Aventura and the Table That Started Everything
At 216 East Washington, a Spanish tapas restaurant built on an old building and a trip to Spain is still the best argument for sharing.
The current menu includes Spanish small plates such as patatas bravas, gambas al ajillo, croquetas, and paella. Check the restaurant's live menu for ingredients and availability.
Aventura is at 216 East Washington Street, in a building that dates to 1872. Sava Farah bought it because she liked the bones of it.1Sava Farah's founding narrative, including the La Mesa table discovery, the research trip to Spain, and her family's immigration from Albania, is drawn from the Pulpo Group's own account and local press profiles of Farah. In the stone-carved basement, she found an antique table left behind by a previous tenant. She called it La Mesa. Something about that table sent her to Spain. She and her team spent weeks eating their way through the country, studying how tapas bars work, what makes a good sherry list, how a meal built on small plates changes the rhythm at the table. They came back and opened Aventura in 2013.
The table still sits in the dining room.
The Food
The restaurant presents the menu as a shared small-plates format, with tapas, paella, pintxos, and Spanish flatbreads. Portions, ingredients, and prices change, so the official menu is the source for current ordering guidance.
The Room
The building predates almost everything else on this stretch of Washington Street. The interior leans into that age with exposed brick, warm wood, the kind of weathered surfaces that a decorator would spend thousands trying to fake. La Mesa anchors the space. The room seats about forty people, which keeps it intimate without feeling cramped.
When weather permits, Aventura lists outdoor seating. Check the restaurant's current reservation page for patio availability and seating details.
The Drinks
The restaurant publishes a sherry and Iberian wine selection alongside cocktails. Current pours and pairings belong to the live drinks menu.
Sava Farah's Ann Arbor
Farah opened Sava's on State Street in 2007 with twenty-five thousand dollars, some of it a family loan, by taking over the lease of a shuttered café. That restaurant became a fixture. Aventura came six years later. The Dixboro Project, set on seven acres of woodland in Dixboro Village, opened in 2020. Together they form the Pulpo Group, named for the octopus.
Farah emigrated from Albania to the Bronx at five years old. Her family crossed what was then the Yugoslav border on foot. That background doesn't explain everything about how she runs restaurants, but it might explain the directness. Aventura doesn't feel managed by committee. It feels like one person's vision of what Spanish food in a Michigan college town should taste like.
Why It Lasts
Thirteen years is a long run for any restaurant. In a college town where a good chunk of the customer base graduates every four years, it's the harder version of the test. Aventura has survived because the format is right, the food is consistent, and the price is honest. Tapas run roughly ten to twenty dollars each, paella is in the mid-thirties to mid-forties, and dinner for two with drinks lands somewhere north of a hundred dollars if you order the way you should. For what you get, in this room, that's fair.
La Mesa remains part of the restaurant's dining-room story. The restaurant's current menu and service, rather than a fixed dish ranking, are the best reason to revisit this profile.
Aventura is at 216 E Washington St, Ann Arbor. Sun-Thu 3 p.m.-10 p.m., Fri-Sat 3 p.m.-11 p.m. Happy hour daily 3-6 p.m. Reservations through Tock. 734-369-3153.