Cliff Bell’s

Cliff Bell’s opened its doors in 1935, timed almost exactly to the end of Prohibition, and it’s the crowning achievement of a man who spent the previous 14 dry years running one speakeasy after another around the city — the DAC Annex behind the Detroit Athletic Club, the Parisian Club, and the Commodore Club among them. When Cliff Bell finally got to go legitimate, he didn’t hold back: he took over a 1928 Albert Kahn-designed building on Park Avenue and hired architect Charles Agree to build what he called “the finest restaurant in America,” with mahogany, brass, green velvet walls, and 12,000 sheets of gold leaf on the domed ceiling.

The club ran under Bell’s ownership until his retirement in 1958, cycled through several other names over the following decades, then sat vacant for 20 years before current owner Paul Howard reopened it under its original name in 2006 — getting the liquor license at 4:59 p.m. on a Friday, with the beer truck already waiting outside. Today it’s one of the busiest jazz stages in the country, with live music most nights and a menu that’s grown well past the shower-curtain-bathroom-stall era of its early reopening.

On our radar as the closest thing Detroit has to a time machine back to the exact moment Prohibition ended, or for genuinely excellent live jazz in one of the most striking Art Deco rooms in the city.