![]() ![]() ![]() Vellum opened in November of 2012 with great expectations and even better early reviews, but there were questions. It’s why he chose to return to the town he grew up in. “I’ve been steeped in this tradition for a long time,” Roumanis says of his upbringing. His father and now financial partner at Vellum, John, owns two other popular Ann Arbor restaurants, Carlyle Grill and Mediterrano, and the family owns an olive oil company in Greece, where they’re from. Roumanis has been working toward this for a long time. He started working in his father’s restaurant at age 12, apprenticed in the kitchen at Taillevent in Paris at 16, under the legendary Jean-Claude Vrinat, later worked the line at Daniel in New York City, graduated from Cornell with a degree in hospitality management and was managing Del Posto for Mario Batali at age 21, the youngest manager of a four-star restaurant in New York. That skepticism is partially why he resisted revealing his age for so long, but he now admits, not quite freely, that he’s 25. ![]() Roumanis is young, with boyish good looks to match, which makes it easy to think his ambition could be blinded by his youth. He admits Vellum, his one-year-old restaurant in Ann Arbor, MI, “is all about balance.” He wants the 130-seat restaurant in his hometown to be both a “modern American restaurant of the moment,” but also one that “appeases the Midwestern palate.” Burgers and bone marrow, Budweiser and Bordeaux and Manhattan in the Midwest, Vellum is a study in contrasts. Peter Roumanis knows he’s walking a tight rope. Roumanis works during a recent Wednesday workshop cooking battle. ![]()
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