Home to a major university and the Zingerman’s Delicatessen empire, Ann Arbor, Michigan, isn’t exactly a dining wasteland. But until recently, it wasn’t the kind of town where you’d walk into a restaurant and find dill flowers in your cherry soup or fennel pollen in your semolina cookies.
At Spencer, the tiny wine-and-cheese bar and restaurant that Abby Olitzky and Steve Hall opened downtown last October, you’ll find just those sorts of dishes, part of a rotating menu of small plates bearing the kind of pretty, hyperlocal, seasonal food that’s still relatively uncommon here. “We get customers who come in and say, ‘This food feels San Franciscan — I hope that’s not weird,’” Olitzky said.
Given Spencer’s DNA, it’s not weird at all: Olitzky, a pastry chef, met Hall, a cheesemonger, when the two were working at neighboring restaurants in San Francisco, Olitzky’s hometown. “I courted her with a loaf of Zingerman’s rye,” said Hall, an Ann Arbor native (and Zingerman’s alum).
The pair came to Michigan with the idea of doing something in Detroit, but quickly became enamored of Ann Arbor. They designed Spencer as a neighborhood hangout replete with coffee, pastries to go, and whitewashed walls, trimming the restaurant only with fresh flowers and two 19th-century oil portraits.
Like its décor, Spencer’s food is an Instagram fantasia: At a dinner in early August, that bowl of chilled cherry soup, its crimson surface streaked with crème fraîche and dotted with pale-green ground cherries, was greeted by a chorus of iPhone cameras. But it’s also food of substance: A salad of arugula, Tongue of Fire shelling beans, pickled red onion and fried breadcrumbs boasted flavors as robust as they were balanced.
A plate of farmers’ market cucumbers and melon got a joyous umami nudge from a Beldi-olive tuille and creamy blobs of whipped feta. Cherry tomatoes and pickled tomatillos, meanwhile, delivered an acid kick to ribbons of hamachi crudo garnished with lime zest and shiso.
All the food was ferried to diners by the cooks who made it, another twist that has made Spencer something of a conceptual leap for Ann Arbor. “Portion sizes and words like ‘crudo’ were definite challenges” at first, Hall admitted.
“There was a bit of hand holding” with their diners, Olitzky added. “But we cook what we want to cook. I would rather have to hold a hand than not do it.”
