When USA Today named its first 27 Bars of the Year in July 2024, the only Michigan entry was Paramita Sound, the Black-owned wine bar and record shop on Broadway. Lyndsay C. Green, the Free Press food writer who picked Detroit's entry, called out the minimalist bar program and the way the room cultivates community through music.
The room is at 1515 Broadway. The owner is Andrey Douthard. He's been doing this since 2014, when he opened the original Paramita in a vacant West Village house with no running water and speaker wires taped to the floor.
Paramita has had three lives. The 2014 to 2017 stretch in West Village is when The Beat Profile ran on the last Friday of every month, free, three years deep, hundreds of people in the room each time. Detroit's most progressive producers played, the city's older heads played, and unheard talent played.
The 2017 move to 1515 Broadway put Paramita in the same building that anchored Detroit's underground music scene from the early 1980s on. Then the pandemic. Then 18 months of figuring out what Paramita was supposed to be next.
What it is now: a record shop and wine bar. The drinks list is intentionally short. Beer.
Curated Michigan wines. That's the whole program. The space is small.
The DJ booth is the priority. Local and national selectors play, often deep into formats they don't get to use elsewhere. Douthard is 38.
He's been a Detroit City FC supporter since 2012, year one.
He talks about Paramita the way someone talks about a project that has already done what it was supposed to do. "We use music as a vehicle to build bridges between generations," he told Detroit City FC for a community spotlight earlier this year, noting that at 38 he sits between older and younger waves of Detroit music. The USA Today honor brought out-of-town traffic for a few weeks.
The bar didn't change. Douthard has been clear since 2014 that the point is the music and the community. The wine list helps pay the lease.
The rest is the rest.
1515 Broadway St., Detroit.
