(Detroit) We walk quietly on Woodward Street in downtown Detroit, between fans waiting in line for a country music show at the Fillmore and people talking to an imaginary friend, then we end up coming across a small restaurant at the evocative name: Mom’s Spaghetti.
Since our hip-hop culture stopped in the mid-2000s, we suddenly stop walking, and start making clever connections, because that’s what we get paid to do: Mom’s Spaghetti? Like in Eminem’s song?
It is then that we realize that we are in Detroit, and that Eminem is from here, and it is there, in a burst of insight which is the prerogative of the greatest detectives, that we arrives at this excellent question: what if this Mom’s Spaghetti was Eminem’s restaurant?
Well, that’s exactly it.
Open since 2021, this tiny restaurant was overflowing with customers on Wednesday evening when we arrived in these lands, and it was also overflowing on this somewhat chilly Thursday evening. In fact, the most discerning palates line up in front of the small window on the side to order take-out of the famous spaghetti in question, which you can then devour straight from a cardboard box.
Like Gordie Howe of old, the menu gets straight to the point: four different kinds of spaghetti, a spaghetti sandwich, a bolognese sandwich, and extra meatballs, veggie meatballs, garlic bread , and then that’s all.
It’s nothing to threaten Gordon Ramsay’s empire, of course, but in a city center which has long been abandoned, and which had lost a little of its identity, Eminem’s spaghetti brings back a little of light where there has been shadow for too long.
