Motor City Eating: Parker's Hilltop Brewery/Bigalora

The Village of Clarkston, MI, where beauty is in the eye of the Beer-holder

A quick little weekend jaunt up to the Detroit area found my spouse and in the company of long-time friends. Even as short as this visit really was (not much more than 24 hours), we as a group got to feast quite nicely, not only on home-prepared Indian delights courtesy of our hosts, but also a couple of culinary jaunts on the town to a popular area brewpub as well as Italian eats from a James Beard nominee chef.

Ice Cream Chronicles (Yr. 4) - Who Could Ask For More?

At the Coppa....Coppa Gelato...the coldest spot north of Scioto (okay, I can hear the collective groan out there.)

To get serious again, I had always considered gelato something of a sipper, much like a higher gravity beer: it's something you take a little time to swirl around your mouth and savor. Not that you can't savor its frozen cousin ice cream, but I'm definitely more likely to gobble down ice cream a lot faster depending on the circumstances and the quality..

This is until I spied one of the chalkboards at Westerville's Coppa Gelato, which conveniently points out that a serving of gelato has roughly half the calories of a comparable serving of ice cream.

Whoa!  Maybe I've been going at this the wrong way the whole time.

Ice Cream Chronicles (Year 4) - A Taste of Tuscany

As I've entered year four of these chronicles, I've begun to realize that the world of frozen confections is much more than just ice cream. I've ventured a touch beyond that when it came to Whit's and their frozen custard, but I figured why should I be limiting myself?  Time is short, and there's plenty of places I haven't gotten to yet.

So why not gelato, ice cream's silkier Italian cousin? And why not start in a place where you can find two ladies having a deep conversation in that very same language in the corner of the cafe?