Jul 21, 2014 | Dine, Marketplace, Restaurant Reviews |
Elsewhere in the former Borders space, Sheila Li hopes to open her Sweetwaters franchise in time for the Art Fair. Li’s husband, Roy Xu, owns the environmental company GreenBright, says Sweetwaters co-owner Lisa Bee, so...
Read MoreJul 18, 2014 | Marketplace |
“Sorry We Close” said a handwritten sign on the door of the Westgate BP. One of those increasingly rare gas stations with a repair shop, it had also been a popular stop for people needing a U-Haul truck on the west...
Read MoreJul 12, 2014 | Marketplace |
A couple doors down from Shabby Chic, Heidi and Eric Langenderfer have opened Little Conductors, a toy store and train rental business. Eric, a carpenter by trade, built a colorful lawnmower engine-powered trackless train out of...
Read MoreJul 12, 2014 | Marketplace |
If you recognize these brands–Hardy, Winston, Keystone–you know what to expect in the white house next to Terry B’s restaurant. Bailiwicks Outdoors opened in time to outfit 2014’s trout fishers with these...
Read MoreJul 12, 2014 | Marketplace |
There’s still a phone store on the corner of Washington and Fourth, but instead of Wireless Toyz, it’s now T-Mobile. With a radiant white interior you can see from across the street, it looks like an art gallery....
Read MoreJul 9, 2014 | Marketplace |
A New Yorker cartoon by David Sipress depicts a couple sitting in a Starbucks cafe. Its caption reads, “Are we in this Starbucks or the one down the street?”The same could be said for Subway. In fact, when it comes...
Read MoreJul 9, 2014 | Marketplace |
Get Some Burritos opened in the former Oriental Express on Packard. It’s the first time in awhile you could get some anything on the block. The Blue Front closed several months ago, making four contiguous empty storefronts...
Read MoreJul 6, 2014 | Marketplace |
“We’re far more technical than any other bike shop in town, without a doubt,” says Oscar Bustos, owner of Great Lakes Cycling, which has moved into a new space on West Stadium. “Not many bike shops have...
Read MoreJul 5, 2014 | Dine, Marketplace, Restaurant Reviews |
It’s hard to assess the offshoot of a popular local institution without comparisons. So here’s the short version: the new Knight’s Downtown Steakhouse is better-looking than its Dexter Ave. parent, but the menu...
Read MoreJul 4, 2014 | Community, Marketplace |
Over the years, the Fake Ad Czar has been called many things. Devious. Unfair. Lanky. And his favorite, clever. Until this month, however, he’d never been called a theological scholar.That changed with Marty...
Read MoreJul 3, 2014 | Marketplace |
John Davis’s Colton Bay Outfitters slid out of the world just as another high-end outfitter of trout fishing equipment slid into it. Lauren Kingsley, one of the owners of the newly opened Bailiwicks Outdoors in Dexter,...
Read MoreJun 30, 2014 | Featured, Marketplace |
Driving by the deserted, dilapidated one-story building at 2285 S. State, no one would ever guess it was the birthplace of the office cubicle, an invention that radically changed the American workplace. The much-maligned...
Read MoreJun 26, 2014 | Marketplace |
Next door to Chelsea Bakery, William Harris–owner of Just Imagine, a book, toy, and music store–is strumming a guitar while he chats with a customer. At the end of March he moved his business, which he opened four...
Read MoreJun 23, 2014 | Marketplace |
GCO became The Floor Trader when its parent company acquired Stone Mountain Carpet Mills, merged the two, and neither company wanted to take the other’s name. “I like the new name,” says Matt Merkel, who opened...
Read MoreJun 22, 2014 | Marketplace |
In May, Dexter residents Kim and Saing Yam opened the Chelsea Bakery in the former Glee Cake & Pastry space on Main Street–and Kim says the community response has been “overwhelming.” The husband-and-wife...
Read MoreJun 21, 2014 | Dine, Marketplace, Restaurant Reviews |
Change is not always about better or worse–and sometimes it’s not even that different. Take Seva, the vegetarian restaurant that had been downtown on Liberty since, like, the hippie days (1973). For many, it was...
Read MoreJun 20, 2014 | Marketplace |
Flophouse Skateboards, underneath Taco King, started when another basement business, Eco Sign Solutions, began spilling over into Taco King’s storage space. After some polite nagging, Taco King owner Saber Naghmouchi...
Read MoreJun 18, 2014 | Marketplace |
Bogdasarian, forty-three, is the president of the Promanas Group, an Ann Arbor real estate investment firm, and he feels fortunate to have made it through the Great Recession. “In the end of 2007 and pretty much all of...
Read MoreJun 15, 2014 | Marketplace |
Of the abrupt March closing of Dexter’s Coney Island, landlord Loreen McCalla had this to say of Jim Cacini and son Brian, who opened the business in 2012: “They’re in the hole $10,000 to me. I told them when...
Read MoreJun 14, 2014 | Marketplace |
It took the sharp eyes of reader Robert Koernke to notice this subtle change: Curry Up is now Curry On. Calling Will Shortz, the puzzle master. Can’t you just hear him saying: “Take the word ‘curry,’...
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