Metro Detroit's Top 10 New Restaurants & Dining Experiences for 2025
The list includes traditional restaurants as well as a pop-up, a pair of bakeries and a breakfast diner.
The full list is below, for quick reference.
Want to dig deeper? Check out our all-time list here.
From Union Joints, the hospitality group behind eateries, such as Vinsetta Garage, Union Assembly and Mom's Spaghetti, Lincoln Yard joins the roster with its little sister, Little Yard. The side-by-side establishments come as a twofer: Little Yard, with an all-day breakfast menu, soups and coffee; and Lincoln Yard, offering brunch, lunch, dinner and spirited beverages.
Full review here.
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For many years, the east side of Detroit's culinary scene has been driven by fast food and fast-casual restaurants. When it opened last summer, Savoy offered an upscale dining experience for the Cornerstone Village neighborhood. Led by chef Melba Dearing, the restaurant delivers an amalgam of Southern dishes and Creole flavors, plus a few fun riffs in between.
Full review here.
JP Makes and Bakes might be new to the New Center neighborhood, but the bakery's breads, cakes and cookies are well established among the Detroit dining scene. Pastry chef Jonathan Peregrino first introduced the bakery as a pop-up concept back in 2021 and quickly wielded his Filipino foodways as his superpower.
Full review here.
One of the most highly anticipated openings of 2024, Vesper made a splash with its collection of wines by the bottle or glass. The new wine bar is operated by Rob Wilson, an alum of Kiesling in Detroit's North End, and partner Symantha Duggan. The duo has established a space that defies the traditional expectations of a stuffy wine bar.
Full review here.
On a frigid Saturday morning just after 10 a.m., when the bakery opens, a line snakes around Forest Bakery, the 488-square-foot shop in Oak Park. Guests, largely families with friendly dogs on leashes and small children in tow, are there to nab the bakery's selection of sweet and savory pastries before they're gone.
Full review here.
The finishing touch on each plate created by Franchesca Lamarre is a toothpick flying the Haitian flag. As if the dishes themselves aren't indication enough, the garnish reaffirms the Haitian American chef's cultural pride.
Full review here.
The coffees at sister shop Encarnación Café remind me of the cups I sipped at my Puerto Rican grandmother's house when I was well below the standard drinking age for caffeine.
The food at La Fonda is equally nostalgic. I've long lamented the lack of Latin American cuisine beyond Mexican in the Detroit area. La Fonda Street has managed to bring many of the classics under one roof.
Full review here.
There's something endearing about a retro diner. Maybe it's the simplicity of those ubiquitous diner foods — thick, whipped milkshakes, malts and floats, patty melts and all-day pancakes. Or, maybe it's the old-fashioned décor — the counter-service stools, leatherette-backed banquettes and vintage accessories like jukeboxes plucked from before your time, and soda machines from an era you'd give anything to relive.
Whatever the reason for the gravitational pull, everyone longs for a neighborhood diner, and Norm's has all the makings of a great one.
Full review here.
When a restaurant draws inspiration from a particular country or region, it can be difficult not to veer into kitschy territory. Leña, the new Brush Park neighborhood restaurant with Spanish influence, strikes a beautiful balance.
Full review here.
It is not hyperbolic to say that you can feel the heat at Puma, Detroit's Argentine street food newcomer.
At the request of chef-owner Javier Bardauil, contractors carved a gaping hole into the façade of the former Core City neighborhood auto garage for a live fire that would burn during service. The heat from the flames toasts your ankles as you approach the front door.
Full review here.
Save the Date: On Tuesday, May 27, Puma, the Detroit Free Press and Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers will host a Top 10 Takeover dinner. Full Top 10 schedule and ticket information at Freep.com/top10.
For a chance to win five $100 gift cards to dine at restaurants on the 2025 Detroit Free Press/Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers Top 10 New Restaurants & Dining Experiences list, visit chevydetroit.com/community/giveaways/roy25.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Top 10 new restaurants in metro Detroit for 2025
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Homebuyers made a huge mortgage gamble. It's backfiring spectacularly.
Matt Hutton was living the millennial homeowner dream. He scrimped and saved until he was able to buy his first place in 2019, paying $324,000 for a two-bedroom townhome in a suburb west of Denver. When mortgage rates dropped to record lows during the pandemic, he refinanced to slash his interest costs. Then home values ballooned, enabling him to sell in August 2024 for a gain of roughly $150,000 in just about five years. Hutton and his wife parlayed those earnings into their own slice of the American dream: a bigger, newly built single-family house on a premium lot. Shop Top Mortgage Rates Personalized rates in minutes A quicker path to financial freedom Your Path to Homeownership But Hutton's gilded path soon morphed into a cautionary tale. The house itself was nice, with fresh appliances, ample light, and clear views of a lake just beyond the property. The couple started to notice some drawbacks, though. For one, Hutton's new commute sucked. "It took forever to get to the highway," the 34-year-old tells me. Simple trips demanded at least half an hour behind the wheel. The neighborhood was still a jumbled mess of construction, with hundreds of homes yet to be delivered. Even little stuff, like the sound of the wind whipping outside, got annoying. By January, only a few months after they'd closed on the house, Hutton and his wife were already starting to talk about moving. Their dissatisfaction left them in a bind. Buying and selling so quickly is usually a recipe for financial loss — real estate agents pretty much always recommend staying put for at least a few years to make up for all the transaction costs. Plus, the Denver-area market softened considerably over the past two years, with more homes sitting for sale as buyers started biding their time. But there was one big issue that put Hutton in an especially bad spot. In lieu of cutting the actual list price, the builder of his current home had thrown in $30,000 worth of incentives to lure buyers like Hutton. The bulk of the deal sweetener came in the form of a "mortgage rate buydown," a financing maneuver in which the builder fronts some cash to help buyers get a lower borrowing rate from the builder's in-house lender, often for just a few years. The incentive is supposed to allow buyers to stretch their budgets and soften the blow of higher mortgage rates. Some takers are betting that they'll be able to refinance for better loan terms before their mortgage snaps back to the full rate. Homeowners who got temporary buydowns in 2022 or 2023 have seen their gamble on rates fail spectacularly. The typical mortgage rate still hovers above 6.5% — roughly around the levels that many buyers back then were hoping to dodge. Given the slowing market, industry analysts, and even some executives, warn that these homeowners could see little in the way of equity gains before the full cost of the mortgage hits. If those buyers try to turn around and sell soon, they may end up having to slash the price just to push a deal through. Hutton's predicament is an example of the pain that could be in store for others who made a similar tradeoff, agreeing to a higher sticker price in exchange for lower interest payments. Rick Palacios Jr., the director of research at John Burns Research and Consulting, has been sounding the alarm about the growing risks for buydown takers since last summer. "People are going to start putting those homes back into the market," Palacios tells me, "and I think it's going to be a bit of a shock to them, what they have to reprice at." The steep rise in mortgage rates in 2022 caused all kinds of havoc for the housing market. Buyers retreated to the sidelines or searched for workarounds that would stave off the pain of higher monthly payments. Sellers had to get real about the fact that they might not get the flood of attention, let alone offers, that listings enjoyed in 2021. And builders found themselves in a tricky spot. After seeing all the demand in the early days of the pandemic, they'd started work on a ton of new houses. With the market grinding to a halt, they'd have to figure out some way to unload them once they were completed. The answer, in many cases, was a buydown. The deals offered an elegant solution for buyers mourning the fact that they'd missed out on the rock-bottom, sub-3% mortgage rates that everyone scored earlier in the pandemic. "Without something along those lines, the market would've been almost completely frozen in that price range," Lydia Creasey, Hutton's real estate agent, tells me. On their websites, builders touted borrowing rates well below the prevailing levels, keeping sales moving by enticing buyers with cheaper monthly payments. By December 2022, three-quarters of builders surveyed by John Burns Research and Consulting said they were offering buydowns. Regular sellers don't typically offer this maneuver to buyers. But for builders who could afford to eat the cost — while conveniently steering buyers to their in-house lenders — buydowns represented "a silver bullet," John Burns analysts wrote in late 2023. "It really saved their business," Palacios tells me. In a normal housing downturn, he says, builders would have started cutting prices on their homes. The rate buydowns, though, were "like a mouse trap that allowed them to not have to adjust price." There are a few ways a buydown can work. One option is the permanent buydown: The builder agrees to pay around 5% or 6% of the sale price to lower the mortgage rate for the entire 30-year loan, usually by one or two percentage points. Let's say someone takes out a $400,000 loan at a time when the typical rate is around 6.5% (pretty close to today's prevailing rates). If the builder buys down the rate to 5%, the buyer would be saving almost $400 every month. The initial outlay may be relatively low — in this example, about $24,000 — but over the length of the 30-year loan, the borrower's savings would come out to almost $140,000. Homebuilders and their mortgage companies are cool with this deal because they've often locked up cheap money that they can use for the loans, and because they don't want to get stuck with a bunch of homes on their books. Plus, they really don't want to cut prices, since doing so would tank the values of all the other homes nearby. The other popular option is a temporary deal, which usually comes in the form of a "2-1 buydown." The builder sets aside cash to lower the buyer's mortgage rate by two percentage points for the first year and one point for the second year, after which it bumps up to the prevailing rate at the time of the home purchase. Again, let's say the prevailing rate is around 6.5%. A buyer with a 2-1 rate buydown would get a rate of 4.5% in the first year, 5.5% in the second, and 6.5% from there on out. If they took out a $400,000 loan, they'd be saving more than $500 every month that first year and more than $250 a month in the second year. That's a total savings of more than $9,000. In theory, this would allow a buyer to stretch their budget a little further to get the place they want, while also giving them some flexibility to refinance down the line if rates drop. "The thing with residential real estate is that it's not about the investment," Eric Agar, an executive at the California-based brokerage firm Pardee Properties, tells me. "It's about your lifestyle. It's about your family. It's about you being at a home that you love. And if that allows you to do it today, instead of a year from now or two years from now, well, that's a huge pro." The popularity of these deals soared alongside mortgage rates. In April 2021, just 17% of mortgage borrowers got a permanent buydown of one percentage point or more, data from ICE Mortgage Technology, a real estate software firm, shows. By the same point in 2023, that share had surged to nearly 45%. Temporary buydowns are more niche — they accounted for almost 5% of mortgage originations in late 2023, but have mostly hovered in the low single digits over the past few years. Still, there's no denying the prevalence of buydowns in the world of newly built homes. Last fall, Zillow published the results of a survey showing that 45% of buyers who purchased a home in the past year nabbed a mortgage rate below 5%, despite rates trending significantly higher. More than a third of those buyers said they got a lower rate because the seller or homebuilder offered them a deal on the mortgage. Both permanent and temporary buydowns come with potential pitfalls, but people who agreed to time-limited incentives are starting to face a particularly harsh reality. To be clear, short-term buydowns aren't the reckless, adjustable-rate mortgages that fueled the housing bubble in the early 2000s — buyers who snag these deals have to prove they'd be able to handle the maximum amount they'll end up paying after the interest rate snaps back. But being technically able to pay that extra money and actually shelling it out each month are two different things. There are still plenty of ways for buydown takers to end up in hot water. With temporary buydowns, some agents and analysts warn that fresh homeowners may be counting on rates dropping in the near future, allowing them to refinance to a new, cheaper loan before their payments bump up to the normal level. For buyers who got into the market two or three years ago, those dreams are fading fast. There's also the issue of lifestyle creep — if someone is used to saving a few hundred bucks on their loan each month, the jump to the full amount could be a bitter pill to swallow. Last summer, though, Palacios began warning of a more dire scenario. His concern was aimed at buyers who got a buydown — permanent or temporary — a few years ago and are now looking to sell for one reason or another, like a new job, new kid, marriage, or divorce. These homeowners face a decidedly weaker market. Many areas of the country, particularly construction hotbeds like the Sun Belt, have more homes sitting for sale than at any point since the onset of the pandemic. The typical mortgage rate has yet to slide in a meaningful way. Home prices are up less than 2% nationwide from a year ago, data from the real estate firm Redfin shows, and major metros like Houston, Austin, and Jacksonville recently posted year-over-year price declines. While buyers in 2022 or 2023 might have been willing to accept higher prices in exchange for savings on their monthly payments, they usually can't pass along those benefits to the next owner of the house. If they want to get a deal done, they might have to either cut that once-inflated price or pay tens of thousands of dollars to offer a rate buydown to the next buyer. An executive at KB Home, one of the nation's largest builders, recently said in an earnings call that many customers are "overpaying" for homes that offer these incentives, suggesting they could have a harder time clearing a profit in the future. "They're tied into this higher price that they're going to be stuck with forever until they sell that home." If you so much as dipped your toe into the housing market sometime in the past few years, there's a good chance you encountered the phrase, "Marry the house, date the rate." The mantra got plenty of airtime when mortgage rates spiked in 2022 — the prevailing sentiment among agents, lenders, and real estate execs was that the jump in rates would soon blow over. Don't stress too much, the logic went, because you can always refinance when rates drop back down. Better to just find a good place while you can. That mindset has so far turned out to be wishful thinking. And while there haven't yet been signs of widespread strain in the market, homeowners who got a buydown just a few years ago may be facing a significant jump in their monthly payments or the prospect of selling for far less than they'd hoped. "I'm hearing more and more stories of buyer's remorse," says Jess Uphoff, a mortgage lender who previously worked for a homebuilder. Not long ago, a temporary buydown seemed like a win-win: Builders could keep list prices higher while still passing along savings to buyers in the form of lower monthly payments. But if one of those buyers is trying to sell now, they'll likely be competing against the same builder who sold them their home — "only the builder has been steadily lowering prices or layering on new incentives." Uphoff says. "That means homeowners often can't resell for what they originally paid." At the end of May, for example, the homebuilding giant Lennar said its average incentive per home had stretched to nearly $60,000, up from $44,000 a year prior. Rate buydowns aren't always a trap for buyers. People who got a permanent buydown a few years ago may feel pretty good about that decision, given that rates haven't yet dropped significantly. But Lauryn Dempsey, a real estate agent in the Denver area, says she counsels buyers to make sure they'll be staying in the home for at least five to seven years if they get one of these deals. "Where I'm running into challenges right now is with the people who bought a couple of years ago that want to sell," Dempsey tells me. "I'm bringing estimated net proceeds that have negative numbers attached to them, so the seller has to bring cash to the closing. And I know I'm not alone in that right now." Hutton, the homeowner in the Denver area, fell into this camp. He and his wife paid nearly $800,000 for their new house in 2024, while the builder bought down the mortgage rate by about one percentage point. That may not sound like a lot, but that meant they were paying hundreds of dollars less in interest every month. The Huttons won't be sticking around to enjoy those benefits, though. When I talked to Hutton in mid-August, he and his wife had just closed on the sale of their home, his second in roughly a year. They managed to sell the house for $800,000 — almost exactly what they paid for it, but down from their original asking price of $850,000, which factored in some of the additional upgrades they'd made to the place. The buyer also requested that the Huttons pay $40,000 for a rate buydown to match the terms the builder was offering for other new homes nearby. They agreed to the deal. Hutton says he worried that if they wavered on a sale much longer, they'd only have more new homes in the neighborhood to compete with, each of them offering a bevy of incentives. "The interest rates were killing us, because no one was buying with that," Hutton tells me. "So the only way for me to get my house sold was to offer an incentive, pretty much." Hutton walked away from his first sale with six figures in his pocket. Roughly a year later, after the latest transaction, all that money is gone. His agent, Lydia Creasey, even dipped into her commission to cut the buyer a check for $350 at the closing table — a rare scenario, she says, owing to the unusual circumstances of the deal. "It was the right thing to do in this situation," Creasey tells me. Hutton and his wife are now living in an apartment, biding their time until they're ready to take another stab at finding their dream home. "I won't jump the gun," Hutton says. "I'm going to make sure to do my homework." James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team. Read the original article on Business Insider Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Axios
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RTP startup uses AI to fight health insurance denials
A Research Triangle Park startup wants to make appealing health insurance denials easier through a new artificial intelligence tool. Why it matters: A growing number of startups are turning to new AI tools to help patients navigate complex policies and byzantine processes to appeal insurance denials, according to NBC News. The number of prescription drug claims denied by insurance grew by 25% between 2016 and 2023, according to the New York Times. And in 2023, Affordable Care Act insurers denied 20% of claims, Axios reported. Driving the news: Enter Counterforce Health, a startup founded at the Frontier coworking campus in Research Triangle Park. The company's AI assistant drafts customized appeal letters that comb through a patient's policy, looking for the best line of defense, greatly reducing the amount of hours many patients spend drafting appeals. At the moment, few patients appeal denied claims at all, according to an analysis by KFF. Zoom in: Neal Shah, a former hedge fund manager turned startup founder, has been trying to change the health care industry he has found frustrating for years, through a succession of startups run by a handful of employees in RTP. Shah, who left his job on Wall Street to move back to North Carolina to take care of sick family members, is the founder of CareYaya, an online platform that helps connect people looking for at-home care workers with students studying health care. That platform has taken off in the past three years, growing from hundreds of workers based at Triangle-area universities to thousands across the country. Now, he's focused on expanding Counterforce Health, which he co-founded last year to provide free AI tools to patients and funding through several grant awards. The company's platform uses a variety of AI models to run its appeals process, pinging medical journals and insurance review commission data to make a case for why a patient's appeal should be granted. He views it as a way to counteract the algorithms that insurance companies use to deny claims. (Some insurance companies are currently being sued for using algorithms to deny claims, Axios previously reported.) What they're saying: "You end up spending hours and hours researching, fighting on the phone and just stressing the hell out," Shah told Axios about the current appeals process. "And many people will be too intimidated and scared to do that." In some ways, it's become a battle of AI versus AI in the insurance world, Shah added, and if the patient doesn't have a tool, "you lose." What's next: Right now, the Counterforce tools are free for patients and clinics to use. Some clinics are using the service, like Wilmington Health, to make it easier to draft appeals for its patients, and some pharmaceutical companies have begun reaching out to the team about the tools.
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Southern African leaders meet in Madagascar to chart path for self-reliance
Southern African leaders are meeting in Madagascar to decide how to make the region more self-reliant and less vulnerable to global economic shocks after years of instability and falling foreign aid. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit gets underway in Antananarivo on Sunday, with Madagascar taking the bloc's rotating presidency for the first time. Leaders from 16 countries will set the course for the region's future, discussing how to boost trade from within and cut dependence on outside partners. The theme this year is clear: remove barriers, move goods faster and keep more value at home. Opening the SADC Council of Ministers on Tuesday, executive secretary Elias Magosi said the region is being squeezed by higher customs tariffs, shrinking aid and political unrest abroad. 'It is becoming increasingly evident that we are more likely to succeed when we depend more on our own resources than on external support over which we have absolutely no control,' he said. 'To achieve this, we must strengthen intra-regional trade, remove trade barriers and invest in essential infrastructure.' Southern African bloc decides to end military mission in DRC Building up manufacturing SADC wants manufacturing to make up 30 percent of its GDP by 2030, nearly triple today's 11 percent. The aim is to build an economy that can keep going when the global market stumbles. Madagascar's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rafaravavitafika Rasata – who chairs the Council of Ministers – said all member states need to be part of the plan. 'By combining the maritime, economic, environmental and cultural potential of the islands with the resources and agricultural and industrial power of the continental member states, we can build the autonomous and competitive SADC we want,' she said. Southern African forces set to deploy in eastern DRC to quell M23 rebel militia Political tensions The summit comes at a time of political strain in Madagascar. Former presidents Marc Ravalomanana and Hery Rajaonarimampianina have criticised holding the event in Antananarivo. In a joint statement, they accused President Andry Rajoelina's government of presiding over a worsening political and economic climate. They cited alleged restrictions on peaceful protests, what they called the 'llack of real independence' of the electoral commission, and a situation in which 80 percent of the population live below the poverty line. They warned that pressing ahead without tackling these issues 'would undermine the credibility of the SADC'. Rajoelina rejected their accusations, saying his predecessors were trying to discourage SADC leaders from attending. He called the summit an historic opportunity for both Madagascar and the region as the island takes the bloc's leadership for the first time.
