This ‘quintessential college town’ charms visitors with big-time sports and a bustling cultural scene
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Rodger Bowser has worked in kitchens in London, studied cooking in Ireland and been a private chef on houseboats in France.
But when it came time to plant his flag somewhere and build a lasting career in food, he always knew he’d return to Ann Arbor.
His decision goes back to Bowser’s formative years as an aspiring chef, when he moved here from rural Michigan for a summer job and became enchanted with the place.
“Being in Ann Arbor, in a college town with multiple thoughts and viewpoints and diversity, and just the way people thought about things … it really opened my eyes up to a different world that I didn’t know existed,” says Bowser, now head chef at Zingerman’s Delicatessen, a beloved Ann Arbor eatery.
Such is the pull of this unassuming Midwestern city, where students, faculty, staffers and alumni migrate back and forth from the handsome University of Michigan campus to the nearby restaurants, shops and bars of Ann Arbor’s bustling downtown. The planet around which the rest of the city orbits, the school boasts some 53,000 students and a vast menu of cultural happenings, lending Ann Arbor a casual sophistication.
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A2, as it’s known to locals, consistently ranks among the nation’s top college towns. Most visitors to the city have ties to the university, but with a year-round calendar of events, a thriving food scene and big-time college sports, Ann Arbor offers plenty for other visitors as well.
“For a weekend getaway, it’s a pretty cool place to be,” Bowser says. “There’s great entertainment — we have folk festivals, film festivals … we’ve got great museums and great restaurants. And if you’re into the nature part of things there’s some pretty cool stuff around town in terms of parks and stuff like that. I really like this town.”
