“You’ll have to excuse me,” said Phillis Engelbert, standing and retrieving a glass of water from the quirky bar situated in the main dining area of Detroit Filling Station, one of her three restaurants. “We hosted ‘Lesbo Bingo’ last night, and I’m exhausted.”
This pretty much describes the carefree, quirky, lively personality of the Filling Station — a restaurant with personality pouring from its warm, vintage brick walls. Engelbert sits back down and begins to share her world with me over a bowl of vegan, gluten-free tater tots with a side of “Yum Yum sauce.”
“Well, it started out with us just cooking on Sundays and really grew from there,” said Engelbert, co owner of The Lunch Room, Detroit Filling Station and The Lunch Room bakery and cafe. This is something I can relate to. The best things grow out of Sunday dinners. Together with neighbor and friend Joel Panozzo, Engelbert began to host vegan dinner parties when the pair realized they had a mutual affection for vegan food and culinary art. From there, they operated a vegan food cart starting in 2011, which was run in a parking lot and manifested from a passion for vegan food and a Kickstarter campaign. She had no experience in the business, nor did she go to school for entrepreneurship or culinary art — which shows how far a passion for the kitchen can truly take you.
Panozzo and Engelbert make an unlikely pair, being an older woman and a young man. Despite their differences, they share many passions and similarities, which makes them great business partners. They are able to both collaborate and split the work between the two of them, in order to keep all three businesses running smoothly.
Since 2013, the dynamic duo have been running the vegan food scene in Ann Arbor with their three vegan-based destination restaurants that are popular among locals and students alike. An ambitious feat — opening vegan restaurants — Engelbert claims that many friends and acquaintances urged her and Panozzo to “not even try at all” when they began dreaming up plans for a vegan restaurant in Ann Arbor. Engelbert began her journey to becoming a successful restaurateur when she worked forty hours a week as a college student in order to pay her way through a college degree from the University. From there, she held an array of jobs, including writing textbooks and reference books, to freelance writing, to running nonprofits. In the past five years, she has grown into an experienced entrepreneur, navigating the challenges of restaurant life with ease and grace.
“Running a restaurant is a lot like community organizing, actually,” she remarked. “There’s a deal of creativity and problem solving involved in both.”
Throughout our conversation alone, she dealt with the erratic blinking sign outside, a shortage of staff for the evening, restocking the bar, communicating with The Lunch Room (which is only 500 feet from Detroit Filling Station) and receiving various shipments. The staff, filled with unique individuals, each friendly and bright, were quick to answer to her, and the lunch shift seemed to run smoothly despite a few bumps in the road. Both restaurants often reach capacity, but due to their close proximity, on a busy night they are often able to accommodate most guests.
When asked to describe how she is able to operate two similar, albeit unique, restaurants just 500 feet from one another, she describes them as two completely different beings that are linked with small comparisons. The Lunch Room is an older sister to Detroit Filling Station, if you will.
“The price point is nearly identical, but the menus are quite different. Both restaurants have chili, but the recipes are different. (At the Detroit Filling Station) we have pizza and ramen. At The Lunch Room, we have certain sandwiches and salads that we don’t serve here. Most people who come eat at one have been to both and it honestly just depends on the mood of the customer that day when choosing which they’d like to eat at,” she said, as she accepted a delivery for wine and worked with an employee to put a price on the beverage per glass.
When The Lunch Room became too popular for its minimal seating, Engelbert and Panozzo opened up Filling Station in Aug. 2017, and have seen incredible success since. Just a few-minute drive away is the third of their businesses: a vegan cafe and bakery serving sandwiches, soups and a wide array of baked goods.
In the beginning of her love affair with the world of vegan cuisine, Engelbert relied on cook books to guide her in the right direction with her menu choices. Since then, however, she has worked with groups of talented cooks to create unique dishes. Oftentimes, she’ll look at a dish that is not vegan (say mac and cheese, for example) and ask herself the question: What could I substitute or use to make this dish vegan? That’s how one of the most popular Lunch Room dishes, the vegan mac and cheese, came to be.
At the end of the day, other than serving the customer and bringing a vegan food scene to Ann Arbor, Engelbert looks to create a community out of her restaurants. Her main prerogative is to give the restaurants each a unique sense of fun and belonging. Obviously, it’s all about the food, but bigger than that is the ability for a meal out to be an experience. This is something she hopes to capture with each new group of guests that comes through the front door.
“There is such a camaraderie between the staff and the customers at all three places. I can’t even explain the energy and feeling in The Lunch Room, but if you’ve been there, you just know it,” she said.
And she’s certainly right — every meal I’ve had at The Lunch Room was an incredibly warm, positive and joyful experience, the space filled with a cozy sense of home. My first time at The Lunch Room, I had the “Taco ‘Bout it Salad,” which I highly recommend. Personal favorites, though having a gluten allergy and a sweet tooth are the vegan ice cream sundae and the peanut butter gluten-free baked goods.
When people walk into restaurants, they’re generally looking for more than food — which is what makes eating out special. Customers are looking to have a social experience, to feel a part of something greater and to share a meal or a drink with friends. That’s what these three restaurants seek to do: bring Ann Arbor something more than just great vegan food.
To that point, Engelbert pauses with a tater tot between her fingers, hanging in the air.
“To me, it’s so much more than what they put in their mouth. Sure, it starts with food, but it becomes the whole vibe and feel of the place, and that’s what’s so important to me with these places.”