In the 1980s and the early 1990s, numerous restaurants served lunch, dinner or both in the greater downtown area. Then some notables disappeared.
The London Chop House, The Caucus Club, the cafeterias in the Penobscot Building and Silver's Office Supplies, the Bull Market, The Caucus Club, all vanished. Even the McDonald's on Congress shut.
But in the past several years, that's all changed with onslaught of new restaurants in downtown, Midtown, Corktown and Southwest Detroit including Selden Standard, Buffalo Wild Wings, Republic, The Dime Store, Chartreuse, Wright & Company, Parc, Calexico, Green Dot Stables, Johnny Noodle King, Katoi and many, many more.
Plus, the London Chop House reopened in 2012 and the Caucus Club is weeks away from doing so.
Wright & Company
Tom Perkins examines for Metro Times whether the restaurant scene downtown Detroit is oversaturated (though the question really includes Midtown, Corktown and southwest Detroit).
Answers are mixed:
"There's a formula that a lot of people are following: How many restaurants are going to open up and rip off Selden Standard's menu?" Mabel Gray owner James Rigato tells Metro Times. "We're starting to see a rinse and repeat, and this multiplicity is going to get dumber and dumber, and it's a poorer version of its original form. Every time a good restaurant opens up, a few shitty ones open up, so it's not 'too many restaurants,' but a lack of quality."
"The bulk of the business models previously lived and died on sporting events, summer festivals, and those sorts of things, and that's not really true anymore for downtown restaurants," says Jessi Nigl, a former manager at Selden Standard and Slow's.
"But older restaurants that people see as out of date and irrelevant could potentially close. I don't know if there's room for new restaurants to reinvent and reoccupy those businesses. It seems like there will be given the demand for residential property. Detroit is at full occupancy — there's no room in the inn."
"The amount of people living in Detroit wouldn't be able to sustain amount of growth in the restaurant industry, but it's attracting people from the suburbs to Detroit," says Lorraine Platman, who ran a restaurant out of the Millender Center between 2002 and 2009 before opening several locations in the burbs. She returned to the city last year with Sweet Lorraine's Fabulous Mac n' Brewz near Wayne State University "For the first time, suburban people are looking at Detroit as a better place to go out to eat than the suburbs."
