy garlic glaze is rather pedestrian, while the hot and spicy one is sweetish, with a mellow cumulative heat factor. The chicken travels well, too, and even the next day the coating on the refrigerated thighs and wings remained crispy.

Though central to the menu, fried chicken isn’t the only dish at Seoul Street, and my friends and I enjoyed Grandma Hong’s mandoo, crispy fried dumplings, preferring the vegetable filling over the meat one. You can have the dumplings glazed, too, but the sweet-garlic dipping sauce makes it superfluous. We also tried kimbop rolls, nori rolls filled with a variety of options, but the bulgogi-and-vegetable combo we chose was tough and uninteresting. A better appetizer or side was the kimchi jun, a vegetable and rice flour pancake, where a generous potion of vegetables mitigated the rice flour’s gummy tendencies. My personal distaste for that texture prejudiced me against duk-bok-ki, thick cylindrical rice cakes in a mildly spicy red sauce with fish cakes, and ra-bok-ki, the same dish with ramen noodles added. Even textural aficionados might find the sauce overly sweet and under-spiced; one friend said the ra-bok-ki reminded her of Spaghetti-Os.

Many dishes come with choices and add-ons; we ordered kimchi fried rice with tofu and an over-easy egg. Incredibly, the egg remained tender and tasty despite the long ride home and additional wait as we indulged in a cocktail before eating, and we all found the dish quite satisfying. The real gluttonous delight of the evening, though, was the kimchi fries, which like the fried rice, thrilled despite the delay in consumption. A heaping pile of fries topped with caramelized kimchi and onions, cheese, scallions, sour cream, and a special mayo, it proved the perfect indulgence to sustain a bout of drinking. An order of fried vegetables—carrots, potatoes, zucchini, onion—didn’t survive the trip as well, clumping together into a solid mass, nor did their side sauce offer sufficient interest.

The add-on list also includes Spam, apparently a relic of the Korean War. In budae jigae, “army base stew,” Spam slices bob along with hot dog pieces, kimchi, tofu, and noodles in a thin, chile-spiked broth. I hadn’t eaten Spam since I was a kid, when my mother would fry slabs of it and put them between mayo-slathered slices of toast for a warm sandwich. I loved those sandwiches then, but would I still like Spam? Apparently yes: both my husband and I found the stew tasty and comforting, and still savory the next day when I reheated the leftovers for lunch (adding edamame to increase the vegetable ratio).

Generous portions of marinated and fresh vegetables and another perfectly fried egg compensated for rather tough and dull beef in the bulgogi bibimbap; I also would have appreciated more hot sauce. Unlike some of the other Korean restaurants in town, the spice factor at Seoul Street is not high, so those who avoid chiles can probably feel at ease here. Even the kimchi was unusually low-key.

Although both Eat and Seoul Street have a few seats, they are geared primarily for takeout, so your best option, particularly for Seoul Street, where the chicken takes twenty to thirty minutes to fry, is to call ahead or order online. Bag in hand, you can then zoom home, uncork the wine, slip a movie into the DVD player, and transform Tuesday night into a weekend evening.

Eat

1906 Packard

213–7011

eatannarbor.com

Tues.–Sat. noon–8 p.m. Closed Sun. & Mon.

Sandwiches $7–$8; sides, soups, and salads $3.50–$7; entrées $12–$16

Limited seating

Wheelchair accessible

Seoul Street

1771 Plymouth, Suite 101

719–0085

eatseoulstreet.com

Sun.–Thurs. 11 a.m.–10:30 p.m., Fri. & Sat. 11 a.m.–midnight

Chicken packages $6–$25, appetizers and sides $3.25–$5.75, entrées $4.50–$13.75

Limited seating

Wheelchair accessible