Fresh bread and vinyl booths: Ann Arbor brunch mainstay Angelo's to close

• Angelo’s, a classic diner in Ann Arbor, will shut its doors on Dec. 23
• The restaurant and two nearby apartments were purchased for $4.5 million by the University of Michigan in late May
• Stephen Vangelatos, the owner of the restaurant, will use the money from the sale to fund his retirement

ANN ARBOR — Inside Angelo's diner, customers see paintings of flowers done by the sister-in-law of the owner, old trophies of a softball team the restaurant used to sponsor, checkered floors and vinyl booths. Among these decorations is Angelo’s newest edition: a countdown clock. On a sunny June day, the clock has 185 days left, counting down until Dec. 23, 2023, the day Angelo’s closes its doors.

The news of Angelo’s closing came in late May, when the Board of Regents at the University of Michigan approved the purchase of 1100 Catherine St., including Angelo’s and two residential apartments. The university said the purpose of the land is currently undetermined. The payout, at $4.5 million dollars, is going to fund the retirement of owner and manager Stephen Vangelatos.

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Angelo’s, which is open until 3 p.m. every day, has been a mainstay for the residents of Ann Arbor— its popular breakfast menu, including seasonal pumpkin pancakes and deep-fried French toast made with homemade bread – since Vangelatos’ father, Angelo, took over the restaurant in 1956. Most weekends, patrons wait in long lines to get a table for breakfast or brunch, including Tom Brady, who spent his college years playing for the Wolverines.

“Tom Brady has been here a few times…They wrote a story in (The New York Times) where he said he was actually standing in line with his parents,” Vangelatos told Bridge Michigan. “And he said to his parents ‘Hey, some day, I’m not going to have to wait in line to get in here.’”

Vangelatos, who turned 65 in May, has his graying hair tucked into an Angelo’s baseball cap. He sits with his elbows on the table, weathered hands pressed together. He has grown up with the diner, working weekends throughout high school, and now both his sons work part-time jobs at the restaurant. Vangelatos said he always intended to take a full-time position at the restaurant, which he did in 1980, after two years at Eastern Michigan University.

“My father was starting to have some issues with his health,” said the restaurant owner. “And I knew this is what I was going to do, so at that point I just said … ‘I’m going to drop out of school and come work here.’”

After a few years, Vangelatos took over the restaurant fully from his father and began to expand. Vangelatos bought the adjacent properties, turning one into a parking lot, and the other into a café called Angelo’s on the side, specializing in coffee and take out. With business booming, Vangelatos turned the garage in the back of the restaurant into additional seating.

At the same time, the university was expanding, something that impacted Angelo’s with its location nestled between central campus and medical campus. The medical campus, which Angelo’s now borders, saw several new centers open while Vangelatos was expanding his restaurant in the 1990s, including the opening of the cancer and geriatrics center in 1997.

Vangelatos doesn’t spend much time up front, because he is in charge of baking all of the restaurant's freshly baked bread, and has been the only person to do so besides his father, who passed away shortly after Vangelatos took over the restaurant. 

“The big part of (running the restaurant) is baking the bread,” Vangelatos said. “If you can't do that, if you can’t bake the bread…you’re going to have a big problem. Since I’ve been doing this, I don’t think there’s been a day that we haven’t baked the bread.”

But that all changed when the announcement of the restaurant’s closing came, and since then they have been so busy that he’s more often been pulled up front to help guide customers to their tables and collect their checks.

Vangelatos said that the announcement caused his inventory of t-shirts to be completely wiped out, and he added coffee mugs to their souvenirs after so many people asked for them.

“In two weeks, I was sold out (of mugs),” he said.

While Vangelatos doesn’t know what the university will be doing with his restaurant once it closes, he knows that it will be demolishing the building. That means when they vacate the restaurant in late March 2024, they’ll be saying goodbye forever. While Vangelatos said the closure of Angelo’s is  bittersweet, his retirement has always been planned. According to Vangelatos, his wife Jennifer, who currently doesn’t have a role in the restaurant, knew what she was getting into when they got married.

“I’ve been married for 31 years,” Vangelatos said. “I told (Jennifer), ‘the day’s gonna come when I’m going to stop.”

Vangelatos realized that time had come when he began to anticipate his 65th birthday. According to Vangelatos, university officials approached him around 2017, inquiring about his plans for the property. He told them that he planned to sell someday, but that he wasn’t quite ready. Between then and now, he was approached by two more buyers.

While Angelo’s is closing, and Vangelatos is losing the place that he described as ‘where he is truly comfortable,’ Vangelatos said that he is excited for his retirement.

“I mean just to, you know, get up on the weekends and at the last moment say ‘Hey, let’s drive up to Petoskey…for a weekend,’ you know, now that’s possible,” Vangelatos said. “That’s never been a possibility for me, I’ve been here every weekend for a long time.”

He met with the university back in November to start negotiations, and when they eventually announced the sale, many Ann Arbor residents weren’t happy. A post in a Facebook group called ‘Ann Arbor Townies!’ exploded with nearly 200 comments, coming from all kinds of Ann Arbor residents. There were hospital-workers, lamenting that the best spot to get non-hospital food close to the medical campus was shutting down. There were students, upset that they were losing a restaurant that reminded them of home. And there were older Ann Arbor residents, upset about losing a vestige of Ann Arbor history, and about the university purchasing the land.

One of those commenters was Mike Woolson, who grew up in Ann Arbor. Though he lives in California, Woolson visits the city about once a year, and has been a patron of Angelo’s for a long time.

“It’s just one of the best places to go get a good breakfast,” Woolson told Bridge. “It’s just a not pretentious restaurant that has really delicious food every time.”

Woolson believes that Ann Arbor is “trying to be a city” when he believes it was “much better as a town.” Woolson said that it’s just another example of how the university is changing the city for its residents.

“I am not happy with the scale of the university,” Woolson said. “The scale of change has made Ann Arbor almost unrecognizable to me…My mother stopped going downtown the last couple years of her life because there was nothing there for her anymore.”

But Vangelatos said that he’s had a very positive experience with the university.

“They’ve given me more than the usual time to close,” Vangelatos said. “They let me stay until the end of the year, which I wanted to do.”

While his customers are complaining about the university’s influence over the city, Vangelatos has a different outlook on things.

“The university is Ann Arbor,” Vangelatos said. “Without the university, I don’t know what Ann Arbor would be like.”

Mary Livernois is an alumni from the university’s pharmacy school, graduating in 1992. In her first two years at the school, Livernois and her friends lived in Stockwell Hall, 10 minutes away from Angelo’s.

“We went to Angelo’s a lot,” Livernois told Bridge. “It’s kind of one of my favorite memories.”

Livernois loved the restaurant for what she described as a “homey” atmosphere. For students living in halls like Mary Markley, Moscher Jordan or Stockwell Hall, Angelo’s is a short walk away.

“All three of my kids have gone to (the university),” Livernois said. “And now we go (to Angelo’s) with them too.”

As Ann Arbor residents flock to Angelo’s for their last visit, and look up at the countdown clock on the fridge as it gets slowly closer to 0, Woolson offers a word of advice to those grieving the loss of the diner.

“Life is full of change,” Woolson said. “I’ve said goodbye to all sorts of people, places, things. So it’s sad to be losing something else that’s been a touchstone in your life, but everything changes, and nothing is truly lost.”