The opening of Slows Bar BQ marks a return to Arbor for co-owners and brothers Terry (left) and Brian Perrone: the two are U-M grads. | J. Adrian Wylie
“It’s been a pretty open secret that we wanted to be here,” says Terry Perrone of Slows Bar BQ, a Detroit destination for two decades. For years they’ve catered local events, hosted food truck tailgates, and served lunch weekly at University and Mott Children’s hospitals. Now they have a permanent presence in downtown Ann Arbor.
It’s a return three decades in the making for Terry and his brother Brian. The Detroit natives each graduated from U-M and pursued careers stemming more from their part-time student jobs than their undergraduate studies.
Terry, now fifty-four, studied English literature but eschewed grad school when Tower Records offered to send him to Argentina, followed by stints in Boston and Dallas as a retail executive. Brian, two years younger, majored in psychology while working at Touchdown Cafe (now Blue Leprechaun), Maude’s (on the S. Fourth Ave. site of Ruth’s Chris Steak House), and Blimpy Burger.
“When I finally started culinary school, it was like the lights were going on: This is it! This is where I should be,” says Brian.
A few years later, slinging burritos from a pop-up at the Lager House in Corktown, he met the janitor, former model Phil Cooley, who’d just bought a cheap storefront a bit farther out on Michigan Ave., diagonal to Michigan Central Station.
They renovated the space, reclaiming old joists as design elements because they couldn’t afford new lumber. In 2005 they opened Slows Bar BQ, named for the characteristic “slow and low” cooking method, Brian explains.
At the time, “Corktown was really left behind,” he recalls. “There wasn’t a lot going on there. The [Tiger] stadium was closed and was never going to reopen. The train station was totally falling apart.” Four months later, Detroit hosted Super Bowl XL, and the Tigers made the World Series in 2006 for the first time in twenty-two years.
“You had this massive influx of press from around the world looking for where to eat in Detroit,” Terry says. “And who’s the shiny new toy?” Major media mentions have buoyed the business ever since, including a September 2025 visit from The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon.
But hype alone doesn’t sustain success. For that, the brothers credit the cuisine’s accessibility and their consistent execution of it. Terry came on board early on to lend management expertise. They added a carryout and catering operation in Midtown in 2010 and a Grand Rapids outpost, which closed in 2023 after nine years. By then, the brothers, along with catering director Josh Keillor, became the sole owners, looking for new growth opportunities.
They committed to a new location in Berkley, near where their late father taught at the Royal Oak high school they attended, and it’s on the verge of launching as well.
But their interest in Ann Arbor remained. Jackson Dearborn Partners kept an eye out for possible sites, and their dream came to fruition at a place already set up with barbecue smokers: Mission Restaurant Group’s Blue Tractor. Jackson Dearborn and Mission’s Jon Carlson are partners in Slows’ Ann Arbor operation, which includes the basement Mash bar and music venue.
They’ve kept Dave Horchem as the general manager for the three-room, 280-seat combined site, and he expects the staffing to reach eighty. “Catering, private events, dine-in, third-party delivery, Mash—there’s just lots of moving pieces,” he says.
Brian clearly brings a chef’s sensibility to the menu, taking inspiration from various regional styles in creating tastes uniquely his own. Their best-selling sandwich is The Reason ($15) because “it’s the reason we opened the restaurant, really the reason we do barbecue,” he says. It’s smoked pork butt, pulled and bathed in a sweeter version of a North Carolina sauce, with coleslaw and dill pickles. For most offerings, diners choose among the six sauces at the table.
Mac and cheese is the most popular of their eight side dishes, but Brian is proud to have recently brought back potato salad after a long hiatus. The prep work had gotten too onerous as the business grew, so he switched from Idahos to unpeeled red-skinned potatoes, cut thicker, keeping the other components the same.
“We want something on the menu to be affordable for everybody,” says Terry. “We’re not fine dining, but we certainly want to be a place where you can do a meeting, you can do a first date, a rehearsal dinner, you name it.”
Slows Bar BQ, 207 E. Washington. (734) 545–1699. Sun.–Thurs. 11 a.m.–9 p.m., Fri. & Sat. 11 a.m.–10 p.m. slowsbarbq.com
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