Little Bella’s Pizza & Wine Bar

We came for the cocktails. We left having found out my husband used to play in the room.

Little Bella’s is doing the thing downtown Royal Oak has been quietly starving for — an intimate, old-world Italian-American spot with a genuinely serious cocktail program behind it. Low-lit, eclectic, tucked into the ground floor of the Main Street corner. It makes a Tuesday feel like a night out.

But that’s only half of why we keep coming back.

The Room Used to Be Memphis Smoke

First time we ate here, Mike got to talking with the guys dining next to us — he does this — and somewhere in there he asked whether any of them knew where Memphis Smoke used to be. The barbecue joint and blues club. The one he’d played a bunch of times, back in his blues band days.

One of them looked at him and said: you’re sitting in it.

I wish I’d had a picture of his face.

100 South Main. Same address, same bones. Memphis Smoke ran here for years — ribs, catfish, and a stage the Detroit Blues Society still counts among the city’s historic blues clubs. Thornetta Davis played it. Canned Heat played it. Mike played it. It closed in 2010, and then it was just gone, the way rooms go, and he’d stopped wondering where it went.

Then the guy told us about Jack White.

Here’s where we have to be straight with you, because we went looking and the story won’t hold still. The legend — and you will hear it in this room — is that Memphis Smoke is where Jack met Meg, back when she was tending bar. What we can actually confirm: Meg White was a bartender by trade. That much is solid. The rest is a mess. Wikipedia says the two met at a coffee shop, somewhere in Ferndale or Hamtramck. The Detroit Historical Society says only that they met at “a local restaurant” and pointedly declines to name it. One site says flatly that it happened here.

Three sources, three stories, and the most careful one won’t commit. We don’t know. Nobody seems to. What we know is that a stranger at a bar in Royal Oak told us the most famous meet-cute in Detroit rock happened where we were sitting, and we can’t prove him wrong.

We’ve gone looking for the rest of him since — the mansion he bought when he made it, and, because Detroit has a sense of humor, a bar called Father Forgive Me.

That same guy also told us to get to Bar Gabi before it got too popular. We finally went this month. He was right about that, too.

What makes Little Bella’s worth it

We’ve been twice — once for dinner, once for afternoon cocktails, which is honestly the sleeper move. The pizza punches well above where you’d expect from a place leaning this hard into vibe, and the bartenders know what they’re doing. It’s the rare new spot that nailed the feeling right out of the gate.

Now, the espresso martinis. We have not had one. This is a reporting failure and we own it — we came for a Negroni kind of afternoon and stuck to it. But they are clearly the thing. We watched them come out of that bar all night, and the bartender told us, delighted, that people come in, order one, photograph it, and sometimes leave before they finish it.

Reader, drink the drink. But we understand.

Come for a date night, a girls’ night, or a long dinner where the second round is the whole point. And if you’re the kind of person who likes knowing what a building used to be — get a seat at the bar, look up at that ceiling, and put a blues band on the stage.