Cafe Marie in Ann Arbor

Kea and I wanted to go to Saica, our favorite Japanese restaurant in Ann Arbor (This is not saying much. The udon is passable, but when is udon not passable?) but it was closed. :( We ended up at Cafe Marie instead. First, it is ridiculous that we have lived where we have for 3.5 years and there are still restaurants right by our house we haven't gone to. Oh well I guess we prefer to stick to what we know. Cafe Marie was pretty good though. It reminds me of Mocha Java or Cafe Laufer in Honolulu, but more Midwestern, middle-of-the-road. I'd prefer Cafe Laufer in a second, but Cafe Marie had some items that sounded "special."

I had a chicken and cherry salad. Salads with dried cherries is my favorite thing about Michigan. I don't know if the whole fruit and greens thing just happened to take off around the time I moved up here... maybe chicken and cherry salad is not just here, but Michigan is known for it's cherries so I think it might be more common here. The chicken seemed a little dry at first, but had good flavor. There was a lot of feta--I might've asked for it on the side if I had known there would be so much.

Cafe Marie also serves breakfast all day so Kea had the Ultimate Omelette which came with sausage AND bacon and some veggies and sour cream. However, we think the "ultimate" part is about the meat. He liked it although he said Cafe Marie must be for old people because it was undersalted.

There were also a bunch of other breakfast items on the menu and sandwiches and wraps. One of my problems was that virtually everything on the menu had cheese in it. That's one way its Midwestern. Second is they had something called Potato Avalanche or Fries Avalanche... which was covered in ranch...

They also had a full coffee and tea menu and some fancy lemonades and outdoor seating.

Kea felt the decor was on the corporate side for an independent restaurant, but that it was there way of attracting a broad customer base. He thought the menu reflected this too--with more boojie stuff and more meat and potatoes stuff. And the crowd was also more racially diverse than I typically see in Ann Arbor. It was a Sunday afternoon and it seemed like partially a post-church crowd but not all. It was an interesting mix.