Bobcat Bonnie’s, one of the early arrivals
to a renewed Michigan Avenue after Detroit’s bankruptcy, is hanging it up.
The Corktown location opened in 2015 and, like Slows down the street, spun off a number of locations around the metro, stretching out to Ferndale, Wyandotte and Ypsilanti, and even further statewide in Grand Rapids and Lansing.
One might say that ten years on Michigan Avenue is a good run and that Bonnie’s reached the end of its natural lifespan for a small business, or that the activity up and down Michigan since Michigan Central has come full circle meant at least one mainstay had to be the first casualty of increasingly changing tastes on the corridor. Perhaps consider the third option: The imminent death of the Millennial Burger Restaurant.
For those of you not hyper-scrolling through TikTok, the Millennial Burger Restaurant — or Place, or Joint — is an accidental meme-slash-pejorative for a specific type of burger-forward establishment that first started to pop up around the late 2000s but boomed in the 2010s. Not all of them are necessarily owned by a millennial (but a lot of them are owned by Just Two Guys with a Crazy Idea), but that generation was that restaurant’s primary customer base, as they came into adulthood and their correlating careers as these restaurants took off.
At its core, Millennial Burger Restaurants was meant to elevate and modernize the family restaurant experience that millennials experienced as kids. The best example of this: If you spent any time in downtown Ann Arbor during the peak of the Millennial Burger Restaurant, remember
@Burger? Largely forgotten now, but @Burger was an early experiment from the owners of the more traditional Big Boy to add flair to hamburgers, adding then-uncommon toppings like chipotle-bourbon glaze, cheeses with vaguely foreign origin, or heaps of bacon, bacon, bacon. Every burger somehow was the variant of Homer Simpson’s
Good Morning Burger, if that rings a bell — a new kind of excess meant to distance the menu from, say, endless shrimp at Red Lobster or unlimited breadsticks at Olive Garden. (On a local level, that meant crafting any kind of modern restaurant that didn’t look like a Sign of the Beefcarver, a Ram’s Horn, or, again, Big Boy.)
But it wasn’t just the menus that were different. You know this sounds familiar when I describe it now: The faux-industrial decor of Millennial Burger Restaurants. Edison bulbs hanging from the ceiling, metal stools with no backsides, Mason jars for beverages, and men with either topknots, handlebar mustaches, or both, in denim aprons making craft cocktails. The entire aesthetic became commonplace in the last decade-plus, but millennials are now aging into midlife and like with all things vintage, TikTok is now forcing us to reassess what’s aged well and what hasn’t.
Millennial Burger Restaurants became an accidental joke after comedian Kyle Gordon — we’re going to get niche here if I ask you, reader, if you remember
2023’s “Planet of the Bass” phenomenon he was also responsible for — uploaded a jangly parody song that embodies the metal-stool aesthetic called “We Will Never Die.” It’s an unholy yet pitch-perfect mash of fun.’s “We Are Young” and The Lumineers’ “Ho Hey” — the
stomp-clap-hey melodies of every (white) wedding you went to between 2012 and 2018. (See also: American Authors’ “Best Day of Our Lives,” Train’s “Hey Soul Sister,” and anything by Mumford & Sons.) This music is now the punchline for millennials as disco was for Boomers and jock jams for Gen X, but a few TikTok users noted the connection between those sounds and the types of restaurants that cropped up alongside it — particularly the prices of the menu items.
Before Bobcat Bonnie’s (and to be clear, same goes for, say, Mercury Bar and Slows, yes, Slows), a burger and fries on Michigan Ave cost, what, no more than six bucks? The primary complaint of the Millennial Burger Restaurant are the heightened prices for burgers
before you add any side item (or “shareables,” which used to be called “appetizers,” another target of the Millennial Burger haters). A quick glance at Bobcat Bonnie’s menu -- which includes "shareables" -- shows that you’re leaning toward at least $20 for a burger, fries and a non-alcoholic drink. That’s on the low end compared to other MBRs in the area. Like, Townhouse downtown? I’m not even going to look, but it’s double that, I’m assuming. Considering that MBR haters are leaning more Gen Z,
already financially strapped as is, it’s understandable why these particular restaurants are now seen with shame, especially when there are more diverse options to be had at similar price points.
At one point, Bobcat Bonnie’s had a bunch of things encrusted in cereals millennials ate as kids, like Cap’n Crunch and Fruity Pebbles, only now charging more per item than what an average box of cereal would cost, adding to the increasing disdain of what Millennial Burger Restaurants ultimately failed at: “Adulting” the childhood experiences of its primary customer in an environment that’s financially untenable to any generation trying to navigate it. To be clear, snarky TikTokers did not plot the end of Bobcat Bonnie’s. But the end of Bobcat Bonnie’s certainly marks an end of an era — a poorly lit era drenched in boozy milkshakes and Moscow mules.