A cigar maker's café that outlived everything

Albert Schuler made cigars. He ran a hole-in-the-wall café on what’s now Michigan Avenue, and by 1917 he’d bought the Garrick Café, and in 1923 he took over the Royal Hotel — a man steadily talking himself out of the cigar trade and into the restaurant business. That hotel kitchen in Marshall is the seed of one of the most familiar names in Michigan dining.

His son Win is the one who grew it. Win Schuler came back to Marshall in 1934 after a stretch teaching school, took over running the restaurant, and bought his father out in 1936. He had a gift for the warm, unhurried welcome — the kind where the host actually means it — and he built the food around comfort: prime rib, a cheese spread set on the table before you’d even ordered, bread you’d remember. Word traveled, and through the postwar decades Win opened Schuler’s locations clear across the state, from Jackson to Grand Rapids to Ann Arbor.

The chain has shrunk back over the years, the way chains do. But the original — on South Eagle Street in downtown Marshall, a few steps from the courthouse — never closed. It’s still there, dark wood and fireplaces and a bar that’s poured drinks for the better part of a century, run by the same family in the same town where a cigar maker first set out a lunch counter. Marshall is a place that’s good at keeping things; the whole downtown is a National Historic Landmark district. Schuler’s is the version of that you can eat dinner inside of.