Wright & Company Closed the Staircase at 1500 Woodward After Twelve Years
The second-floor small-plates room served its last dinner on July 3, 2026. Private events continue; the replacement concept has not been named.
Downtown Detroit lost its second-floor restaurant on Friday, July 3, 2026, when Wright & Company served a final dinner and stopped taking public reservations at 1500 Woodward Avenue. WXYZ reported the closing after the owners announced it on Instagram in early June, roughly a month of notice. That timing is itself unusual: Jolly Pumpkin's Midtown beer hall announced and closed on the same Sunday in March.
Our profile of the restaurant covers the room. This is the record of the run.
What it was
Dave Kwiatkowski opened Wright & Company with chef and partner Marc Djozlija in the summer of 2014. ClickOnDetroit covered the opening on July 30 that year, describing a second-floor bistro built on "contemporary American small plates, craft cocktails, natural and organic wine and Michigan beer," with the entrance around the corner on John R. The opening menu it listed ran to fresh potato chips with white cheddar, bacon, and scallions; warm dates; whipped ricotta with an orange honey drizzle; tuna tartare; and poached shrimp with avocado mousse.
Shared plates as the whole format was not the safe bet downtown at the time. Hour Detroit's tenth-anniversary piece by Mickey Lyons placed the debut in the middle of the city's recovery from municipal bankruptcy. Kwiatkowski had opened Sugar House in Corktown three years earlier, and Wright & Company became part of the Detroit Optimist Society group he built around it.
The building did real work
The address is the F.J. Schwankovsky Building, completed in 1891, and it held the Wright-Kay jewelry firm from 1920 to 1978, according to WXYZ. Hour Detroit described the brick turret, the tin ceilings, and the long bar that ran the length of the room. The Detroit News, reporting the closing announcement, added the marble tables, the banquette seating, and the chandelier.
None of that is decoration in the ordinary sense. A restaurant on the second floor has to give people a reason to climb a staircase, and the reason here was the room itself: a nineteenth-century jewelry showroom with a brick turret at the corner and a bar running the length of the floor.
The bar was the through-line
Hour Detroit's anniversary reporting is the most useful record of what the bar actually did. Old-fashioneds sat next to shoyu cocktails and drinks built on Nixta elote liqueur; the wine list ran from Bordeaux to Slovenian orange wine. More to the point, the piece describes a training program that put a long line of Detroit bartenders through the room and sent them out into other bars.
A cocktail list is easy to copy. A bar that produces bartenders is harder to replace, and that is the part of Wright & Company the city will actually feel.
Chef and co-owner Marc Djozlija received a James Beard Award nomination for Best Chef: Great Lakes in 2015 and a Food & Wine recognition in 2017, per the Detroit News.
Why it closed
No cause has been made public. The owners' announcement, quoted by WXYZ, said: "For more than a decade, you've made us part of your first dates, anniversaries, celebrations, late-night cocktails, and countless unforgettable evenings." Management told the Detroit News that "being part of downtown Detroit for the last 12 years has been an incredible privilege." Neither statement gives a reason, and nothing published since has added one.
What happens to the second floor
The room is not going empty. Metro Intelligencer reported in June that the space stays available for weddings and private events, with bookings still being taken through the transition. The Detroit News reported that a new concept is planned for the address, without details.
Twelve years is a long run for a restaurant and a very long one for a dining room a customer has to choose to walk upstairs to reach. That staircase was the whole proposition. Enough people climbed it for twelve years to make 1500 Woodward a fixed point on every downtown dinner list, and the next tenant inherits a room that has already proved the hard part works.
Wright & Company operated at 1500 Woodward Ave, Detroit, from July 2014 through July 3, 2026.