CityLab had an interesting article today regarding Detroit’s culinary scene. The article uses a different viewpoint, one that looks at gentrification and race.
In today’s Downtown Detroit, the majority of new restaurant ownership—along with the bulk of prestigious staff positions at these establishments—is overwhelmingly white. So is their patronage. With a few important and notable exceptions, Downtown Detroit’s contemporary culinary scene, as celebrated by popular media coverage, investment capital, and growing industry recognition, is almost exclusively white-faced in a breathtakingly black city—and adjacent to other similarly white-faced commercial and residential concerns. This inequality is the final destination for most urban revival schemes, a sad union of capitalism and structural racism that’s hard to untangle.
