Lobster bisque at a walk-up hot dog stand sold me on Ann Arbor, Michigan. Good chance of finding other surprising combinations, I figured, when this bisque tasted great.

Clearly this is a university town with a big medical complex but it’s also homey, tasty, talented and unpretentious.

Nice personality for a visit. My notion panned out in nearby Ypsilanti, Chelsea and Dexter too but Ann Arbor is the place to start. Detroit’s only 35 miles to the northeast but that city-in-massive-automotive change wasn’t my focus.

Fine food, superb art in museums, galleries and cooperatives, beguiling book stores, active theaters and music scenes along with lively main streets defined this southeastern Michigan city of 114,000 people for me on a blustery December visit.

Must be really nice in the spring.

Shopkeepers surely want visitors to purchase their wares but plenty of Ann Arbor businesses also offer classes, demos and tours. They linger over interesting conversations too. They’re passionate about their places and consider their merchandise like collections.

That’s unusual, and I found it special.

Consider Hollander’s Decorative Papers & Bookbinding Supplies. Tom and Cindy Hollander love their place, and their craft. So does his 90-year-old mom in Connecticut, Annette Hollander.

She started the book art movement in the late sixties, Tom says, and shared the skills.

Couldn’t quite tell if I was in a museum or a three-story shop. Maybe a school.

Sure you can buy stationery, and big sheets of exquisite paper to wrap gifts, frame as art or muse about how to use. 1,500 different kinds are draped head high on narrow dowel rods, at least 10 rods to a frame.

Take one of their seven-hour workshops and you‘ll know how to make a beautiful covered box with tight corners and seams.

The American Academy of Bookbinding in Telluride, CO thinks so highly of Hollander’s operations that they send their finest teachers here to partner with the School of Book and Paper Arts, Tom says. Nowhere else, just to Ann Arbor.

Paper art happens on the bottom floor of this 1890s building with late 19th century equipment working like it did in earlier days of book binding arts.

Third floor is a kitchen with cooking classes; $15 each. Good place to print your menus or make a cookbook downstairs.

The Ann Arbor Potters Guild is cooperative of at least 50 clay artists, at work most days in active studios downtown creating plates, bowls, mugs, vases and decorative fine craft.

Show up at 201 Hill Street, even unannounced, and you’re likely to find creations in progress and an invitation for a tour.

Workshops and classes happen often, with master clay artists considering the Guild, started in 1949, to be one of the oldest in America. The annual spring sale will be Apr. 24 and 25.

“Clay art and other crafts have risen to a major place in the art world. Crafts now can be large, serious and expressive as only painting and sculpture used to be,” says artist Ethel K. Potts, known to her colleagues as Epie. Her stoneware created in 1954 is part of the Guild’s historic collection.

Fine works, many by members of the Guild, are seen and sold at the Clay Gallery on South Main Street.

The Zingerman Community of Businesses has so much food and shopping I think it’s a destination all by itself, a separate holiday within the Ann Arbor vacation.

Here’s a glimpse with full details in another story, another day.

Ginger spice coffee cake and a lemon almond brioche started my morning and handmade chocolate candy ended the afternoon. In between I experienced eight businesses, eating, drinking and buying foods and cookbooks the entire time.

Zingerman’s is a deli and a bakery, coffeehouse and chocolatier, cooking school and restaurant, teacher and farmer, visionary and plain hard worker.

Wish I had a foodie business plan to propose to founders Paul Saginaw and Ari Weinzweig because they do accept new partners.

“We want to give people an opportunity to succeed,” says Pete Sickman-Garner, marketing manager. “We have mature businesses and young businesses, and a clear decision-making process. Plus we smile on the telephone because that mood comes through.”

They also have 75 different kinds of olive oils and an aged balsamic vinegar in a locked case that sells for $750.

Now that’s some kind of a reserve.

Chance-upon-it eating like that hot dog stand named Le Dog is fun on a holiday, following leads suggested by local folks, but Ann Arbor has such outstanding restaurants that making reservations in advance is a better plan so you don’t miss the experiences.

Mediterrano is one of those, located in an unlikely strip mall called Concord Center and brimming with flavors and aromas.

Culture and heritage too because owner John Roumanis returns frequently to his native Greece and fills the restaurant with art as well as recipes.

Four to five cases of extra virgin olive oil from his home village named Lakonia find their way into entrees, appetizers and dipping dishes for fresh crusty breads.

“As a child we had no other choice. All that was available was fresh and natural – olives, oil, wheat bread, legumes. If we had meat, it was like a condiment,” Roumanis says.

“Flavors at Mediterrano are simple but intense; our spices are North African and Mediterranean.”

His balsamic vinegar reduction stands out, thick like syrup, memorable for dipping my chunk of ciabatta bread and clinging to the side of the pitcher.

Roasted winter squash soup with some Michigan apple cider and Madagascar bourbon vanilla and dates stuffed with house-crafted chorizo wrapped in apple wood smoked bacon led into my main course: sea scallops on braised red chard and lamb chops seasoned with cumin, coriander and preserved lemon.

Roumanis has an interesting personal story and some observations of his neighbors.

“Sugar coating does not work here,” he says. “A restaurant needs substance because you cannot fool an Ann Arbor consumer.”

The University of Michigan attracted him to America 39 years ago – “a student in the middle of a storm, the flower generation” - and despite seven years of running a Hyatt restaurant in California, Roumanis has called Ann Arbor home as much as Lakonia, Greece where he maintains a home.

Dinner is Italian at Paesano Restaurant and Wine Bar, serving seasonal food. The seasons reflect the Veneto region of Italy, homeland of Chef Isabella Nicoletti.

Bit of a switch for the eat-local movement, but chef shops the Ann Arbor farmers’ markets.

Rustic Italian dishes emphasizing regional preparations influenced by Italian wines: that’s what proprietors Michael and Bridgett Roddy say about their 26-year old restaurant.

If my beef cheeks braised in port were rustic, I can’t imagine cosmopolitan. Caramelized to perfection and served with sweetbreads, sweet potato and ginger puree and delicate, long and skinny parsnip chips, this was a dinner to warm up a December visitor.

I was already calm, thanks to the starter of chestnut risotto with a glass of wine made from Italy’s Barbera grapes. They have a bit of a cherry tang.

Don’t know when I might be visiting Italy, but I certainly want dinner at Paesano’s first, preferably the second Thursday of any month.

That’s when Chef Isabella serves a four-course meal with wines and instructions how to order food in Italian.

She gives tips on how Italians wine and dine, and sends you home with instructional materials. $50 per person for the experience.

Learn some language also with Salvatore Bissaccia during a cooking class or wine tasting at Paesano’s.

Art is easy to access in Ann Arbor and walking among public outdoor sculpture, inside the new galleries at the University of Michigan Museum of Art or throughout downtown and the many galleries is good exercise between sumptuous meals.

Tempting to peek ahead throughout the University Museum’s new galleries, opened in March of 2009 after a $41.9 million expansion and renovation. The spaces are wide and African art flows easily to Asian, modern to outdoors, wood to ceramics.

Sightlines are open and inviting.

Creates a mood of anticipation and eagerness. So does the Museum’s “open storage gallery” where wood, glass and ceramics were on display the day I visited without many signs. Kind of a relief to simply see the art and not feel obligated to learn anything.

A glass-front room in the gallery space allows visitors to watch meticulous conservation of Asian art, and the gift shop features handsome and pricey wood objects turned from trees felled in the expansion process.

The University is so big students need a bus to move from central to north campuses so a tour of the outdoor sculpture takes some time. Imagination too for some of it. This is hands-on, touch and play art.

The Wave Field is purely earth, a 90-foot square with a pattern like waves according to artist Maya Lin.

She’s the one who created the Vietnam Wall in Washington, D.C. and the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, AL. Presumably it changes with the sun and the shadows, but my day was all about snow and clouds.

The cube named Endover is big too—15 feet wide and 15 feet tall, sitting on a corner. Give it a gentle push and it rotates on its axis.

Lots of the outdoor sculpture is near the Engineering Department, a nice intersection of art, math and science.

Pop in the tall and narrow West Side Book Shop for a look at used and rare books and a chat with proprietor Jay Platt. He’s tall too.

It’s two doors down from the Ann Arbor Center for the Arts. And that’s the way to consider this Michigan city----a step away is yet something else interesting, over and over again.