
Update: Echelon Kitchen and Bar is slated to open Thursday, Feb. 6. Reservations are now open on exploretock.com/echelon
As a young man, Joseph VanWagner left behind his native Michigan to seek opportunities in the culinary world.
He honed his chef skills at several Michelin-starred restaurants like New York City’s Daniel and Chicago’s Blackbird and Alinea. During that time, he noticed a pattern: much of the best produce the restaurants sourced came from Michigan farms.
“My philosophy for many years has been that no one’s really pushing for what Michigan tastes like,” VanWagner says. “In Michigan, we’re the second largest producer of food in the United States; we have the second largest biodiversity to California, and so much of our amazing food goes to great restaurants in other states. It’s just kind of disheartening.”
Perhaps that’s why, after departing from The Dixboro Project early last year, VanWagner took on an executive chef position at an upcoming restaurant that calls itself “a love letter to the local bounty of the state.” The name of the eatery is Echelon Kitchen and Bar, a concept put together by Doug Zeif of Next Hospitality.
The restaurant has cultivated a close relationship with Ann Arbor’s Argus Farm Stop. “They are essentially our produce company,” VanWagner says. “And then we’ll fill in the gaps with other farms that we really love to work with.”
The restaurant will operate at 200 S. Main Street, formerly a BD’s Mongolian Grill.
The food and drink team includes level two sommelier Taylor Schmidt Johnson, who previously worked at The Royce and Michael Symon’s since-closed Roast; as well as pastry chef Ben Robison, who helped craft the pastry menu at Le Suprême.

The menu, which will change “almost daily” depending on what’s fresh, will be a la carte. It will feature both large and small format plates, all of which are designed to be shared. Wine, beer, cocktails, and mocktails will also be served.
The restaurant will also offer three types of tasting menus — one for omnivores, one for vegetarians, and one for vegans. Guests can watch their dinners be prepared at the tasting counter, which sits in front of the open kitchen that includes a charcoal grill and wood-fired stove.
Seasonally, guests can expect a vegan dish with cabbage that is pickled, then char-grilled and served with an okonomiyaki pancake and tonburi (a seed nicknamed “land caviar” due to its appearance, which comes from the summer cypress tree). VanWagner also plans to serve a rotating salad composed of the day’s freshest vegetables. Menus will incorporate pasta, meats (sourced locally, whenever possible), and even seafood.
“Obviously, we don’t have seafood in Michigan. But I love seafood, so it’s going to be on the menu,” VanWagner says. “When we can’t source from Michigan, we will source the best product possible.”
Eventually, the Echelon team hopes to secure the license to do its own dry aging. There’s also a staff member who’s licensed to sell mushrooms; and foraged ingredients will be a regular part of the menu.
“Foraging is a huge part of Michigan cuisine,” VanWagner says. “It allows you to work with something that nobody else is providing their guests and allows to learn and grow as cooks and as chefs, if we get to bring in a bunch of chanterelles [a type of edible fungi] or different mosses, all kinds of different things that you just don’t see. It’s a really fun learning moment for both the guests and for the cooks.”
Since last July, the team has been popping up in a wood stove-fitted food truck, borrowed from Chef Luciano Del Signore; who used it for his Bigalora restaurant.
“The food truck was definitely us getting impatient for all the things that need to happen to open a restaurant,” VanWagner says. “We got all our produce from Argus and a few other farms, and we just ripped.”
The truck will return every year from July 15 through October, VanWagner says, in a partially enclosed patio space along Washington Street.
Echelon employees will receive health benefits. Additionally, Echelon will set aside a percentage of its revenue, regardless of profit, in an account called the “team wellness fund,” which will be paid out monthly to non-tipped workers as a supplement to their wages, based on the number of hours each employee works.
Employees also receive three days quarterly of PTO, to be used for volunteering in the community. It will even have a “culinary library,” where employees can check books out and put together book reports to share what they’ve learned with the rest of the staff.
Says VanWagner, “To us, Echelon is about being better chefs, better people, better servants to the community.”
To learn more visit echelonkitchenandbar.com.
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