Even with football back on a lot of our favorite places in Ann Arbor are hurting. Hoping to soften the blow a bit, we're partnering this fall with Underground Printing to do a t-shirt a week for the places we love. All proceeds go to the restaurant/bar/whatever.

Limited time offer: We'll keep the order open for a week (because ordering bulk means more for the institution).

Previously: Good Time Charley's, the Brown Jug, the Blind Pig the State and Michigan Theaters, Mr. Spots, and Literati.

This week: Dominick's.

How far along are you on the previews? I got through the DEs before I had to flip back to work. It's annoying too because usually the week before football season is one I look forward to all year. Brian's writing the previews, the sun is hanging around lazily, heedless of the onset of September and things that bring tension, and I spend the week mostly booking the sponsors for the season.

And I always try to get in an afternoon of sangria and friends in the cloister. You know the one.

[Hit THE JUMP for a vague invitation. This one is personal]

I was tempted by Dominick's for a long time before I even knew what Sangria was. The cardinal red and hunter greens of its façade are calibrated to be vibrant in a summer sun and muted when they close for the winter. The stray freshman coming from East Quad might walk past several times without realizing it's more than student housing. I learned it was a thing a day after it closed, and then my daily route took me by it five times a week for an entire winter.

This might have been somewhat on purpose. That porch was a siren.

I finally got in my first court on the last day I could. I arrived around 3:20 p.m., which was 20 minutes after completing my last final, and 18 hours before I had to leave Ann Arbor for the next three months. We sat in the courtyard: Dave Malak, Tres Crow, the Hibbard twins, Kevin Short, Vern Elkins and his girlfriend, Dan Vega, Matt Peck, and two or three older dudes who came and went as court was in session. Tres and I had read Henry Adams's "Machine in the Garden" for some class, and he remarked it looks like "The Garden in the Machine." This became an album title.

The veterans ordered Sangria. It came with mason jars. Other people at other picnic tables were also drinking out of mason jars. It struck me that the things the people at the other tables are talking about were interesting, that I'd grown accustomed to this, and in that 18 hours the conversations around me would go back to being forced, weary, polite, sarcastic, and purposeful. Some combination of mild heat, liberality, and [tries to count] an amount of sangria had me hungry.

Someone said get the pizza—the pizza is so good that when an offshoot of Dominick's couldn't measure up they had to change their name to Domino's—but I have a major thing for pasta, and when I navigated through a parlor and hallway I found the Lloyd Carr era version of this and nearly had to be tied to a mast.

Ravioli Portabello, if you must know, devoured too quickly and too early in my palette's development to properly rank it among the cuisine I'd later experience in Europe. I tortured myself with the decision, especially because people who knew about Dominick's would keep bringing up the pizza.

Part of that was because I kept passing it. So often it was the wrong season. If it wasn't I had somewhere to be. Or I had this stupid thing about wanting to be there in a big group. I dunno. I didn't go often enough for how often I thought about it.

Coming to the end of finals of senior year I just made the damn thing happen. Without anyone knowing what it was, including me, I threw myself a kind of graduation party, inviting disparate people from my various campus cliques: Daily, frat, band, my Jews from home, French film friends, etc. Invitations were word of mouth and vague on the timing: "Afternoon." I held court at a long table in the garden, affixing time by a sun that had no more interest in letting that "afternoon" end than I did. Somebody knew about the gazpacho (I'd never had it) and that plus another giant mason jar of sangria were the thing whenever another guest or pack arrived. GAWD that was a great day.

That day sat with me way deeper than I realized. When my dad died in July 2014 my way of getting through the immediate trauma was to find my mom's set of mason jars and set up on the picnic table in her backyard. Somebody else started making sangrias. Those were my worst days, but when I remember them now it's not that panicked feeling of being on the edge of an emotional cliff but a wood table with sangria and friends around. A garden in the machine.

Today's another day when the great porch and loud façade are muted, as they've remained for the many years since COVID came. The garden in the machine is a phenomenon, not a restaurant. Things have to align. But I swear people, when all of this is over, and whatever work projects don't need attention, and football's not really doing anything, and the world isn't going to hell just that moment, and the sun isn't in such a rush to disappear behind the other houses, and you just want to sit outside with your mind swimming with sangria and ideas, we'll find a day to hold court again.

In the meantime let's keep Dominick's around another cycle: