Nya Marshall opened her first restaurant, Ivy Kitchen + Cocktails, in East Village in December 2019. She bought the building a decade ago when there was effectively nothing on that block. The neighborhood reorganized around it, in the way Detroit neighborhoods sometimes do when an anchor business shows up and stays.
She is trying that trick again, two miles east. Antidote opened January 19 at 14628 E. Jefferson Avenue.
A soft launch ran through November and December. The Spanish-inspired restaurant takes over the 2,000-square-foot former Norma G's, the Caribbean spot that closed in September 2023 after about five years. Marshall designed the room herself.
She put $475,000 into the buildout, more than double her original $200,000 budget. The address sits on the line between Jefferson-Chalmers and Grosse Pointe Park. Marshall, a native east sider with an electrical engineering degree from Michigan, is direct about why that matters.
"We need to bridge that and merge that so we can all come together to make the entire corridor, including beyond Jefferson Chalmers, more than what it is," she told Axios. The name Antidote, she has said in three separate interviews, is hers as much as the restaurant's.
The menu runs about twenty dishes. Mussels and chorizo steamed in cider, finished with fried shallots and microgreens. Marinated leeks with saffron-garlic beurre blanc.
Bacalao, the Catalan-style cod, with potato, leek, scallion, and serrano oil. Saffron truffle potato pavé. Basque cheesecake.
Marshall plans to rotate based on what the dining room actually orders, which is the kind of thing restaurateurs say and rarely do. John Neely runs the floor as general manager and beverage director, after stops at AC Hotels by Marriott, the Siren, the Cambria, and the Highlands. The wine list pulls from Europe, the Americas, and points elsewhere.
The cocktail program runs alcoholic and non-alcoholic in roughly equal weight, which is a holdover from Ivy, where the mocktails are some of the best-sellers. Antidote is a hospitality bet on a single block. Marshall has done this before.
The first time, on a corner in East Village that nobody else wanted, the bet paid out. 14628 E. Jefferson Ave., Detroit.
