Why Dime Store matters.
Dime Store is a chef-driven American brunch restaurant where Downtown Detroit's Financial District's historic banking heritage meets Josh Taylor's inventive breakfast cooking, scratch-made comfort food and the revival of independent dining in the city's commercial center.
Positioned inside Chrysler House on Griswold Street between West Fort Street and Lafayette Boulevard, the restaurant occupies a ground-floor space near Campus Martius Park, surrounded by the Financial District's early twentieth-century skyscrapers and Detroit's historic concentration of banking institutions. The building's limestone exterior and neoclassical architectural details establish an expansive commercial setting, contrasting with the intimate proportions of the restaurant's street-level dining room. Inside, vintage school chairs, glass-globe lighting and antique milkshake machines introduce references to the American lunch counters and neighborhood variety stores that inspired the restaurant's character. Hand-painted murals influenced by the Winged Liberty Head dime extend that historical association across the interior, connecting the dining room's decorative program to the building's original financial purpose. The result is a restaurant whose lively interpretation of American diner culture occupies a distinguished architectural setting within Detroit's historic commercial center.
What defines Dime Store.
Dime Store is best known for Jeff Alexander, Larry Kahn and Ann-Marie Murphy establishing an independent, chef-driven brunch restaurant inside Detroit's historic Dime Building during the city's downtown commercial revival. The three longtime friends developed the business around their shared interest in breakfast and lunch prepared with the technical attention associated with ambitious full-service restaurants. Murphy brought professional experience in marketing, including work connected to businessman Dan Gilbert's Detroit development activities, giving the founding partnership a direct relationship with the city's changing downtown economy. Kahn contributed a background in catering, providing practical knowledge of food preparation and hospitality operations. Alexander had managed restaurants including Max & Erma's, Cracker Barrel and the Omelette and Waffle Cafe in Plymouth, adding experience across several established American dining formats. Their complementary backgrounds supported a restaurant concept that combined familiar breakfast traditions with more ambitious culinary preparation. The partners selected a ground-floor location inside the former Dime Savings Bank Building, a property completed in 1912 and subsequently renamed Chrysler House. Architect Daniel Burnham designed the original skyscraper around a neoclassical exterior and a skylit banking hall, creating a commercial landmark whose name recalled the bank's practice of accepting savings deposits as small as ten cents. A $40 million renovation in 2002 had already established an important chapter in the property's redevelopment before the restaurant's founders arrived. The building later entered Dan Gilbert's downtown real-estate portfolio, placing the emerging restaurant inside a broader period of renewed investment in Detroit's central business district. The founders adopted the name Dime Store as a reference to both the historic bank and the five-and-dime variety shops whose lunch counters had once formed an important part of everyday American commercial life. Executive chef Josh Taylor joined the project with more than three decades of professional culinary experience and formal training at the French Culinary Institute in New York. His earlier career included work at Park Grill in Chicago, bringing experience from a major urban restaurant into the founders' Detroit venture. Taylor developed a menu organized around breakfast, brunch and lunch, applying classical technique to familiar American preparations and introducing ingredients associated with several international culinary traditions. Dime Store opened on August 25, 2014, initially operating as an American brunch bar before receiving approval for alcoholic beverage service. The restaurant's early popularity prompted Murphy and her partners to expand operating hours in December 2014, adding Sunday brunch and extending weekday service. Its success developed alongside Detroit's broader downtown restaurant revival, attracting office workers, neighborhood residents and visitors into a commercial district whose historic buildings were acquiring new hospitality uses. Readers of Hour Detroit and Metro Times subsequently recognized Dime Store through awards for breakfast, brunch and diner cooking, establishing a sustained local reputation beyond its opening period. The business retained its original ownership team and Taylor's culinary leadership as its menu developed through an expanding archive of rotating chef's specials. Its reputation also supported a second location in Rochester Hills, extending the founders' approach to scratch-made brunch beyond Downtown Detroit. More than a decade after its establishment, Dime Store represents a distinctive collaboration between independent restaurant entrepreneurship, professional culinary training and the reuse of Detroit's historic commercial architecture.
Taylor's cooking begins with the concept that familiar American breakfast dishes become more distinctive when their fundamental components receive the same preparation and technical attention as those in an ambitious dinner kitchen. The restaurant's scratch-made approach establishes that foundation through biscuits, gravies, sauces, dressings, marinades and jams prepared in-house, giving the kitchen direct control over flavor and texture before individual dishes are assembled. Its potatoes are cut fresh for hash preparations, allowing their surfaces to brown during cooking and develop the crisp exterior necessary to contrast with softer vegetables, meat and eggs. The Duck Bop Hash demonstrates how Taylor extends that foundation through a technique associated with classical French cooking, slowly confiting duck leg until its connective tissue softens and the meat develops a rich, yielding texture. Korean barbecue glaze introduces sweetness and savory concentration, and pickled vegetables provide acidity that cuts through the richness of the duck. Sriracha adds heat, completing a preparation whose flavor develops through the relationship between slow cooking, crisp potatoes, fermentation and assertive seasoning. This approach also shapes the kitchen's interpretation of corned beef, which begins with Sy Ginsberg's brisket and continues through slow cooking before the meat enters hash and sandwich preparations. The resulting beef carries a substantial savory character, allowing horseradish cream to introduce sharpness against the potatoes and vegetables. Taylor applies a related balance of richness and acidity to the restaurant's Benedict preparations, using the familiar combination of eggs, bread and sauce as a foundation for more substantial savory ingredients. The Cheesesteak Benny brings shaved ribeye, mushrooms, onions and American cheese into that structure, translating the flavors of a Philadelphia sandwich into a breakfast preparation. The kitchen's relationship with locally grown Stoney Creek Mushrooms reinforces the importance of ingredient selection within these otherwise familiar combinations. Sweet breakfast cooking follows the same commitment to preparation, with brioche French toast and malted Belgian waffles developing contrasting textures through enriched bread, batter and controlled surface browning. Michigan maple syrup supplies sweetness with a distinct regional agricultural connection, and fresh fruit introduces acidity and moisture against the richer cooked components. The restaurant's custom burger blend, developed with Fairway Packing, extends its ingredient-focused approach into lunch, establishing another connection between local producers and familiar American food. Taylor's rotating specials provide an outlet for further experimentation, incorporating preparations such as Kung Pao Chicken Hash and Fried Green Tomato Benny into the restaurant's established breakfast structure. These changing dishes preserve the underlying relationship between recognizable culinary structures and unexpected combinations of technique, seasoning and ingredients. Zingerman's locally roasted coffee provides a complementary beverage foundation, bringing the aromatic depth of carefully prepared coffee into a meal organized around substantial savory and sweet flavors. Cocktails extend the restaurant's brunch-bar character through mimosas, Bloody Marys and coffee-based preparations, connecting the morning menu to a broader tradition of American daytime dining. Dime Store's culinary distinction emerges from this consistent transformation of familiar breakfast foundations through scratch preparation, professional technique and inventive flavor combinations, giving the American brunch tradition a distinctly Detroit expression.
How Dime Store fits.
Dime Store works as the concluding destination for a Downtown Detroit itinerary connecting the city's expansive financial architecture, the industrial wealth that shaped its skyscrapers and the historic public square at the center of its urban development.
Begin at Guardian Building, the celebrated Art Deco skyscraper commissioned by the Union Trust Company during the height of Detroit's financial expansion in the 1920s. Architect Wirt C. Rowland of Smith, Hinchman & Grylls designed the forty-story headquarters, completing its plans in 1927 before construction concluded in 1929. The building's distinctive orange brick exterior surrounds a richly decorated interior whose vaulted ceilings, stained glass, colored marble and elaborate tilework established its reputation as Detroit's Cathedral of Finance. Mary Chase Perry Stratton's Pewabic Pottery contributed symbolic ceramic decoration, and artist Ezra Winter created expansive imagery connecting the banking institution to Michigan's industrial and agricultural economy. The financial collapse following the 1929 stock market crash transformed the building's ownership history, and the property subsequently served as a command center for American wartime ordnance production before receiving National Historic Landmark designation in 1989. Continue to Penobscot Building, the towering Art Deco complex developed by the family of lumber entrepreneur Simon J. Murphy. Murphy established his fortune through the timber industry before investing in Detroit real estate and supporting early automobile ventures, including financial backing for Henry Ford's Detroit Automobile Company. His family expanded an original 1905 commercial building through a second tower in 1916 and a forty-seven-story skyscraper designed by Wirt C. Rowland in 1928. The completed Greater Penobscot Building rose 565 feet above the city, becoming Detroit's tallest building until the Renaissance Center surpassed it in 1977. Its Indiana limestone exterior, stepped upper stories and illuminated red aviation beacon established a commanding presence above the Financial District, connecting the family's commercial ambitions to Detroit's emergence as an international industrial capital. Conclude at Campus Martius Park, the historic civic square that became the organizing point for Detroit's reconstruction after the devastating fire of 1805. Judge Augustus Woodward developed a new street plan inspired by Washington, D.C., placing the intersection of Woodward and Michigan avenues at the center of a system of radiating streets and broad public spaces. The Point of Origin marker preserves the geographic reference from which Detroit's northern mile roads take their distances, connecting the square to the larger metropolitan landscape. During the nineteenth century, the site accommodated military gatherings and became home to the Michigan Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, whose sculptural program commemorates the state's Civil War service. A major reconstruction completed in November 2004 restored the square as a landscaped civic destination, and the Urban Land Institute recognized the project with its inaugural Urban Open Space Award in 2010. The progression moves from the Guardian Building's expansive banking architecture through the Penobscot Building's industrial-era commercial ambition and culminates in Campus Martius Park's historical role as the organizing center of Detroit, placing Dime Store within the financial and civic development of the city's downtown core.
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