Weekender Favorites: Wood-Fired Fare at Detroit's Selden Standard
Chef Andy Hollyday serves a thoughtful menu filled with vegetable dishes, pastas, and great grilled chicken.
Welcome to the weekend! Here’s what you’ll find in today’s newsletter:
Weekender Favorites: Nine years in, Selden Standard is the standard-bearer for Detroit’s dining scene.
The Order: Naming a favorite mac and cheese is a tall order, but this Raleigh, North Carolina version has our number.
Weekend Reading List: Tropical drinks with the Los Angeles Times and a new pizza destination in the Delta from John T. Edge.
October’s Featured Destination: In Door County, a Jamaican ex-pat and her husband are selling an authentic jerk sauce with Wisconsin flair. Plus, download our Field Guide to Door County, a 20-page dining guide featuring all our restaurant and bar recommendations.
Into the Fire at Selden Standard
DETROIT, MICH. — When the 2023 James Beard award finalists list was announced this spring, three of the five nominees for Best Chef Great Lakes came from Detroit (the other nominees, Diana Dávila of Mi Tocaya Antojería and ultimate winners Tim Flores and Genie Kwon of Kasama, are based in Chicago). We took that as a sign that we needed to head to Detroit for a weekend to try the nominees’ restaurants, and made dinner reservations at Marrow and Selden Standard and popped into Saffron De Twah (which is temporarily closed) for lunch. Selden Standard wasn’t just our clear favorite of the three — our dinner was one of the best we’ve had all year.
We were seated at the counter, which is where you want to sit since you can watch the chefs sliding veggies into the wood-fired oven and cooking meat over the wood-burning grill. And they barely stopped all night — we saw more servings of roasted mushrooms coming out of that oven than anything else, and for good reason. Served over a sauce of ajo blanco and topped with chimichurri and a sprinkle of espelette pepper, these mushrooms were savory and bright with a kick of heat. Partner and executive chef Andy Hollyday’s American menu is mostly comprised of vegetable dishes, so we also had the vegetable carpaccio, thin slices of root veggies dressed with lemon, capers, and shaved Parmesan, as well as the oven-roasted potatoes with charred scallions, pickled peppers, cilantro, and dabs of smoked paprika aioli.
Moving into the meat and fish part of the menu, we had rigatoni with fennel sausage ragù and rapini, and, our favorite dish of the evening, a Peruvian-inflected grilled half chicken with tangy aji verde and avocado. Many of the dishes evolve with the seasons; in summer, the grilled chicken comes with white barbecue sauce, piquillo peppers, and watermelon.
At nine years in, Selden Standard, which was named the Detroit Free Press Restaurant of the Year in 2015, is still setting the culinary standard for the city. And it’s why it’s so important to seek out a mix of newer and more established spots when we travel — keeping up with the new openings is important, but so is seeking out restaurants that have been operating at a high level for nearly a decade or more: These are the places that give a restaurant scene its soul.