Editor’s Letter: This Month Marks the 300th Issue of ‘Hour Detroit’

Editor Kate Walsh on the magazine’s milestone and selecting the 2022 Restaurant of the Year
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For more than 25 years, we’ve been the award-winning authority on everything Detroit — from the arts and automobiles to fashion and food — bringing you these stories via our big, beautiful pages each month. Our mission since 1996 has been to discover and share narratives about the unique people, venues, and institutions that make up the fabric of metro Detroit.

Kate Walsh
Kate Walsh

I consider it fortunate timing that I joined Hour as its eighth editor just as our editorial team, led by writer and editor Dorothy Hernandez, was narrowing down our annual Restaurant of the Year honor. Unlike other annual features that highlight the best Detroit has to offer, this one does not include a variety of venues and individuals; we choose just one restaurant. So, this pick is a big deal, one that we keep close to the vest until the issue is published. As you’ll read in the issue, this year’s Restaurant of the Year was chosen not only for the chef’s impeccable, innovative food and the restaurant’s expert, welcoming service but also for its resiliency and ingenuity during the last two challenging years.

As part of the restaurant-selection team, I found that dining at some of the metro area’s best restaurants was a great way to dive back into Detroit after moving back from New York with my family seven months ago. It felt both wonderfully new and familiar, since my roots are firmly in the Detroit area: My dad worked for Ford Motor Co. for decades; my great-uncle Harry F. Kelly was governor of Michigan in the 1940s; and my brother and I shared a Detroit Free Press paper route in Royal Oak, throughout junior high and high school. 

Coming into the editor job as Hour Detroit was approaching its 300th issue was another piece of great timing for me. As I paged through Hour’s back issues in research for our commemoration, I was reminded of some of the brilliant storytelling that the editorial and design teams have produced over the years. That will undoubtedly fuel exciting ideas for the magazine’s future. There’s one thing I know will remain constant: our mission to serve you, as the leading authority on this region and its people.

I hope you enjoy this stroll down memory lane as much as I did — and that you get the opportunity to dine at our 2022 Restaurant of the Year.


This story is part of the March 2022 issue of Hour Detroit. Read more in our digital edition