Detroit's Newest Restaurant and Training Center "COLORS" Is Open For Business!

Detroiters now have a dining choice that not only nourishes the body, but the local economy as well.

As of Tuesday, Jan. 10, COLORS-Detroit will serve up an eclectic lunch and dinner menu that offers superbly and ethically prepared meals at 311 East Grand River, Detroit, across from Paradise Valley (formerly Harmonie Park).

It is the second such restaurant in the country. The first COLORS restaurant was opened in New York City in 2006 by restaurant workers from the World Trade Center who were displaced by the 9-11 tragedy.

The Restaurant Opportunities Center of Michigan (ROC-Michigan) founded the restaurant and training center to help hundreds of Detroiters secure living wage jobs, promote access to fresh and healthy food, including sourcing food from the city’s flourishing urban farms, and to incubate collectively owned food enterprises.

“We are committed to improving the working conditions for Southeast Michigan’s 134,000 restaurant workers, many of whom work for low pay with little to no benefits,” said Minsu Longiaru, director, ROC-Michigan. “COLORS-Detroit is just one way we can champion better working conditions for restaurant workers.”

While diners will enjoy knowing they’re supporting a novel community effort, at the end of the day, the food needs to taste great – and COLORS-Detroit delivers.

“We are celebrating the wonderful multicultural cuisine in our community while highlighting local ingredients,” said Phil Jones, executive chef and general manager, COLORS-Detroit. “For example, our Greek Meatballs are a tribute to the history of Detroit’s Greektown community made from local grass-fed beef and lamb, feta cheese from Zimmerman’s Creamery and fresh herbs sourced from GROWN IN DETROIT and D-Town Farms.” Jones continued, “Although our menu is international in scope, it’s accessible. It is an opportunity to expose metro Detroiters to food with international flair in a non-intimidating way.”

COLORS-Detroit was made possible by grants from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the C.S. Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems, Detroit LISC, the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund, the Hudson-Webber Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Keeping the Dream Alive (the UAW Foundation) and the United Way of Southeast Michigan.

About the Restaurant Opportunities Center of Michigan With over 750 members, the Restaurant Opportunities Center of Michigan (ROC-MI) is the state’s largest organization of restaurant workers. ROC-Michigan is an affiliate of ROC-United, a national restaurant worker organization founded after September 11, 2001 by restaurant workers displaced from the World Trade Center. ROC-United seeks to improve wages and working conditions for the nation’s low-wage restaurant workforce. ROC-United is the only national restaurant workers’ organization in the United States. Despite having more than 10 million restaurant workers and an economic impact of $1.7 billion annually, the restaurant industry is less than 1 percent unionized nationwide. Until ROC-United’s growth and development, the lack of organization left millions of restaurant workers vulnerable to abuse and exploitation around the country. Through participatory research and policy work, employer engagement, workplace justice campaigns, membership and leadership development, and more, ROC-United has become a powerful national vehicle for restaurant workers to lift their collective voice on issues affecting all low-wage workers, including the minimum wage, paid sick days, compliance with basic employment standards, and lack of health care. For more information on ROC-Michigan please visit, www.rocmichigan.org.

U.S. State Department Selects DC3 to Participate in Creative Industries Delegation & Conference

Detroit Creative Corridor Center (the DC3) Director Matthew Clayson will travel abroad this week to share the best practices being used to accelerate Detroit’s creative economy as part of the North Africa Partnership for Economic Opportunity “Creative Industries” delegation to Algiers, Algeria and a panelist for the 2nd Annual U.S.–Maghreb Entrepreneurship Conference in Marrakech, Morocco.

Clayson departs Wednesday for Algeria as part of a four-person “Creative Industries” delegation that includes Marete Webster from Americans for the Arts, John Cimineo from Creative Leaps International, amongst others. As part of the “Creative Industries” delegation, he will provide entrepreneurial training to Algerian creative practitioners. His topic of focus will be digital marketing and tools to reach a global audience.

Then, on January 16, 17 and 18 Clayson will be presenting at and participating in the Conference which has the goal of bringing together private, social, and cultural sector entrepreneurs to identify and implement specific projects and programs in the areas of entrepreneurship, arts & culture, education & research and science & technology.

“Believe it or not, Detroit and Algiers share similar assets and challenges,” said Clayson. “I look forward to sharing the best practices the Detroit Creative Corridor Center is using to accelerate our creative economy in Detroit in hopes of providing relevant examples of resources, tactics and strategies that can help advance the work of creative practitioners and grow creative economies in the Maghreb.”

The U.S.–Maghreb Entrepreneurship Conference is sponsored by the U.S. State Department, U.S. North Africa Partnership for Economic Opportunity (NAPEO), Partners for a New Beginning (PNB), and The Aspen Institute. To learn more visit www.napeo.ma

About Detroit Creative Corridor Center 
Detroit Creative Corridor Center (DC3) was established in 2010 to energize the creative economy in Detroit. Offering a suite of services and initiatives designed to accelerate the growth of creative sector industries and practitioners; DC3 is striving to transform Detroit into a global center of creative innovation. DC3 is a joint venture between Business Leaders for Michigan and the College for Creative Studies. www.DetroitCreativeCorridorCenter.com

GM Out Sold Every Automaker in China in 2011, Selling 1 Car Every 12 Seconds!

Forbes

In another positive sign for the U.S. auto industry, General Motors took the top spot in China sales in 2011, displacing Japanese automaker Toyota to take a dominating share of what the Detroit automaker called its biggest international market.

GM sold 2.547 million vehicles in China in 2011, up 8.3% from the same period a year ago. Toyota, on the other hand, sold 883,000 vehicles in 2011. At 4% year-over-year growth, that’s Toyota’s slowest sales increase in China since 2004.

Ford’s China division posted 2011 sales of 519,390, up 7%.

After many years in the gutter, U.S. automakers seem to be on the rebound. As Forbes’ Joann Muller noted from the North American International Auto Show, “[U.S. automakers are] gaining market share, raking in profits, cranking up production, and welcoming consumers who are finally in the mood to spend.” Detroit’s Big Three are on the comeback after GM and Chrysler were bailed out in 2009, while Ford was on the ropes. Now, they seem to be dancing around the ring.

On the losing side we find Toyota. The large Japanese automaker suffered the effects of the massive earthquake-cum-tsunami of early 2011, which disrupted its production and reduced its market share. As it repairs its supply chain, Toyota aims to take its China sales north of one million in 2012.

GM is the clear outperformer in China. The largest of the Detroit automakers, GM sold one truck or car every 12 seconds in 2011. The company operates 11 joint ventures in China and two wholly owned foreign enterprises, and counts with more than 35,000 employees. It has expanded its dealership network to 2,700 and now covers all of China’s mainland provinces.

Click HERE to read the rest of this article!

More Luv From the NYT: Little Engines of Creativity, Spinning Freely in the Motor City

Mary M. Chapman
New York Times


Navigating tables laden with lentil burgers and smoked wild salmon B.L.T.’s, Sharon Robinson escorted a guest toward paintings hanging on the high walls of the Cass Cafe, a venerable gathering place near Wayne State University popular with students, poets and visual artists. The cafe is about three miles from Cobo Center, the site of the North American International Auto Show, where press previews officially begin on Monday.

“It’s one of the bonuses of coming here, all this great stuff,” Ms. Robinson, 32, a Detroit poet and habitue of the cafe, said of the dozens of paintings by local and nationally known artists for sale on the walls. “They’ve been rotating them for years, but it seems like what’s been going on the last year or two, all the artsy folks around, more people have been paying them attention.”

Detroit will always be entwined with its automotive heritage, and after a few years in the abyss, the primary industry of the Motor City is looking up. Sales last year were at their highest levels since 2008, and analysts project an even more robust 2012.

The renewed fortunes of the big three automakers is a welcome story here, but a funny thing happened on the way through the recession. The region, which had long suffered the vagaries of a cyclical industry, was forced to rethink its identity and, yes, its dependence on an industry that, despite the improved near-term outlook, is hardly out of the weeds.

Skepticism toward an enduring automotive rebound has fomented a kind of can-do, post-industrial attitude here that embraces Detroit’s lineage and also separates from it. Young people, many from the suburbs, see opportunity in Detroit’s transition and are moving into affordable loft spaces, opening small businesses and generally contributing to a vision, not altogether cohesive, of a city that isn’t so dependent on one income stream.

“A lot of people feel like the auto industry is something that we don’t think about anymore,” said Amy Kaherl, facilitator for Detroit Soup, a two-year-old organization run by volunteers that uses entrance fees from monthly dinners to finance creative projects in and around Detroit. “People in this community are looking for something else, not for the next industry that’s going to save the city, but working toward a lot of sustainable things that can build this community up.”

“We saw a need to encourage people to try things that they’ve always wanted to try, on a smaller scale,” Ms. Kaherl said in a telephone interview.

There are also new-business incubators like Paper Street, based in suburban Ferndale, which leases office space in a building and offers classes ranging from photography to business. “We get more creative types rather than those from traditional automotive businesses,” Andy Didorosi, the company’s founder, said in an interview. “But whoever has a viable idea can get space with us. The idea is to get here, then go on to big things.”

Jacques Driscoll and his wife, Christine, spent years in San Diego before arriving here two years ago. They are opening a restaurant called Green Dot Stables, after the original owners’ equestrian involvement, near the Corktown neighborhood of Detroit. “We came here for a wedding and started talking about all the potential here, all the affordability and the growing cultural community, then how we wanted to live here,” Mr. Driscoll, 30, said. 

Gerald Dixon has been at the vanguard of the city’s growing creative class. For nearly a decade, in black-lighted basement gigs in the city’s historic Boston-Edison district, which once sheltered many of Detroit’s auto barons, including Henry Ford, his events have included spoken-word marathons, photo exhibits and a steady stream of concerts.

“We all know that it used to be you could go to the factory if you couldn’t find anything else,” said Mr. Dixon, who is in his late 40s. “Now, all that’s changed. Not only can we not get those jobs, a lot of us can’t get any job. So people come here and to places all over the city as outlets for whatever they’re feeling. Positive outlets. And some of us have been able to make a living at it.”

Two years ago, James Feagin IV lost his job as an economic and community development coordinator for a nonprofit. A chance encounter with an artist resulted in Mr. Feagin leading the marketing and strategic management efforts of BeloZro Visual Energy, a painting and graphic design collective, out of Mr. Feagin’s downtown loft.

“My peers and I see opportunity in everything. We know that there aren’t so many traditional jobs left, so we’ve got to figure out new ways to make money,” Mr. Feagin, 30, said. “When I got laid off, if there was anything less practical than going to work in the auto industry, it was trying to sell original art. But we’re doing it, in new ways.”


Click HERE to read the rest of this article!

Detroit Lands On The "10 Emerging Sustainable Cities To Watch in 2012 " List

Triple Pundit 

Excerpt:

When “green,” “sustainable” or resilient cities come to mind, the usual suspects crop up: Portland, Amsterdam, San Francisco and even high-tech Abu Dhabi score plenty of attention. As more cities push their green agenda the way they promote business opportunities or local tourism, some cities are way ahead of others. Mayors now try to jockey themselves to the front of the sustainability beauty contest with some cities here in the United States showing far more success (Chicago) than others that miserably fail (Los Angeles). Around the world are many cities that have responsive government, vibrant passion at the grass roots level, or both.

Whether they benefit from visionary leaders, flourishing social enterprise, or commitment from community activists, the following 10 cities are well worth a visit to experience their transformation and resilience. If they are not in your travel plans anytime soon, track them from afar. The progress underway in these cities will inspire other mayors and civil societies to learn from their example.

Detroit, Michigan: 

The year is off to a bad start with the announcement that light rail will not happen and the city is close to a takeover by a emergency financial manager. But young graduates and professionals who seek to reinvent themselves will find the area’s leading universities, low cost of living and local biodiversity ample reasons to plunk themselves in the Motor City. Never mind an overwhelmed local government, ignored buildings and automakers who are just now recovering from the crisis of a few years ago: Detroit’s contraction means the city’s citizens are already in the middle of redefining the urban and rural. Watch for urban farming, social enterprise and the creative arts to thrive.

Click HERE to read the rest of this article!

Serious Eats: 6 Great Taquerias in Detroit

El Papa De Los Pollitos Taco

Serious Eats

The 48209 zip code of Detroit is a hot bed of delicious taco activity, as I found out on a one-day whirlwind tour of 11 taquerias and trucks in the city. Though Detroit's Mexican Town is located in the area, the tacos we tried from the several joints located directly in Mexican Town were uniformly sub-par compared to some of the exceptional finds at the trucks, supermarkets, and loncherias nearby.

At each taqueria we tried, we ordered at least one taco with carnitas, one with another steamed/braised meat, one with a griddled/grilled meat, and a specialty of the house. Do the math and you'll find that's nearly 50 tacos in one day with only two stomachs consuming. Yes, there were leftovers.

We judged tacos based on the quality of their tortillas (charred, tender, moist, and corny is the ideal), the fillings (punchy flavors and plenty of moisture and freshness—we had more than our share of meat that was just on the other side of spoiled), their salsas (bright, complex, complementary), and their cilantro and onions (freshly chopped and aromatic).

Overall, I was floored by the quality of the tacos in Detroit, a city I've always known for the quality of its burgers, but not necessarily its tacos. Truth be told, almost every taco I had blew away anything I can get in New York.*

Click HERE to read the rest of the article (and droll over the photos)!!!

Detroit Makes Food & Wine's "Top Sliders In The US" List

Sliders from Saltwater 

Food & Wine Magazine

Once the territory of greasy diners and fast food chains, "sliders" originally referred to thin mini-burgers in squishy potato buns. While purists can still find this classic version, America’s obsession with haute comfort food has inspired chefs to adopt the term for any shrunken sandwich. Now, buzzy ingredients like pork belly or ahi tuna stand in for ground beef, and condiments might include miso aioli over ketchup or house-made kimchi in place of grilled onions.

Detroit, Michigan:


A humble roadside burger chainlet founded in the 1940s, Telway sells mini-burgers topped with grilled onions for just $1. 6820 Michigan Ave.; 313-843-2146.

At Saltwater in Detroit’s MGM Grand Casino, celebrity chef Michael Mina serves a twist on the Vietnamese street sandwich: A baby banh mi of breaded sea bass, pickled veggies and cilantro on a tiny bun.

Click HERE to read the rest of this article!

Must See TV: Lemonade Detroit (video). Prepare to Be Inspired

"Lemonade: Detroit" - 17-minute short. from Erik Proulx on Vimeo.

Noah Stephens's 'People of Detroit' Portraits Show City's Humanity

Huffington Post

"Because not everyone in Detroit is an abandoned building" -- that's the tongue-in-cheek but sharp-edged tagline to Noah Stephens's "People of Detroit" portrait series.

Stephens, who grew up in Highland Park, says he started his photography project in response to negative and over-generalizing media portrayals of the city. The one that sparked the idea for "People of Detroit" was a 2010 "Dateline" special about a Detroiter who hunts raccoons and sells their meat, which received criticism for its misrepresentation of the city.

"When 'Dateline' implied that circumstances in Detroit were so dire that people had been forced to consume wild 'coon meat as some kinda of post-apocalyptic staple food, I had finally had enough of misery-obsessed, sensationalized portrayals of the city," Stephens wrote in an email to HuffPost. "I started 'The People of Detroit' to call attention to a side of life in the city rarely examined in national or global media."

Stephens posts his widely varying portraits to his blog. Most are of strangers he meets around the city, and each portrait is paired with a short essay about the subject.

"I try to get a sense of what it is that drives them; occupation, hobbies, what are they passionate about," Stephens said. "I also like to find out as much as I can about the relationship the person has with the city."

What began as a response project quickly took on a life of its own. Recently, when Stephens started thinking about bringing his photography to an offline audience, he came up with the idea to show his photographs at the Renaissance Center during the 2012 North American International Auto Show. The big car event will be held at Cobo Center, but the nearby Ren Cen is General Motors' headquarters.

Stephens made a fascinating case for why his work should be shown to coincide with the Auto Show.

Click HERE to read the rest of this article!

Mayor Bing Named "Political Rising Star in 2012."

The Daily Beast

While the 2012 presidential race distracts the nation in the new year, 20 up-and-coming pols will be quietly gaining strength. From Gary Locke to Tim Scott and Susana Martinez, David A. Graham on the Republicans and Democrats to watch.

 Democrats: Dave Bing

If there’s good news coming out of Detroit, you can probably thank Dave Bing. It’s not his first turn in the spotlight: he was a seven-time all-star in the NBA. Since becoming mayor of the beleaguered Motor City in 2009 after his predecessor’s massive corruption scandal, he’s worked to “right-size” the city, bring in young members of the creative class, and attract new business. But with massive deficits facing Detroit, it’s unclear whether Bing will be able to beat the buzzer to prevent municipal bankruptcy.

Click HERE to read the rest of this article!

Simply Suzanne’s Granola Expands Availability to All Meijer Locations

Beginning on Jan. 6, 2012, Detroit based Simply Suzanne Granola will be available at more than 190 Meijer stores in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky.

Simply Suzanne has been on the shelves of 43 Michigan Meijer stores since their debut this summer but strong sales have shown that Simply Suzanne is ready for full distribution to all Meijer stores in all states.

“Building a relationship with a nationally-known retailer with the volume and revenue Meijer has is an amazing step for our company and we are ready for this expansion,” said Suzanne Vier, owner.

The partnership with Meijer marks the largest Simply Suzanne retail account to date. “I am proud our product is showing that we can stand alongside the national brands out there. After an amazing year, we look forward to continued growth in 2012,” said Vier.

Each bag of Simply Suzanne Granola is all natural and handcrafted in small batches using whole grain rolled oats. Local farmers and suppliers are used as much as possible in the process, too. Each batch is produced in the Detroit area and locations include a warehouse in Detroit.

The granola comes in three sizes and comes in four sweet and savory flavors: Original, Lotsa Chocolate, Dark Chocolate and Coffee and So Very Cherry. Availability of flavors will vary on a per-store basis for all Meijer locations. All flavors are all natural and made without preservatives, artificial flavors, trans fat, cholesterol and high fructose corn syrup.