Marketplace

A family once shut out of Ann Arbor home ownership now has a lawn to mow and taxes to pay. A young couple skipped a starter house and moved straight to a multibedroom family home. And a professional couple saved hundreds of...

This is a tragedy in three acts.The setting is a huge, festively decorated L-shaped room in Chelsea’s Clocktower Commons. Adobe walls are adorned with colorful murals, including one of a lady kneading dough who seems...

I’ll admit right up front that I don’t have much experience with chain restaurants—this summer, my friends had to walk me through a Dairy Queen excursion like a visitor from outer space. But I try to keep an open...

Andrus McDonald says the name of his new nightclub, the Fifth Quarter, refers to several things: the club’s Fifth Avenue location, the five clubs he hopes to eventually run (a second spot in Lansing is in the works), the...

Theresa Whitley, who is forty, has spent most of her life arranging flowers. “I’ve been doing flowers professionally at a flower shop since I was thirteen years old, but I’ve actually been arranging flowers...

Stepping into Bagger Dave’s the first time, I felt as if I were entering a giant time-and-space blender. Take a 1950s soda fountain, add a dash of 1980s sports bar, season with local nostalgia blowups from the 1920s and...

Mike and Jennifer Spadafore had twins last fall. This fall they opened a twin business, Main Street Bagels, right next to their Twisters Ice Cream in Chelsea.The bagel shop was carved out of some spare space at one side of the...

Renaissance has brightened the uninspiring southeast corner of Division and Washington, formerly parking space for TCF Bank. Owner Roger Pothus regrets the loss of foot traffic he had in his former location on Main, but he says...

Most restaurants try to give things away to customers when they open, but Ann Arbor’s fourth Panera, when it opened the last week of September in Upland Green on Plymouth, was taking—asking customers to donate...

Elmo’s Hideaway, beneath Elmo’s Main Street T-Shirts, is no Birdland or Village Vanguard. Still, it sure gave owner Elmo Morales a thrill when his first paying customer was musician Dick Siegel, who reserved the...

While young Kathryn Loy, owner of Pastry Peddler, was on the phone with a technician trying to get her credit card machine to work, the older woman at the counter explained that this was exactly the kind of annoying glitch that...

Wladyslaw and Nell Narowski started out online selling big tables—really, really big tables. “They go from a five-foot table that seats six and expand up to twenty-two feet and seat twenty-four,” says Nell.Size was...

Once again, Saline’s Downtown Diner has changed hands and its name. Former owner Keith Saloum decided to pursue a career in civil engineering, so he recruited Jamal Sway, who spent a few weeks observing before deciding on...

Cupcake Station owner Kerry Johnson credits the popularity of his cupcakes to variety and portion control. “If you’re having a party with twelve people, you can come in and get twelve different kinds of...

Mahek reestablished the Indian restaurant presence on East Washington in late August, a year after Shalimar Cafe’s departure left it a curry-free zone. The new restaurant was still young and uneven during my visits in...