The Kitchen
The frita lands hot: a chorizo-spiced beef patty buried under a tangle of shoestring fries, packed into a soft egg roll until the thing barely closes. Eve Aronoff built the menu around it. She took diplomas at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, ran the ambitious Kerrytown restaurant eve until 2011, cooked a dinner at the James Beard House, and turned up on Bravo's Top Chef in 2009 before opening this Cuban street-food counter at 117 W Washington Street in 2010. The frita is the one dish she refined down to its ideal version, and at roughly $12 it is the cheapest serious cooking in Ann Arbor.
Order it with a batido — a tropical milkshake of fresh guava, mamey or papaya blended with crushed ice and sweetened milk, treated with the same care as the food. The room itself won a 2012 American Institute of Architects Honor Award for its design, which sounds absurd for a burger counter and is exactly the point: Aronoff takes the whole thing seriously, from the bun to the bench you sit on.
The Room
Bright, loud, communal. Long picnic-style tables run the length of the room, white walls bounce the daylight, and the hum climbs to a roar at the lunch rush. You order at the counter, carry a number, and a server finds you. It is not a quiet room and never tries to be — the noise is the appeal. Seating is bench-tight, the light is daytime-honest, and the dress code is whatever you wore to class.
Best for Solo Dining
Eat at the counter. A solo lunch here is one of Ann Arbor's easy pleasures: no reservation, no awkward wait for a table for one, a frita and a guava batido in front of you within minutes. The counter seat faces the line, the turnover is quick, and nobody makes a single diner feel like a problem. Bring a book or watch the cooks build fritas; either way you are out in half an hour, well fed, for the price of a sandwich.
Not for: a date you want to linger over — the picnic benches are shared, the room is loud, and the counter format keeps you moving. Skip it if you need quiet or a table to yourselves.
Frita Batidos FAQ
Is Frita Batidos worth it? Yes — for around $12 you eat a frita that a Cordon Bleu-trained chef refined to a single ideal version, plus a batido made with real tropical fruit. It is counter-service, so you are paying sandwich-shop prices for a kitchen run by a Cordon Bleu–trained, Top Chef alumna. Few college towns offer cooking this considered at this price.
Do you need a reservation at Frita Batidos? No — it is walk-in counter service with no bookings. You order at the till and find a seat at one of the communal picnic tables. Expect a short line at the weekday lunch peak and on football Saturdays; off-peak you walk straight up. Solo diners can almost always grab a counter stool without waiting.
What should I order at Frita Batidos? Start with the chorizo frita, the chorizo-and-beef patty under shoestring fries that the whole place is built on, and pair it with a guava or mamey batido. Add a side of the fried plantains if you are hungry. Vegetarians can swap in the black-bean frita, which gets the same treatment as the meat.
Is Frita Batidos good for solo dining? It is one of the best solo lunches in Ann Arbor. There is no reservation to make, no table-for-one stigma, and the counter seat puts you in front of the kitchen. The fast counter format means a single diner is in and out in about half an hour, f