Main Street closes to cars between Waldon Road and Washington Street tomorrow, and by noon the block will smell like every kitchen in downtown Clarkston decided to cook at once. Ten tickets for ten dollars, no cash at the booths, a stilt walker somewhere in the mix, and Corvettes parked nose to tail for anyone who wants to look at chrome between bites. That much has held steady for 28 years. What's different this time is that one of the buildings the crowd will walk past twice, once heading up Main and once heading back, spent this year collecting the kind of attention downtown Clarkston restaurants don't usually get.
The Shape of Sunday
The Clarkston Area Chamber of Commerce runs the 28th Annual Taste of Clarkston in partnership with Independence Township Parks, Recreation & Seniors and the City of the Village of Clarkston, from noon to 6 p.m. on Main Street. Admission is free. Parking is free, with shuttle buses running from Clarkston High School, Clarkston Junior High, and Renaissance High School for anyone who'd rather not hunt for a spot downtown. Food and drink both run on tickets rather than cash, sold in packs of ten for ten dollars at booths scattered through the event footprint.
Last year's 27th annual event brought 22 local restaurants into the street along with two beer tents, one run by the Optimist Club and one by the Rotary Club, plus a kids zone with bounce houses and a caricature artist. This year's listing again promises more than 20 restaurants and exhibitions with live music running throughout the afternoon. The event sits inside Clarkston's downtown social district, which means visitors can carry a drink from a licensed restaurant and keep walking rather than finishing it at a table.
None of that is new information to anyone who has been to the festival before. What's new is what's sitting at 9 South Main Street this year, and why it's there.
What Changed at 9 South Main
Rudy's Market operated on Main Street for 88 years, opening in 1933 near the corner of Washington and Main before relocating to its current address in 1954. It closed in 2021 as owners Robert Esshaki and Chris Thomas weighed the future of an independent grocery store. Rather than sell the building, they gutted it. Working with Birmingham-based Saroki Architecture and Kelly Building & Development Company, they turned the century-old structure, originally built in 1915 as the Voorheis Ford Service & Auto Supply Company before it became a Kroger and then Rudy's, into a 4,500-square-foot steakhouse that seats up to 132 guests.
Rudy's Prime Steakhouse opened in October 2024. Sixteen months later, Hour Detroit named it the magazine's 2026 Restaurant of the Year, and it's already picked up a 2025 Building Award from the Michigan Historic Preservation Network for the renovation itself.
The kitchen has the résumé to match the attention. Executive chef Josh Stockton opened Detroit's Gold Cash Gold, worked the Daniel Boulud brasserie at the Wynn in Las Vegas, and did a stint at the Daxton Hotel before taking over Rudy's kitchen. General manager Jean-Baptiste Caillet spent 25 years running dining rooms in New York, including Balthazar and a Wall Street institution called Harry's. That's not the staffing pattern of a small-town steakhouse. It's the staffing pattern of a restaurant built to be judged against the rest of the state, and this year it was.
The Street's Fall Calendar
Taste of Clarkston doesn't sit alone on the calendar. It's the middle event in a three-week stretch that gives downtown its fall shape.
| Event | Date | Location | Host |
|---|---|---|---|
| Art in the Village | Sept. 19-20 | Depot Park | Clarkston Community Historical Society |
| Taste of Clarkston | Sept. 27 | Main Street | Clarkston Area Chamber of Commerce |
| St. Daniel Oktoberfest | Oct. 3 | St. Daniel Catholic Church | St. Daniel Parish |
Art in the Village, the historical society's long-running fall art fair, closed out last Sunday with more than 80 vendors and what organizers called the show's largest-ever food court, along with a new addition this year in Jackson Marr, a Clarkston-area native whose Michigan Rockworks turns stone into pendants and knife handles. Proceeds fund the Clarkston Heritage Museum. A week later, St. Daniel Catholic Church runs its 2nd Annual Oktoberfest on Oct. 3 from noon to 9 p.m., with German food, a petting zoo, bingo, a bake sale, and a silent auction, admission free.
Three weekends, three different organizing bodies, one stretch of Main Street. That's the rhythm before anyone gets to what's happening inside any single storefront.
The Next Storefront Already Has Plans
Esshaki and Thomas didn't stop at the steakhouse. They've since purchased the former Clarkston News building next door at 5 South Main, and the plan is a second restaurant built around Mediterranean cooking, along with a basement wine cellar meant to serve both venues and an upstairs bourbon and cigar bar. None of it is open yet. But anyone walking Main Street for Taste of Clarkston this weekend will pass a building that's already been bought for a second act before the first one has even finished collecting its awards.
That's not how restaurant investment usually works in a small downtown. Most operators wait to see if the first location holds before committing to a second. Here, the wine cellar and the cigar bar were already part of the plan before Hour Detroit's write-up ran, which says the owners were betting on the neighborhood before the neighborhood voted back.
What the Judges Saw That the Ticket Line Will Too
The restaurants inside Taste of Clarkston's ticket line have always ranged from casual to upscale. What's different this year is that one of them arrived at the festival carrying a preservation award and a magazine's top honor in the same twelve months, built by a design and construction team, Saroki Architecture and Kelly Building & Development, with enough track record between them that Rudy's called their own history together "a fantastic team" during the project's public unveiling.
For a festival built on the idea of sampling a little of everything, that changes the math on what a ticket buys this year. It's not a bigger festival. It's the same 20-plus restaurants, the same two tickets-only booths, the same Corvette Club rolling through, set against a Main Street where the anchor building at one end just proved, on paper, that the bet on turning a shuttered grocery store into something else entirely paid off faster than almost anyone renovating a historic downtown building has a right to expect.
St. Daniel's Oktoberfest is a week away. The shuttle lots at the high school and junior high will be running again by noon tomorrow. Main Street will close the same way it has for 28 years, and the tickets will still cost ten dollars for ten.
Downtown Clarkston's restaurant scene is worth watching closely if you live here, whether or not you're thinking about real estate. But if a shift like this one, a shuttered grocery store turned award-winning steakhouse with a second act already bought and planned, has you wondering what it says about property values on Main Street, that's exactly the kind of local read the Shane Adams Group is built to give you.
