For the 2024 Outstanding Restaurateur nominees, Hamissi Mamba and Nadia Nijimbere, Baobab Fare in Detroit, Michigan is more than just a restaurant. Founded by the husband-and-wife team, who are refugees from Burundi, East Africa, Baobab Fare is a celebration of vibrant flavors and simple ingredients, authentic dishes and rich culture, and a destination in which community, connection, and conversation intersect…
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Chicago Sukkah Design Festival returns for third annual exhibition
The 2024 Chicago Sukkah Design Festival—this year’s AIA Chicago Honor Award recipient of the Robert Feldman Architecture for Social Justice Award—returns this Sunday, Oct. 6 to the James Stone Freedom Square in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood. For 20 days, the third annual festival will activate the public plaza with custom-built sukkahs, designed by five teams who reimagined the outdoor pavilion…
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A Bar of Their Own
Sports fans often recognize the powerful potential of a great moment. It is at times in a play, a strategy, or a gravity-defying move so memorable and so riveting that it is fixed in time as an iconic moment in athletics history. From the rush of adrenaline, and the recognition of resilience as a player or team weathers injuries and…
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Mezkla
Tucked into the brick façade of downtown Holland, Michigan’s W. 8th Street, where Late Victorian architecture meets contemporary, mixed-use development inspired by the style, Mezkla Taqueria & Fruteria is bringing a fresh, bold flavor to the vernacular palate. While modest in footprint, the brick-and-mortar storefront is just one chapter of a much larger story for Founder and Owner Patricia Vasquez,…
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Daisies: from seed to radical taproot
For Joe Frillman, executive chef and owner of Daisies in Chicago, Illinois, food is a deeply personal act that often evokes memory and nostalgia—for better or for worse. It is an experience that invites diners to participate in a journey that can delight the palate, tie generations, and expand horizons, and it is also one that seeks a certain level…
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A culinary tradition
Today, many Americans have easy access to pre-prepared food—whether it be slabs of meat packaged at the grocery store or a ready-to-eat meal from a fast-food chain, acquired from just five minutes spent in a drive-through line—and the life cycle of each plant or animal behind the meal is often not thoroughly considered. With an outlook inspired from more than…
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Eclectic flavor
In Downtown Detroit, a city known for its community of designers, industrialists, creatives, and culinary artists, this adaptive reuse of a 1940s-designed Art Deco Streamline Moderne building near Woodward Avenue along Parker’s Alley is a thoughtful curation of the old and the new. Realized by a collaborative design, build, and creative team led by the award-winning firm of McIntosh Poris…
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Skyline coastal
In an open-air ode to leisure dining as seen in seaside towns along the Iberian Coast, the makers of renowned Chicago destinations like The Violet Hour, Big Star, and The Publican, have launched a new rooftop bar concept offering sweeping views of the Chicago skyline, and a relaxed interpretation of the outdoor cervecerías signature to Spanish and Portuguese coasts. Bar…
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MDRD in cityscape
The skyline in Grand Rapids, Michigan could be considered one of the most changed in the Midwest, with development projects and creative moments of design found around most corners of the downtown core, which spreads along western Michigan’s Grand River. It is a burgeoning travel destination with a bent for hospitality, with several recent hotel projects hosted in hospitality families…
