ABOUT BAR GABI
Bar Gabi is a chef-driven restaurant in Hazel Park, Mich., from Gabriel and Gabriela Botezan, a husband-and-wife culinary team who unite savory and sweet, Old and New World in an experience defined by their instinctive and uncompromising hospitality.
Inspired by Romania’s culinary traditions, modern Bucharest, and their training in top Italian kitchens of Metro Detroit, Bar Gabi is at once refined and irreverent. It is a place where Transylvanian myth collides with cosmopolitan edge, where modern plates carry the DNA of ancestral cooking, and where the drinks are as dark and daring as dinner. Oh, and you MUST save room for dessert.
Our mission is to channel the dark romance and raw edge of Romania into an American dining landscape that has rarely tasted it, transforming heritage, history, and modern influence into an unforgettable food and drink experience. We exist to both honor and disrupt tradition — to seduce curiosity about a cuisine too long overlooked, and carve out new space for Romanian food in America.
GABRIEL + GABRIELA BOTEZAN
They were already married when the kitchen gave them a new name. G2. Gabi Gabi. A shorthand that rolled off tongues because Gabriel and Gabriela Botezan moved like one body, one rhythm, side by side on the line. He ran the savory as chef de cuisine; she ruled the pastry corner he had pulled her into. Gabi Gabi — the nickname stuck.
But the story begins earlier, across an ocean. Both born in Romania, their roots carry the flavors of Transylvania’s dark forests, Bucharest’s bustling markets, and family tables buckling under the weight of Old World hospitality. Their training sharpened in Italy and Detroit, where Gabe cooked in some of the region’s top Italian kitchens. What emerged wasn’t fusion, but something stranger, truer: Romanian instinct sharpened by Italian technique, delivered with that singular Detroit spirit.
Bar Gabi is the culmination of that journey. A restaurant where Old World flavors and New World irreverence collide, where heritage is honored but never embalmed, and where hospitality comes instinctive, warm, and unafraid to show its teeth.
The name was always there, waiting, like an incantation. Gabi Gabi. Now it lives in Hazel Park, with four walls, a kitchen, and a bar to call their own.
This is theirs. This is Bar Gabi.