Drive down Old Woodward past the Emagine Palladium and until recently you'd pass a storefront that had sat dark for years, the Alice in Wonderland murals still faintly visible through the windows. Head a few blocks over to Eton Street and the old train depot told a similar story: a building everyone in Birmingham had eaten in at some point, closed and quiet since the end of 2021. If you've lived here through any of that stretch, you probably wondered the same thing more than once. What's actually going to happen to these places?
The answer arrived in two parts, less than nine months apart, and neither building went back to being what it was.
The Depot and the Mad Hatter Were Birmingham's Two Big Question Marks
The building at 245 S. Eton Street started as the Grand Trunk Western Railroad Depot before it was converted into a restaurant in the 1980s. That restaurant ran for nearly 40 years before closing at the end of 2021, leaving the Tudor Revival building with its gabled roofline and herringbone brick sitting empty on a stretch of Birmingham that otherwise stayed busy.
A few blocks away, 185 N. Old Woodward Ave. had its own long pause. Mad Hatter Bistro opened there in September 2014 and built a loyal following around its tea parties and Alice in Wonderland theme before closing in 2020. The space sat dark for four years, directly across the avenue from the Palladium theater, in what is otherwise one of the most walked blocks downtown.
Two of the buildings Birmingham residents asked about most often finally got answers. Bell Bistro reopened the Mad Hatter space in November 2024, and Big Rock Italian Chophouse reopened the depot about eight months later, on July 15, 2025. Neither project simply reheated what used to be there.
What Actually Moved Into the Depot
Cameron Mitchell Restaurants, the Columbus-based group behind Ocean Prime, took on the depot as a joint venture with Detroit native Tom Celani and partner Dario Bergamo. The original plan, announced in 2023, budgeted the renovation at $10 million. By the time Big Rock Italian Chophouse and The Rock Cigar Club opened, Mitchell told the Detroit News the real number had climbed to roughly $12.5 million, a two-and-a-half-year overrun the team attributed to the scale of preserving a landmark building rather than replacing it.
What that money bought is an 11,000-square-foot building split into two distinct experiences: about 7,718 square feet of dining room seating roughly 280 people downstairs, and a separate 2,357-square-foot members-only cigar club upstairs with its own entrance, terrace, and private lockers for about 80 more. The menu leans into prime steaks, house-made pastas, and an extensive wine list, but Mitchell has been direct that the cigar club, not the food, is what he thinks sets the property apart from Birmingham's other steakhouses. If you're walking past on a weeknight, the restaurant currently runs 4 to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday and later on weekends, so the depot that sat quiet for three and a half years is now one of the more active corners of that stretch of Eton.
The Mad Hatter Space Grew Up
Bell Bistro, from Bloomfield Hills-based Cicero Hospitality Group, took a different approach with the old Mad Hatter address. Rather than replace one theme with another, the new restaurant is named for Samuel Oliver Wylie Bell, the building's original owner, which is a small detail but a telling one for a group that could have picked something splashier.
The 3,000-square-foot space, redesigned by Ann Arbor-based Bowers + Associates, seats 36 in the main dining room plus a 12-seat bar, with another 30 seats downstairs. Executive chef Gabriel Botezan, a Le Cordon Bleu-certified chef with a long run in metro Detroit dining, built a New American menu that includes a Wagyu meatball starter, rigatoni alla gricia, and the Bell Smash Burger, backed by a cocktail list with drinks like the Bellerina and the Belfry. It's a considerably more grown-up register than the tea party theme it replaced, and it sits in the same walkable pocket of downtown as the Palladium, which means a dinner reservation and a movie are now back to being an easy pairing on that block for the first time in four years.
The Same Eighteen Months Brought More Than Two Reopenings
The depot and the Mad Hatter space were the two vacancies most residents had opinions about, but they weren't the only changes to Birmingham's dining scene in this window. A few others worth knowing about if you haven't been downtown in a while:
- Wilder's: restaurateur Samy Eid, already known locally for Phoenicia, Forest, and Leila, built this Art Deco-inspired supper club from the ground up. It opened in early 2025 and is now well into its second year, with a menu of dry gin martinis, caviar, and filet that leans into the atmosphere of a mid-century dinner club rather than a trend-driven new opening.
- Besos: celebrity chef Matthew Kenney had his hard opening for this vegan, whole-foods restaurant on May 27, 2026, giving Birmingham its first restaurant from a chef better known nationally than locally.
- RH Rooftop Restaurant: inside RH Detroit, The Gallery, a 60,000-square-foot, four-story flagship that opened in late 2025 and is the only gallery of its kind in Michigan. The rooftop restaurant has skylight ceilings and views over the city, with a menu that includes lobster towers and steak frites.
None of these three occupied a building that had been sitting vacant for years, which is part of why the depot and Mad Hatter stories stand out. They were the two long-running open questions. Everything else was simply new.
What This Means If You Live Here
If your read on downtown Birmingham is still shaped by driving past two dark storefronts, it's worth an update. As of this Labor Day weekend, Big Rock Italian Chophouse is open and taking reservations on Eton, closed only for the holiday itself before reopening September 8. Bell Bistro has been serving on Old Woodward for almost two years now. Between those two, plus Wilder's, Besos, and the RH rooftop, a resident who wants a genuinely different night out four times in a row can now do it without leaving a few walkable blocks of downtown, something that wasn't true three years ago when both of the neighborhood's most recognizable dining buildings were sitting empty.
That's the more useful way to think about what's happened here. This wasn't a wave of brand-new construction changing the character of downtown. It was two long vacancies finally resolving, arriving close enough together that the change felt sudden even though each project had been years in the making.
If you're weighing a move to Birmingham, or already live here and want a fuller picture of the neighborhood beyond what's on your dinner table, our Birmingham neighborhood guide covers the rest of what makes this stretch of Oakland County worth knowing well.
Robert Torrey has spent years watching Birmingham's blocks change from the ground up, first in construction and now in real estate, and he pays attention to what a building's history says about its future use. If you have questions about this neighborhood, whether you're a longtime resident or just curious about what's next, Let's Connect with Robert Torrey.
