Bon-A-Rose Home Style Foods is the product of family: a family business, family recipes, the family name. “My parents purchased a 19th century home 30 years ago with the intention of opening a restaurant in it,” explains Anna Hoffman, owner of Bon-A-Rose. At the time they purchased the house, it was used as an upper and lower flat. In the ‘80s Anna’s parents converted it into a full-service, seven-day-a-week upscale Italian restaurant using all of Anna’s grandmother’s recipes. “It was always my mom’s dream to have a restaurant,” Anna continues. “Her parents had a restaurant in Detroit so she wanted to honor that.” The original restaurant, also called Bon-A-Rose, remained open for several years until Anna’s mother was forced to close it about 10 years ago due to medical issues.
The family kept the property and at the time Anna was doing bookkeeping for her father. It so happened that both of her daughters were having showers (bridal and baby) at about the same time, which triggered in her a passion to re-launch the family’s restaurant – but doing things a little differently this time. “When our last tenant left I talked mom into redoing the restaurant,” Anna says. “[I told her], ‘We already had the commercial kitchen so we can cater parties on-site and use grandma’s recipes.’” For her daughters’ showers, which they held in the old Bon-A-Rose space, Anna didn’t want to give the usual cheap trinkets as party gifts for guests, so she and her mom made their own salad dressings and marinara sauce with custom labels under the “Bon-A-Rose” name and gave them out as gifts.
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