Downtown Ann Arbor is the most competitive culinary neighborhood in an extremely robust culinary town, but even it is not immune from competition from food delivery services, big box stores and fast food. That is why Main Street Ann Arbor hosts the Taste of Ann Arbor, to bring people downtown to both remind them about old favorites and give people a peak into places they didn’t know had opened or haven’t gotten around to trying yet. And judging by how slammed Main Street was on June 1, it was a massive success.
“I find it really joyous to see everybody get outside, especially when the weather turns really good. I look forward to when they close down the streets and have people out all day long. Over the winter it can get kind of dreary, so it’s nice to see everybody outside,” Vivian Griffin, a student at the University of Michigan, said. “Students definitely make our way to this part of downtown as often as we should. So I think events like this definitely encourage us to get over to the area.”
How it works
Taste of Ann Arbor is pretty straightforward. They close the most prominent few blocks of the city’s main drag, from the courthouse to William Street, and fill the street with tents. Each one is for a different restaurant – and once you collect a series of paper tokens for $1 a piece on Liberty Street, you can pay for sampler portions from each of the restaurants.
“Ann Arbor has a bounty of good food, and often it can feel overwhelming to figure out where I want to dine. This gives me an opportunity to try a lot of things,” Missy Stults, the director of the city of Ann Arbor’s Department of Sustainability, said.
Not everything in downtown’s restaurants cost that much. But a lot of it does – and this provides a fun way to get a bit of what you are missing, or what you might spring for the next time you have a celebration worth coming downtown for.
“I think downtown is great. I grew up in a suburb so I love seeing people coming together for events like this,” Kaleb Stephens, who is visiting from Los Angeles, said. “I got a cookie from Cinnaholic, and that’s definitely the best.”
The city and regional business associations have gotten really good through practice at using events like these to paper over the doldrums. College towns like Ann Arbor can easily run out of enough people to keep local businesses going when most of the student body suddenly stops being around for weeks at a time on a regular basis, hence the city’s encouragement of the Art Fair, this festival, Bloom, and the community’s embrace of Sonic Lunch.
Linda Kuehnel, and assistant manager at Cherry Republic, said that Taste of Ann Arbor is especially important for foot traffic and getting people to know that businesses like Cherry Republic are there. Having worked at various businesses across downtown for years now, Kuehnel said, “Taste of Ann Arbor helps with the sampling mentality that we do all the time. We’ve even noticed that we’re going through our samples more quickly today – we’re an extended booth for today, which is really nice.”
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How eating local can be eating green
Sustainability is also at the heart of the event. A lot of the restaurants, like Echelon, use local farmers – an enormously greener way to feed people than importing food from out of state or internationally.
“We are here talking about A2ZERO, and handing out [bamboo] silverware to help people minimalize plastic,” Stults explains. “And we’ve actually worked with a lot of the restaurants. Those who have sustainable food are labeled, so you can sample sustainable, plant forward, sustainable food and really help people understand sustainable food tastes delicious.”
Sunday afternoon felt almost like Art Fair in miniature. Luckily, the long lines moved fast, making it possibly to bounce from booth to booth.
“My partner Eric found out about it and said ‘why don’t we have a little date day downtown?’ and I said ‘for sure – I like eating, I like Ann Arbor. Why not combine the two?” Phillip Vaneyl-Godin, an Ann Arbor resident attending for the first time, said with his sample in hand. This allowed him to try food from places he’s “never had before. I had the Jolly Pumpkin buffalo slider, and Shalimar.”
Drew Saunders is a freelance business and environmental journalist who grew up just outside of Ann Arbor. He covers local business developments, embraces his foodie side with reviews restaurants, obsesses over Michigan's environmental state, loves movies, and feels spoiled by the music he gets to review for Ann Arbor!
