A British pub on Mack Avenue is booking Detroit's techno founders

A British-style pub on Mack Avenue has turned into one of the more unlikely techno rooms in Detroit.

Cannons sits at 15421 Mack Avenue in the Morningside neighborhood, in the space that the Lost River tiki bar left behind in 2023. The project comes from Detroiter Zak Pashak, who also runs Detroit Bikes, and his hospitality partner Joe Shields. The room downstairs leans 1800s English pub: dark wood, British beers, a shot-and-beer special, barrel-aged and pre-batched cocktails, and a short food list built around oysters, cockles, pickled eggs, cheese boards and Welsh rarebit. Almost everything is sourced locally, except the oysters, which come in from Massachusetts. Weekends add brunch. The official venue listing puts hours at 4 to 11 most weeknights, later on Friday, and 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. on weekends.

The second floor is where the bar stops behaving like a neighborhood pub. Upstairs is a music room that runs up to an open-air rooftop, and the booking there has reached straight into the founding generation of Detroit techno. Per the venue's own event calendar and DJ accounts of playing the room, both Juan Atkins and Derrick May have already appeared upstairs since the bar opened. Kevin Saunderson followed on May 2, 2026, billed alongside the Saunderson Brothers and Ashton Swinton, per the Resident Advisor listing for the date.

That is all three of the Belleville figures inside one small room on Mack Avenue within months of opening. The pull of the place is the scale. A Saunderson set at a festival main stage is one kind of night. The same set in a pub-sized room upstairs is another, and the close-quarters version is the one the city tends to remember.

The reach into the founders has also made Cannons a marker for the wider underground. Detroit DJ Tony Nova, writing about his own night there, called the bar "the city's newest sanctuary for the real" and argued that "when a room has been tuned by the pioneers, the frequency of every night that follows is elevated."

Oysters and pints on one floor, the architects of Detroit techno on the next. Cannons is at 15421 Mack Avenue.