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Ann Arbor's Vellum Restaurant closed Sunday after two years on Main Street.

(Jessica Webster | The Ann Arbor News)

Two years, nearly to the day, after opening on Ann Arbor's Main Street, Vellum Restaurant has closed its doors. The front windows have been papered over, and Kosta Roumanis has confirmed that the family made the decision to close the restaurant on Sunday.

When Peter Roumanis opened Vellum in early January 2013, his ambitions were lofty. After working in kitchens in New York, Chicago and Paris, Roumanis partnered with his father, Ann Arbor restaurateur John Roumanis, on an inventive, stylized menu that was designed to challenge traditional ideas of restaurant dining.

"The ritual and pomp are dying, and that's a good thing," Roumanis told the Ann Arbor News in 2013.

"The goal of what this restaurant wants to do is deal with flavor profiles and ingredients that are pretty simple, humble and classic," he said. " And what we want to do is coax out as much flavor as we possibly could, and present them in a way that grabs people's attention."

Roumanis definitely grabbed that attention. Positive reviews reviews from The Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press soon led to a 2013 Best of Award of Excellence by Wine Spectator and Roumanis being selected as a semi-finalist in Eater's Young Gun best young chef awards.

The restaurant fostered a sense of creative adventurousness, both with diners and the staff. During his time at Vellum, Roumanis launched Wednesday workshops, where kitchen staff engaged in after hours Chopped-style head-to-head cooking competitions or presented cooking demonstrations to staff and restaurant management.

"We treated that kitchen like a laboratory," said Mary Potts, former pastry chef at Vellum and current pastry chef and garde manger at Lena. "We were experimenting and daring each other to do the impossible, or simply 'the strange.' it was like no other kitchen I've worked in.

"Peter gave me so many interesting challenges and creative freedom, and I developed more in that year than ever before."

Despite the positive reviews, Vellum wasn't as quick to catch on with Ann Arbor diners as John Roumanis was hoping, and a broader, more mainstream menu began to appear by late fall 2013.

The sub-zero temperatures in January 2014 were brutal for Ann Arbor restaurants, and Vellum nearly didn't last the month. Staffing was cut, the menu was further broadened, incorporating items from John Roumanis's west side Ann Arbor restaurant The Carlyle Grill.

A rebranding in fall 2014 followed.

"The problem is that (Ann Arbor) is a market that is rather small, and the market we were looking for with the original concept represented a very small percentage of the total consumer market,” John Roumanis told The Ann Arbor News at the time.

Kosta Roumanis said that an explanation statement would be available on the restaurant's website soon, but declined to go into detail about the fate of the building, which the family owns.