I've been looking around New Orleans for good Greek food, and found nothing yet. Despite the kitsch, I am a big fan of Niko Niko's in Houston. Ann Arbor has no Greek food worth eating (seriously, the prominently named place on Main St will not be named in this space, but avoid it all costs - I'll explain another day in a post about worst meals ever). So I'm still looking around NOLA.
But while waiting to a find my Mediterranean fix, an interesting story has been in the news lately. It turns out that most restaurants in America serve mass produced gyro meat that comes from one factory, Kronos. Think of it as SPAM in the shape of a lamb shank. The New York Times has video and an article, about the process - worth watching for lovers of this lamb(ish) sandwich.
On a side note, I've heard that Ann Arbor doesn't do proper gyros, because health codes won't allow a piece of meat to hang out on a spit for 12 hours a day. The NYT article seems to confirm that the oversanitized, factory-formed version of meat is a way to get around those health codes. Personally, I'd rather eat a real piece of meat, and take my risk with some germs.
Now I need to find a gyro... preferably with someone who can pronounce it correctly.
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3 comments:
Great post! I learned a lot. I got to know the gyro when I lived in Paris where they are just called "sandwich grec." I wonder what the regulations there are about hanging the meat.
French regulations are MUCH more lax than in America. For example, dogs aren't banned from restaurants (or if they are, it's ignored). And meat rotating on spits is a frequent sight (as you surely remember). SOn-site smokehouses and other methods of food prep disallowed in the states are common (so much for the freedoms of America, huh?) In Ann Arbor, Casey's had a smoked salmon sandwich that was very popular, and they smoked the salmon on their own property. Sure enough, it was shut down by the health board, because Casey's smokehouse doesn't meet board recommendations. Last time I checked, they had replaced it with a salmon salad sandwich, or some sort of thing. Truly a disappointment to have a culinary favorite that hadn't hurt anyone to be removed by some bureaucratic rule.
Personally, I believe these rules are often intended to do nothing more but create competitive disadvantages for small, local businesses, and to pass profits along to the large, mass produced sort of operations like that outlined at Kronos. It's the lobbysists from those big factory farms that help our politicians write "safe" legislation - not the local purveyors and consumers of food (sensu Michael Pullan).
Whoa whoa whoa. Everyone knows the proper pronunciation rhymes with "high-low." Though I agree with the learned author about a certain Ann Arbor Greek restaurant purveying the worst food in all of Southeast Michigan. And that includes the Huron River hobo encampment just downstream from Barton Dam (best Hobo's Delight in the Midwest, btw).
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