Detroit’s dining scene, much like the city itself, is undergoing a period of rapid transformation. The food-obsessed from the suburbs and beyond are returning to the long-beleaguered downtown areas, with a new-found curiosity for exotic cuisines, flavors and ideas. Innovative pop-ups, homegrown distilleries, urban farms and a growing number of celebrity chefs (Michael Symon, Wolfgang Puck and soon, Roy Choi) have all helped to land the city at No. 3 on our ranking.
What to know
While New Yorkers or Angelenos might roll their eyes at the phrase “pop-up,” here it’s an incubator for some of the hottest chef talent. Revolver, a perma pop-up space of sorts in the Hamtramck neighborhood, is a training ground, having hosted chefs like Kate Williams and Andy Hollyday who use the space to test new menus. One of Detroit’s most famous pop-ups, Guns and Butter, plans on opening a permanent location in the future, bringing high-end, forward-thinking cuisine to Detroit. Motor City Wine, a newish wine bar located in Corktown has also been hosting pop-ups featuring some of the most innovative talent in town.
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| Photo: CBS Local |
I say this because it’s true and because I just read a column by Aaron Foley that offered a bleak – if sarcastic – warning to New Yorkers attracted by the Move to Detroit billboards. He cites shoddy schools, rising rents — as well as beer gardens without kids’ menus – as reasons why New York parents should ignore those catchy billboards and cross Detroit off their list. And he makes some valid points (though not his points about beer gardens because who needs a beer more than a parent?) But as a mom of two who quit her job in New York last year and moved to Detroit to be a part of its future, I’m here to tell Foley he’s wrong.
It’s true that there are no public playgrounds in my downtown Detroit neighborhood and that school options here are extremely limited. In Detroit, I don’t have the elaborate parent network I had in Brooklyn from which I could get advice or borrow baby gear. But I’m sending two kids to preschool for roughly half of what that cost in Brooklyn. We’re living in an apartment that’s significantly larger than the shoebox we shared in Brooklyn, for a much lower price, and I’m no longer commuting long distances and working the kind of marathon hours that were required for me to afford my life in New York. In Detroit, I spend much more time with my children than I ever did in family-friendly Brooklyn because here I’m not working all the time.
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The Shed 5 project includes a fully-restored public market space as well as a first-of-its-kind Community Kitchen, educational and meeting space (The Kid Rock Kitchen Commons) and the new, outdoor DTE Energy Foundation Plaza.
“This transforms the way Eastern Market interacts with the community, helping to set a national standard for regional food hubs,” said Dan Carmody, President of Eastern Market Corporation. “The new Shed 5 and all of its parts helps us nourish Detroit in so many new ways. This is our third major shed completion since 2006, with $16 million in investment and, by far, our most transformational because of the impact the Market and surrounding district can now in making Detroit stronger and healthier.”
Eastern Market Shed 5
2934 Russell Street, Detroit
Saturday May 2, 2015
Ceremony featuring Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and Senator Debbie Stabenow at 10 a.m.
• Ambassador Bridge Co. will transfer to the city 4.8 acres of prime riverfront property, and provide $5M for park improvements
• City to transfer 3 acres of undeveloped parkland to Bridge Co. it requires for possible second span.
• Construction of new baseball and soccer fields, picnic and fishing areas, to begin this fall
• 1,050 windows in the Michigan Central Train Depot will be installed by December 31, 2015, securing the exterior of that landmark.
An agreement between the City of Detroit and the Ambassador Bridge Company will pave the way for a significantly expanded and improved Riverside Park and the renovation of the exterior of the Michigan Central Depot, Mayor Mike Duggan announced today.
Once the agreement is approved by Detroit City Council, the Ambassador Bridge Company will transfer 4.8 acres of prime waterfront property to the City of Detroit to expand Riverside Park to the west. The Bridge Company also will pay the city $3 million which will be invested in Riverside Park improvements.
Riverside Park Concept Plan “This agreement gives the city the land and funding it needs to create a marquee park at Riverside and give Detroiters even greater access to our riverfront,” Mayor Mike Duggan said. “At the same time, it provides a dramatic improvement in the appearance of the Michigan Central Depot, making the future redevelopment of that landmark more likely.”
The funding being provided by the Bridge Company also will allow the city to redevelop a 3.4-acre piece of unused city land to expand Riverside Park to the north. Improvements to be made to the park starting in fall 2015 during this first phase include:
• New Baseball Diamond, soccer field and multi-use play areas on the northern city parcel
• New Riverfront Playscape
• New benches, picnic tables & shelter
• Improved Waterfront Promenade
• Improved Landscaping
Click HERE For More Details!
The Comerica Hatch Detroit Contest is back! Submit your brick & mortar retail business idea starting May 1st!
Posted by Hatch Detroit on Friday, April 24, 2015
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| Credit: Jesse Greene |
Those of us who know and love Detroit consider it a kind of half-finished heaven. We favor its brawny, threadbare aura, its onion-and-mustard-spangled coney dogs, its rambling thoroughfares from a time when Cadillac Eldorados ruled the roads. The city's lonely Gothic churches, historic Art Deco skyscrapers, and spacious island park are joined by a vast network of urban farms growing all sorts of delicious, fresh things in between swaths of concrete jungle. These farms, together with the city's new restaurants dispersed in pockets all over town, make an urban road trip the best way to explore Motown.
Start your cruise at Anthology Coffee (1401 Vermont St.), the city's newest specialty roaster. The warm, airy café is stashed away behind an obscure yet quintessentially New Detroit spot: a co-working space for local entrepreneurs and creative types in a former Corktown printing factory. There, owner Josh Longsdorf brews his single-origin beans at a Modbar espresso machine and a spacious pour-over bar.
Suitably caffeinated, you'll want to head northeast on Jefferson Avenue, through downtown and past the iconic Joe Louis fist-bump monument at Hart Plaza, keeping Canada on your right, until you arrive at Rose's Fine Food (10551 E. Jefferson Ave.). Run by cousins Lucy Carnaghi and Molly Mitchell, the 30-seat restaurant specializes in refined diner food, like brisket hash, huge cinnamon rolls, and old-fashioned egg creams. Consider taking your meal across the water on Belle Isle, an idyllic 1,000-acre island park with an Albert Kahn-designed aquarium and conservancy plunked in the middle of the Detroit River.
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On the 1st June 2015, Virgin Atlantic will launch direct flights to Detroit, the birthplace of Motown, Madonna and the motor car.
Flying daily from London Heathrow, we will be the only British airline to fly direct to this fascinating city. Customers can also take advantage of Delta Air Lines’ services and connect onwards to other US cities including New Orleans, St Louis, Indianapolis, Salt Lake City and Nashville.
Click HERE For The Full Article!
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| Rose’s Fine Food, Detroit. Photo: Jesse David Green |
Is Rose’s Fine Food a diner? Let’s look at the facts: The space, on a decidedly not-hip main drag on Detroit’s east side, has been a diner on and off for decades (cousins Lucy Carnaghi and Molly Mitchell leased it, coffee cups and all, last July). The menu, with its bacon and pancakes and fried fish sandwiches, can read like a truck stop’s.
But then there are those “crybabys,” house-baked potato doughnuts glazed with maple and orange zest one day, wild raspberry the next—not to mention that plate of green-onion pancakes with herb-pickle sauce, and that bag of locally milled organic flour used to make the chunky biscuits.
Few diners take the eat local ethos as seriously as Rose’s; fewer still serve a rabbit sandwich on homemade bread. That’s the charm of Rose’s. (And charm is putting it lightly; it’s more like a gravitational pull—one that instantly makes you feel like a regular.) The cousins work to make their restaurant a place that is, as they say, “what real old-school diners were: for all people.” And they’ve succeeded.
Click HERE For The Full Article!
The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is taking art to the streets around Metro Detroit for the sixth year in a row. The DIA announced on Friday the participating cities in this year’s popular Inside|Out program, which brings high-quality reproductions of masterpieces from the DIA’s collection to outdoor venues throughout the area.
Over the past five years, the DIA has installed more than 800 reproductions in over 100 communities. During the 2015 season, eight venues will be participating for the first time, including Midtown Detroit; the Osborn neighborhood in Detroit; Grosse Ile; Memphis; Ortonville; White Lake; Flat Rock; and Wolverine Lake.
“We are delighted at the continued success and popularity of Inside|Out,” said Graham W. J. Beal, DIA director. “Thanks to the Knight Foundation’s sponsorship, we are able to refresh the program and expand partnerships with metro Detroit community organizations.”
Highlights for next year include new images that better reflect the diversity of the museum’s collection and broad interests of communities. During the summer months, the DIA will partner with Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision to create an Inside|Out community garden exhibition. The exhibition will illuminate a handful of Detroit community gardens and provide new programming opportunities within the intersection of gardening, nutrition and art. The DIA will also partner with the Huron River Watershed Council to host an Inside|Out exhibition in the five Huron River Trail towns, an initiative to help develop an arts and culture component on the Huron riverfront.
The DIA encourages each community to plan activities centered around its Inside|Out works. Previous events have included bike and walking tours, bus tours, talks at local libraries, festivals and more.
More than 80 reproductions will be in 10 communities from April to July, and then in 10 other communities from August to October. Each community will have from seven to 12 images clustered within walking or bike-riding distance.
Click HERE For More Information!
Let me introduce you to a few Detroiters I encountered when I returned to the city where I was born and worked for 25 years. After we moved away, for several years we kept a small condo there, overlooking the Detroit River. In the same way you never forget your mother, your heart never leaves your hometown.
I did not seek out Mike Duggan, the energetic new mayor and the first white one in four decades in the largely black city. Or the leaders of businesses and foundations that donated hundreds of millions to help free Detroit from bankruptcy. Or multibillionaire Dan Gilbert, Detroit’s sugar daddy, who founded Quicken Loans, the nation’s largest online mortgage lender. Gilbert moved Quicken to his hometown, bought more than 70 properties (mostly downtown and ripe for rehab), seeded dozens of start-ups, and employs an estimated 12,500 people.
My curiosity was not about the mighty directors of this unfolding drama but the small players who are creating a new city out of what was long dismissed as a wasteland. Some moved in with solid plans; some nurse airy dreams; some subsist on fortitude. Others pray that their candles, so far from the changes, might somehow catch a spark. Detroit’s decay is now its engine: Nowhere else in urban America can you do so much with so little money.
The new Detroit shines downtown. Nearby areas like Corktown and Midtown radiate energy. But around this incandescence skulks the old Detroit, acres of decay and ruin, prairies where the remaining houses stand aloof from each other. The plants that made the vehicles that built this town shed chunks of graffitied concrete. Glass is gone from a million windows, like eyes absent from faces.
I ricocheted from high hopes to despair. But the Detroiters I met, almost to a one, have faith in even an uncertain future. Indeed it’s what defines them. Those who couldn’t summon hope left long ago, if they could.
IT’S POSSIBLE TO DRIVE to downtown Detroit without confronting the still crippled Detroit. The city’s freeways are sunken, hiding its plight, the departure of more than half its peak population. Robert Hake did just that for months after he moved his growing custom sportswear company from the suburbs to the city’s Corktown neighborhood. Called MyLocker.net, it can ship a hundred hoodies for your family reunion in days. “My decision had nothing to do with reviving Detroit,” he tells me from behind his shiny, ten-foot desk, which reflects the skyline. Instead he’d snagged a good deal—an empty auto parts factory the size of two football fields. “But,” he says, “now that I’m part of it, I’m being drawn in.”
Hake, 41, overcame what he admits were deep doubts. Detroit was called Murder City U.S.A. in the 1970s for a reason. He recalls the trepidation he felt as a suburban kid riding into the city, when his parents warned: “Roll up your windows and lock your doors.”
Excited by the city’s new effervescence, he searched Google for graffiti artists, interviewed several, hired one, and gave him a key and instructions: “Do whatever you want, wherever you want, whenever you want.” The walls are adorned with icons of Detroit, from Faygo soda pop to boxer Joe Louis’s fist. He’s hiring locally, adding 70 Detroiters to almost double his full-time staff.
One morning Hake, who still lives in the suburbs, drove outside his comfort zone, onto streets that stretch like worn threads between the freeways. He hauled 400 colorful T-shirts designed by his staff to donate to an elementary school. On the ten-mile drive, he passed street after street of broken-down houses. At the school, though, “I found hallways full of happy, innocent, beautiful children,” he says. “It was heartbreaking to know that those children lived on those streets.”
He thought: How blind I have been. I should give a T-shirt to every kid in Detroit.
Robert Hake is emblematic of what’s happening in this once forlorn city. It is reinventing itself, building by building and idea by idea but, as important, person by person. More tangibly, freed from about $18 billion in debt, the city has money to do some of what needs to be done. It has replaced about 40,000 streetlights ruined by scrappers and time. Police response time has shrunk from almost an hour to less than 20 minutes. And roughly a hundred ramshackle homes are crushed each week.
From his studio a few blocks from MyLocker, Antonio “Shades” Agee, the graffiti artist who’s painting it, isn’t surprised that Hake only recently discovered Detroit’s gloom. It’s easiest to stay on the city’s bright side.
Agee grew up in Detroit. His Hispanic mother still lives in his childhood home, now one of the few on the block, in a neighborhood he doesn't like to visit. It’s not “the new Detroit.” Nor was Black Bottom, Detroit’s vibrant Harlem, where his father played jazz. It was bulldozed in the 1950s for redevelopment and a freeway.
At 44, he is trim from biking; he rarely drives. His right arm—“my painting arm”—is densely tattooed. From the multi-tinted panes of his loft in a former paintbrush factory, Agee has watched Corktown change. He’s a regular at the Detroit Institute of Bagels, just below his window, built for a cool half million dollars. “It still blows my mind to see a girl running down the street and she’s not being chased,” he says.
He’s genuine Detroit—gutsy, driven, growing up when he had to “find water in a cactus.” He says, “Detroit has originality because we don’t have any distractions.” At 15, he was drinking and drugging and tagging. Woodward Avenue, Detroit’s main street, now aglitter with shops and condos, “was so dead I could paint a wall and nobody would care.” Agee transcended the streets. His clients include Reebok, Quicken, and Fiat Chrysler, and even white suburbanites: He painted a grand piano with feel-good slogans and his signature giant lips.
He knows he’s part of a now popular brand, a Detroit that’s tough, resourceful, proud. He resents that the brand has become a talisman for people who hardly know Detroit but boast its name on their shirts. “This big flourishing,” he says, “it’s great! I love it. But most people, they wanna save Detroit. You can’t save Detroit. You gotta be Detroit.”
Click HERE For The Full 3-Part Series!
On May 8-9, Detroit’s Hart Plaza will be transformed into the perfect venue for a brand new street skateboarding contest from the mind of Ryan Sheckler, one of the biggest names in the sport.
The new event, dubbed Red Bull Hart Lines, sets out to produce a high-energy, high-impact skateboard event featuring an innovative new contest format showcasing 21 of the world’s best skateboarders.
Red Bull Hart Lines will feature two distinctive lanes, each with its own unique set of skateable features. The course itself incorporates a mix of existing stair sets, rails and ledges in Hart Plaza, along with additional custom-built features designed by California RampWorks.
Watch the course animation above for a sneak preview.
Alongside Sheckler, many of the biggest stars in skateboarding will be on hand, including Torey Pudwill, Chris Cole, Nyjah Huston, Sean Malto, Ishod Wair, Felipe Gustavo, Wes Kremer, Riley Hawk, Curren Caples and many more. (See below for the full list.)
Each skater will be required to skate each lane once, then for their third run, the athlete can select either lane to better their score. The top score from each lane then will be averaged to determine the skater’s overall score.
“This is a start-to-finish contest, including an element of speed, with a very unique course design that allows each skater to express themselves,” said Sheckler, event creator and competitor. “If I had to explain the contest and skateboarding in one word, it would be ‘fun’ and that’s what I am going for.”
With the majority of the professional skateboarding scene based in California, Sheckler wanted to bring a street competition to a place where passion collides with innovation.
“Detroit is an amazing city with a rich history," he said. "Skateboarding has passion and I want to use that to impact the Midwest and skate scene as a whole.”
Schedule
Pro Qualifiers: Friday, May 8 - 2-5 p.m.
Finals: Saturday, May 9 - 2-5 p.m.
Confirmed skaters
1. Alec Majerus – USA – 19
2. Boo Johnson – USA – 22
3. Chris Cole – USA – 33
4. Curren Caples – USA – 19
5. David Gonzalez – COL – 24
6. David Reyes – USA – 25
7. Evan Smith – USA – 24
8. Felipe Gustavo – BR – 24
9. Ishod Wair – USA – 23
10. Justin Brock – USA – 27
11. Kyle Walker – USA – 21
12. Leo Romero – USA – 28
13. Nick Merlino – USA – 27
14. Nyjah Huston – USA – 20
15. Riley Hawk – USA – 22
16. Ryan Decenzo – CAN – 28
17. Ryan Sheckler – USA – 25
18. Sean Malto – USA – 25
19. Shane O’Neill – AU – 25
20. Torey Pudwill – USA – 24
21. Wes Kremer – USA – 25
22. Youness Amrani – BEL - 23
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