Opening a new restaurant and bar in a city that fancies itself a foodie town is a risky business. But Regents Field chose not to play that game. The successor to Cafe Felix is a straight-up sports bar, offering reasonably priced pub standards in a jovial atmosphere where diners and drinkers can revel in their shared passion for sports.
Elegant details left behind by Cafe Felix add some allure to what co-owner and manager Matt Leach describes as a “sports bar for adults” with plentiful screens, free Skee-Ball, darts, and a generous daily happy hour.
For Leach, the bar is “a dream.” A portrait of his grandfather Dick Leach, who “caught every pitch” for the Wolverines at the fabled 1953 baseball championship, shares space on the wall with a portrait of his father Rick Leach, the U-M sports hero who started at quarterback for four years and went on to play Major League Baseball. Matt Leach himself is the co-host of the sports-talk show “The M Zone” with Jamie Morris on WTKA, which broadcasts weekly from Regents Field during basketball season. In football season, the bar hosted live podcasts by Wolverine legends Thomas Guynes and Che Foster, offering insiders’ perspectives of the game peppered with glory stories from their years on the field.
It remains to be seen whether a sports bar will do better than a European-style bistro, but Regents Field seems to have hit the ground running.
Regents Field, 204 S. Main. (734) 800-4143. Daily 11 a.m.-2 a.m. regentsfield.com
