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FoodWEDNESDAY, JANUARY 6, 2016 . WASHINGTONPOST.COM/FOOD MG VA PG EE E

5 FOR THE NEW YEAR

Nourish columnist EllieKrieger shares a week’sworth of favorites from hernew cookbook. E6

BY MARK GUARINOSpecial to The Washington Post

Veteran Detroiters always knew their city was ameat-and-potatoes town. To find more-eclectic cui-sine meant doing what most people downtown didafter work: Leave.

No more. Detroit is in the midst of a culinarytransformation. Rock-bottom housing stock and an emerginggeneration of young restaurateurs and chefs settling in toexperiment have brought new restaurants, breweries, tastingrooms, cocktail bars, pop-up events and quirky lunch spotspromising nutritious food — in neighborhoods where the onlyoption to eat had previously been fast food. Keeping up withlaunches is now a sport in this rebounding city, which over thepast decade survived a government bailout of two of its threemajor car companies, the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S.history and the shuttling of a recent mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick,to federal prison.

“Now people are excited,” says Dennis Archer Jr., part ownerof Central Kitchen + Bar, a bustling gastropub facing CadillacSquare downtown. “Before, when people would visit, it wouldbe for the auto show or a game. Checking out the Detroit foodscene was not a priority. Now it’s on their agenda.”

The lunchtime crowd at Rose’s Fine Food on the city’s eastside could be a cross-section of Detroit: Professionals, daylaborers, tourists, hipsters and seniors sit at counters and

DETROIT CONTINUED ON E4

From bankrupt to bustlingAs Detroit’s recovery continues,

cheap real estate and urban farminghelp spark a surge in new restaurants

BY TAMAR HASPELAND MARION NESTLE

Special to The Washington Post

Gothroughthefineprintoftheomnibusspending bill just passed by Congress, andyou’ll see that the 2015 Dietary Guidelines,scheduled for release in—youguessed it—2015, have been pushed out to 2016. Youwouldn’t think that the government’s ef-forts, every five years, to help Americanseat more healthfully would turn into apolitical football. But when its appointedscientists reviewed the literature on meatand health, for example, they did some-thing quite radical. They said what theymeant with no equivocations: Americansshould eat less meat.

As if that were not radical enough —previous committees had pussyfootedwith such euphemisms as “choose leanmeats to reduce saturated fat” — this

DIETARY CONTINUED ON E3

Six rogue rulesfor a year ofhealthful eating

For director Steven Soder-bergh, the bottle of sin-gani — presented to himin 2007 by the Boliviancasting director for hismovie “Che” — was the

booze equivalent of the conversion ofSaul on the road to Damascus.

Usually a vodka-rocks guy, Soderberghstarted drinking and was smitten. Hehunted down the giver with questions,“and he started giving me the narrative”:that singani has been made for hundredsof years, that it’s made from one particu-lar grape and only in one particular areaof Bolivia. “Which was intriguing, but atthe time my main concern was, ‘Can youget me enough of this stuff to get methrough the shoot?’ ”

Surprisingly, there wasn’t a clear an-swer to his question. At the time, “as itturned out, they didn’t export it.”

The drink that was a bolt from the bluefor Soderbergh is no surprise to themillions of Bolivians who consider sin-gani (sin-GAH-nee) virtually the nationalspirit. For Ramon Escobar, a U.S. foreignservice officer whose family is Bolivian

Meet singani, Bolivia’s best-kept secret

RECIPESlChufly E5lSingroni pictured above, E5

SpiritsM. CARRIEALLAN

PHOTOS BY SALWAN GEORGES FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

TOP: Two James Spirits, which bills itself as Detroit’s first legal distillery since Prohibition, operates a lively tasting room in aformer doughnut factory in Corktown. ABOVE: Modern-French restaurant Antietam opened in two renovated buildings in thecity’s Eastern Market neighborhood. No sign marks the spot; the owner is counting on curious diners to find him.

and who says he has been drinking it“since before I was supposed to,” singaniis something special: a native Bolivianspirit whose success in the larger interna-tional market could make an enormous

difference to the country it hails from.“Every hectare of grapes that’s plant-

ed in Bolivia lifts a family out of extremepoverty,” says Escobar. “The grapes aregrown by Bolivians, picked by Bolivians,fermented into wine by Bolivians, dis-tilled into spirit by Bolivians. It’s bottledby Bolivians in bottles that are made by

SPIRITS CONTINUED ON E5

DEB LINDSEY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

QUENTIN BACON