Vigilante Kitchen coming to Clawson

CLAWSON — Vigilante Kitchen, a restaurant designed to give some of the overlooked people in society a chance, will be moving into 76 W. 14 Mile Road in Clawson following its approval at the April 22 Clawson Planning Commission meeting.

“The mission of the brand is that we help people in the industry who are suffering from addiction in order to kind of get their life back on track,” said Aaron Cozadd, chef and owner of Vigilante Kitchen. “This concept of finding the inner super hero of people we work with along with the concept of doing something in an industry that isn’t really talked about or seen, kind of taking it into  our own hands, is sort of that vigilante ideal.”

Vigilante Kitchen is a restaurant that serves “elevated Midwestern food with Asian influence and classical French roots,” according to the restaurant’s Instagram, @vigilantekitchen.

Cozadd brought a site plan proposal to the Planning Commission on April 22 with some additions and modifications to the already existing building. The plan was unanimously approved with the exception of a mural.

The site is currently 3,150 square feet and located on the north side of 14 Mile Road just west of Main Street.

Cozadd and his team proposed changes to the building’s exterior including a flat metal awning to be put on the front of the building, a walk-in cooler and a permanent canopy over an exterior cooking area to be added to the rear of the building.

The proposal document also asked to put a mural on the side of the building facing westbound traffic on 14 Mile Road.

The 10-by-10-foot cooler will accompany an exterior smoker oven area where food will be cooked. The smoker will be vented above the building roofline.

The mural shown in the proposal document has superhero characters. Planning Commissioner Erin Redmond brought up that a mural using real characters might be susceptible to copyright infringement.

“When I thought of the idea of murals, it was more of like something that is an original art production that kind of stands out on its own,” Redmond said.

Cozadd said that he would work with the artist to potentially change that idea and make more of an original art piece.

“Now that I think more about it, representing the staff as superheroes I think is actually a better idea; also, it avoids Mickey Mouse coming after us,” he joked.

The smoker that the Vigilante Kitchen would be using in the back of the restaurant would be a Southern Pride rotisserie oven, and it would use green hickory wood.

“It’s a closed unit, it really only uses wood for flavor, so it’s heated through a gas jet,” Cozadd said. “It’s a light white smoke. Green hickory burns a lot less than like a cured wood like firewood. We might only use, like, one or two logs in a cooking process, so that’s going to be something that’s not going to really cause a lot of smoke.”

Cozadd also said that the cooking process is about two to four hours, so the restaurant will not be smoking meat for 14 hours overnight.

The food will be prepped inside the building and then brought out and put into the cooler to be transferred to the oven.

Smoke would be a problem if it was not controlled properly, according to Planning Commission Chairman Gregory Kucera, who said that in the past the city has run into problems with restaurants having smokers outside.

“If the city needed to impose some rules about when we can smoke, if there is a window each day, that’s something that we could do to accommodate as well,” Cozadd said.

Kucera said that the approval of the mural should be held off.

“I’d like to see an actual finished drawing of what you plan on putting there before it gets painted on,” he said.

Cozadd and his team will have to come back once the final mural design is finished for the approval of the Planning Commission, but the rest of the site plan was unanimously approved by the commission.

Cozadd said that he and his team are hopeful that the restaurant will open in September or October of 2025.