The building at Forest and Second has been a corner bar for as long as the neighborhood has had memory of itself. Red brick, ivy creeping up the facade, the kind of structure that already looks like it knows the block better than the block knows itself. Sandy Levine and Doug Hewitt put Dirty Shake in it on March 13, 2025.This is a deliberate downshift.
Levine's other rooms are Freya and Dragonfly in Milwaukee Junction (Freya was Hour Detroit's 2024 Restaurant of the Year), Chartreuse Kitchen & Cocktails in the Art Center, and the Oakland Art Novelty Company in Ferndale. Hewitt is a James Beard-honored chef at all of them. None of those places sell an eleven-dollar burger.
Dirty Shake does. That is the point."This part of Midtown is one of the few neighborhoods where people who lived here fifteen or twenty years ago are still around," Levine said in his opening statement. "We want to honor that history while also welcoming students and newcomers." The room is a few hundred feet from Wayne State.The bar program comes from Kamalani Overall, who ran the bar at the Oakland in Ferndale.
The cocktail menu reads like a love letter to Detroit drinks the city has half-forgotten. The Hummer, the local invention of frozen rum and ice cream and Kahlua. A fruit-forward Green Tea cocktail.
The Strong Island, capped at two per customer, runs OFTD overproof rum, navy-strength gin, Suntory whiskey, Bärenjäger honey liqueur, house sour, and a vanilla coke float poured into a glass that probably should not be near anyone's hand by the second one.The food is simple and serious. The double-patty burger runs sharp cheddar, pickles, grilled onions, mayo-mustard on a Martin's potato roll for eleven dollars. House sausage with kraut and spicy pickles.
A vegan cauliflower with pepper jam, scallion, and cilantro. The wings get brined for twenty-four hours, dry-cured for another twenty-four, smoked for two, then fried. "It's a three-day process," Hewitt said.
"But at the end of the day, it's still chicken wings."
The team that runs Detroit's most ambitious tasting menus opened a corner bar that takes itself seriously about chicken wings and not much else. Forty seats inside, a wraparound patio for fifty more, ivy still climbing the brick.
4642 Second Ave., Detroit.
