No. 7: Aaron Cozadd at Detroit's Vigilante Kitchen curated menu at Oakland County Jail

Vigilante Kitchen and Bar is No. 7 on the Detroit Free Press/Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers Top 10 New Restaurants & Dining Experiences list. Chef Aaron Cozadd is named the 2024 Chef of the Year for his commitment to forging a safe work environment for hospitality workers overcoming addiction and substance abuse.

At Vigilante Kitchen and Bar, a shiny, stainless steel tray with three compartments clanks onto the table. Two smaller sections are filled with a tart salad of cubed apples dressed in fresh herbs and sliced red onions and a meaty blend of roasted fingerling potatoes and shimeji and shiitake mushrooms spotted with crunchy fried garlic bits. The larger compartment is a stage for pink slivers of a 6-ounce A5 Miyazakigyu ribeye blinged out in sel gris gems.

The sweet and savory dish, the restaurant’s most decadent menu item — and at $125, its most expensive — is served on the kind of meal tray you’d find in a correctional facility. It draws inspiration from the very place the chef curated the menu and the overall concept for Vigilante Kitchen and Bar: Oakland County Jail.

Vigilante chef and partner Aaron Cozadd started cooking at age 16 and went on to earn his education from The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. Only the appeal of a career in hospitality for Cozadd was, in part, the restaurant industry's more toxic traits. A singer, rhythm guitarist and frontman of a punk-rock band, Cozadd aspired to the live-fast, party-hard lifestyle of a rockstar, and working in restaurants enabled that path.

“Rockstar or chef was my kind of goal and to me, they were a similar thing,” he said, adding that the stories of cut-throat kitchens chronicled in books like Anthony Bourdain’s acclaimed “Kitchen Confidential,” (Bloomsbury USA, 2000), were less cautionary tales for the young cook, but rather exciting accounts of a life he longed for. “When I read that book I thought, ‘This industry is perfect for me. This is exactly where I should be.’ ”

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Ultimately, Cozadd would break into the industry, most notably working for Union Joints, the restaurant group behind metro Detroit restaurants Clarkston Union, Honcho, Gran Castor, Union Assembly and Vinsetta Garage.

Soon, however, he’d fall into the same traps of drug and alcohol addiction that many restaurant workers face across the country.

In a recent survey conducted by the American Addiction Centers, 40% of food service workers consider casual substance use to be a part of their work culture. A number of factors, including the accessibility of alcohol and stressful work settings, can make restaurants prime establishments for substance abuse among staffers.

In 2012, a second impaired driving charge and a violation of bond led to Cozadd’s 30-day stint in jail.

The chef would spend his 30th birthday, Christmas and New Year’s in the Oakland County Jail, and instead of celebrating a feature on Food Network’s “Diners Drive-Ins and Dives” for his work as executive chef at Clarkston Union Kitchen, he was confined to a cell.

Cozadd committed himself to a life of sobriety during his time in jail and conceived of a restaurant that would support the needs of recovering addicts like himself and so many of his colleagues. In order to encourage those struggling with addiction to stay on a path of sobriety, he’d need to entirely reimagine the nature of restaurant work — no more 80-hour work weeks, low pay and lack of health insurance. He’d need to create a project with recovery as its central guiding mission.

When he was released, Cozadd got clean and started taking up practices like meditation and reignited a passion for martial arts. He sought to get into better physical shape and enrolled in CrossFit classes. In addition to going to weekly counseling sessions, he started attending recovery meetings. As a part of his practice, he became a Dharma teacher at Dharma Gate Zen Center in Troy, took on pottery as an art form and became a black belt in Japanese sword art.

“It became apparent to me that I really needed to find life rafts. It wasn't like I could just stop using drugs and alcohol and then live my life normally,” he said.

Cozadd developed a new outlook on his addiction, seeing the strength in his obsessive-compulsive tendencies.  

“The obsessive-compulsive brain that creates addiction is not a weakness, it's a superpower,” he said. “It just needs to be harnessed.” Cozadd believes that if individuals with addictive habits are steered toward healthier activities, they have the ability to become powerful people both personally and professionally.

This attention to detail shows up at Vigilante in the form of dishes like the Pho-Ken Noodle Soup, a fusion of pho and chicken noodle soup, which takes days to prepare.

"I thought it would be hilarious to take something as simple as a chicken noodle soup and make it just as complicated as possible," Cozadd said of the Vietnamese-inspired chicken broth teeming with chopped vegetables, hoisin and chili oil. Poaching each piece of chicken over several days, he said, makes the bowl of soup "one of the most complicated dishes in the restaurant."

A sous vide half chicken that is broken down, pan-roasted and served with a traditional French mousseline in the center, takes two days to prepare. "Everything's old-school French technique, and that's the the main difference in our food," Cozadd said. "We put in the time and effort. No corners cut. If anything's ever off, we start over."

Today, Vigilante Kitchen and Bar sits in the former Smith & Co. space in Detroit's Midtown neighborhood, and offers employees benefits aimed at improving their overall quality of life. Full-time employees receive full health benefits through Mission Restaurant Group, the group behind Smith & Co., Jolly Pumpkin, Avalon International Breads and a number of other Michigan eateries. Through this insurance plan, employees in need qualify for low-cost personal addiction counseling.

All Vigilante employees are eligible for Planet Fitness gym memberships at no cost, and each dinner service begins with a 15-minute guided meditation for all workers led by Cozadd.

“The thing about meditation is, addiction starts in the mind, so if you can learn to have a different relationship to your thoughts and to watch those thoughts rise and pass, then you start to see that the addictive mind is not something that has any control over you.”

Those at the management level at Vigilante — Cozadd, the restaurant’s general manager and chef de cuisine — all well into their own walks of recovery, function as supporters and accountability partners for team members in need of guidance.

“We're always available and eager to help them along their path,” Cozadd said. The team is also connected with the Detroit chapter of The Phoenix, a network of individuals in recovery, which offers events, activities and resources for those looking to connect with other sober Detroiters.

Vigilante blends the Zen elements of Cozadd’s practice with all of the frills of rock and roll. There are poignant quotes from philosophers and figurines inspired by The Buddha, while neon lights cast a pinkish hue throughout the space and loud rock music fills the air.

The bathrooms are decorated with murals depicting Amy Winehouse and Sid Vicious, an ode to musicians who publicly battled and ultimately succumbed to addiction.

“They're incredible artists who had so much impact on culture, but they were consumed by their addiction,” Cozadd said. He noted the gilded lines that run through the murals painted by Detroit artist Kelly Golden.

“The gold running through the murals of the artists represents Kintsugi cracks,” he said of the Japanese art technique. “When a piece of pottery breaks in Japanese culture, they'll put it back together with this gold epoxy, the belief being that the broken and repaired state is more beautiful than it was before. The idea is that we shine most beautifully and brightly from our cracks.”

If the obsessive-compulsive brain is a superpower, the name of the restaurant might imply that Cozadd sees himself as the vigilante — the superhero who’s stepped in to save restaurant workers from their addictions. But it’s the employees who are the heroes of their own stories. Cozadd is just a sidekick. Written along the façade of the bar is the phrase: “I had a dream I was a vigilante sidekick,” taken from a song by Rancid that details the band's vision of serving the community.

“In my mind, I’m — and everyone else here — we’re all just sidekicks.”

Vigilante Kitchen and Bar

644 Selden St., Detroit. 313-638-1695; vigilantekitchen.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.