Isalita Is Gone. Ann Arbor Is Worse For It.

Isalita is closed. It was at 341 East Liberty Street, and sometime in 2025 it stopped being at 341 East Liberty Street. No announcement that I saw. No farewell post that circulated widely enough to reach me before the fact. I found out the way you find out about too many Ann Arbor restaurant closures: someone mentioned it in passing, and the weight of it landed later.

The honest thing to say is that I did not write about Isalita enough when it was open. It ran a serious cocktail program and a menu built around composed tacos at a time when Ann Arbor's Mexican dining options were almost entirely casual. That is not a knock on casual. But Isalita was doing something different. It was asking the question of whether Ann Arbor would support a Mexican restaurant that spent the same energy on its cocktail list that a fine dining restaurant spends on its wine program, that treated the taco as a vehicle for something considered rather than just a familiar format. The answer, for a while, was yes.

The margaritas were the thing. Not in a novelty-variation way, where a place calls something a margarita because it has lime and tequila in it. These were properly made cocktails: good agave spirits, fresh citrus, balance that held from the first sip to the last. I ordered one on my first visit because you order the margarita at a new Mexican restaurant to find out what the bar is actually doing. I ordered it on every subsequent visit because it was one of the better margaritas in Ann Arbor.

The chicken tinga was the dish. Braised chicken in chipotle and tomato sauce, pulled and heaped onto tortillas with the toppings calibrated so nothing overwhelmed anything else. It is a classic preparation, not a novel one, and the reason it is classic is that it works. Isalita's version worked. I have eaten a lot of chicken tacos in Ann Arbor and around southeast Michigan, and I measured other chicken tacos against this one. Most of them lost.

I went several times. I brought people who had not been. I thought Isalita was going to be one of those Ann Arbor restaurants that becomes permanent through the force of being genuinely good at what it does. It was not.

East Liberty between Main and Fourth has been an interesting block for years. It has cycled through a number of concepts. What Isalita was on that block, while it was there, was a restaurant with a clear point of view about what upscale Mexican food could mean in a mid-sized university town. That point of view does not have a replacement on East Liberty right now. It does not have a clear replacement anywhere in Ann Arbor.

The loss is the gap more than the building. The building will have another restaurant eventually. The specific thing Isalita was doing, the combination of that cocktail program and that kitchen and that particular care about a cuisine that gets less serious treatment than it deserves in most American cities, that is not automatically reproduced by whoever comes next.

Isalita was at 341 E Liberty St, Ann Arbor. It closed in 2025.