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By Melanie Votaw
Photographs courtesy of Melanie Votaw and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Cleveland: Food, Wine, And Rock & Roll
If you travel to Cleveland primarily for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you might find that you’re equally impressed with the food. A highlight for me in the city was a tour of the West Side Market led by one of the chefs at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where we stayed. This is a weekend package that you can purchase at the hotel. The chef takes you on a tour of the market, you select the ingredients you want, and he creates a three-course lunch from those ingredients. The other items you buy are cleaned and wrapped by the hotel staff for easy transport home.
I would love to have the West Side Market in my back yard, although nothing beats a personal tour with a food expert. We were led through the extraordinary array of gorgeous produce, handmade pasta, breads and pastries, meats, cheeses, international ingredients, and condiments. With more than 180 vendors, it’s a one-stop gourmet shop for most any recipe. The market itself is a National Historic Landmark and one of the oldest remaining municipal markets in the United States.
The Ritz-Carlton’s chef also made us a memorable breakfast one morning at Muse, the hotel’s restaurant. He created four small delicious plates with fruit, homemade muesli, a yogurt smoothie, and a tapioca and fruit pudding concoction. It was great to have something other than the customary buffet breakfast.
One of the most exciting culinary experiences in Cleveland is at Table 45, a restaurant in the Intercontinental Hotel. Famed Cleveland-born chef, Zach Bruell offers an interactive cooking demonstration the first Tuesday of every month for just eight people. Called “Table 45 with Zach,” it costs $55 per person for a 5-course tasting menu and some recipes to take home. While we, unfortunately, weren’t there on a Tuesday, we did get to sample some of the free Happy Hour appetizers from the restaurant’s international menu.
I also especially enjoyed a lunch at the Greenhouse Tavern, a French bistro that is the first certified green restaurant in the state of Ohio. The dishes made from local, sustainable ingredients include Ohio goat pasta and foie gras steamed clams.
It’s the building of the restaurant itself that most impressed me, however. Almost everything is recycled. Old windows with the glass removed serve as shelves, some of the seating is old church pews, and the walls are recycled wood, one of which is from a Civil War-era barn. Some of the flooring consists of recycled carpet tiles, the bar tops were made from sustainable concrete and recycled glass, and the ingenious light fixtures were made from bike rims and eco-fabric. Astonishingly, all of these mismatched materials have been skillfully used so that they create an aesthetically pleasing atmosphere.
We tried happy hour fare at a couple of restaurants in the Shaker Square area – one called fire, food & drink (purposely lowercase) and one called Sergio’s SARAVA, a popular Brazilian restaurant. At fire, food & drink, we ate small plates such as tandoor shrimp with Lebanese cous cous. Unlike many restaurateurs, Chef Douglas Katz has resisted the urge to open another restaurant. He likes to stay so familiar with his customers that he knows who prefers a certain drink or a black napkin.
At Sergio’s SARAVA, the small plates consist of reasonably priced Brazilian street food like bite-sized pan-seared chicken with garlic-scallion sauce. Fun drinks include sparking wine with passion fruit nectar called “Passion Bubbles” and variations on the caipirinha – the Caipiroska, which is a caipirinha with vodka, and the Caipirita, which is a cachaça margarita. If these kinds of drinks aren’t your style, you can order from a list of Brazilian and Cleveland beers. The dinner menu includes mouth-watering possibilities such as key-lime and pistachio chicken or the Salada São Paulo – a green salad with fried plantains, pecans, and ginger-plum vinaigrette.
If you like wine with your culinary experiences, you can drive for less than two hours from Cleveland to Lake County, where there are nearly 20 wineries. Outfitters can help you with a winery tour, and you can stay at one of the bed and breakfasts in the area if you want to make a weekend out of it. There are even services that will drive you from one winery to another so that no one in your party has to be the designated driver. You can also rent Frank Lloyd Wright’s Louis Penfield House. No tours of the house are offered, but it’s available for overnight stays.
Our first stop in Ohio’s Lake County wine country was Debonné Vineyards, which also makes its own beer. We were given a tour of the grounds, including the machinery used to make the wines, and we got a nice whiff of freshly picked grapes. You can visit Debonné and taste four wines while enjoying some cheese, crackers, and sausage for just $5.95 per person.
Our second stop was Grand River Cellars, a sister winery of Debonné. These vineyards are especially known for their ice wines and Rieslings, although I wasn’t impressed with the wines we tasted. I will readily admit, however, that I’m no wine expert. I just know what I like. Still, it was a lovely way to spend an afternoon.
 After all of that wine, we definitely needed some lunch, so we stopped at Molinari’s, a nearby restaurant in Mentor, Ohio. We had seafood risotto with fresh fava beans, followed by a moullard duck breast, cabernet franc roasted chanterelles, and honeyed sweet potatoes. The third course was local apple galette with crème anglaise. The restaurant maintains a wine shop with about 700 bottles, which can be purchased at retail prices plus a $5 corkage fee without the usual table mark-up.
The Ritz-Carlton Hotel in the downtown area definitely lived up to the Ritz-Carlton name. Our stay was handled professionally and courteously from beginning to end . The 206 rooms have everything you would expect of a hotel of this caliber from marble bathrooms to iPod stations. What you won’t get elsewhere, of course, are the beautiful views of Lake Erie from your windows. The property has been renovated recently and is a AAA 4-Diamond and Mobil 4-star rated hotel.
Some nice perks include in-room massage therapists and babysitting services upon request. I also appreciated the complimentary overnight shoeshine, which I haven’t often seen. The hotel has an indoor pool, 24-hour fitness center, a wine bar, and indoor access to and from the neighboring Tower City Center shopping mall.
All great hotel and culinary experiences aside, Cleveland is best known for its Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an amazing chronicle of popular music. For me, this was the best part of my visit to the city, and I could easily have spent a day or two there. The sheer number of artifacts is mind-boggling from a 1935 guitar that belonged to Lead Belly to a Michael Jackson glove. I especially loved the interactive computer exhibits. In one such exhibit, I touched the screen to choose a style of music, then an artist of that style. I listened to their music through headphones, as well as the music of their main influences. Through Spring 2010, the Hall of Fame is housing an extensive exhibit devoted to Bruce Springsteen, which was created in cooperation with the Boss himself. If you love music, this museum is a must.
I also visited the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, which is small but contains excellent natural habitats for its animals. It includes some species that are rare to see, such as cheetahs and rhinos. The zoo currently has a fun outdoor exhibit for children of animatronic dinosaurs, one of which sprays water at you unexpectedly. It even includes tiny baby dinosaurs that have just “hatched.” I wouldn’t take very young children through this exhibit, however, because even I found myself keeping a distance from the T-Rex.
One evening, we saw the musical, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” at the Great Lakes Theater Festival at Playhouse Square. The cast from the resident repertory company was excellent, but the most interesting thing about the experience was the theater itself. Rather than cram as many seats into the space as possible, the designers placed couches in the back of the theatre, along with cushioned chairs and small tables so that groups can sit together more comfortably. All theatres should be built like this!
Travel always creates some aching muscles, so we had massages at the Marengo Luxury Spa, located in The Arcade, one of Cleveland’s best known landmarks built  in 1890. A stunning building, it’s one of the first indoor shopping malls in America and really does make you feel as though you’ve stepped back in time. It’s the perfect setting for a spa, even though the full menu inside is totally modern with services like a mango & mandarin salt glow.
Of course, Cleveland also has its own symphony, a celebrated art museum, sports, and much more that goes beyond food, wine, and rock and roll – and all in a beautiful lakeside setting. If you get bored there, something’s dreadfully wrong!
© November 2009 LuxuryWeb Magazine. All rights reserved.
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