Sandy Levine and Doug Hewitt opened Dirty Shake at Forest and Second on March 13, 2025. They picked the date for the obvious reason.
313 Day is a press-friendly opening for any Detroit bar that wants the local TV crews. The location is more interesting. Forest and Second is the kind of intersection that has been one or two storefronts away from being a destination for fifteen years.
Dirty Shake, with a wraparound patio, a roll-up garage door, and a Shitty Polaroid Wall, is a calculated bet that the neighborhood is ready to be the destination it has been threatening to be. Levine and Hewitt are James Beard semifinalists. They run Freya in Milwaukee Junction, which Hour Detroit named 2024 Restaurant of the Year.
They run Chartreuse Kitchen and Cocktails in New Center. Levine owns the Oakland in Ferndale. Dragonfly is theirs.
None of those rooms are casual. Dirty Shake is the casual one. The food is burgers, chicken wings, finger-food bar staples.
The drinks are five-dollar cans, a mezcal cocktail with house-made kimchi watermelon rind called the Daily Rind, a Strong Island Iced Tea capped at two per guest because of what's in it. Kamalani Overall runs the bar program. The hummer is hers.
The Strong Island, with overproof rum, navy strength gin, whiskey, honey liqueur, house sour, and a vanilla Coke float, is a drink that announces it does not need to be respected. The Green Tea is peach tea, Jameson, amaretto. The non-alcoholic side is Faygo and Hi-C.
Dirty Shake is not trying to court any cocktail-bar credibility it doesn't already have through its operators. It's selling shenanigans. The room seats forty inside, fifty more on the patio.
The garage door opens onto the sidewalk in summer. There's a five-dollar ring-toss bottle game. The polaroid wall is exactly what it sounds like.
It looks the way a bar looks when its owners have spent a decade getting tasting menus right and decided it was time to do the opposite. Levine has framed the bar around the long-tenured residents at Forest and Second and the students from across Cass. Both groups showed up the first weekend.
Both groups will keep showing up.
4642 Second Ave., Cass Corridor / Midtown.
