Wurst Bar Closes on Cross Street

Wurst Bar is closed. The sausage-and-beer bar at 705 West Cross Street in Ypsilanti shut its doors in August, and the block is quieter for it.

I want to be specific about what was lost, because "gourmet sausage bar" undersells the place. Wurst Bar served house sausages with actual thought behind them — duck and cherry, lamb merguez, a rotating wild card that changed with the season. The buns were good. The mustard selection was unreasonable in the best way. You could get a flight of four mustards with your bratwurst, and if that sounds like a joke, you weren't paying attention. The craft beer list ran deep, 20-plus taps that skewed Michigan and skewed interesting, the kind of lineup where the bartender could talk you through every handle if you let them.

The room was small, loud, and intentional about being both. Wood tables, a bar that seated maybe eight, walls covered in the kind of signage that accumulates when nobody is curating and everyone is contributing. On a Friday night, Wurst Bar was the place that caught the overflow from Depot Town — people who wandered west on Cross Street from Sidetrack or 734 Brewing, found a seat and a sausage, and stayed longer than they planned.

Cross Street is the scrappier half of Ypsilanti's dining identity. Depot Town gets the foot traffic and the weekend crowds. Cross Street gets the places that feel more like someone's idea than someone's business plan. Wurst Bar fit that. It was specific in a way that chain restaurants can't be and that most independents don't bother to be.

Dan Klenotic cooked at Wurst Bar before he moved to Bellflower, the Pearl Street restaurant where he's now a James Beard semifinalist. I mention this not to suggest that Wurst Bar was a stepping stone — it was its own thing — but because it says something about the kitchen. The kind of cook who ends up at a James Beard-level restaurant chose to work at a sausage bar on Cross Street first. That tells you about the seriousness of the place even when the menu read like a party.

Basil Babe, the Thai restaurant that opened at 701 West Cross in 2023, is two doors down from Wurst Bar's old address. The corridor is not dead. But it is different. Wurst Bar brought a particular energy — beer nerds, sausage loyalists, the post-concert crowd from the Dreamland Theater — that doesn't transfer automatically to whatever opens next.

No word on what's coming to the space.

Wurst Bar was at 705 W Cross St, Ypsilanti.