The best things we ate in metro Detroit in 2024

Tom Kha at Kacha Thai Market
This unfailing favorite soup is a masterful blend of sweet, sour, salty, spicy and umami. Coconut cream, lime juice, peppery galangal, chicken meat and broth, chiles — each flavor does its bit. Kacha Thai is generous with the chicken, and the soup is a lovely ivory color with golden blobs of liquid fat. Despite the coconut, it bears no resemblance to a warm smoothie. —Jane Slaughter

Bánh Mì at Quan Ngon Vietnamese Bistro This sandwich, a result of Vietnamese cooks appropriating from French colonizers, comes in a regular size, as a trio of sliders, or deconstructed with an egg sunny-side-up. A crisp baguette, toasted or not, is spread with housemade mayo and done the Vietnamese way — without egg whites or vinegar; just yolks and oil. Housemade chicken paté is added, then grilled chicken, beef, or pork. Pork is lightly caramelized for a bit of sweetness, pickled carrots add tang, and cilantro finishes it off.—Jane Slaughter

Blonde Gazpacho at Leña
An age-old peasant dish also known as ajo blanco, or white garlic, this is gazpacho only in the sense that it’s a cold soup, Andalusia style. There’s not a tomato in sight; rather it’s a thick and creamy blend of garlic, olive oil, Marcona almonds, and bread from The Mother Loaf. The effect is more or less liquid garlic, garnished with roasted red grapes and more almonds for crunch. It’s vegan, too. —Jane Slaughter

Aguachile Negro at Vecino
Aguachile is similar to ceviche, but the marinade for the raw tiger shrimp is chile water (thus the name). First chiles de arbol are roasted on the open hearth, and their ash is mixed with shrimp broth and lime juice for a dramatic black sauce that’s pleasantly acidic. The shrimp are firm, the sauce not super spicy but cilantro-forward, and there’s a dollop of avocado-serrano purée. The dish is served with totopos, as in Sinaloa, but I’d order Chef Edgar Torres’s exquisitely tender tortillas to sop the juices with; their masa is nixtamalized in-house with varieties of corn imported from Mexico, with indigenous names like Pink Xocoyul and Cacahuazintle; they might be yellow or blue, and they actually taste like corn. —Jane Slaughter

Layered Pastries at Forest Bakery
Croissants, Danish, and pain au chocolat are all made with amazingly flaky, tender layers of pastry and imported French butter — literally 27 of each. Varieties of Danish are both sweet and savory: Apple Butter-Vanilla Custard-Oat Streusel; Spinach and Artichoke Dip; French Onion Soup; Brie-Bechamel-Cranberry Jam, and I’ve seen a Danish filled with raspberries — but it’s the pastry itself that’s the star. Croissants might be filled with pistachios but are heavenly on their own. The chocolate buried in a pain au chocolat is Valrhona, one of France’s best. The three young owner-operators do all the work themselves, and it shows. —Jane Slaughter

Diots a vin blanc at Alpino
Diots a vin blanc, or sausage in white wine, is a traditional dish from the Haute-Savoie region in the Alps, where France, Italy and Switzerland come together. This is the neck of the woods that Alpino in Corktown focuses on — a refreshingly original idea with a whole menu of dishes that are new to the city. The diots arrive with two banging pork sausages in an onion and wine broth with a mustard rouille. The broth is what makes it, and is relatively simple. Alpino starts by sweating the onions, which serves to pull out their sweetness and soften them without caramelizing. It then adds a Savoie white wine and chicken stock, then simmers out the alcohol. I could drink it by the gallon. —Tom Perkins

Kebabs at Saj Alreef
It’s a toss-up between the lamb quzi — a massive lamb chop heavy with cardamom that slides right off the bone — and the kebabs at this excellent new-ish Iraqi spot in Sterling Heights. I recommend getting both, but if you can only eat one, the kebabs are cooked over a charcoal grill that leaves the edges with perfect char and imparts a lovely smokiness. One kebab came with minced lamb and beef, and another with ground chicken. Both burst with flavor from what tastes like some combination of parsley, garlic, onion, sumac, cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, coriander, and more. The hunks of piquant chicken and lamb tikka kebabs stood out, the former with a nearly candied texture from the smoke. Owner Steven Arbo touted Areef’s meats, which come from Barry and Sons and other reputable halal butchers. —Tom Perkins

Fried chicken at Taj Al-Yemen/Family Donut in Hamtramck
The oddest pair in town might be the Family Donut/Taj Al-Yemen team at Caniff and Conant in Hamtramck. As if an old-school doughnut and coffee shop mixed with a Yemeni restaurant wasn’t enough — it might just also have the area’s best fried chicken. I’ve long groused over the dearth of excellent fried chicken in Detroit, but this is it. This changes everything. A medium level of crunchy crag, the right level of salt, moist but not too greasy, and your fingers will be left stained yellow from turmeric — plus, it is priced to move. Part of why it's quickly become a favorite lunch spot is because it’s a pretty good representation of the evolving demographics of Hamtramck, and manager Nivil Al-Haiga says that’s by design — they want to have something for everyone. So there’s Bangladeshi options, Yemeni dishes, Bosnian burek, donuts, coffee. Truly a gem. —Tom Perkins

Stuffed shawarma pizza slice at Tania’s Pizza and Kal’s Lunch Bowl
Tania’s Pizza in a Royal Oak party store has quietly assembled one of metro Detroit’s top pizzas, becoming something of an institution for its incredible stuffed pies. Meanwhile, Mr. Kebab, a carryout restaurant in a Berkley Mobil gas station, grew in recent decades to become a nationally lauded shawarma spot, which largely owed to the work of its chef, Kal Al-Amara. He now runs the awesome Kal’s Lunch Bowl in Royal Oak.

Folks, the universe has smiled upon us: The two restaurants at the top of Detroit’s shawarma and pizza games have teamed up, creating a dish that deserves to be in the region’s best slice conversation — the stuffed shawarma pizza. Kal’s makes the chicken or beef shawarma, and Tania’s stuffs it between its garlic-butter crusts with a combo garlic-red sauce and pickles in the chicken pie, or, in the beef version, garlic-red sauce, onion, tomatoes, and beets.

The Tania’s-Kal’s stuffed shawarma pizza ascends to the same high echelon of Detroit slices as all the kings — the Salami Kilpatrick from Pie-Sci, anything from Loui’s, the eponymous pizza from Supino, and the dill pickle soup pizza from HenriettaHaus. That’s high praise. —Tom Perkins

Chicken Shawarma at Shawarma’s House
There’s no shortage of shawarmas in metro Detroit — even good or excellent shawarma abounds, because we are blessed. But finding a spot that does a common dish like shawarma better than everyone else is a rarity and a joy in life, and that’s what Shawarma’s House has on offer.

As with any simple dish of this caliber, it’s the details that make all the difference. Shawarma’s House cuts its bird from a massive inverted cone of chicken on a spit to produce small shavings. They’re intensely aromatic, moist, bright, and lemony pieces of bird that are wrapped in pita with better-than-most pickles and solid garlic sauce. Guessing on the spice combo here, but I suspect it’s driven by coriander, paprika, clove, nutmeg, cumin, and more. The aroma-generating combo and the perfect texture are what put the package in its own class. —Tom Perkins