Detroit doesn’t have one single “Detroit gift card” you can grab off a shelf at Kroger. What it has is better, honestly — a stack of specific, local options that actually mean something to the person opening them. A gift card to a restaurant they’ve been wanting to try. A card that spends at 100 different shops downtown. A box of Buddy’s Pizza on the way to their door because Goldbelly shipped it.
This is the list. Organized by who you’re buying for, with real links to where each one actually sells.
Restaurant Gift Cards: Buy Direct From the Restaurant
Skip the third-party marketplaces charging a markup. Every restaurant below sells its own gift card straight from its website, and it lands in an inbox in minutes.
Chartreuse Kitchen & Cocktails
Farm-forward New American food in Midtown, and one of the better date-night rooms in the city. A $75–$100 gift card covers a full dinner for two with cocktails.
Selden Standard
Wood-fired, seasonal, and consistently one of the hardest reservations to get in Midtown. A gift card here says you know what you’re doing.
Buy a Selden Standard gift card →
Prime + Proper
Downtown’s steakhouse-of-record, a block from Campus Martius. This one runs expensive — a $150–$200 card is the realistic floor for a proper dinner for two, so don’t undershoot it.
Buy a Prime + Proper gift card →
Buddy’s Pizza
The Detroit-style pizza that started the whole square-pan category. Buddy’s sells gift cards on its own site, and Goldbelly ships the actual pizza — frozen, nationwide — if the person you’re buying for doesn’t live here anymore.
Buy a Buddy’s Pizza gift card → or order Buddy’s Pizza shipped via Goldbelly →
Apparatus Room
The restaurant inside the Detroit Foundation Hotel, downtown near the Renaissance Center, set inside a converted 1929 firehouse. There’s no standalone restaurant gift card — instead, Aparium (the hotel group) sells one gift card that covers the room upstairs and dinner at Apparatus Room downstairs, which is honestly the better version of a restaurant gift card anyway.
Buy an Aparium gift card for Detroit Foundation Hotel and Apparatus Room →
If the restaurant you have in mind isn’t listed here, check its website first — most Detroit spots now run their own gift card page through Toast or a similar ordering system rather than a third-party service. Search “[restaurant name] gift card” before you assume it doesn’t exist.
The Detroit Card: One Card, 100+ Local Businesses
This is the closest thing Detroit has to a citywide gift card. The Downtown Detroit Partnership and Bedrock merged their two loyalty/gift programs — The Detroit Card and The Spirit Card — into one digital card that spends at more than 100 local businesses across the city, not just downtown. Retail, restaurants, coffee shops, boutiques.
It’s the right move for someone whose taste you don’t know well enough to pick one restaurant. Load it, hand it over, let them pick.
Learn more and buy The Detroit Card →
For the Sports Fan: Fanatics Gift Card
If they’d rather pick out their own Lions or Tigers gear than have you guess sizes and colors, a Fanatics gift card solves it. Fanatics carries officially licensed merchandise for the Lions, Tigers, Red Wings, and Pistons, and gift cards come in denominations from $10 up to $500, delivered by email or mail.
One thing worth knowing before you go looking: SeatGeek does not sell an official gift card. If someone tells you they found one online, it’s a third-party reseller, not SeatGeek itself. For a sports fan who’d rather go to a game than wear a jersey, the better move is buying tickets directly and gifting those instead.
For the Detroit Food Nostalgia: Goldbelly and Zingerman’s
For anyone who grew up here and moved away — this is the category that actually gets used. Goldbelly ships Detroit and Michigan food nationwide: Buddy’s Pizza, and hundreds of other makers beyond it. A Goldbelly e-gift card lets the recipient pick what they’re craving instead of you guessing.
Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor — 45 minutes from downtown Detroit and about as Michigan as food gifting gets — sells its own gift cards directly, from $5 to $200, delivered by email within the hour if you need it fast.
For a Weekend Away: Hotel Gift Cards
Not every gift needs to be consumable. If you’re sending someone a Detroit weekend rather than a Detroit dinner, a hotel gift card or a booked stay does more than a $50 restaurant card ever will.
MotorCity Casino Hotel sells its own gift cards, redeemable at any MotorCity restaurant, the hotel itself, the gift shop, Sound Board, and the spa — no minimum beyond $5, no expiration date, and no fees for sitting unused.
Buy a MotorCity Casino Hotel gift card →
One thing to know: Shinola the retail brand and Shinola Hotel are separately run, and the Shinola retail gift card is not redeemable at the hotel — it only works in Shinola stores and on shinola.com. There’s no official Shinola Hotel gift card. For that property, skip the gift card altogether and just book the room directly:
🏨 Find Hotels in Detroit on Booking.com →
For the Design and Art Crowd: Shinola Retail and DIA Shop
Shinola’s flagship at 441 W. Canfield St. in the Cass Corridor sells its own gift cards, good for watches, leather goods, and bikes, in denominations from $25 up to $1,000 or a custom amount. Delivered instantly by email, or mailed physically if you’d rather hand over a card.
The Detroit Institute of Arts Museum Shop is the other strong pick here. DIA gift cards work on-site for retail and restaurant purchases inside the museum, and you can buy one by calling the shop directly or browsing diashop.org and completing the purchase by phone.
Learn about DIA Shop gift cards →
For the Mall Shopper: Somerset Collection
Somerset Collection in Troy is Metro Detroit’s upscale mall — more than 180 stores, from Nordstrom to Swarovski. Most individual retailers sell their own gift cards, and the mall’s concierge desk (248-643-6088) will help you buy one for a specific store or wrap it nicely if you’re picking it up in person.
Amazon Gift Cards, If You Want Zero Chance of a Wrong Guess
Sometimes the safest gift is the most flexible one. An Amazon gift card doesn’t say “Detroit,” but pair it with a Detroit-branded card holder or a note about what it’s for, and it covers everything from Lions gear to a Detroit cookbook.
Shop Detroit-themed gift card holders on Amazon →
Buying in Bulk: Client Gifts and Office Holiday Gifting
If you’re the person at the office who ends up handling client gifts every December, Detroit gift cards solve a real problem: they scale. You’re not shipping 40 different boxes of merchandise and hoping sizes fit. You’re sending 40 emails, each one landing in an inbox within minutes.
The Detroit Card is the strongest option here specifically because it works for out-of-town clients too — someone in Chicago or New York who flies into Detroit twice a year can actually use it, unlike a card tied to one restaurant they may never visit. Goldbelly works the same way for clients who won’t be back in the city at all; ship them something with a Detroit or Michigan name on it instead of a card that requires a plane ticket to redeem.
For a Detroit-based team, splitting the list between a few restaurant gift cards spreads the goodwill around the neighborhood instead of funneling every dollar to one national brand — that’s worth factoring in if “supporting local” matters to your company culture.
Digital or Physical: Which One to Send
Every option above comes in both formats, and the right one depends on timing more than preference. An e-gift card lands in minutes and works for anyone you can’t hand something to in person — out-of-town family, a client, someone you’re not seeing before the holiday. A physical card gives you something to actually wrap, which matters more than people admit when the gift is otherwise “just a card.”
If you’re ordering close to a deadline, go digital without exception. Chartreuse, Selden Standard, Buddy’s Pizza, Shinola, and Zingerman’s all deliver the e-gift version same-day or within an hour. Physical cards from any of these need 5–7 business days minimum, longer during the holiday shipping crunch in December.
How Much to Put on a Detroit Gift Card
Rough guide, based on what these places actually cost:
A casual spot — Buddy’s Pizza, a coffee shop, Eastern Market vendors — $25–$40 covers a real visit. A mid-tier dinner spot like Chartreuse or Selden Standard needs $75–$100 to feel generous rather than “here’s a discount.” A steakhouse like Prime + Proper needs $150–$200 minimum; anything less and the recipient is paying the difference out of pocket, which defeats the point. Hotel gift cards work best at $100+ increments since a night downtown rarely comes in under that.
Where to Buy These in Person, If You’d Rather Not Order Online
Eastern Market on a Saturday has several vendors who sell their own paper gift certificates at the stall — ask directly, it varies by vendor and by season. Somerset Collection’s concierge desk handles in-person gift card purchases for any store in the mall. And most of the restaurants listed above will sell you a physical gift card at the host stand if you stop in — just call ahead so they have one on hand.