The Chevy Traverse seamlessly offers the space and versatility your family needs, great for everything from gear to groceries.
A shared meal has a sound to it: pita tearing, plates landing, forks crossing the center of the table, someone asking for one more spoonful of sauce. Around Metro Detroit, several restaurants build that feeling directly with family-style meals for dinner, brunch, or a night out.
Blue Nile Ethiopian Restaurant
545 West Nine Mile Road, Ferndale
221 East Washington Street, Ann Arbor
Blue Nile Ethiopian Restaurant places the meal directly in the center, with injera spread across a large platter and dishes arranged on top for everyone to share by hand. The restaurant’s Ethiopian feast can bring together doro wat (tender chicken), zizil wat (beef strips), yebeg alicha (lamb), kik alicha (pureéd split peas), gomen (spiced greens), cabbage, beets, and other vegetable and meat preparations, each scooped with torn pieces of the soft, tangy flatbread. Instead of guarding a plate, diners build bites from the same surface, moving between lentils, greens, stews, and spice until the injera underneath has soaked up the sauces. Few dining styles make the center of the table work harder.
Genitti’s
108 East Main Street, Northville
Genitti’s treats Italian dinner as a full-table event, with its long-running family-style format giving the meal a clear beginning, middle, and end. The Northville restaurant is known for its seven-course spread that moves through antipasto salad, Italian Wedding soup, pasta, Italian sausage with peppers, baked chicken, oven-roasted potatoes, and bread, and concludes with cannoli for dessert, resulting in the kind of lineup that keeps plates moving and conversation circling back. The dinner-theater setting adds another layer to the evening, but the table remains the anchor: bowls passed, second helpings offered, and a meal made for groups rather than solitary entrees. It still feels like the kind of outing built for birthdays, visiting relatives, and anyone who wants dinner to take up the whole night.
Mabel Gray
23825 John R Road, Hazel Park
Mabel Gray brings sharing into a smaller, more focused room in Hazel Park, where the table pays close attention to each course as it arrives. Chef James Rigato’s restaurant is built around a changing tasting-menu style of dining, so the details shift, but the structure gives the meal its shape: the chef’s choice tasting menu guides the table through eight courses, while the à la carte menu has 10 to 12 items, with a variety of gluten-free, vegetarian, and seafood options available. A dish might not arrive on a giant platter, but it still pulls the table together when someone cuts off a taste of fish, passes over a forkful of pasta, or saves a spoonful of sauce for the person across from them. The shared energy here is quieter, centered on the same plate at the same moment.
Le Petit Dejeuner
4216 Woodward Avenue, Detroit
Le Petit Dejeuner turns breakfast into a family-style spread instead of a one-plate routine. Pancakes, eggs, potatoes, breakfast meats, and other morning staples can be ordered as a table meal, with the restaurant using group-size names that make the format part of the fun. Owner Tina Motley shares, “Le Petit Dejeuner is French for Breakfast. We are a family-style dining breakfast restaurant. Most family-style restaurants are Italian-based. Family-style dining allows our guests to select multiple items from our menu to be prepared for the entire table. We have meals named after TV shows and movies. The number of guests determines which meal is appropriate for you. We have a Living Single, which is a meal for one. Our Two Can Play That Game meal is a meal for two. This meal allows two people to select four items from our menu for the table. There’s a Three’s Company meal, which obviously is a meal for three; a Family Matters meal is prepared for four or five guests. Our largest meal is a Brady Bunch, which allows six or more guests to collectively agree upon seven items that would be proportioned for the number of guests at the table. We have been in business for 11 years, opening our first doors in 2015.” As a group, decide what your selection will be, whether it is a combo of sweet potato pancakes and wings, or a customized omelette paired with grits and sausage.
Leila
1245 Griswold Street, Detroit
Leila’s Lebanese menu starts strong when the table fills with mezze. Hummus, baba ghanouj, labneh, muhammara, fattoush, tabbouleh, grape leaves, haloumi, batata harra, vegetables, and warm pita all make sense in multiples, with each person building a different bite from the same spread. Larger plates such as chicken tawook, lamb, grilled branzino, rice, and grilled vegetables can extend the meal, but the mood is set early by dipping, scooping, and passing. Continue the sharing mood with ordering a few desserts to split, like the Lebanese Sundae, Sticky Date Cake, or the Chocolate Crème Brûlée.
These Metro Detroit restaurants show how much character a meal gains when food moves between people. Whether the table is covered with appetizers, breakfast platters, or tasting-menu plates shared bite by bite, the focus stays on the center: the place where the dishes land and the conversation keeps returning.
