After establishing Taste Kitchen as a mainstay of Ann Arbor’s fine dining scene, owner/chef Danny Van has branched out with a passion project: Red Lotus, dedicated to plant-based cuisine. Van went vegan for about a year a few decades ago, but he found it professionally incompatible with his career ambitions and the need to taste his meat and seafood dishes.
“I’m at the point right now that I’m able to do this and not have to worry about the financial part,” says the Vietnamese-born Van, who came of age in Houston and trained under a master chef at a country club there. Taste Kitchen was itself an audacious early pivot from the sushi concept that first brought him to Ann Arbor. It was a particularly harsh winter—not ideal sushi weather—and he also realized that sushi prep was too repetitive to satisfy his culinary creativity. “So I decided to gut everything out. And people thought I was crazy, right?” he beams.
Now he’s spending most of his time in the neighboring Michigan Theater storefront that he leased when Elevation Burger went down just before the pandemic. Starting slowly with lunchtime hours, Red Lotus shares several elements with Taste Kitchen: an elegant yet casual full-service experience, a fusion of international influences, and an ever-changing menu.
“I feel like food, it’s gotta evolve. It’s gotta change. So that keeps people more interested, you know?” Van says. He plans to utilize local farms for produce, shift with the seasons’ bounties, and glean feedback from a new base of customers who’ve gone meatless. Van will next transform the traditional bar area into more of a coffee and juice counter.
Related: Taste Kitchen
While still a seafood aficionado, Van cites both health and spiritual reasons for the focus on meatless meals. “Our food system right now, I just feel like [there’s] a lot of things wrong with it: the cross-contamination, the hormones, and the way we slaughter the animals … that leaves a negative energy, so when we consume that energy it kind of goes through our system,” he says.
Like its namesake plant, he hopes Red Lotus will take root in the community and eventually sustain all-day operations: “I want to push it to the point where [when] people come in here, they say, ‘Wow, I can’t believe Ann Arbor has plant-based food at this level, and not expensive!’” Entrées are in the $13 to $15 range.
Red Lotus, 529 E. Liberty. (734) 369–4241. Tues.–Sun. 11 a.m.–4 p.m. Closed Mon. tastekitchena2.com/red-lotus-kitchen-menu
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