New Restaurants Coming to The Village in Grosse Pointe
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
For three years, the storefront at 16844 Kercheval sat dark. Most people who walked past it on the way to the pharmacy or the wine shop stopped registering it as a problem to solve and started treating it as a fact of the block, the way you stop noticing a crack in a sidewalk you've stepped over a thousand times. It used to be City Kitchen. Before that, something else. By this summer it was just the gap in an otherwise busy stretch of The Village, the small downtown business district inside the City of Grosse Pointe, tucked between The Hill's white-tablecloth reputation to the north in the Farms and The Park's ongoing redevelopment to the south.
That gap is closing this fall, and the way it's closing tells you more about what's happening on this block than the opening itself does.
Jared Gadbaw runs Oak & Reel, the restaurant he opened on East Grand Boulevard in Detroit in 2020, a spot that built its reputation on the kind of contemporary cooking that gets national attention. Before that, he ran the kitchen at Marea in New York, where the restaurant earned two Michelin stars under his leadership. He is not a chef who needs a second location to prove anything.
His new partner, Cory Barberio, moved to Detroit in 2018 to become the opening chef at San Morello inside the Shinola Hotel, part of chef Andrew Carmellini's hospitality group, where he eventually rose to executive chef and managing partner. He's leaving that post to focus full time on the new project.
The two are opening Angelo's Fine Italian at 16844 Kercheval, targeting a window between late September and early October. The buildout calls for about 100 seats on the main floor, a 15-seat bar, and a private dining room downstairs with another 40 seats, designed by the Royal Oak firm VERSA, the same studio behind Oak & Reel's interiors. The name comes from Barberio's son, and the concept is a deliberate turn away from the envelope-pushing style both chefs are known for, toward Italian American classics finished with what Barberio calls a higher level of craftsmanship, the kind of food that pulls people around a table rather than food that impresses them.
Neither chef needed to bring that concept to a three-year-vacant storefront in a Pointes retail strip. Milwaukee Junction, Corktown, and Midtown would have made an easier pitch to investors. Gadbaw said in the opening announcement that Grosse Pointe "has a character all its own," and Barberio put it more plainly: "We want people to walk in and immediately feel at home." That's marketing language, but the storefront choice is not. A chef with Gadbaw's résumé betting a second concept on the coldest retail asset on the block is a different kind of signal than a press quote, and it's the kind of signal that tends to get other operators paying closer attention to a district they'd previously written off.
While Angelo's was still under construction this summer, a different verdict came in a few blocks away. High Pointe Burger Jointe, at 369 Fisher directly across from Grosse Pointe South High School, was named Best New Restaurant in Wayne County by Hour Detroit Magazine's annual contest. Wayne County includes the city of Detroit, which means the win covers restaurants across Detroit too, not just the handful within walking distance of Kercheval.
High Pointe opened in December 2024 in the former Extreme Pizza space. Owner Jennifer Bierkle is a fifth-generation Grosse Pointer whose family has deep roots in the local automotive business, and she built the restaurant with no prior restaurant experience, alongside her husband Jason. The concept started as slider-sized "Smashers" inspired by a favorite burger stand the family visits in Lexington, Michigan, and it grew a second identity almost by accident: when Bierkle's daughter was diagnosed with celiac disease while the restaurant was being built, she turned High Pointe into a fully gluten-free kitchen in addition to its standard menu, something the surrounding area hadn't had before.
Bierkle's reaction to the county win, in her own words, was simple. "I was in shock," she said. "I couldn't believe it."
That kind of win doesn't happen because a burger stand near a high school has good foot traffic. It happens because the countywide contest measured it against every other restaurant that opened that year and picked the one across from Grosse Pointe South anyway.
The third data point is the quietest and, in some ways, the most telling. SideStreet Diner, already an established fixture in The Village, was recently featured on America's Best Restaurants. Co-owners Sheila Taylor-Frunek and Meghan Spicer Josefosky say they aren't entirely sure who nominated the diner for the segment. Nobody on staff submitted an application or pitched a producer. A diner built around a straightforward local following got picked up by a national audience without asking for it.
Line these up and the pattern is not about food trends. It's about who is doing the judging. A Detroit chef with two Michelin stars on his résumé chose this storefront over neighborhoods with more built-in buzz. A countywide contest that had to consider every new restaurant in Detroit picked a burger stand across from a high school. A national restaurant feature found a diner that never asked to be found.
None of those decisions were made by people who live in the City of Grosse Pointe or have any reason to root for The Village specifically. That's what makes them worth paying attention to if you already live here. Residents talking up their own neighborhood is expected. Outside chefs, outside judges, and outside producers independently landing on the same six blocks within the same year is a different kind of evidence, and it's the kind that's harder to find anywhere else right now.
None of this rearranges the block overnight. But it changes a few concrete things for anyone who already treats Kercheval as their own front yard. Angelo's is likely to be hard to get into for the first several weeks after it opens, given the pedigree behind it and the relatively modest seat count for a destination-level Italian restaurant. High Pointe, now carrying a countywide title, is going to draw visitors from outside the immediate walking radius who previously had no reason to detour to Fisher Road. And SideStreet, having landed a national feature, may see a few more out-of-towners in the booths who found it through a screen instead of a walk down Kercheval.
If you've been meaning to try the diner before it gets discovered, or you want a table at Angelo's before the opening rush settles, the next couple of months are the window. The Village spent three years being the block people walked past without much thought. That's no longer the accurate description of it, and the people making that call this year weren't the ones who already lived here.
If you're curious how any of this shows up in what homes on these blocks are actually worth, that's a longer conversation and one Megan Prieur has been having with Grosse Pointe families for years. Closing and Toasting can walk you through it street by street. Get your instant home valuation whenever you're ready to see where your own address fits into the picture.
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