If one could ascribe a theme to the menu - which includes ham terrine, carrot soup, Williams’s take on spaghetti and meatballs (tobiko is among the ingredients) and potato doughnuts - it would be “charmingly hyper-local” the makings of Lady of the House’s salads travel only several blocks from an urban farm to Williams’s plates (and some of the restaurant’s china originally belonged to her grandmother).Ī list of Motown attractions wouldn’t be complete without a music store, and vinyl collectors come from around the world specifically to flip through the display crates at Peoples Records.

Raised in the suburb of Northville, the chef Kate Williams told the Times’s Pete Wells that she “fell in love” with Detroit after returning home because of a death in the family Williams then “decided this is the only place I want to have a restaurant.” She opened Lady of the House last fall and it quickly became a regular on best new restaurant lists, even earning a James Beard Award nomination for the same superlative. Both are situated outside of Detroit’s city limits (in Dearborn, home to one of the largest Middle Eastern populations outside of the Middle East, and the neighboring Dearborn Heights), but it’s well worth the short car ride to fill up on falafel, perfectly spiced shawarma, hummus and stuffed grape leaves. But a more literal measurement of the establishment’s reputation could be the number of pitas made each day by its co-founders Khalil Ammar and Zaki Hashem and their kitchens: approximately 4,000, at each of Al Ameer’s two locations.

In 2016, the Lebanese restaurant Al Ameer received an America’s Classic award from the James Beard Foundation (honorees must have been open for a decade and be locally owned), the first of its kind in the Michigan food scene. Patrons stop in on Thursday, Friday or Saturday evenings for a mixed drink made with “pop” (namely Faygo Rock ’n’ Rye) and whatever’s on the menu - sometimes grilled cheese, sometimes Peking duck. (Mongo himself took an indirect route to speakeasy ownership, running a chain of hair salons as a young man.) Still, Café D’Mongo’s Speakeasy has the distinct vibe and assorted wall hangings of a storied dive. Larry Mongo opened his eponymous downtown bar and restaurant in 2007, but the space has had a number of past lives - most famously, as Cafe Joseph in the late ’80s, then as the Wax Fruit Rhythm Café nightclub, run by Mongo’s son Jerome in the early ’90s. One can truly see the whole city without leaving the building.

The word “hotel” is actually a bit of a misnomer, since the Siren itself has all of the makings of a destination: 106 guest rooms, ranging in size from bunked twin beds to a duplex penthouse, a lobby coffee bar serving Michigan-roasted beans, a pair of restaurants (Albena, helmed by the James Beard Award nominee Garrett Lipar, and the still-in-progress Karl’s, by the chef Kate Williams), a cocktail lounge, a florist, a karaoke bar, a two-chair barbershop, the Siren’s own retail space and a rooftop, to be completed next year, that looks into the Comerica Park baseball stadium and onto Canada, just across the Detroit River. But the five-months-old Siren Hotel has breathed new life into the Renaissance Revivalist exemplar, restoring its travertine floors, the plaster detailing on its ceilings and its terra-cotta signs. The 14-story Wurlitzer building has been an unmissable part of Detroit’s skyline since the mid-1920s it housed, for decades, a musical instrument company before emptying out in the ’80s and then falling into disrepair.

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