This year’s Restaurant of the Year Classic never lost sight of Detroit's French roots

For its 23-year run serving fine, French dishes in the New Center neighborhood, Cuisine is the 2024 Detroit Free Press/Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers Restaurant of the Year Classic. Executive Chef Paul Grosz earns the Sylvia Rector Lifetime Achievement Award for Hospitality.

Chef Paul Grosz recently shuffled through a handful of papers and uncovered a memento of his storied culinary past.

Grosz pored over a three-page essay he’d written as a high school student in the 1980s at Warren Consolidated Schools on the type of restaurant he hoped to open someday. The name of the restaurant was Cuisine, and from the name down to the charming townhouse with the flair of a European estate and the circular tables draped in white linens, the essay narrated the essence of what Grosz’s French restaurant is today, more than 40 years since he outlined his dream on those pages.

The Cuisine of Grosz’s adolescence was inspired by the former monthly food magazine acquired by Conde Nast in 1984.

“That name stuck with me,” Grosz said. “If you define cuisine, it's not only food, it's the culture of cooking. The restaurant will always be known for its food and the chef that cooks here — whether it's me or somebody else in the future — and of course, service and wine fall into that as well. But I want there to be a food culture here.”

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As he stood in the dining room at Cuisine after reading that defining essay, Grosz was in awe.

“To look back on those notes and see exactly what I wanted to do back then as a teenager, and to actually have done it in my 30s is pretty cool,” he said

At Cuisine, Grosz has created a culture of fine dining rooted in French cooking. Since it opened in 2001, the restaurant has become a special-occasion destination for locals from across the region. Located across the street from the Albert Kahn-designed Fisher Building, home of the Fisher Theatre and Broadway in Detroit, it’s a sophisticated place for showgoers to fill their bellies before a long, lively musical, or to compare interpretations of a heady play.

Mahogany wainscoting throughout the space and warm lighting hearken back to a time when Detroit’s elite, like the Fisher brothers — the automakers who owned the theater and the home that Cuisine now occupies — valued craftsmanship and grandeur. Today, though, television screens airing sporting events at the bar and modern cobalt blue light fixtures tone down any sense of pretense in the space.

Grosz was introduced to French cooking in 1983 when he joined Keith Famie’s opening team at Raphael’s, then the popular French restaurant attached to the Sheraton Detroit Novi Hotel. From that experience, his love for the cuisine grew.

There was an ease that Grosz felt in French kitchens, a sensibility that came naturally to him. When paired with a little bit of divine timing and a lot of hard work, his pure talent set him on an early path to success in the field.

Grosz looked to the greats to master the craft. Just after high school graduation, he accepted an opportunity to work in the Chicago area under Jean Banchet, the late Le Francais chef. He collected cookbooks by Roger Vergé and Paul Bocuse — “He was my hero,” he said — and studied their recipes as intently as he studied their lives and food philosophies.  

“With social media and the Internet, it’s such a golden age of opportunity right now, but back then, you had to put a little more effort in,” he said.

He’d visit New York City often to witness the ascension of superstar chefs like Daniel Boulud, Eric Ripert and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and traveled across the globe as part of his research. He earned a more formalized training at the famed Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.

“Traveling, actually going to France and across Europe and studying not just food but the people and the culture, that's where I fell in love," Grosz said.

Grosz had plans to take his passion for French cooking to the East Coast — “My next move was probably going to be New York or L.A., but I felt L.A.’s dining scene wasn't ready yet and New York’s definitely was,” he said — but metro Detroit called him home. In 1988, he accepted a role to head up the kitchen at La Rotisserie at the former Hyatt Regency Dearborn.

At 24, Grosz landed his first executive chef job and in just three years, he’d take on a new position at the helm of the kitchen at the Whitney.  

“That was one of the hardest jobs I ever had in my life,” he said of his early days at the palatial Romanesque Revival restaurant. The swanky mansion consistently drew large crowds with reservations booked to capacity daily. And as a 27-year-old chef, he was challenged to earn the respect of seasoned cooks.   

To date, Grosz is always up for a challenge. The chef spent 10 years in the position at the Whitney before leaving his post to open Cuisine.

A Warren native with decades of experience working in metro Detroit restaurants, Grosz has seen the evolution of Detroit’s dining scene. He remembers a time when the city’s trusted French restaurants were few — he recalled the former La Fontaine at the GMRenCen and Pontchartrain Wine Cellars as two standouts in the ’80s — and admitted to traveling to bigger cities for top-quality dining experiences.

He celebrated when chef Jimmy Schmidt became the city’s first James Beard Award-winner for his skills at the Rattlesnake Club in 1993, and was patient during the subsequent 30 years when Detroit became a flyover city for the Beards and other national accolades.

Today though, Grosz is proud to see the progress and growth of Detroit’s food industry. With another James Beard Award-winner in Warda Bouguettaya in 2022 and deserving finalists each year since, Grosz believes Detroit is ready for the next level.

“I’d like to see the Michelin Guide come to Detroit,” he said. “We've finally become a food scene over the last several years, and I think we're ready.”

An avid traveler, Grosz has tasted dishes that have met the standards to earn three Michelin stars and believes Detroit delivers the same level of excellence. He touts the chefs from across the country who recognized the value in Detroit and brought their talents and cuisines here, diversifying the city’s restaurant scene.

“You're getting chefs from outside of Detroit, which I love to see because they're changing the culture," he said. "They're bringing in their own regional cuisine. I had to leave to learn more than what I was seeing in Detroit whereas now, a young cook doesn't have to leave Detroit. There's enough talent here now and different styles of cooking that you can gather enough to succeed.”

As the restaurant scene around it has experienced the bright spots and weathered the dark times, Cuisine, too has experienced its highs and lows.

When Grosz opened the restaurant in June 2001, the intent was to give his staff an opportunity to find its footing by the theater’s fall season. As the chefs perfected a menu of French classics like foie gras and steak frites and the service team got into a rhythm, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 slowed the tempo.

“9/11 was scary because military trucks pulled up across the street and were protecting the Fisher Building,” Grosz said. The historic building was under suspicion of being attacked.

Still, in 2002, the Detroit Free Press named Cuisine its third annual Restaurant of the Year. The honor helped usher in large crowds of epicureans and brought some relief to the business after a lag in patronage and eventually, Grosz earned enough to purchase the historic home that houses the restaurant.

In 2008, Grosz felt the tremble of the Great Recession and just five years later, the aftershock of the Detroit bankruptcy.

“Things were just really bad,” he said. “We barely got through that and then we rebounded and things were going well — and then COVID happened.”

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 devastated the business unlike any crisis before it

“Nothing compared to COVID because we were forced to shut down by our own government,” he said. “I got into this industry at a young age because I thought there was always going to be a job for me to cook somewhere. Now I'm being told that I can't cook anywhere, and it took a couple of weeks to wrap my mind around that.”

As longtime restaurants in the area shuttered in the wake of the pandemic, Grosz considered the possibility of closing Cuisine’s doors permanently, but he couldn't accept the defeat.

“I told myself, ‘You know what? I don't want to go out like this.’ I wanted to keep pushing the envelope and to finish on my own terms.” It’s this grit that has powered Grosz's 50-year culinary career.

If you peek into the kitchen on any given night at Cuisine, you’ll likely see the soft-spoken chef meticulously dusting a plate of chubby scallops with vibrant dehydrated beets or topping a potato pancake the size of a half-dollar with a mound of caviar the color of night.

You may even spot him mentoring a team of interns on rotation at the restaurant. For more than 13 years, Grosz has become a culinary academic, beginning as an adjunct instructor at Schoolcraft College's culinary arts program in 2010, and transitioning to a full-time faculty member in 2021.

Grosz was at first reluctant to venture into teaching, but renowned Detroit chef Brian Polcyn encouraged him to share his gift with a new generation of cooks.

“He reminded me that someone taught us and we needed to give back,” he said of his conversation with Polcyn. Grosz said he shadowed a class of Polcyn's and was hooked right away.

In his years as a professor, Grosz has impacted the lives of hundreds of today’s most acclaimed local chefs, an accomplishment that comes a close second to his own immediate family.

“I'm not proud of anything else, I swear.”

For his commitment to the craft of French cooking and the overall culinary arts, chef Paul Grosz has earned the Detroit Free Press/Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers Sylvia Rector Lifetime Achievement Award for Hospitality. And as the 2024 Restaurant of the Year Classic, Cuisine is the first establishment to become a two-time honoree in the history of the Free Press’ Restaurant of the Year program.

Named the 2002 Restaurant of the Year, Cuisine is the longest standing restaurant that remains open in the program’s 24-year history, and has paved the way for a new generation of French-inspired hotspots.

In recent years, a gust of French restaurants have breezed through the city, many even topping the Detroit Free Press’ Top 10 lists. In 2021, downtown Detroit welcomed The Statler, a French-American Bistro. Last year, Bar Pigalle took the No. 1 spot and Ladder 4, the popular wine bar with a French underpinning, was named the 2023 Restaurant of the Year. This year’s list even features an ambitious concept with French influence.

“When you think about it, Detroit was once a French territory and here we are, 300-plus years later and we're finally starting to see more French restaurants,” Grosz said.

But for this chef, French cooking is no trend. It’s not a fad nor is there a French resurgence in his world.

“French cooking is not something new for me. It’s what I've always done.”

Cuisine

670 Lothrop St., Detroit. 313-872-5110; cuisinerestaurant.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.