To sit at a restaurant’s bar is to partake in a peaceful revelry. The bar is a safe place, an incubator for boozy, intimate conversations. It’s a place to get to know your local restaurant staff, and to boot, the bar is usually the best spot to snag a seat without a reservation. In Detroit, I like Selden Standard on a Monday evening. My modus operandi there is to order a Negroni and whatever seasonal tartare and pasta is available. I’ll finish with a second drink, text a few friends that I miss them, and walk out feeling refreshed, having indulged in my little weekday evening treat.
Mabel Gray, Supino Pizzeria, and Forest are also among my favorite restaurant bars in metro Detroit. But I may just have a new favorite stool to make my home on a Monday night, and it’s at Rose’s on the east side of Detroit.
Rose’s, you may recall, was once a popular diner slinging pancakes and breakfast plates from 2014 to 2023. Having shut down for a couple of years, the new Rose’s has been talked about as a comeback, but I see it as more of an arrival. Again helmed by chef Molly Mitchell, Rose’s has ditched the brunch service and instead darted toward a dinner menu focused on local sourcing, delicate Polish influence, and the type of warm, nourishing dishes that, frankly, I wish were more prevalent in Detroit.
Though Rose’s utilizes Michigan’s seasons and bountiful produce, the menu is steadier than you might think. Mitchell often reimagines classic dishes with a bit of Polish flare and thrifty imagination. Take the cabbage Caesar salad — presented here with chunks of chopped, crispy green cabbage nestled snuggly into a clam-shelled cabbage leaf. The crunchy, cruciferous vegetable is dressed with a citrusy anchovy dressing and poppy seeds, served with a flaky Parmesan cheese disc baked into some local sourdough. The salad is refreshing and crunchy, and I have found it to be even better the next day after some further marination in my home fridge.
It needs to be said that if you’re going to Rose’s, prepare yourself for a lot of cabbage and dill. The braised cabbage lasagna is a glorious interpretation of vegetable lasagna — with a layer of zucchini, braised tomatoes, house-made ricotta, and a crust of Parmesan cheese and crispy rice. It’s incredibly well conceived, with a short stack of well-seasoned vegetables each providing their own delicate flavor and a smack of black pepper dotting your taste buds during every bite.
For those seeking a bit of fine-dining refinement, I’d recommend the crispy and fatty duck confit leg served with a sweet cherry glaze. In addition, I was impressed with Mitchell’s fine touch on her zupa rybna, a fish soup featuring buttery, flaky poached cod in a clear mushroom broth. This was one of the most magnificent soups I’ve enjoyed in all of Detroit, and one I would happily slurp up all winter long.
Rose’s is a restaurant that blossoms in the summer and settles gracefully in the winter. In early September, I enjoyed a plate of sugared peaches served sweetly and simply, adorned with a sting of jalapeño and cooling mint. In the winter, the peaches are swapped for a saucer of chunky, marinated red and golden beets with pickled red onions, fresh dill, and salt, all drizzled with olive oil. Tangy and seasoned, the beets feel unfussy and nourishing. The cucumber mizeria, a warm-weather Polish classic, amounts to thinly sliced cucumbers with crème fraîche, fennel, and herbs. Meanwhile, a bowl of tender, creamy navy beans is simply topped with garlicky breadcrumbs and herbs. In the summer, the beans have a lovely char to them, but in the winter, those same beans have a little more broth, a perfect cure for the blustery, chilly weather outside. At their core, all four dishes feel like outliers in Detroit’s larger restaurant scene. A plate of beets, a saucer of peaches, a blanket of beans — “Why aren’t more restaurants serving dishes this simple and satisfying?” I thought to myself.
Rose’s also boasts a (nearly) full bar, with a small selection of craft cocktails, wines, and cans of beer. The pickle martini excites, with pickle brine and blobs of dill oil floating atop like lily pads, but I don’t recommend it if one plans to order dill- and pickle-forward dishes. A better complement to a meal at Rose’s is bourbon. The old-fashioned — made with Detroit City Distillery Butcher’s Cut Bourbon, bitters, and simple syrup — features crushed ice cubes, which at first might seem unusual, but I found them to be delightful to munch on. I felt like a kid getting to the bottom of his slushy. Crushed ice cubes feel a bit more proper with the aptly named Rosebuds cocktail, made with the same bourbon, hibiscus syrup, and fresh lemon. It’s an energizing, fruity drink that sharpens the palate like one of the butcher knives hanging from a magnetic strip on the back wall.
Rose’s is a lived-in restaurant with plenty of congeniality and spunk. Diner-shaped, as many great Michigan restaurants are, the tiled, checkered floor is hypnotic, and the bar’s cushioned seats, though bolted in place, swivel and twist at the customer’s childlike delight.
Everywhere at Rose’s, there are empty wine bottles covered with the drippings of melted candles, along with stocky, seemingly bespoke oil paintings of vegetables and plants stuck to the walls. Meanwhile, curtains with a pink and orange hue spread brightly across the windows (whether the sun shines or not).
Rose’s speaks a certain language that diners can understand: simple and soft-spoken but also weighty and filled with meaning, like a passage from your favorite poet.
Chef Mitchell herself is a writer, with an active newsletter on Substack in which she waxes about everything from poaching pears to pulling weeds. I get the sense that she understands language in all of its various forms, whether it’s the language of prose, food, drink, love, hospitality, art, or even music. (The soundtrack at Rose’s is always moody and eclectic, ranging from Bobbie Gentry, Labi Siffre, and John Fahey to more jazzy tunes in the evenings.) There is an easy elegance at Rose’s that anyone can experience, which is what makes this place so great — the prices are affordable, the food is nourishing and delicious, the ambiance is personal, and the service is phenomenal. In short, Rose’s speaks the love language of restaurants clearly and with annunciation.
I find myself pondering all of this at the restaurant’s front counter, the bar, while munching on some boozy crushed ice. I’m alone, yes, but I would easily take my parents to Rose’s — or one of those old friends I often text after a couple drinks, or a new girlfriend I’m sweet on. But Rose’s is also the place I’ll go to when I want to take care of me. There’s something meditative about sitting at a restaurant bar alone, something restorative and self-assured about dining by yourself in a stellar restaurant. When you dine alone, you become closer to the people who built the place, those who care for it and offer their hard work, and it’s hard to think of many restaurants I want to become closer with than Rose’s.
This story originally appeared in the March 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
|
|
|
|
|
|
