Cooking With A Legend

By Janice Binkert | Feb. 11, 2017

The gleaming stainless steel demonstration kitchen in the Oliver Art Center in Frankfort – a former U.S. Coast Guard Station building that underwent a 3.4 million-dollar renovation in 2011 – boasts an awe-inspiring view of Lake Michigan from its upper level perch.

The kitchen is quiet and empty now, but soon it will be bustling with lively conversation, sizzling pans and the rhythmic percussion of knives on chopping blocks. And the participants who have already signed up for the center’s first culinary arts class of the spring to be held Feb. 18 are no doubt happily anticipating being taught by a master: Joe Muer III, scion of the eponymous Detroit restaurant dynasty. For 70 years, Joe Muer’s was the place to go for seafood in the Motor City, welcoming everyone from Detroit’s high and mighty to everyday citizens.

The Muers’ legacy as restaurateurs goes back to Muer’s grandfather, Joseph Muer Sr., the son of German immigrants who arrived in Detroit in the mid-1800s to open a cigar factory at 1996 Gratiot Avenue near St. Joseph’s Church and Eastern Market. Cigar making was a lucrative business in that era, part of the economic and cultural fabric of booming industrial Midwestern cities. “And where did people go to smoke cigars?” Muer asked, quickly answering his own question: “To the saloons, of course. That was where people met to exchange views, to do business and to pass on life experiences. It was the internet of its time.”

When Joe Sr.’s father passed away suddenly in 1906, Joe Sr., as eldest son, stepped in to run the factory. He was just 19 years old, but the business prospered under his leadership until the dawn of Prohibition in 1919. When alcohol as a social institution was killed, the twin institution of smoking cigars died with it. Joe Sr. struggled on for another decade but lost a fortune.

Not one to be kept down, he changed directions and opened Detroit’s first public oyster bar with just seven tables in the front room of the cigar factory. The date was October 28, 1929 – one day before the crash of Wall Street and the start of the Great Depression. Somehow, said Muer, perhaps because of his grandfather’s Old Country work ethic and his love of people and food, the new venture not only survived but thrived.

Why did Joe Sr. choose to peddle oysters given that the nearest ocean was more than 700 miles from Detroit? “At the time, they were a hot commodity, and his enterprise was the only place in the city where you could eat them besides private clubs,” explained Muer. “Sourcing was relatively easy, too, because Detroit was served by great rail transportation back then. My grandfather received regular shipments of oysters packed in ice in great big wooden barrels from the famous M. F. Foley Fish Market in Boston.”

Muer’s father, Joe Jr., took over the flourishing little business in 1941 and turned it into a full-on restaurant seating about 120 people. After that, the rail – and later, refrigerated truck – shipments from Foley’s grew to include not only oysters but clams and lobster and all other manner of seafood delivered three times a week.

Muer was already shucking oysters and clams when he was 12 years old, but his long apprenticeship in the family business began even earlier than that. “My dad used to take me and my older brother Chuck down to the restaurant when he did the bookkeeping on Saturday mornings,” he reminisced. “I was about 10 or even younger, and he’d tell us to take the chairs down from the tables where the cleaning staff put them when they mopped the floors every night. Our reward was that we’d get to have ice cream or go to the soda machine and drink pop. I was trained in every aspect of running a restaurant from the ground up. Very early on, I learned how to swing a mop, buff the floors, clean toilets – the whole nine yards. By the time I got into high school, I was in the kitchen, which is right where I wanted to be. My mentor was head chef Ernst Zeltwanger, who had started with my grandfather in 1930. He was a fantastic cook and an awesome individual – he worked for our restaurant for 40 years.”  

Under Chef Ernst’s tutelage, Muer went from deep-fry cook to broiling to sautéing to garde manger to learning how to fillet fish and split lobsters by hand. “But gradually, my father moved me to the front of the house,” he said, “because he was grooming me to take over the restaurant. In college, I studied insurance, business, economics, public speaking and labor relations – all of the practical stuff I figured I’d need to run the business someday.”

That someday came in 1965, and Muer was ready. “Each generation that came along…made expansions and improvements and championed new developments,” said Muer. “With my younger brother Tom, I undertook a complete renovation of the restaurant inside and out, enlarging it to 400 seats spread over five dining rooms. As customer demand for what we were doing continued to grow, those seats filled up night after night, week after week. Sometimes it took me over an hour just to make the rounds of the tables to greet and talk to our customers!”

Muer loved running the restaurant and was heartbroken when he was forced to close it in 1998 as a result of demographic changes and downtown Detroit’s economic decline. On the positive side, he and his wife Jane were now free to pursue a dream they’d long held. They had vacationed with their family at a cottage on Crystal Lake for many years, and they’d often said to each other, “What if we could live up here?”

About 10 years ago, they made the move to Frankfort and immediately became involved with the community, including the Oliver Art Center. Muer said, “I felt very fortunate to have lived the way I did and to have the opportunities I had. When I closed the restaurant, I closed that chapter of my life, too.”

But Joe Vicari, CEO of the Joe Vicari Restaurant Group in Detroit, had other plans. In 2005, he approached Muer about reviving the legendary Joe Muer’s in a spectacular new location – the GM Renaissance Center overlooking the international riverfront in the heart of the city – and he wanted Muer to come on board as a consultant to get it started.

“For several years, I resisted the idea,” said Muer, “because I didn’t think my name and the restaurant’s name were that valuable anymore, but he finally convinced me. And apparently they were [valuable], because the new place, which serves iconic dishes from the original Joe Muer’s as well as ‘new classics,’ opened in 2011 and is very successful.”

It seems the Muer name is a powerful magnet in Frankfort, too. “Joe's classes, which he does with his associate Jean Sitter, are immensely popular and consistently sell out,” said Mercedes Michalowski, executive director of the Oliver Art Center. “He’s a terrific chef and instructor, and his charismatic personality brings students back again and again.”

Much of what Muer passes on to his students are things Chef Ernst taught him many years ago. “I call it ‘kitchen nomenclature,’” Muer explained. “I go through a whole litany on that, including knife skills, seasoning pans, safety and sanitation, purchasing, handling and storing fish and seafood, various cooking methods and time-saving tips.  I love to teach, and I always have. I encourage people to ask questions and share their opinions and critique – their ways of doing things.”

Joe Muer III may be the teacher now, but reminiscent of his childhood and later career, he never tires of learning something new.

Joe Muer’s 2017 Culinary Arts classes at Oliver Art Center begin Feb. 18 and will be held once a month (except May) until September. The cost of each two-hour session is $55 for Oliver Art Center members and $65 for non-members. For more information, to register or to check out the full schedule and descriptions, visit Oliverartcenterfrankfort.org or call (231) 352-4151. Oliver Art Center, which also offers a wide variety of art classes, exhibitions, special events and programs, is located at 132 Coast Guard Road in Frankfort.