Making a Pointe

The simple but solid City Kitchen in Grosse Pointe fills a dining gap on the east side

Restaurant dining in the Grosse Pointes has long followed what might be called the Eliot Spitzer theorem: If you want something more exciting, go find it in another city.
Restaurant owners, people in the trade, and more than a few good citizens of the Pointes themselves have openly wondered why a set of communities that’s so affluent don’t support restaurants.
The Pointes have produced very few top restaurants in the greater Detroit area through the years, a sharp contrast to the very restaurant-happy communities of Oakland County. And, it’s not for not trying. Jimmy Schmidt couldn’t make it with his Italian place Chianti in the late 1980s. Its successor, One23, went under. More recently, Sparky Herbert’s, which had been extremely popular and inexpensive, closed. As did Tom Brandel’s superb Tom’s Oyster Bar, the flagship of that group.
If anybody understands the Grosse Pointes and its eaters, it’s Chick Taylor, owner of City Kitchen on Kercheval in Grosse Pointe, one of the area’s newer efforts. “I’ve lived here all my life, and absolutely it’s true,” Taylor says with a chuckle when asked about the phenomenon.
Taylor opened City Kitchen in 2006, and has shrewdly tried to position it in the gap left by both Tom’s Oyster Bar and Sparky Herbert’s. “I wanted to have a place that was upscale, but very casual and offered top-quality food,” says Taylor, who for 18 years managed Joe Muer’s, the long-gone seafood restaurant in Detroit. When Muer filed for bankruptcy in 1997, Taylor bought Joe Muer’s second restaurant in Southfield, which he eventually closed in 2004.
City Kitchen sits in the former Moosejaw store on Kercheval in Grosse Pointe’s business district, across the street from The Barkery, a pet boutique where your dog can have its teeth and nails cleaned, and sandwiched between Village Toy and dress store Dawood.

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This article appears in the May 2008 of Hour Detroit.
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