Despite being a “hot” scene, opening a restaurant in greater downtown Detroit is not a guarantor of success.
Two restaurants have fallen in the last week.
Last night, Red Corridor announced on Facebook that they’re closing after a year.
The Metro Times reported their hellacious customer service interactions online. In a market with a lot of options, that could have been the beginning of the end on a place that, if we’re being honest having gone there a couple times as a local wasn’t worth writing home — or on this site — about.
The exterior signage looked out of place, like a touch of suburban strip mall in Corktown. More importantly, their food never made a splash in multiple visits.
Also over the weekend, as reported by the Freep, La Dulce who had left their popular spot in Royal Oak went to a space in downtown Detroit that seems to be the kiss of death for dining, the bottom of the Crowne Plaza Hotel.
It seems from reports they (forgive the pun) bit off more than they could chew with space.
But there’s a few reasons, at least in our opinion, places keep failing there.
You can’t really walk to it from anything easily. The patio isn’t that inviting in the summer because it looks out on multiple lanes of roadway and is noisy. After all, nothing says romance like the sound of constant high-speed traffic.
If the hotel wants to rehab that space, they need a rethink. Maybe they should pull a few pages from City Planning Director Maurice Cox’s playbook before they put something else there. Maybe flip the main entrance of the space off of Jefferson toward Larned, which would put it in direct view of The Foundation Hotel and Apparatus Room to create a more cohesive street.