“It is easy to imagine that well over half of the town’s most interesting business deals, new relationships, heart-to-heart conversations, and entrepreneurial ventures … benefitted from, or were influenced by, one of the restaurants that appear in the following pages.”
So writes Zingmaster Ari Weinzweig in his intro to the new, photo-rich paperback Iconic Restaurants of Ann Arbor. I found it helpful for time travel through many long-lived culinary landmarks I’ve heard about (and in some cases read about in novels of Marge Piercy and others) but had arrived in town too late to experience.
Indeed, the book has photos and tales from the fifty-five-year reign of the Sugar Bowl ice cream and penny candy shop at 109 S. Main and of the original Pretzel Bell (whose bells rang from the 1930s until the 1980s for athletic victories and to alert customers to phone calls). Montages evoke traditions borne over decades at Drake’s, Mr. Flood’s Party, the first Bimbo’s, and Indian Summer natural foods.
But the stories of spectacular debacles are where co-authors Jon Milan and Gail Offen really shine. Have you ever heard of Lulu’s Storyville Saloon, which in 1967 and 1968 brought in national jazz and folk acts and then suddenly went bust? How about La Seine, the one-year wonder that Lulu’s replaced on S. Main–a French haute cuisine “cautionary tale” with Limoges china, crystal chandeliers, nine owners, and an employee named Ruth Reichl (who went on to become a superstar among culinary writers).
You can learn why Sze-Chuan West on W. Stadium had such an extreme stucco jungle cave decor: in its original life as Kales Waterfall Supper Club, it was designed in 1963 to woo and wow patrons with intimate nooks and a namesake thirty-five-foot burbling fountain.
The organization of the book is a bit haphazard, and the quality of the photos and illustrations varies. But there’s plenty of intriguing info about spectacular successes and perhaps even more spectacular failures of yore. As local social history, it’s a treat.
Iconic Restaurants of Ann Arbor is $22.99 at local bookstores or at arcadiapublishing.com.