A fresh approach to an old fave makes Roses Fine Food on Detroit’s east side the Detroit Free Press/Chevy Detroit 2026 Restaurant of the Year.
For those who frequented Roses Fine Food in its early days, sitting in the newly revived dining room of the cozy Jefferson Avenue diner can evoke the same sense of pride you might have for a child — perhaps not your own, but maybe a niece or the son of your very best friend.
To witness Roses’ topsy-turvy trajectory firsthand is to watch the unfolding of a coming-of-age story. The restaurant’s reopening in the summer of 2025 has shown us that an establishment built with intention has the potential to soar — even in its second act.
For about six years, beginning in 2014, Roses was a sought-after brunch joint, where the frittata was froufrou, and so was everything else. There were sodas flavored with vanilla bean or Michigan maple syrup or lavender and lemon. There were old-fashioned egg creams and housemade granola, heirloom black rice topped with meaty slabs of maple bacon, spicy kimchi and mushrooms. There were velvety purple potatoes tossed with bacon. The frittata was an egg custard whisked with crème fraiche and roasted seasonal vegetables.
The place was a joy, derivative of little more than the classic American diner and the classic American home, where recipes are passed down by family members and the smell of batter on a grill fills the air. The pancakes were the star, golden, eggy and doughy and a love letter to chef-owner Molly Mitchell’s Grandpa Richard. Fresh loaves of bread made with organic flour were baked daily, as were pastries that often riffed on the diner’s name. There were precious candy jars filled with pale pink rose macarons and handmade pop-tarts with rose icing freckled with dried rose petals. There were gorgeous retro ice box cakes draped in pastel curd and buttercream piping.
Roses was a happy place for restaurant-goers at a time when Detroit’s dining scene was taking off. It became a part of the fraternity of eateries that took a defibrillator to the restaurant industry, and shaped what the landscape would become for Detroiters starving for establishments with a pulse. It was casual but exciting, fun and unfussy but sophisticated. It built upon the legacy of the classic Detroit diner Elmo’s Restaurant, and evoked an air of nostalgia. It was bright and full of promise. In 2019, after years of leasing, Mitchell purchased the building and she and former Roses employee Eggy Ding had plans to expand with Poppies, a bakery on Detroit’s west side.
The legions of people who loved Roses know what happened next.
Like most businesses, Roses went through an identity crisis in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. The place that once felt like a warm embrace had gone sterile. Trying to operate within the confines of frenetic federal and state guidelines, Roses’ frequent changes gave diners whiplash. One day it was a bottle shop, the next, a bakery. The one constant, Grandpa Richard’s pancakes, was a consolation prize diners thought could bring comfort during a period of grief. The grill was off, though. Now, Roses was a deli. It enraged customers.
“They were literally just shocked when they would come back to the space for pancakes and there was wine and sandwiches,” Mitchell said. In a word, she explained, it was bad. “I felt like I was working against what I had set out to do, which is provide a nice space for people to have fun in. We ended up getting a new crowd of people who liked the new business, but it never really took off in the same way as the original.”
In 2023, after nine years of Roses, Mitchell made the decision to close the restaurant. “It was like I was fighting my original customers in trying to pivot, and it just became overwhelming,” she said. She went on to evangelize good food in other ways. She became the associate director of culinary arts at Detroit Boxing Gym, creating opportunities for Detroit youths to learn kitchen skills.
But all of her dreams led back to Roses.
She tried to sell the business, but the deals never closed. “I was like, ‘how does nobody see what a special restaurant this is?’ ” she asked herself as deal after deal fell through. No one, it seemed, saw Roses potential but her.
In April 2025, when news broke that Roses would reopen, there was an almost-audible roar among the city’s most tapped-in food folks. Yet again, the restaurant was firing up to fill the city’s need for lighthearted, good food. But if it were to return, it would have to do so with its feet firmly planted, a clear vision for what it was and the gusto to be unwavering in that. Mitchell, who admits she entered into the business back in 2014 with the naivete of a young chef turned first-time restaurateur with a romantic idea for what a neighborhood diner could mean to a community. She and her cousin Lucy launched a Kickstarter, hired a team on the fly and got cooking. This time, Mitchell would be more deliberate.
Physically, the space didn’t change much. Walls got fresh coats of dusty green paint, knickknacks moved around, a wooden pew moved in, the lighting softened and Mitchell fashioned orange and pink striped fabrics into window curtains in place of red and yellow checkerboard decals.
Old standouts returned, like herby navy beans flavored with garlic and dill, and thick slices of toasted sourdough, this time made by local bread maker Lillian Elliott of Lillian’s Loaves. The grill still toasts diners seated at one end of the bar and guests at the other end still have a view of the day’s produce — a spread of giant red apples, bowls of cherries or radishes or garlic or perfectly ripened pears ready for their wine bath.
At Roses Second Coming, Mitchell doubles down on emphasizing simple ingredients as she always believed a great diner should. She leans on produce from Michigan farmers from Detroit to the Thumb, serving sliced sugared peaches picked up from Rickert Orchard’s stand at Eastern Market on silver platters as if presenting the day’s hunt to the queen. Seedling fruit on the west side of the state is the source of a reduced pear syrup used as a base for a spiced pear vodka cocktail loaded with crushed ice, and Norm Holtz, a centennial potato farmer of Holtz Farm in Ida, Michigan, lends the potatoes that will become the creamiest, butteriest whipped heap topped with meaty mushrooms beside a confit duck leg. “My original vision for the restaurant was that I was imagining a diner that was not fed by these big warehouses with pancake mixes,” Mitchell explained. “It was a diner where people who opened a restaurant knew how to cook.”
Except now, Roses has, decidedly, forgone pancakes altogether.
This Roses is a dinner diner. Tapers propped in wine bottles give the place a glow from within, with wax tears cascading down the side of the bottle in shades of white and rose. Where there were once briny allusions to Mitchell’s Polish American heritage — pickles here and there, dill everywhere — the newer recipes are more personal, culled directly from the chef’s fondest memories growing up with Polish grandparents. Where there was once a side of bacon, there is now kielbasa, smoked, split and fried hard, its skin reddish and snappy. Where there were soft scrambled eggs and griddled potatoes, there are potato dumplings swimming in borscht. In place of bowls of grainy organic grits, there’s pungent dill pickle soup.
Roses’ Second Coming feels like a grown-up version of the last, without any loss of whimsy. It’s no longer the bright start to your day in a light-flooded dining room, but rather a place for a moody nightcap, with the warmth of being at a dear friend’s dinner party. Dishes, though technically well made, carry no pretense. There are snappy pickles from the snacks to the martinis — here, pickle oil waltzes on the surface of the cocktail — and tosses of dill feel less haphazard but like playful garnishes that add intentional flavor and aroma to a dish. Duck confit, which can feel otherwise stuffy, is draped in a gravy of red wine cherry reduction, and made cutesy with tart, juicy cooked cherries strewn on the plate like gems.
The retro cakes are back in all their glory, reimagined by Hanna Nall, the cottage baker behind Venla’s, and Mitchell herself. A graduate of The French Pastry School in Chicago, Mitchell is a trained pastry chef. She’d been a baker at Detroit’s Avalon International Breads and a cook at Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor before relocating to San Francisco, where she spent a few years as a baker at the routinely lauded Tartine Bakery.
The cakes aren’t too precious, just layers of mildly sweet creams and moist cake with delicate designs that feel like Kodak moments. Dark chocolate mousse plopped into parfait glasses line the shelves of a glass-door refrigerator, flirting with you with their pinky rose-infused fluffy whipped topping that hovers over the glass edge. Poppy seeds and a cherry on top is their blush.
With every visit to Roses, I become more enchanted by the place. My first trip since the reopening, I was so enamored with the silver plate of peaches coated in slivers of jalapeño, I shared them with a woman sitting next to me. I insisted. There were more than I could eat and someone, anyone had to experience those slippery slices of God’s creation with a sprinkle of Roses magic. I wrote about those peaches again and again, and again and soon felt like an evangelist for the stone fruit, or maybe for Roses and the place’s ability to make the mundane magnificent.
Another visit, a friend and I sat in the garden at Roses sipping kompot, a European beverage made of boiled fruits. Lanterns lit all around sunflower plants and would-be wildflowers in the midst of fall, we looked out at the restaurant glowing in the distance and agreed — this is the dream.
I return to the restaurant often and maintain that declaration. Roses is a dream. And it underscores that as epicureans, our dreams aren’t lofty. We’re not asking for much. We want a beautiful, comfortable environment, a kind server, simple food that just tastes good and an opportunity to get closer to each other. Roses, with its twinkling lights, produce that sits on display like artwork and Polish cuisine that brings us closer to an ambitious chef like Mitchell, offers exactly what we’re looking for.
It’s a bold act to exhume a restaurant that sits in the memory fondly. Will the next version be as good? Better? Will it live up to its reputation? Or would it be better left resting in peace? Roses Fine Food, the Second Coming, though different, is as delicious as it was and probably as darling as it’ll ever be. Unless, of course, they resurrect the pancakes. Then, perfection.
10551 E. Jefferson Ave., Detroit. 313-332-0404; rosesdetroit.com
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Enchanting Roses Fine Food in Detroit is 2026 restaurant of the year
Reporting by Lyndsay C. Green, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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