From the archives: 25 years of Detroit Free Press Restaurants of the Year

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26-03-2025

We're marking 25 years since the Detroit Free Press named its first Restaurant of the Year.
This year's pick will be announced next week, along with our annual list of Top 10 New Restaurants and Dining Experiences.
But as we prepare to reveal the Detroit Free Press/Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers 2025 Restaurant of the Year, let's look back in our archives for what we said about previous winners:
Alpino's ability to honor Alpine traditions so well is due in large part to its hometown. Michigan, one of the eight American states that make up the Great Lakes region, though notoriously flat, bears similar geographical attributes that typify Alpine cuisine. Fresh waters serve as natural habitats for mild-flavored fish, and lush woodlands are ideal environments for edible plants, fungi, nuts and wild berries. Cold winters have even groomed great food preservationists, giving life to sweet jams and pungent pickles.
This agricultural parallel allows Executive Chef J. Colin Campbell to cull ingredients from Michigan purveyors and farms in the surrounding Great Lakes region at Alpino. It allows him to ladle a silky cream sauce teeming with plump morels sourced from Michigan over crisp Wienerschnitzel and allows diners to slather slices of housemade bread with knifebacks of smoked butter churned Up North, where grass-fed cattle graze Michigan's verdant pastures.
More: Alpino brings a foreign, yet familiar cuisine to Detroit
At Ladder 4 Wine Bar, steak au poivre is fanned across your plate. It's perfect, nearly twinkling as the light bounces off melted fat and flecks of sea salt. Its edges are charred from an open fire and every surface of the meat and the velvety sheet of cream sauce underneath it is freckled with cracked black pepper.
There's pan con tomate. The sourdough is crisp where the edges thin like the delicate outskirt of a handwoven lace doily. A puree of sweet tomatoes ripened in the heat of the Core City sun at Hio Farm is spread across it like a runny jam dotted with tomato seeds. You top it all off with four slivers of anchovies and suddenly, the plate is even better than the way it's done in Madrid.
Despite the elegance of each dish, the experience at Ladder 4 is laid back.
This year's Restaurant of the Year is not a restaurant. But with an outstanding wine bar, a commitment to ethically and sustainably sourced wines and an elevated culinary menu, Ladder 4 is a pillar of all-around excellence.
More: Detroit's Ladder 4 Wine Bar named 2023 Restaurant of the Year
(Chef-owner Hajime) Sato's defiance of the status quo is as evident in Sozai's hours of operation as it is in the restaurant's overall mission and commitment to sustainability. He challenges diners to consider why restaurant hours should begin and end in double zeros in the same way that he calls you to question how your eating habits contribute to the world's growing population of endangered aquatic species. If you enjoy delicacies at seafood-centric restaurants, there's a chance you play a role in the consumption of unethically sourced ingredients. Sato wants to talk about that.
The 13-seat sushi bar, where the only element separating diners from Sato is a strip of blond wood reclaimed from local abandoned homes, is the heart of Sozai. It's the place where you'll sink your teeth into sweet, plump scallops and if you ask, it's the place you'll learn about the origin of those scallops and the sustainable fishery Sato worked diligently with to bring to your plate.
More: Clawson sushi bar Sozai named 2022 Detroit Free Press Restaurant of the Year
For 21 years, the Detroit Free Press has named a Restaurant of the Year. That annual tradition is taking a pause in 2021 as we instead turn our praise and attention to a dozen chefs and restaurant operators who expanded that defining spirit of hospitality in the first year of the pandemic by extending it to exhausted hospital workers, isolated seniors, the food insecure and front-line workers in their own hard-hit industry.
It's certainly just one piece, but (Phil) Jones' community work in 2020 — from securing thousands of pounds of raw products for the Too Many Cooks In the Kitchen initiative to helping coordinate massive Friday food pickups at the TCF Center to feeding 5,000 hungry Detroiters on Thanksgiving using food that would otherwise go to waste and the turning around and doing it again on Christmas — has secured him yet another title we hope he'll proudly accept: the Detroit Free Press/Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers 2021 Chef of the Year.
More: Chef of the Year Phil Jones distributed 100,000 pounds of chicken in height of pandemic
It's been a little strange to watch national media heap praise and accolades on Middle Eastern restaurants in places like Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Oakland, Calif., when we know that metro Detroit — from Dearborn to Sterling Heights and beyond — is the real American mecca of Arab cuisine. Sure, stalwarts alongside Phoenicia like Al Ameer and Shatila have received their share of attention in recent years, but they're always positioned as antique artifacts, not exactly hallmarks of modern dining.
Enter: Leila, which confidently stepped into the latter role upon opening, quickly becoming Detroit's pinnacle of modern Lebanese cuisine in one of the city's most visible historic quarters. Leila serves best-in-class versions of food that's both familiar to and emblematic of the region, while exuding a grace and elegance that defies a large, high-volume restaurant.
More: Leila is the 2020 Detroit Free Press Restaurant of the Year
'Ima in Japanese kanji means 'now', as in 'in the moment,' ' chef-owner Michael Ransom says of his Madison Heights restaurant's name.
'My philosophy behind the 'now' thing is that food is an escape. When you're sitting down at a table with great food and great people … nothing else matters. It's kind of an escape from reality a little bit. It's that break in the middle of your day or night that really does allow time to stand still.'
With Ima — which also has a location in Corktown — Ransom has seized the larger culinary moment as well.
Ima has all the hallmarks of a trendy, chef-driven spot, where each dish is carefully sourced, thoughtfully constructed and colorfully presented by friendly staff in a minimalist space blaring electronic music; where French techniques underpin au courant Japanese and Korean flavors and ingredients that the classically trained chef grew up on.
Fine-dining Ima decidedly is not, instead it rides the current wave of fast-casual service that's almost necessary to turn a profit in a mid-priced restaurant where two people can enjoy apps, entrees and drinks for less than $50. Food of this gourmet quality is rarely this affordable.
More: Ima named Detroit Free Press Restaurant of the Year for 2019
The journey starts at the door.
Ten or so courses of impeccably sourced, improbably cooked food that will unfold over a span of three hours. Depending on your level of devotion to these types of experiences, it might turn out to be one of the best meals of your life.
All the superlatives you hear tossed around about great food apply, but let's be concrete: chef Thomas Lents creates the finest, most precise dining experience Detroit has seen in years. (If not ever.)
More: Chef's Table in downtown Detroit is our 2018 Restaurant of the Year
Don't let the name fool you: There's nothing drab about Mabel Gray.
The Hazel Park restaurant glows an ardent orange during packed dinner hours, smoldering with the heady aromas of north African green harissa and pungent Thai fish-sauce caramel from its kaleidoscopic global pantry.
For a place that shares the name of a fabled Lake Michigan recluse and her legendary ghost, the restaurant is surprisingly full of life and conviviality, a serried mass of hungry patrons often crowding the 3-by-6-foot waiting area while '90s hip-hop blares from the speakers.
But its moniker makes sense when you realize that the restaurant is chef-owner James Rigato's own culinary anthem, inspired more by the eponymous folk song by the band Brown Bird than by the legend of the hermit Alice Mabel Gray.
More: 2017 Restaurant of the Year: Mabel Gray
The menu may change with the seasons, but at Chartreuse Kitchen & Cocktails in Midtown Detroit, spring is always in the air.
You could point to the green-colored walls, the produce display in the front window, the living wall of succulents or the curtain of dried flowers near the back of the dining room as reasons for the season.
But it's more than that. To be sure, executive chef Doug Hewitt's dignified rustic dishes — think earthy mushroom ricotta with preserved onion on toasted sourdough, or Michigan-farmed shrimp with andouille sausage, spring peas, black lentils and tangy pickled cabbage — are exceptionally fresh, even in the depths of a gray Detroit winter.
More: 2016 Restaurant of the Year: Chartreuse
Two or three years ago, few people would have expected a restaurant of this quality and style to open near a derelict corner a block from Cass Avenue.
But chef-owner Andy Hollyday and co-owner Evan Hansen believed so firmly in the city's comeback, they bet their futures on it, turning a graffiti-scarred dry cleaners at Second and Selden into an oasis for food lovers.
Their timing couldn't have been better: Detroit's restaurant scene blossomed last year in a way it hadn't in decades — and Selden Standard is the best of the best.
More: 2015 Restaurant of the Year: Selden Standard
Chef Garrett Lipar and his staff of four create their alchemy in a 9-by-15-foot kitchen — a space smaller than some walk-in closets. There is no gas cooktop, no walk-in cooler and a freezer that holds only ice cream. But Lipar works around the obstacles, using countertop induction units instead of gas burners, for example. The kitchen's under-counter refrigerator is small, so he must receive more frequent deliveries, "but that means we are always giving our guests the freshest things," he says.
More: 2014 Restaurant of the Year: Torino
Bacco has not only survived, it has thrived by finding innovative new ways to serve customers; stayed fresh by embracing lighter, healthier ingredients, and remained laser-focused on producing dishes that shine with flavor, sophistication and integrity. With its unwavering focus on culinary excellence and its ability to evolve without sacrificing standards, Bacco Ristorante is truly one of Detroit's great dining destinations.
More: 2013 Restaurant of the Year: Bacco
By some definitions, they were upstarts. And by any logical measure, their idea was a gamble. But guided by their own tastes and an intuitive sense for what diners want, they have created a food-driven destination in White Lake Township that hits one right note after another — a restaurant not only in tune with today's tastes and needs, but one that takes seriously the economic and environmental issues that should guide what we consume.
What the Woodshop offers customers is honest, down-to-earth and real. The plates are aluminum baking pans; the potato salad gets spooned right on the tray liner. Iced tea comes in a jar, and the sauces are in plastic bottles. The servers don't wear uniforms, and they stop and chat with folks they know. We told you: It's casual. But there's nothing casual about the care, quality and integrity that go on in the kitchen — or that went into resurrecting a restaurant from its recessionary ashes.
Forest Grill "reminded us that exceptional food isn't defined by price, exotic ingredients or gimmicky techniques — and that exceptional restaurants can be as near as the next corner."
Fire licks the back of the wood-burning oven. Fire glows in the mesquite and hardwood charcoal that fuels the custom-built, 6-foot-long grill where steaks are cooked. And fire slowly roasts the Beast of the Day — a whole suckling pig, young goat or baby lamb that will cook for 6 to 10 hours in the open stainless steel rotisserie beside the dining room.
At 5 p.m. on a recent Thursday, an air of expectancy — or maybe nervousness — fills the kitchen. It is time for the nightly tasting ritual, when chef de cuisine Steven Fretz or his sous chefs, Dan Campbell and Marc St. Jacques, taste and judge every sauce and garnish on every dish on the menu, before the restaurant opens.
And then there are Saturday mornings, with pony-tailed Mark Ellison mixing Bloody Marys and mimosas at the bar. All eight seats at the U-shaped counter are filled with regulars he greets by name as he sets up their usual without being asked. He's so well-liked, people wait for a seat at the bar just so he can be their server.
That's the thing about Seldom Blues, the elegant Renaissance Center restaurant that has evolved into Detroit's most distinctive and memorable dining experience: You can't isolate just one element and say that's its secret. It's the distinctive combination of all of them — a balance of great atmosphere, smooth service, delicious food, and soulful, sophisticated music.
They're part of the charcuterie revival occurring at top restaurants all over the country. Such food might seem out of place at Five Lakes, given chef Brian Polcyn's avowed disdain for trends, but he didn't just discover it, he's made it for years.
Ask him how he can turn just a handful of ingredients into such complex, intriguing dishes ... how he makes even bland whitefish memorable ... why his vegetables are so vivid and the surface of his seared mahimahi so crisp. Surely there's a trick to all that flavor.
Excellent service is never listed on a menu. It can not be artfully arranged on a plate, drizzled with chocolate or swirled in a wine glass. Service is that intangible, ephemeral part of the dining experience that sends us home with warm feelings and fond memories — or leaves us shaking our head in irritation or disappointment. "Why can't anyone do something about poor service?" we ask each other. It's not that most restaurants aren't trying. But delivering great service may be the most difficult part of a challenging business. It takes effort to build, and determination to maintain. And if it falters, as it so easily can, it takes courage to say, "We are good, but good is not great."
"When I'm in other cities, people say, 'Oh, Detroit. Those people don't know food — they won't support a place like that. They're a meat and potatoes kind of town.' But they used to say that about Chicago, too, 20 years ago, and look how many great restaurants are there now."
Dining out has become such an integral part of our lives that what many of us long for in a restaurant — besides excellent food, service and value — is a place that feels like our own, whether we're celebrating an anniversary, lunching with friends or having dinner with a client. Crafting a menu, an atmosphere and a setting that will give guests that feeling has been their first priority.
For many of the region's most influential business and industrial leaders, Tribute is a favorite haunt. For many other people, it is a once-a-year splurge. But for all who come, a meal here is never ordinary, and the welcome is always warm. It is, above all, a collection of people who know and love food — and who love sharing their enthusiasm.
Send your dining tips to Free Press Dining and Restaurant Critic Lyndsay C. Green at 313-223-4410 or [e-mail]. Follow her on Instagram and X @LadyLuff. Read more restaurant news and reviews and sign up for Eat Drink Freep, our food and dining newsletter.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Free Press Restaurant of the Year history: 2000-2024