Detroit Tigers and Coney Island Challenge

For the holiday weekend, we hosted some visitors from Chicago - Mitchell and Laura.  The morning after their arrival, we cooked them our traditional Lee-style brunch before we headed outside to enjoy the warm weather with a little cornhole.  We actually inaugurated our cornhole set with their visit as we haven't been presented with a better opportunity to test it out until now.

Early afternoon, we let them experience Detroit's finest form of transportation, the SMART bus,
as we rode it downtown for the Detroit Tigers game against one of our favorite AL competitors, the Seattle Mariners. The funny thing about that is only that I seem to frequent Tigers games against the Mariners, purely by chance. 

As we entered the gates, I thought it fit to show some love to the late Ernie Harwell, Detroit's famed broadcaster aka the voice of Detroit Baseball.  We ended up buying pretty cheap seats in the right-field upper decks where we saw the Tigers punch in a win with fireworks to boot!

Post-game, we brought Mitchell and Laura over to the two downtown side-by-side (on Lafayette Boulevard at Michigan Avenue) Detroit Coney Island Restaurants: American Coney Island (the older of the two) and the Lafayette Coney Island for a Coney Island Challenge.  "As the story goes, two brothers who founded American Coney Island got into an argument, and one brother opened Lafayette Coney Island next door," according to Mlive.com.  The two restaurants faced off in the popular television show, the Travel Channel's Food Wars.  More information regarding the competition and winner located here at the Detroit Moxie, who covered this story quite well or some clips from the Food Wars web site here.

Our competition or "war" was pretty basic, taste test out the coney dog, thus, we kicked off the competition at Lafayette where we each ordered a "coney island" and a "beer".  We weren't entirely sure what kind of beer we would get as it was just a "beer" on the menu.  We also spotted on the menu, "loose hamburger" which made us chuckle.  

We didn't waste time devouring that "dawg" before moving on over to American, where we spotted similar menu items.  We couldn't stand to eat another full coney so each couple split a coney with a side of cheese fries.  Great post-baseball game food, by the way!   The verdict....

It was all American for us!  Now if you ask me why, I probably couldn't tell you anything specific. In fact, both coney island hot dogs look and are dressed the same with the mustard, chili, an onions oozing from your typical all-white bun.  But there was something about the American that just sealed the deal for us, and I'm assuming it was the hot dog.

We capped off the evening with a return bus ride and stumble over to Birmingham's own, Dick O'Dows, for a night cap!  More pictures from the entire day located in my Picasa album.