If you’ve been to Silicon Valley, you’ve seen the vast open workplaces at tech giants, who bring in top-flight chefs to keep their employees focused and well-fed. Closer to home, Chicago abounds with industrial-looking cafés like Fairgrounds, where guests are encouraged to work and dine.
But there hasn’t been anything like it in Ann Arbor until now.
Venue, in the old Lucky Market/Kroger on Stadium, is an ambitious, 30,000-square-foot project aimed at remote-working locals, visitors looking for a place to hold meetings and events, and diners from near and far.
Under construction for more than a year, Venue opened completely in early September.
It’s a sister facility to Prentice 4M’s live-work apartments across the street but with far more features, which you’d expect given the $10 million renovation.
“The pandemic kind of spurred all kinds of new thinking about what are we going to do about gatherings and social community,” says Prentice 4M CEO Margaret Poscher. Logan vet Thad Gillies is culinary director. | Photo: J. Adrian Wylie
“The pandemic kind of spurred all kinds of new thinking about what are we going to do about gatherings and social community,” says Margaret Poscher, the chief executive of Prentice 4M.
The dining side was created by Thad Gillies, who ran Logan downtown with his brother Ryan until the farm-to-table restaurant closed in June 2020, an early victim of the pandemic. (Frita Batidos has since expanded into the space.)
Venue’s entrance has shifted to the west side, facing South Industrial, while the front is now fitted with four garage doors that open on nice days. Coworking desks rent for $35 a day or $400 a month for a dedicated space and twenty-four–hour access. There are ten private offices, renting for around $700 a month, “booths” for making private mobile phone calls, a mothers’ lactation room, and a podcast studio. Food can be ordered on an app and brought directly to where people are working.
On the entertainment side, Venue has a bar that seats 150, a private dining area that seats forty, and a 2,500-square-foot event space off the bar. One group has already reserved the events space plus the bar for a November football game.
There are five different menus, including one for cocktails, and one of the stars is gourmet pizza, at around $20 depending on ingredients. Venue can cook five at a time in a new high-temperature oven inside the renovated, 8,500-square-foot kitchen.
There’s also a coffee bar, a small gourmet market, and a section with fresh flowers. While he isn’t trying to compete with Zingerman’s, where he worked as a deli chef for ten years, Gillies says he will stock some of the top-quality groceries that the deli and other Zingerman’s businesses offer.
At one time, Venue planned to feature several different chefs. But after Logan closed, Gillies and Poscher talked about the idea of him becoming Venue’s culinary director. “He’s asking me: what are you going to do with it?” Poscher recalls. “I started to explain it to him, and he goes, ‘I want to run it.’ It’s an undertaking, and he’s the one to do it.”
While the restaurant and bar may have as many as sixty people working, there are no traditional servers. Instead, “concierges” will drop off food and drink to guests, who hopefully will begin receiving their orders within five minutes of sitting down. “It’s kind of a self-guided experience,” says Gillies.
Along with pizza, the menu includes roast chicken at $50, which feeds two to four people, a whole branzino at $85, also meant for two to four, pastas at $18 to $24, and vegan and vegetarian dishes including zucchini kafta at $28, made with Impossible “meat.”
Gillies gets emotional when he talks about his return to the Ann Arbor dining scene.
“It’s very important that it be successful and that people find what they want here,” he says. “I’ve been dedicated to this town. I’ve been cooking food here for about thirty years. Losing Logan was heartbreaking. But to be back cooking in a facility like this is exciting.”
Venue, 1919 South Industrial Hwy., (734) 800–1028. Sun.–Thurs. 9 a.m.–9 p.m., Fri. & Sat. 9 a.m.–10 p.m. experience4m.com/venue
Got a restaurant or retail tip? Email marketplace@aaobserver.com.
