Creative Partnership

Ben Robison and Joseph VanWagner have reached a higher echelon of the industry—making their vision for a Michigan-centric restaurant a reality.

BEN ROBISON AND Joseph VanWagner have taken different paths but have arrived at the same point: creating a restaurant based on their collective vision.

As the youngest of three kids, Robison said he was a bit too young to play with the neighborhood kids in the small New York village where he grew up and was told to hang out with his mom in the kitchen. That fostered a love of cooking at a young age. He took culinary classes at Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, where he went to high school before going to Schoolcraft College.

His first pastry job was at Bacco Ristorante a year into his studies at Schoolcraft. Despite his lack of experience, the pastry chef at the time took a chance on him.

Starting his career at an Italian restaurant instilled a longtime appreciation for the Italian approach to food, which emphasizes high-quality ingredients prepared simply and with care.

When the pastry chef moved on, Robison stepped up to be executive pastry chef and “never really took a step back from there.”

“A lot of my career was just kind of like that mind-set of just figure it out, keep going,” he said.

VanWagner’s connection to food was as strong but different. He was raised on Michigan’s west coast, where agriculture was a common occupation among his friends and family, and hunting and fishing were integral parts of daily life. But that connection to food didn’t translate to the dinner table.

“My mom was one of 10 kids, and her mom, as the story goes, would make the same dinner every Monday, the same every Tuesday through Friday, and on Saturday and Sunday you would fend for yourself. So she never learned how to cook.”

VanWagner went to Michigan State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in hospitality business, which led him to Chicago for his first job out of a college: a two-star Michelin restaurant that opened a new world of food for him.

“I had never seen food like that before, so it was unbelievable,” VanWagner says. “I was just shocked that there was food like this. I remember eating a bite of lobster on a gold spoon with a little foam. And I almost wanted to cry because I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

He begged the chef to let him trade his service manager duties to the kitchen and from there he would stage (essentially an unpaid internship for cooks to learn new techniques) all over the country in a “very intense and tenacious pursuit of knowledge.”

Since VanWagner started cooking as an adult and didn’t go to culinary school, he felt like he was “cooking from behind or trying to make up for lost time.” He tried to close that gap by working at as many top restaurants as he could, putting in 80 hours a week and staging on the weekends.

“It was a different time in Michigan. There weren’t a lot of people pushing the envelope,” he says. “I think a lot of us felt like we had to seek knowledge elsewhere.”

After several years, he returned to Michigan like many other chefs who left and came back to be a part of the culinary scene. “To come home and to meet someone that was so like-minded who was also showing me all these things I didn’t know about was pretty amazing.”

While VanWagner didn’t work at Bacco for long, he and Robison would cross paths again many times at many of the area’s top restaurants, including Bistro 82, Chartreuse and Local Kitchen and Bar, always “connecting and having fun with food.” They also collaborated on several pop-ups.

VanWagner has “a very pastry approach astry approach to savory food. I have a very savory approach to pastry, so we just kind of hit it off right away,” Robison says.

“I would always get the joke when I would [start working at] a new restaurant, ‘So, like, when’s Joe gonna start working?’” Robison says.

Jokes aside, VanWagner has “a very pastry approach to savory food. I have a very savory approach to pastry, so we just kind of hit it off right away,” Robison says.

Now the two are about to embark on their latest restaurant venture together: Echelon Kitchen and Bar in Ann Arbor.

VanWagner had recently returned from New York—where he worked for The Dinex Group, which was founded by award-winning Chef Daniel Boulud—when he landed at the Dixboro Project in 2022. That was when VanWagner connected with Chef Louis Maldonado, the partner and chef at the time at the Ann Arbor restaurant. Maldonado told VanWagner he should talk with Doug Zeif, who was planning to open an “ambitious project” in Ann Arbor, a wood-fired, vegetable-forward concept highlighting as many local producers as possible in Michigan.

After VanWagner got on board the project in fall 2023, he knew who he wanted to call to join him.

“Ben is the best pastry chef, probably, in the Midwest. He’s one of the best pastry chefs in the country. And I always knew I made my best food when I was with Ben,” VanWagner says.

At that point Robison had recently left Freya, where he worked for several years, and was “bouncing around” and doing a lot of consulting when VanWagner called.

“[The opportunity] kind of just, like, fell into my lap. I was, like, ‘Oh, here you go. Here’s your answer.’ It was a weird point in my life. It was probably the first time in my life where I didn’t have a stable job—or two jobs, for that matter,” Robison says.

The idea behind Echelon is to celebrate Michigan, VanWagner says. The menu will be globally inspired and “brought to life with as many Michigan-produced ingredients as possible.”

The market for pastry chefs is small in Michigan and new challenges are hard to find. That’s what attracted Robison to Echelon.

“What excited me about this was the opportunity to come in and really do something that is special, that’s unique, that’s not just like a cookie-cutter restaurant,” Robison says.

The idea behind Echelon is to celebrate Michigan, VanWagner says. The menu will be globally inspired and “brought to life with as many Michigan-produced ingredients as possible.” The frequently changing menu will be based on concepts for dishes that will serve as “placeholders” that can be modified depending on what the farms have available that day.

“For instance, we have a baby carrot dish on the menu that we love. We hope some version of this will always be on the menu where we grill carrots and we make a mousse with carrot juice and Gruyere and it’s tossed in house-made vinegar and candied hazelnuts and cilantro and chives,” VanWagner says.

There will also be a tasting menu with a vegan option. “I think that’ll be a really cool opportunity to not only celebrate what’s being grown, but to push ourselves as chefs and cooks to find different ways to present these ingredients,” VanWagner says. “We do have a strong focus on vegetables and letting the vegetables be what they are.”

An example of that is their cabbage dish. The cabbage is first cured, like a protein, then grilled to charred and crispy perfection. It gets dressed with shiso vinaigrette and vegan kimchi aioli.

Another dish highlighting the humble cabbage is a take on okonomiyaki, the Japanese pancake. The cabbage is cooked until crispy, then dressed with a vegan sauce and garnished with “land caviar,” which is tonburi seeds—dried seeds from the tree summer cypress, Kochia scoparia.

When it comes to the pastry program, Robison says he’ll be following the same thought process of focusing on the seasonality of ingredients. The wood-fire preparation is something new for him, but he aims to get as many components on the fire as possible. With his deep understanding of vegetable and fruit cookery, those skills will help in “pushing forward the same mentality that Joe’s bringing.”

“Everything that we’ve put on the plate, from a produce standpoint, has come from a local farm in Michigan. So that presents its own unique challenges and opportunities,” VanWagner says.

“We’ve formed a strong alliance with many local farms from Metro Detroit to Ann Arbor. And we’ve also created a really strong relationship with Argus Farm Stop, who has essentially served as our produce company.”

Robison and VanWagner say the dedication to source locally goes beyond food, such as working with artisans like Grayling Ceramics to create their plates.

“If we’re going to spend X amount of dollars on a beautiful plate, why don’t we try to get it made in Michigan with Michigan clay? [Working with local producers] creates and intensifies the bond with community and the goals that we have as a team,” VanWagner says.

That sense of community is a huge part of the ethos of Echelon. For Robison, helping the next generation and paying it forward are the most rewarding aspects of the job.

“Most importantly—especially for me—our goal is to produce a group of humans within our walls that will someday leave to do bigger and better things while carrying on our passion,” he says.

“In the business of hospitality, we’re not just here for the guests. Our job is to care about everyone around us. This is a very personal goal for me and is a major reason why I joined the team at Echelon. Not only do I want to be the person I didn’t have [while] coming up in this industry, I want to be all of the people I did have, so I can pass my experiences on to others.”

And it’s not just the work they’re doing at Echelon. The close-knit community of chefs and farmers in Michigan are working together to raise the state’s profile, Robison says.

“There’s a South African philosophy called ubuntu that translates to ‘I am because we are,’” Robison says. “This is something that has stuck with me for years and I think it applies to this restaurant more than any other I’ve been a part of. I can do good things, but with a community of talented, like-minded individuals, together WE can do great things.”

Dorothy Hernandez is a freelance journalist who frequently writes about food at the intersection of culture, entrepreneurship and social justice.