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We’ve counted down the Best New Restaurants in the metro Detroit area, including all establishments that opened in the tri-county area during the 2016 calendar year.
Detroit Free Press
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Peter Dalinowski selects music for dinner at the Revolver restaurant in Hamtramck on Friday, Jan. 24, 2013. Dalinowski is now partnering on a new concept in Hazel Park called Frame.(Photo: Kimberly P. Mitchell, Detroit Free Press)Buy Photo
Slated to debut in Hazel Park Wednesday, Joebar is a neighborhood bar designed with the average Joe in mind. But there’s nothing average about the plans for the dining space hidden behind one of its walls.
Joebar proprietors Joe and Cari Vaughn have partnered with Revolver impresario Peter Dalinowski on Frame, a separate restaurant concept located inside Joebar but with a slightly different address and a completely different forte.
At Revolver in Hamtramck, Dalinowski created a restaurant built around rotating guest chefs cooking one-off dinners. Frame takes that concept of ticketed prix fixe dinners to the next level with week- to months-long chef residencies.
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If Revolver offered chefs the possibility of sharing their hit singles, Frame is akin to the long-playing concept album.
Frame will launch March 31 in beta form with a planned month-long residency from chef Brad Greenhill and the crew of Katoi, who found themselves without a restaurant space after a devastating fire gutted their Corktown building last month.
“Brad was the person we were talking about launching this with, but it was going to be under different circumstances,” said Joe Vaughn, a renowned photographer who’s been shooting the hospitality industry for local and national clients for two decades.
The fire and Katoi’s need for a temporary space to work from pushed up the timing for Frame’s debut, Dalinowski said, noting that details such as dinnerware, music and the website will all be updated after this first beta phase. The staff will all be Katoi’s, but Frame will provide its own front-of-house staff for future residencies.
“A big part of it is keeping the staff in jobs,” Dalinowski said.
And while it will be the chefs of Katoi, the Frame residency will see them experimenting with dishes that have never been served at the restaurant, and the menu will change from week to week.
“For me, Revolver is an experiment,” Dalinowski said. “It’s a foot in the door and a way to test certain ideas, but I have limitations. One big limitation is something that would completely change the character of it and I don’t want to do is a liquor license. Joebar, in front before and after Frame events, is a huge thing. So bringing some basic ideas from Revolver and then building this amazing, grown-up, fully realized structure around it I think is amazing, and this will give us the power to create an absolutely complete dining experience and also bring in some big names not just for one night. It’s not just a pop-up.”
“In fact, we hate the word ‘pop-up,’ ” added Vaughn. “But him already having Revolver and knowing the baseline of everything Revolver wasn’t and what he wants to do now is an amazing match. He’s already worked out 100% of Revolver issues, now he’s taking it to level two.”
Despite sharing much of the back-of-house infrastructure, the 48-seat Frame will be a completely different experience from its host, and not just a banquet space for Joebar.
“It’s supposed to feel like a different place,” Dalinowski said. “It’s supposed to have a different vibe. The experience – while you can tell they are sister and brother, they are very different.”
Tying the two together is newly hired bar manager Anna Atanassova of the Skip and Rock City Eatery in Detroit. Atanassova will run the bars of both Joebar and Frame to, as Vaughn puts it, “guide the synergy of the two spaces.”
The name is a reference to a few different things: the framed off structure within another structure, how the proprietors and chefs plan to frame each experience, and the link to Vaughn’s main line of work.
Joebar debuts in Hazel Park Wednesday, March 15, 2017. Frame, a hidden restaurant concept inside, will launch with a month-long Katoi residency on March 31. (Photo: Joe Vaughn, Joe Vaughn)
“As a photographer and primarily a hospitality and food photographer, I’ve been shooting all these other experiences,” Vaughn said. “I’m always walking into the space and photographing this experience. The thought of us hosting the perfect experience and Peter guiding that experience and me being able to photograph that, it’s like, now they’re coming to us.”
To that end, a skylight in the kitchen provides ample natural light for food and action shots. A large north-facing window in the Frame dining room brings in more soft light, and a sliding wall can open the kitchen entirely to Frame, turning it into something like a 48-seat chef’s table in the heart of the action.
“It’s another big thing for me partnering with Joe and not just trying to do this on my own somewhere,” Dalinowski said. “Now we can take that evening and show to everybody legitimately what it looked like and what it felt like. … It’s going to be photo documented in a way that we both agree looks and feels like the evening was, which is totally next-level. Nobody is able to do that because you don’t have an in-house Joe. That’s such a big selling point for me on this place.”
That doesn’t mean that Revolver will fall by the wayside. Dalinowski said he just renewed the lease on the Hamtramck space, but the focus has been subtly shifting over the last year to become a launching board for lesser-known chefs.
Frame will be reserved for headliners.
Tickets for Frame beta featuring Katoi will be available Thursday at framehazelpark.com. The cost is $75 per person and includes five courses plus a rotating punch. A cash bar with limited cocktails will also be available. Seatings are available at 6 and 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 6 p.m. Sundays.
Contact Mark Kurlyandchik: 313-222-5026 or mkurlyandchik@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @mkurlyandchik and Instagram: mkurlyandchik.