Marketplace

Not much was left of Linens ‘n Things the first week of November. The bankrupt chain was down to selling the crown moldings ‘n things. Tom Goldberg, of landlord ATMF, says he hasn’t yet signed a new tenant for...

It took the Chipotle Mexican Grill chain fifteen years to come to Ann Arbor. But once it got here, it went viral in just eighteen months. The third Ann Arbor Chipotle opened in October on South State, bringing monster-size...

NYPD is slowly and carefully franchising its New York–style pizza. While the two campus locations will continue to be called NYPD (short for New York Pizza Depot), there are now three locations of Uncle D’s, as the...

When Ismail Houmani opened his first cigar store in 1996, he didn’t smoke cigars. He just wanted in on the action. “In 1996, the cigar business was booming,” he says, so he opened his first La Casa de la Habana...

The showroom of Être Design was dark and its doors locked for most of the past year, but the little jewelry store hadn’t gone out of business. In fact, business was so good that there wasn’t time to open the store...

The year’s not quite over, but I’m going out on a limb and naming as the most contentious restaurant closing of 2008 the demise of Kerrytown’s Lunch at Everyday Cook. It made headlines by putting the spotlight...

Okay, it’s a Saturday night and neither of you feels like cooking, so your sweetie proposes a big night out at . . . the grocery store?Not exactly the height of romance. Or perhaps it is, if your idea of romance includes a...

I suspect that my eight-year-old son no longer believes in Santa Claus, but I haven’t been able to prove it. I’ve never asked him outright, and any attempt to trip him up would be pointless because he’s wilier...

Ashley Terrace, the new condo at the corner of Huron, has suffered from bad timing and worse architecture (see “The Good, the Ugly, and the Hideous,” p. 21). But it’s found a persuasive salesman: one of its...

When a store is called Tree City Diapers, people figure it sells nothing but diapers. And when Molly Ging started Tree City Diapers in her basement in 2003 to cater to a growing demand for cloth diapers, diapers were all she...

The Glass House Cafe, which opened in September, sits in a beautiful location—in Palmer Commons, part of the university’s life sciences complex on the inside curve of the Huron-Washtenaw junction. The cafe occupies one of...

In early November owners Tricia and Hans Masing, who started the original Tree Town Toys in Traver Village in 2006, opened a second location in Briarwood’s Sears wing.Briarwood doesn’t attract many mom-and-pop shops;...

A few days before the Blue Tractor opened, while the floors were being polished and the tractor parts being hung on the walls, brewmaster Fred Rouse was offering anyone in sight a sip from a beaker of sludgy tan liquid that was...

Mudpuddles at Kerrytown doubled its size in October by knocking down a wall and taking over the space next door. Stairs had to be added also—the floor next door was three feet higher. “That’s because the ceiling on...

I’m having trouble with my metaphors here. I want to say that walking into a restaurant for the first time is a blind date. But if you had as bad a first date as we did on our initial outing at the Black Pearl, it would...