Coffee and Cocktails

Ann Arbor restaurants are awash in workers with wide-ranging resumes, but few can match Terry McClymonds. He served the first meal at Escoffier, the fine French restaurant that opened in 1982 on State St. and later moved to the Bell Tower Hotel. He also tended bar at the Aut Bar for twenty years, and hosted a trivia night there until it closed in the pandemic. And now, at seventy-five, he’s again doing trivia at a bar—but this time at the Argus Farm Stop on Packard.

Argus is a low-profit, mission-driven company known for its year-round farmers markets and cafés. Why add alcohol?

“We had such great energy in both of our locations in the morning,” says Bill Brinkerhoff, who founded Argus with his wife, Kathy Sample. “But generally, by two or three in the afternoon, it’s kind of a rare person who is still looking for espresso drinks.” And because income from the cafés lets Argus offer extremely generous payments to the food producers who sell there, “we really felt obligated to find a way to make a great use of the buildings.” They got a tavern license through the Downtown Development Authority for their original location at W. Liberty and bought a Class C license for their new  Burns Park spot.

That put Argus on the leading edge of Ann Arbor’s latest food trend. Thanks to newly available liquor licenses and relaxed city parking requirements, two other café-bars opened this year, with two more in the offing.

At TeaHaus on N. Fourth Ave., Lisa McDonald is selling tea-infused cocktails and mocktails alongside her dozens of varieties of tea. In the former Peaceable Kingdom on Main St., Mark Wilfong just added local beers, wines, and a few liquors to the coffee offerings at his new Hidden King Cafe & Bar.

In Kerrytown, Chris and Lisa Hutton are remodeling their Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea franchise to add a bar while working out the operational details with Sweetwaters owners Lisa and Wei Bee. And just north of the Broadway bridges, Pete Baker, Joe Bollinger, and Hubert Raglan are building out the future Lowertown café and bar with the goal of opening this fall.

All are careful to distinguish their hybrid offerings from full-service bars. Several even offer the same disclaimer, stressing that they’re not opening “a bar-bar.”

“I’d say it’s more like in Europe,” says Brinkerhoff, “where you might see a place in a neighborhood on a corner where you could go down and get some food and/or have a beer or wine.”

Both Argus locations also host a busy roster of events, from food pop-ups to a reading group.

McClymonds’ trivia nights are a highlight. A neighbor and patron of the original Argus on Liberty, he says he admires Brinkerhoff and Sample as “wonderful, compassionate capitalists.” They invited him to share his trivia skill last year, when they added a second Packard location, reorganized their café at the corner of Dewey, and added the craft beers and wines they’d already been selling on Liberty.

The selective addition of alcohol “has been an amazing success,” McClymonds says. “It’s more of a generalized community space than just going to a place with a liquor license.”

He has a glass of wine himself on trivia night. The player who calls out the correct answer gets a coupon that’s good for 25 cents off a beverage, or that can be saved up to claim a T-shirt. That’s the part McClymonds likes best, because guess whose picture is on the T-shirt?

“They’re real collector’s items,” he says. “I’m so pleased to have a T-shirt with my face on it!”

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“I’ve been wanting to do this since I opened fifteen years ago,” says TeaHaus’s McDonald. “It just never kind of lined up. Also, in Washtenaw County it’s extremely hard to purchase a liquor license. There are very, very, very few available, and they were cost-prohibitive for many years.”

The license situation improved after the 2020 census, when the city got eight new licenses based on its growing population. And some older business owners “thought the pandemic was a good time to retire,” she says, making more locations available.

“I’m not actually a big drinker,” McDonald says. She just wanted a place where she could meet friends for a glass of wine without having “to clean my bathroom or get dressed up”—and realized TeaHaus could be that place.

“People weren’t ready for tea-infused alcohol” when she opened fifteen years ago, McDonald says. With a two-year-old and a three-day-old baby at the time, she concedes, “It may have also been that I wasn’t ready.”

McDonald started selling bulk teas and accessories then added tea service with pastries and savories. More recently, she’d “been consulting on menus for a lot of bars that have at least one cocktail with tea in it, like Ravens Club, Detroit Street Filling Station, and Slurping Turtle.”

She took the leap to serving alcohol herself after completing a rearrangement and remodeling this spring. “To now be able to sell those in my own store is kinda fun,” she says.

TeaHaus no longer offers a full lunch menu, but “we still have 230 teas. We still have the French macarons. We still have the pastry that we always made in-house.” And they “still have people sitting here for six hours buying one cup of tea, so it’s not about monetizing the space,” she says. “It’s just about having a different space.

“I can come in on a Friday night and we’re not big, and we’re only open ’til ten, so I would have maybe eight or twelve people having a cocktail, but there might be twenty people still having tea.”

She says she has employees who “gravitate to just working the bar, and employees who gravitate to working the pastry case, but all are ServSafe certified, which is one of the legal requirements.” Also, most of the drinks are “prebatched, because they do need to sit a while and let [the alcohol] blend with the teas.

“We call it a tea bar and lounge.”

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Mark Wilfong has been around the building at 210 S. Main since he was a five-year-old helper when his mother, Carol Lopez, cleared out the building for her shop selling fine crafts and eclectic gifts.

The Peaceable Kingdom closed when Lopez retired in 2017. Before she died last year, she encouraged her son to pursue his vision for the Hidden King. As Dave Algase reported in Marketplace Changes last month, it “takes its name from a hidden mural of Gambrinus, a legendary European hero associated with beer and brewing, standing regally, with a lion underfoot.” Revealed and then re-covered during that first renovation, a small portion of it is now visible while the rest awaits a future professional restoration.

The Hidden King was awarded one of the city’s new liquor licenses. “I’m finding the best local products,” Wilfong says, including beer from Mothfire Brewing Co., mead from Bløm Meadworks, and some of Lisa McDonald’s TeaHaus specialties. One of his favorite drinks is a “gin and tonic made with Mammoth gin and TeaHaus’s bitter lemon tonic syrup with double quinine.”

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The Huttons’ Sweetwaters was the company’s first franchise, in 2005. Soon it will be the first Sweetwaters to also sell beer, wine, and cocktails.

Like Hidden King, it won one of the city’s new licenses. Coffee is a daytime business, Hutton says—“eighty percent of the sales are five o’clock and before”—and he’s looking to build on that. He says he has “Lisa and Wei’s blessing,” but “at the same time, I can’t just serve whatever I want. They have to review everything and make sure it conforms to their brand standards.

“We’re trying to keep everything simple at the beginning,” he says. “There will be a menu that [the current staff will] serve off of … I’m not going off and hiring trained bartenders. Organically if it grows into that, two or three years from now, sure.”

And it will “still be a coffee shop,” Hutton stresses. “This is just to augment and give another place for people to casually sit down and talk in the evening around something different than a caffeinated drink.”

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“Downtown isn’t the be-all and end-all,” Pete Baker says. “Cars aren’t the be-all and end-all. Talking to people in person is a renewed luxury and social experiment.”

That’s the vision Baker, Joe Bollinger, and Hubert Raglan have for Lowertown when it opens this fall. 

“I think especially as everyone has gone remote in a lot of work, the opportunities for getting out of your house are less and less,” Baker says. “So having something nearby—a real neighborhood establishment—is feeling more and more important.

“We actually started out thinking of this primarily as a bar but then we’re like, ‘What do we do the rest of the time? Let’s have some coffee.’ Now we’re seeing this as at least fifty-fifty, if not more, of a coffee service place—because of that spread in the hours and the desire for places to hang out, not to mention a lot of people are not always looking for an alcoholic drink anymore.”

Baker admits that none of the partners has ever owned a bar or a coffee shop. But, he says impishly, “We’ve done a lot of research, if you know what I mean.”

While they won’t get downtown’s foot traffic, Bollinger’s business, Sic Transit Cycles, will be one way to build their community base. “They do a lot of group rides,” says Baker, “hundreds of people riding for forty miles on a Saturday.” Come fall, “rather than starting in the parking lot [of Sic Transit], they can start at our coffee shop—and meet there for a beer afterward.”