A semifinalist for the 2026 James Beard Restaurant and Chef Awards, Detroit wine bar Chenin lands at No. 6 on the 2026 Detroit Free Press/Chevy Detroit Top 10 New Restaurants & Dining Experiences list for its relaxed approach to fine wine and small plates.
If the walls could talk at Chenin, the new 10-seat wine bar at The Siren Hotel, they might not utter a word, but rather let out a deep exhale.
After six years operating as Albena, arguably the city’s finest dining experience, which served a multicourse tasting menu of dishes like a honey-poached seaweed tartlet and pork belly sliced like a holiday ham, to just eight diners a night, the space has let its hair down. Chenin sheds its formality with approachable bottles of natural wines to anchor the wine program, while deep-dish pizzas (more like focaccia topped with dollops of ricotta and pepperoni rounds), fresh pastas and meaty sandwiches comprise the food offerings.
Chenin is the brainchild of Nick Arone, a hospitality professional and no stranger to The Siren as the boutique hotel’s former food and beverage director.
Arone’s handprints are on every cranny of Chenin, from its selection of wines — ranging from old- to new-world — to the deep-dish pizzas, fresh pastas and quizzical ice creams he crafts by hand, to the very walls of the cavernous bar he brushed in micro cement himself over the course of three weeks.
Even the guests, Detroit’s coolest kids, feel like friends of Arone’s. They file in early to nab an exclusive seat, where they’ll slurp bowls of spaghetti and meatballs as they share inside jokes with the multihyphenate owner-bartender-chef, often dressed in a cap and a tee behind the bar. Or they’ll lean along the back wall of the narrow railroad space spooning sweet-savory scoops of an ice cream sundae topped with olive oil chocolate sauce into their mouths when it’s standing room only.
Pizza bedazzled with creamy swirls of pistachio ricotta, sandwiches with thin slices of mortadella and ice cream spiked with booze. When you summarize the menu here, it comes down to food that can feel like a kid’s menu, made for adults.
1509 Broadway St. Ste. A-1, Detroit. barchenin.com
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit wine bar Chenin has just 10 seats to clamor over
Reporting by Lyndsay C. Green, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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