Jeanne Loveland closed Cafe Marie just after Mother’s Day. The gracious letter to customers she sent out earlier in the month urged: “Please continue to seek out small, independent businesses, not only when you’re in Ann Arbor but when you venture out of town as well, because these are the places that give our communities character and uniqueness and make our lives and our world authentic and meaningful.”
Loveland bought out then-partner Dave Loesel in 2003 and moved the cafe from Eisenhower to Plymouth Rd. the same year. She grew up on a farm in Grass Lake: “Hard work was never a problem for me,” she says, “and the last few years, we’ve had the Cafe Marie garden” on her parents’ farm, making it a farm-to-table restaurant. “I know that’s all the fashion now,” she laughs and explains that, when you grow up on a farm, eating what you grow doesn’t seem like an exotic invention.
But Loveland says the restaurant alone was no longer sustainable; she needed to expand her catering business. A large part of catering in Ann Arbor involves the university, but she was unable to crack the code for getting on U-M’s “preferred vendor list,” which she describes as a Catch-22: “They said I had to do a certain dollar amount of business with the university to get on the preferred vendor list, but departments are encouraged to only use preferred vendors.”
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Bruce Hink, who opened Mia Za’s (originally Za’s) on East U in 2005, had plenty to say about its sudden closing. He emailed: “The sidewalk in front of the business was closed/restricted for about three and a half years” for nearby construction, though he notes that “our property tax increased while the city [was] restricting the sidewalk and killing the business … Then combine that with two of the coldest winters and poor football teams”–he claims Za’s did three times more business after a win than a loss. “As a result we did not want to sign a five-year new lease at a higher rent.” Hink also has Mia Za’s in Madison and Champaign, IL.
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A customer at Pier 1 Imports on Carpenter asked a busy cashier why the store was closing. “Because they ‘couldn’t renegotiate the lease,'” she said, her spiky intonation implying that they didn’t try very hard. “They only told us about the closing two weeks ago,” just days before it was announced to the public.
This wasn’t the only lease Pier 1 was not trying very hard to renegotiate. The trade mag Chain Store Age announced in April that Pier 1 was closing 100 stores as part of a “real estate optimization plan,” a smiley-face way to characterize massive retrenchment after dismal losses. Pier 1 at Cranbrook Village remains open.
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On May 15, a couple of waiters stopped at the Creekside on Jackson Rd. to pick up their last checks. One of them, Dave, had been working the previous Monday night.
“By the end of the evening we knew something was going on,” he says, and they were right: it was the restaurant’s last day. “We were offered alcohol instead of information,” he said–the newly unemployed workers were told only that the restaurant had been sold and when it reopened it would be under new ownership.
“You can say I’m disgruntled,” says Dave, who didn’t want to give his last name, but readily admitted he was “the only Dave on the night shift.” He says the owner was Tom Milligan, with two partners. “It was a very poorly run, badly managed restaurant,” he says–a verdict echoed by an Observer staffer, who says she had “one of the worst meals of my life” there shortly before the closing.
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