I’m planning on heading to Eastern Market tomorrow morning, as I try to do any Saturday that we can make it. It is really one of the largest and best urban open-air farmers’ markets in the country, with a wide variety of produce and other delights from all over.
You can sip Detroit Bold coffee, the city’s own brew, while you wander through the stalls and sheds, and if it is cold as it has been, I’ll probably do that. You can take a pedestrian bridge over to Gratiot Central Market and see a display of meat that will leave you speechless.
I’ll do that too, and at least buy some hot dogs. But for the last twenty-five years or so, I’ve tried whenever possible to start off with breakfast at the Farmers’ Restaurant, right in the middle of the action. They had decent scrambles and bacon and huge pancakes. Gourmet dining it was not, though we think they may have had the best grits in Detroit.
But it was good affordable food and plenty of it. Once a former Paris bureau chief for Time magazine decided to visit Eastern Market and told me he wanted a perfect Detroit place to eat. I sent him to Farmers. Later that morning he called me. He had absolutely loved it. When I was teaching I sometimes went there in the late afternoon, had a sandwich and graded papers.
They didn’t care how long I stayed. I’d talk to the matriarch, a lovely Greek woman my age whose family owned the place and worked there. Shar, my favorite server, had a husband on the police force who worked the tough East Side of Detroit, and she told me about her worries.
You’d see doctors in there and lawyers; cops and construction workers and people who looked like they were one paycheck from disaster. It was a true melting pot, like all of Eastern Market on a Saturday, or like the nation someday in Martin Luther King’s dream.
I was planning on having breakfast at Farmers’ tomorrow too. But now I can’t. Sanford Nelson, who has been buying up properties all over the market, bought the building the restaurant was in, and the family running it immediately decided to retire.
Local media are hinting that there is more to it than that, that it is perhaps some form of protest over hipster gentrification. I frankly don’t know. Sanford Nelson said he wanted Farmers to stay open, but that the owners wanted to call it a career.
Running a restaurant is hard work, and they may well have had enough, though I never saw any sign of that. But what I do know is this:
Farmers was something rare in Detroit. An affordable but good restaurant that was authentically part of its neighborhood. There are other hip restaurants around Eastern Market, most of them considerably pricier. There are also food trucks, but not much in between,
That is why Farmers was so beloved. Restaurants come and go; always have, always will. Eastern Market has undergone a tremendous expansion in recent years, and there have been many improvements. But it needs an eatery like Farmers, or maybe more than one.
Let’s hope one will take its place, maybe in the same space, soon.
