James Beard Award-winning chef Shawn McClain to open restaurant atop RenCen

The rumors are true: Shawn McClain, a James Beard Award-winning chef known for properties in Chicago and Las Vegas, will open a new restaurant atop Detroit's Renaissance Center.

The as-yet-unnamed restaurant will take up approximately 20,000 square feet on the building's 71st and 72nd floors, home previously to Coach Insignia, which shuttered almost one year ago when the landlord declined to extend its lease. Back then, General Motors subsidiary and RenCen owners Riverfront Holdings, Inc. issued a statement saying the search was on for a "world-class restaurant" to replace it.

That search now appears to be over.

"We want to reinvent that top of the tower experience," said McClain, founder of the McClain Camarota Hospitality group, which runs three properties in Las Vegas: the fine-dining Sage restaurant and the casual Five50 Pizza Bar in the Aria Casino, as well as the Libertine Social gastropub at Mandalay Bay.

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"We really wanted to kind of throw out the old traditional model of the one-hit-wonder room with a view," McClain said of his plans for the space. "We want to welcome all of Detroit and give them options, from laid-back to refined — a little more multi-faceted. We want to give them reasons to return on a regular basis."

The new restaurant will likely have one overarching name with a few "sub-brands" inside that appeal to different demographics, McClain said. The concept or concepts will be all new, with little overlap from his existing restaurants, although the chef left open the possibility that we might see a version of his famous foie gras brulee.

While Detroit has seen an influx of attention from the likes of the James Beard Foundation in recent years, very few local chefs have actually won an award from the so-called "Oscars of Food." The last James Beard Award-winning chef to have a presence in the city was Rattlesnake Club founder Jimmy Schmidt, who sold his interest in the riverfront restaurant in 2010.

McClain, a San Diego, Calif., native who grew up in Ohio, first made a name for himself in the 1990s at the vaunted Trio restaurant in Evanston, Ill. He left Trio after seven years to open his first concept in Chicago, Spring, in 2001. Spring earned a Best New Restaurant nomination from the James Beard Foundation in 2002 and four years later McClain took home the title of Best Chef: Midwest.

In 2009, while still living in Chicago, McClain opened Sage, his first Las Vegas property. Two years later, he moved his family to Grosse Ile, where his wife and business partner, Holly, is from. Since then he's been commuting between Grosse Ile and Las Vegas. (At the end of 2017, McClain shuttered his Green Zebra restaurant, a vanguard of the vegetarian and vegan dining movement, signifying the end of his Chicago run.)

McClain said he began seriously looking for potential restaurant properties in the Detroit area about two years ago. Through that process, he was put in touch with representatives for GM once the Coach Insignia space became available. The timing just so happened to coincide with the downtown dining scene's resurgence.

"Selfishly, I knew I was going to be in Detroit and I would call Detroit home," McClain said. "Fortunately, what's going in town is a huge bonus. It's a huge windfall in a way for the city to get so much exposure nationally and locally for what people are doing in the food scene. The fact that it coincides with the timing is really serendipitous for me and really fortunate. I feel really lucky to be part of the community. In a lot of ways it feels like when I first opened a restaurant in Chicago in 2001 -- some of that same energy in some of the neighborhoods that was going on back then.

"I'm super excited to finally do something at home and put a stake in the ground and put a flagship in my hometown."

McClain confirmed that he was leasing the space from GM but declined to say for how long or under what terms.

"We're looking at it as an investment -- a long-term relationship," he said. "GM has shown a lot of support, including financial support and believing in the project and realizing we want this to be a long-term thing."

Despite the sprawling size of the project, McClain said the restaurant will employ approximately 45 people when it opens in the fall of 2018.

Contact Mark Kurlyandchik: 313-222-5026 or mkurlyandc@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @mkurlyandchik and Instagram: curlyhandshake.