Places like Leo’s Coney Island stand for something. For Michiganders, they’re monuments to working-class food culture.
Two “Detroit-style” restaurants opened in Phoenix years ago, where I had been living. Of course, I was curious. One promoted pizza à la Buddy’s and Jet’s. The other advertised itself as our kind of Coney Island. I popped in for a pie from the first place only once, leaving with nothing more than a Faygo Rock & Rye after the store’s one employee explained to me and the only other customer there that, with business slow as it was, he was working solo and prepared to fill our orders provided we had patience for the proprietary pie-making process he was still learning. Restaurant customer rule: If you go somewhere hungry for professionally prepared food only to be forewarned by staff that they may not deliver on that reasonable expectation, politely excuse yourself and, perhaps, return another time. As to the Arizona chili dog joint, it disappeared under dunes of disappointment maybe a year after its ballyhooed debut.
For all my years alive and well-fed in the desert, my one point of reference to Detroit’s Coney Island lore was the Hatfields and McCoys story of the Lafayette and American restaurants on Michigan Avenue; their enduring, chili-smothered frankfurter feud also mirroring the quirky mythos of the fictitious Olympia Café, a frenetic, foreign-yet-familiar, family-run food business comically captured in all its no-frills, no-nonsense glory by Saturday Night Live immortals John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd way back when. Restaurants that fit that bill still tickle me to death.
So, how do I love thee, Leo’s? Let me count the ways. Firstly, you serve a classic Coney for a song ($2.69, with everything). The naturally-cased dogs have that difference-making snap. You also get bonus points for the roasted beets and artichoke hearts in your Greek salads ($6.29-$11.29, four sizes), and for attaching calorie counts to your menu descriptions. They give me pause and, occasionally, willpower. Other times — often, when I’m weak — thin and crispy onion rings ($3.79) and a small handful of chicken-fried wings (five for $7.99) mitigate my guilt over gluttonous ordering. For the record, I’ll also heap praise on hand-battered cod ($7.19-$11.99, sandwich or dinner with chips and slaw), and a club sandwich ($8.19) which is the standard by which I measure the professional patience and pride of any short order cook or kitchen. Experience taught me what a pain in the ass this many-layered sandwich is to put together when it’s busy. Amateurs and the apathetic throw it together, which shows in the plating. Committed culinarians create appetizingly colorful, precisely-cut, equilateral triangles of this glorious assemblage of meat, cheeses, garden goods, and mayo-gilded toast. And you, Leo’s, are true artists in this specific medium. Bravo! Encore! Of anything I’d say to keep you humble, the lemon rice soup ($3.69 cup, $4.19 bowl) left me cold. Mine tasted pretty darn close to pure lemon curd. More chicken/stock would have added some savory balance to the bowl.
Aside from Leo’s consistently satisfying food, there’s something to be said for servers there who feel comfortable calling customers “Sweetie” without coming across as inappropriate or artificially flattering. They’re just refreshingly comfortable in their own skin; not guarded and/or careful with every word, and allowed to be, presumably. And notice the winter clothes trees attached to every booth. That’s so Michigan to me. I can’t wait to hang my first scarf of the season on one and order a $2.59 hot chocolate. Also, I love how virtually every seat in the house at Leo’s is a booth. There’s something two shades more comfortable and welcoming about sliding into one over merely grabbing a chair at a table. So says me. Since every Leo’s is pretty much packed whenever I visit, the people-watching experience is typically a plus as well. Seeing young parents proudly watching their little ones pack their cheeks with fries and pancakes feeds my soul as a father who remembers when. (Spying faces in the crowd still sporting surgical masks is a hoot, too. Half these hold-outs continue to wear them only as chinstraps; an effective defense, one supposes, if one were trying to stop the spread of lower lipstick or goatee dandruff. Sigh.)
Back in my old neighborhood after almost four decades out West, it feels like I’ve come full circle in a life’s work devoted entirely to food, from blue-collar Dearborn to fine-dining Scottsdale and back to suburban Detroit. These days, I meet for regular breakfasts and lunches again with two of my best childhood friends. John is a retired, white-collar career man from “Ford’s” (which Michigan’s answer to Mark Twain, Mitch Albom, once famously observed we Mitten-Staters claim so personally and possessively as our own), and Bret pastors a Christian church in Dearborn Heights. We met during our first day of kindergarten, and I’ve yet to meet a better man. Where yours truly is concerned, I just like turning a meal taken in a good restaurant with great company into short stories of what goes into social experiences that nourish us all, body and soul.
The merits of places like Leo’s, or chains like Florida-based First Watch and Illinois-based Brunch Café, are many. Give me a menu that triggers some degree of difficulty in deciding what to order — breakfast, lunch, or later — and let me order it any time of day. Sometimes, I crave Cobb salad at 10:30 in the morning. Some nights, I want breakfast for dinner. Coney culture hangouts accommodate that. Places where the service is human and genuine — not stilted and standoffish — satisfy a sociability we crave. Again, Coney culture delivers.
Visits to Leo’s have left me more confident in guessing what ingredient might have been missing from those Phoenix restaurants looking to satisfy what Michigan’s cut its teeth on culturally: actual Michiganders. When you’re raised a working-class Detroiter, you learn the value of a dollar and where you can go to spend it wisely among family, friends, and others who know exactly where you’re coming from. That’s Leo’s.
Leo’s Coney Island has 72 Michigan locations. More information is available at leosconeyisland.com.
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