The Cellar Is Gone
Grizzly Peak's basement bar was underutilized and a little eccentric. That was most of the point.
The Cellar under Grizzly Peak on Washington Street is gone. The basement space that was doing frosé and not a lot else on summer afternoons has been replaced by The Ranch Honky Tonk: a concept built around live country music, DJ nights, and, per the bar's own description of itself, a place "where boots hit harder than feelings."
The Cellar's appeal was the frosé and the low-pressure basement format. Frozen rosé made sense on hot afternoons, and the room offered an unhurried alternative to Ann Arbor's busier bars. Its limited hours and small footprint made it easy to miss, which was part of the point for regulars.
That underutilization was a feature. Not every bar needs to be packed to justify itself. The Cellar justified itself by being exactly right for a specific kind of afternoon that Ann Arbor does not have many good answers for.
The Ranch is something else entirely. Their website describes a two-level venue: live music upstairs Thursday through Sunday, a 21-plus DJ club downstairs. Draft beer from Grizzly Peak's own brewery, which means the brewing operation is still in the building. The food menu has expanded to include green chile bison burgers and cowboy steaks, which is a significant departure from whatever minimal menu The Cellar was running. Red Solo cups, based on the aesthetic that appears to be part of the concept.
The two concepts are different enough that a direct comparison is not useful. The Cellar was a low-key basement bar. The Ranch is a honky-tonk venue for the Washington Street corridor, with live music upstairs, a 21-plus DJ club downstairs, and a larger food menu. It may work exactly as intended for a different audience.
What The Ranch cannot be is the frosé bar in the basement where nothing was happening and that was the entire point.
The block at Washington and Ashley has changed enough over the years that attaching too much grief to any specific configuration is probably a mistake. But I will say this about The Cellar: it filled a gap in Ann Arbor's bar scene that is genuinely hard to fill, the gap between "somewhere you have to be on" and "somewhere you can just be." Those bars are rarer than they look. The city has a version of them, but they come and go, and when they go, the replacement is almost never another version of the same thing.
The Ranch Honky Tonk is at 122 W Washington St, Ann Arbor. Grizzly Peak Brewing Company, which supplies the draft beer program, is at the adjacent 120 W Washington St.