Walk past 9 South Main Street in downtown Clarkston today and you will see white tablecloths, a bar pouring Billecart-Salmon by the glass, and a line of regulars who booked their table weeks ago. What you will not see, unless you already know it, is that the building spent its first six decades doing nothing close to fine dining. It opened in 1915 as the Voorheis Ford Service & Auto Supply Company. At some point it became a Kroger. Then, starting in 1933, it was Rudy's Market, a neighborhood grocery store that fed Clarkston for close to ninety years before closing its doors in 2021.
That same stone structure is now Rudy's Prime Steakhouse, and in February, Hour Detroit magazine named it the 2026 Restaurant of the Year in the entire Detroit region. A building that could not survive as a grocery store just became the best restaurant in Michigan's biggest metro. That is not a coincidence specific to one address. It is the pattern that explains how a small downtown with no more room to expand keeps producing new reasons to visit it.
A Grocery Store That Became the State's Best Table
Robert Esshaki and Chris Thomas had run Rudy's Market and its corporate dining arm since 1989. When the grocery closed in 2021, they did not sell the building or let it sit. They gutted it, working with Birmingham-based Saroki Architecture and Kelly Building & Development Company to turn a 4,500-square-foot former dealership-turned-supermarket into a 132-seat steakhouse with a bar and lounge built for walk-ins. It reopened in October 2024 under executive chef Josh Stockton, who came by way of the Wynn in Las Vegas and Detroit's Gold Cash Gold.
The menu tells you what changed and what didn't. Piedmontese tomahawks come from Fairway Packing Co. in Detroit's Eastern Market. The dry-aged Prime Porterhouse ships from Allen Brothers. There is a bone-in veal chop Milanese and a Wagyu meatball starter, but there is also a burger on the menu, a nod to the fact that this building has always fed the whole town, not just the people who can afford a $50 entree.
In 2025, Esshaki and Thomas received a Building Award from the Michigan Historic Preservation Network for the renovation, an honor reserved for preservation projects completed in the prior three years. Then came the Hour Detroit title. Two different institutions, one judging historic renovation and the other judging food, landed on the same building in back-to-back years. That is a hard thing to fake.
The Chamber of Commerce sees what this means for the rest of the block. As executive director Kendal Petzold put it when the project was first announced, Main Street's identity is tied directly to what happens inside these old storefronts.
"Our Main Street is a destination for great food. People know Clarkston because of our wonderful restaurants and businesses downtown."
Esshaki and Thomas aren't stopping at the steakhouse. They also bought the former Clarkston News building next door at 5 South Main, where plans call for a Mediterranean restaurant, a second-floor bourbon and cigar bar, and a basement wine cellar meant to serve both spaces. Same block, same owners, another old building about to become something it has never been before.
Main Street's Other Reinventions
Rudy's is the loudest example this year, but it is not the only one. Clarkston Union Bar & Kitchen operates out of an 1840s church on Main Street, and the building still shows it: stained glass windows over the dining room, a digital counter tallying every order of mac and cheese served since 1995. A few doors down, Union Woodshop turned a barbecue concept into a name recognizable well outside Oakland County after a visit from Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.
Out on Dixie Highway, Kruse's Deer Lake Inn occupies the site of the original Deer Lake Inn, a lakeside hotel documented in photographs from the 1920s with wide porches built for summer guests arriving by train from Detroit. When the Kruse family, who opened their first Kruse & Muer restaurant in Rochester back in 1988, finally found the right building in Clarkston, they didn't build new. They worked with Independence Township to bring an old inn back to life under the same roofline it has always had.
None of these businesses expanded the town's footprint. They all took a building that already existed and asked more of it. A handful of names on today's Main Street reflect that same pattern:
- Rudy's Prime Steakhouse, 9 South Main, formerly a Ford service garage, a Kroger, and a grocery store
- Clarkston Union Bar & Kitchen, an 1840s former church
- Kruse's Deer Lake Inn, on the footprint of a 1920s lakeside hotel
This is a town that has learned to trust its old buildings more than it trusts new construction. That instinct, more than any single restaurant, is what makes Main Street worth walking down twice in one week.
The Same Four Blocks, Every Year
The same logic applies to the town's calendar, not just its buildings. Clarkston does not invent a new festival every time it wants an event. It runs the same handful of gatherings, in the same small stretch of Depot Park, and lets the years stack up.
The Chamber of Commerce's Concerts in the Park series, presented by McLaren Clarkston, ran its 46th consecutive summer this year, with free Friday night shows at Depot Park from June through late July. Local acts open at 6 p.m. and headliners close out the evening by 9. It is not a festival built to impress first-time visitors. It is a routine, decades deep, for people who already live here.
Art in the Village works the same way. The Clarkston Community Historical Society has hosted the show at Depot Park every September for roughly four decades, and this year's edition lands on September 19 and 20. Regional artisans set up for painting, pottery, sculpture, and jewelry, and the Historical Society uses it as its primary fundraiser for the year. A week later, on September 27, the Chamber and Independence Township Parks & Recreation co-host Taste of Clarkston, pulling in more than 35 area restaurants for one afternoon of sampling, live music, and a kids' zone.
Three different organizers, one small park, and none of it needs new land or a new building to keep growing. The town just keeps returning to the same public square and asking more of that square each year, the same way it keeps returning to its old storefronts and asking more of them.
What This Fall Actually Looks Like
For anyone mapping out the next six weeks in town, the pattern holds together into an actual calendar. Concerts in the Park wrapped its Friday run in late July. Pine Knob Music Theatre, a few minutes from downtown, keeps its outdoor season going from May through October, so the amphitheater's parking lots and Main Street's restaurants will both stay busy on show nights into the fall. Art in the Village takes over Depot Park on September 19 and 20. Taste of Clarkston follows on September 27, when the Optimists typically set up their own beer and wine tent alongside the restaurant booths, a tradition some locals still call Op-toberfest.
None of this required Clarkston to add a single new venue. It required the town to keep showing up for the ones it already has, the same way Rudy's kept showing up for its building on South Main long after the grocery store made sense to close.
That is the part of this town that took me longest to appreciate when I started working in Oakland County. I spent years on the construction and project management side before I ever sold a house, and that background trained me to look at a building and ask what it could still become, not just what it currently is. Clarkston's Main Street answers that question over and over. A garage becomes a grocery becomes a steakhouse. A church becomes a kitchen. A lakeside hotel becomes a family restaurant that still serves fish on quiet Monday nights.
If you already live here, you've probably eaten in three of these buildings without ever hearing their full history. If you're weighing whether a town like this fits how you want to live, that same instinct, protecting what's already good and building on it rather than over it, tends to show up in the housing stock too.
I'm Robert Torrey, and Clarkston is one of the communities I spend the most time in, both walking it and working in it. If you want a longer look at the neighborhood, or you're weighing a move to this part of Oakland County, reach out. Let's Connect.
