No. 4: Le Suprême, an ambitious project, honors Detroit's French heritage
Lyndsay C. GreenLanding at No. 4 on the 2024 Detroit Free Press/Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers Top 10 New Restaurants & Dining Experiences list is Le Suprême, the French restaurant and first food and beverage concept at the ambitious Book Tower.
The biggest Detroit restaurant trend of 2023 was the rise of the hotel eatery.
By December, Detroit was awash in seven major new establishments: Cibo, the long-awaited Mediterranean beauty at the Cambria Hotel, the Godfrey Hotel’s I|O Rooftop Lounge with expansive views of the historic Corktown neighborhood, and at the ground level, Hamilton’s, helmed by Samy Eid of 2020 Restaurant of the Year Leila and 2018 Restaurant of the Year Classic Phoenicia. Ash Bar moved into the upstairs space once occupied by Karl’s at The Siren and at the newly renovated Westin Book Cadillac, Sullivan’s Steakhouse opened its first Michigan location.
But no project was more ambitious or impressive than Le Suprême at the Book Tower.
One of the notable high-rise rehabs to alter the allure of the city skyline, the Louis Kamper-designed Italian Renaissance building sat vacant for just under 15 years before it reopened last summer under Bedrock management with four food and beverage establishments. The $317 million redevelopment of the 13-story Book Building built in 1917 and the attached 38-story Book Tower built in 1926, focused largely on returning the grounds to its former glory rather than starting anew.
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That emphasis on honoring history extends to Le Suprême, the first restaurant to reach completion at the Book Tower. Starting with a French restaurant honors the city the buildings have called home for more than a century by celebrating its foundation as a French territory.
Fashioned after a 20th-century Parisian Bistro, Le Suprême is lined with wood paneled walls that give the effect of dining inside a walnut shell. There are bistro tables with marble tops and wrought-iron pedestals, tufted leather banquettes and framed artwork with a vintage feel.
Here, moules marinière are served in a Dutch oven, an umami broth of wine, butter, shallots and thyme pooling into each onyx shell. An herbaceous hunk of butter slides its way down a hot hanger steak for a plate of steak frites and trout amandine packs on the most generous helping of thinly shaved almonds you’ll have ordering the dish anywhere else in town.
A giant, braised lamb shank is tender, veiled in a sweet tomato gravy, ideal for dunking pastry chef Benjamin Robison’s warm, housemade breads. If you step into the lobby, you may spy Robison’s pastry team prepping breads and various confections, like colorful macarons or pan au chocolate for any or all of the venue’s eateries.
“It's probably the most rewarding part about being here,” Robison said of the glass box that’s become a spectacle of the Book Tower lobby. “To see the people, the kids, the dogs — to see everybody and how excited they are just to walk into this building is a very cool thing to witness firsthand, because most of us are stuck in the kitchen all day and we don't get to see how guests are interpreting what we're doing here.”
A slice of the Tarte Tatin here is a buttery delight, topped with soft, warm apples and served with a globe of simple vanilla ice cream churned in house. The profiteroles, drizzled with warm, rich, dark chocolate, are like little elegant ice cream sandwiches freckled with powdered sugar.
Like any trend, the initial boom of hotel restaurants sparked a concern for this restaurant critic: What does Detroit’s dining scene become if overcrowded with major projects powered by hospitality groups with out-of-state headquarters? What is the potential for groups like Method Co., the Philadelphia-based company that operates The Book Tower's entities, including the extended stay hotel Roost Detroit and its bars and restaurants, to contribute to Detroit’s dining landscape? Or worse, what is the potential to extract from it?
Coincidentally, Detroit’s recent wins have offered responses to those questions.
A moment like this, one where an unprecedentedly exciting Detroit Lions season ignited a multimillion dollar economic surge and when an impending NFL Draft is poised to rival the impact of the Super Bowl, calls for glitzy restaurants like Le Suprême backed by power players like Method Co. Not to mention, the big number of jobs that open up for hospitality workers when big projects come to town.
Le Suprême and the hotel restaurants like it, become showpieces for out-of-towners, shifting a larger perspective of what Detroit is for anyone outside these 139 square miles. Like Candy Bar, San Morello and the Apparatus Room before it, hotel bars and restaurants become the most reliable middle men for communicating a message of beauty to Detroit travelers.
On any given night at Bar Rotunda, Book Tower's central lobby bar and cafe, guests from New York City stop in for an Americano. Visitors from overseas sip dirty martinis and couples clink glasses of Champagne after scouting the building as a potential wedding venue. They're all killing time before dinner at Le Suprême, where they'll surely continue to be wowed by our city.
And while restaurants like Le Suprême are destinations for visitors who only get to enjoy the place for but a moment, they are treats for residents who have the luxury of returning many times over.
Le Suprême
1265 Washington Blvd., Detroit. 313-597-7734; lesupremedetroit.com
Ticket sales for the upcoming Detroit Free Press/Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers Top 10 Takeover dinner series benefit Forgotten Harvest, an Oak Park-based nonprofit committed to fighting food insecurity in the Detroit area. Dates for the 2024 dinner series will be announced later this month. Visit freep.com/top10 for updates on the events. For a chance to win $500 to dine at five restaurants on the 2024 Detroit Free Press/Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers Restaurant of the Year and Top 10 New Restaurants & Dining Experiences list, visit freep.com/roycontest24. Contest ends March 11 at 11:59 p.m.