Dubbed the "Rust Belt Renaissance," the burgeoning hospitality industry all across this region has helped to revitalize broken neighborhoods while helping plug the employment gap. Like his colleagues in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Buffalo, and Cleveland, Rigato has watched his beloved Detroit confront the monumental challenges of deindustrialization, suburban flight, and recession to establish the kind of food and drink cultures long reserved for much bigger markets. I was cooking in Detroit in 2008, 2009, and 2010 and the country's consensus was pretty much 'Let it fucking burn.' They were ready to carve us out of the country." "I think we've been the underbelly of the nation's food scene for so long. Now, with two restaurants under his control - the hyper-seasonal Root and the intimate, ambitious Mabel Gray - Rigato and his colleagues in the food world are part and parcel of the city's recovery, right alongside the artists, entrepreneurs, and big-business tycoons who are working to rewrite history. It's night and day." Evan Lockhart/Thrillistįew are more familiar with this storyline than Chef James Rigato, who was working in his hometown of Detroit at the height of the Great Recession, when two of the Big Three automakers were perched on the brink of insolvency.
"We opened Roast in Detroit 10 years ago and look what has happened to the dining scene since that time. "You start building a little family tree and then the family tree branches out and starts doing their own thing and the next thing you know you have a culinary scene," explains Symon, Cleveland's first recipient of a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Great Lakes. And all of it can be traced as accurately as a genealogical register back to a handful of pioneering chefs. Those ripples soon made it out of Cleveland, and then beyond Ohio's borders to other Rust Belt cities. īut this narrative didn't stop at the Tremont border the seismic ripples emanating from the South Side eventually reached other Cleveland neighborhoods, transforming the city over those same two decades from a chef-starved wilderness into a Yelper's wet dream. These days, Tremont is a bustling, high-density community filled with bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and art galleries. Lemko Hall - the site of the wedding reception scene in the classic film The Deer Hunter - was converted into condominiums. Long-abandoned residential properties were purchased and renovated, soon joined by new market-rate apartments and pricey townhouses. While mainstays like the iconic century-old Polish cafeteria Sokolowski's still thrive, new spots from big-name chefs began introducing the neighborhood to a whole new population.
In the two decades since Lola - an upscale bistro focused on progressive Midwestern fare - opened its doors, Tremont has experienced nothing short of a food-fueled renaissance. But in the wake of numerous shuttered factories, the rise of suburbs, and the construction of an interstate that cleaved the neighborhood into fourths, those numbers dwindled to less than 10,000, sending countless properties into disrepair.
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When Chef Michael Symon opened Lola in 1997 at the corner of Literary and Professor in the heart of Tremont, he set in motion a series of events that few at the time could have predicted, impacting not just his city, but an entire region.īack then, the neighborhood was beginning to show some small signs of life, but it was a far cry from the Roaring '20s, when 35,000 residents packed every square inch of that inner-city community. While a handful of fine-dining options existed elsewhere - largely in the city center and affluent suburbs - Tremont was still referred to as the "South Side," home to blue-collar dives that opened at first light to serve thirsty third-shifters fresh off the clock at nearby steel mills. In the late '90s, the Tremont neighborhood just south of Downtown Cleveland was better known for bodegas and break-ins than bistros.
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