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Restaurant Review: Logan

What and Where:

Logan | 115 West Washington | Ann Arbor, MI| (734) 327-2312

Ratings (1=terrible, 5=mind-blowingly great)

  • Tastiness: 4.25
  • Service: 3.5 (though see below)
  • Price (1=super cheap, 5=super expensive):5
  • Value:4
  • General vibe: 4

    • Comments

    • This review was prompted by yet another event during my annual birthday week. The surprise I mentioned before turned out to be a special fixed/wine tasting menu. But Annette and I’ve been here several other times before, too.
    • When this place first opened up a few years ago, Annette and I both thought that it was going to last a week. It has kind of an alarming color scheme of oranges and yellows, the menu seemed a little all over the place, and it is rather expensive. Who the heck is gonna go to this place? we thought. Tells you what we know. It’s been there and been getting good reviews and good crowds since it opened.
    • Across the board, the food is excellent. They’ve got a fennel salad that has to be tried even if you don’t like fennel. They’ve got a pork belly appetizer that is super-duper rich and delicious. It seems to me that we’ve almost always had some kind of special for a main course, and while I can remember some things being better than other, I can’t recall getting anything that was less than “pretty darn good.”
    • Last night, we were at one of these special food paring with wine sort of meals that was really over-the-top, but I suspect some of these things will show up on regular dinner menus: perfectly cooked and unbelievably clean mussels with a saffron foam, sweetbreads with various garnishes (my first time with those, and I am sure I will order them again when I’m in a fancy eatin’ mood), the previously mentioned pork belly dish, rabbit in pancetta (sorry Troy and Lisa), and a very interesting ginger flan.
    • Wine is a big deal here. They don’t have the biggest wine list in town– that would be The Earle, I think– and they aren’t about “good values” in terms of the prices. But the wine guy (Kevin) knows his stuff and he’s quite friendly about it all, too. Needless to say, the wine last night was great.
    • Interestingly enough, the lunch at this place is similar but different. The fennel salad and the skate are on both menus, but most of the items are (logically enough) more lunch-like. But the food is just as good and the prices are considerably less, so lunch at Logan is a sensible way to check it all out.
    • If I had any complaint, I guess it would be that while the service is good, it isn’t as good as the rest of the place. Last year for my birthday, we were in New York City and we went to Babbo, and one of the things that was really remarkable about that place was the unbelievable level of customer service. Now, Logan is in the same general price range (well, Babbo is a bit more expensive, but it’s in NYC), bu the wait staff service and the like is just a notch or two less than it should be. But it’s still darn good.
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    Birthday Week continues: my big gift comes early

    I guess mostly as a result of my whining about it (because I knew what I was going to get) and partly because my actual birthday is on a night Annette is teaching, I got her and Will to give me my big birthday gift, an iPod Touch. Sweet! (Actually, I tried to post this from my new pod/touch yesterday, but I got tired of trying to make it work, so I’m posting this from a regular computer. But I’m still back dating the post).

    For those not in the know, the pod/touch is basically the same as an iPhone but without the phone: that is, it’s an iPod, you can watch videos, and, assuming you have a wireless connection, you can track your stocks (my vast portfolio, of course), you can buy stuff from iTunes, check your mail, and sort of surf the web with Safari. When the iPhone first came out, my first reaction was “I don’t need a phone, but if I had something that had the rest of this stuff, that’d be cool.” Well, here ya go.

    Anyway, I haven’t taken it out “in the wild” yet, so I don’t know how well it will respond/connect to wifi networks in coffee shops and stuff. I guess it’ll work fine. The email app works great, and the google sites I use all the time (reader, news, etc.) have iPod/Phone/Touch -specific versions, which is nice. And now there’s a whole bunch of web sites specifically made for the iPod/Phone/Touch, which is a potentially interesting topic of “Writing for the World Wide Web” this spring. I finally figured out how to use HandBrake to rip a DVD to an iPod/Phone/Touch format, meaning I can watch Spirited Away on a tiny screen in fantastic resolution. This is cool, but I am not sure I can watch a 2 hour movie like this– David Lynch probably has a point.

    Oh yeah– it plays music too.

    Anyway, mucho thanks to Annette and Will!

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    Let the 42nd birthday week begin (or continue?): suprise CDs

    My birthday is Tuesday, March 25, and so I’m getting a bit of a late start on my traditional birthday week/birthday month. I guess there really isn’t anything that “special” about 42, although, as this helpful entry on wikipedia points out, there’s a lot to good ol’ 42, including (and how did forget this?) the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

    My actual birthday itself is Tuesday, and my big plan/gift/surprise to myself is I am taking the day off and I absolutely refuse to go anything school. My hope is to spend some time playing around with the “surprise” I know I’m getting. Since Annette teaches Tuesday (and hey, it’s the middle of the week too), we’re going out tomorrow, a real surprise for me. Stay tuned for the details on that.

    This was on my mind because of the surprise CD set I received today, Vee-Jay: The Definitive Collection, was waiting for me. This was surprising for two reasons. First, I didn’t order/buy these CDs; rather, they were the extra/gift item we received for the donation for the WEMU fund raiser. What I’ve heard so far is pretty cool, but it isn’t the sort of thing I would have bought directly. Second, it seems like we sent in the pledge card about three days ago.

    Anyway, surprise CDs are always good, birthday week or not.

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    Don’t worry Iowa MFA students, your unpublishable manuscripts are still safe

    Last week, I posted about protests by grad students at the University of Iowa about putting their theses up online. Apparently, the MFA students won. And thus the title of this post.

    (Deep sigh, followed by chuckle.)

    For what it’s worth, my dissertation has been online for about 12 years now. Now, for a bunch of reasons I won’t go into now, I wasn’t really thinking about turning it into a book. But if I had tried to make it into a book (I think its too late at this stage), I would have had to revise to a point where I would have ended up writing a new book based on the diss, meaning that the print version would be notably different from the online version. I think this is pretty much par for the course for anyone trying to take a thesis or a dissertation to the next level, creative or not. Conversely, I can think of nothing but good things that have come from putting my diss up online. A couple of different scholarly things have come my way over the years because of this, I get emails from people who stumble across the site once in a while, and I still get around 100-150 hits a week on the site. So for me, putting my diss up online had no downsides and modest positives.

    I appreciate that these MFA folks are hoping to be the next Vonnegut or ZZ Packer or something. But I dunno, this guy seems to do okay and he puts all of his fiction out there for free.

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    Map of SXSW talks by Jenkins and Johnson

    Here’s a link to an image of the keynote talk at the 2008 SXSW conference by Henry Jenkins and Steve Johnson. I’d post the image itself, but it’s pretty dang big.

    It’s kinda cool, kinda makes me want to go to SXSW (though it also makes me think that I might be in the wrong age demographic), but it actually makes me think that I might have students in ENGL 516 do some kind of “end of the semester” project where they make a “map” like this of the course so we can post them someplace. As long as it’s something that would fun and not too much busy work.

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    Here’s my contribution to a St. Patrick’s day celebration

    Actually, it is boing-boing’s:

    All I know is I was trying to find a place to do some reading and writing yesterday in downtown Ann Arbor and the place was a freakin’ zoo, in part because there was some kind of “fun run” kind of event, and also in part because I think a bunch of people were taking the Pope’s advice about celebrating before the holy week. Though I have a feeling some of those folks might sneak in a beer today.

    Anyway, I might not even wear green. That’ll show ’em.

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    Once again, I am overlooked

    The UK’s Guardian/Observer has a list I came across via waiterrant (he’s #44) of “The world’s 50 most powerful blogs,” and once again, yours truly is not included. Figures.

    Actually, it’s an interesting list and will serve as fodder for blogs to invite to my survey, though I haven’t had a lot of luck in getting “big time” bloggers to participate as of yet. And it’s a list to take with a grain of salt. It’s kind of UK-centric, and it doesn’t include a bunch of different blogs you think it would include– the Daily KOS, for example.

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    Iggy Pop sings Madonna songs at the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame Ceremony

    Here is the Ypsi Township native singing “Ray of Light:”

    I think that MTV or VH1 is going to broadcast the show next weekend or something, but as the YouTube site tells it, Madonna apparently wanted Iggy and the Stooges to perform her songs instead of singing them herself, maybe because she thinks that Iggy and company have been snubbed by the Hall of Fame for too long, maybe she just wanted to do something different. The audience seems a little confused.