After Baatin's departure from Slum Village, there was a lot of pressure upon the group to deliver a solid follow-up to their previous album, Trinity. The lead single from Detroit Deli was "Selfish", produced by and featuring Kanye West, with John Legend providing vocals during the chorus. The song was a moderate hit and the group's highest charting single, partly as a result of Kanye West's mainstream popularity. The album received a fairly solid reception, but further promotion from Capitol Records stopped short of a second single or music video. Some of their longtime fans viewed the collaboration with West as a ploy for mainstream attention. The group would acknowledge this somewhat, on their following album, 2005's Slum Village.
The song "Reunion", was originally supposed to feature all four members of Slum Village, but Baatin was absent from the final version.
A lot of people think that's a Dilla track, but it was produced by Black Milk, Dilla is just rapping on it. Basically what happened was me and [producer] Young RJ went over Dilla's house, playing joints for him off the album 'cause we wanted to work with him on it. We played a couple joints and he picked to rap on that one. Originally it was supposed to be me, him, Baatin and Elzhi, but Baatin at the time wasn't feeling doing anything Slum Village.
Me and Elzhi already had our verses, then Dilla put his "rep mo' D than 12Eminems" verse down, then Elzhi said, "You know what, I'ma keep it real. I'ma tell people what really happened with Baatin cause they lookin at us like, 'T3 kicked Baatin out'". I didn't kick him out, he left the group. Elzhi wanted to tell the truth and he did it. That's when he put his "unlawful demons" verse down. He called Baatin up maybe like a week after he did it and was still asking him to get on the song, but Baatin never did.
It was supposed to be four of us but Baatin was going through his whole struggle. I'm kind of mad that we never got to make a reunion LP, 'cause me and Dilla always talked about doing it. It's kind of upsetting that we didn't get to close the Slum Village chapter like that. Now it's at a point like, where do we go from here?
Detroit Deli (A Taste of Detroit) was met with generally favourable reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 67, based on six reviews.[2]
AllMusic's John Bush called the album "a parade of digital R&B jams that skillfully navigate the divide between cutting-edge headphone productions and bumping club tracks".[3]Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club called it "a surprisingly solid disc characterized by the top-notch production that has always been the group's saving grace".[8] Raymond Fiore of Entertainment Weekly found the album "impresses most with production prowess", adding "...if only rappers T3 and Elzhi had the personality to match the enticing soundscapes".[9] In his mixed review for Rolling Stone, Christian Hoard resumed: "long on verbosity but short on personality".[7]
