My postings to this point have all focused on academics. As I've said, I would also like to talk about some of the cultural/entertainment amenities of Ann Arbor. Let's start with food!
Ann Arbor probably covers the same range of dining tastes one would find in a prospering college town or in the suburbs of a major city. One area in which I would say Ann Arbor stands out is in its vegetarian dining options. As I recall, three out of the eight students in my Fall '84 entering graduate school cohort (myself included) were vegetarians, so this is of personal relevance!
The first restaurant I'd recommend to vegetarians is Seva. I make it a point to go to Seva on all my return visits to Ann Arbor. As can be seen in the comments from the linked document, Seva has a wonderful variety of food, as well as a nice atmosphere.
Another good place for vegetarians is Afternoon Delight. "AD," as some people call it, has a bright, lively atmosphere. One goes along a cafeteria-type line, either ordering a made-to-order dish or sampling from what's out, pays, and then sits down. It's a good, relatively quick place to, for example, take a break from your data analysis or writing and grab dinner. Niall Bolger, a Michigan post doc at the time and now a professor at NYU, and I used to run into each other frequently at AD.
Perhaps the restaurant most uniquely identified nationally with Ann Arbor is Zingerman's delicatessen. Although I can't find a link now, Zingerman's made some kind of USA Today Top Ten list for delicatessens a few years back. Based on things I've read over the years, Zingerman's really seems to pride itself on concentrating solely on the Ann Arbor community and not going national.
Another relatively famous place is Angelo's restaurant, which specializes in breakfasts (not being a morning person, I didn't get to Angelo's all that often). As you can hear from the Angelo's website, the place even has its own theme song! Angelo's is featured prominently in the 1989 book Big Ten Country by Bob Wood.
Ann Arbor being a college town, it naturally had a wide variety of pizza places. My favorite place -- and indeed my favorite restaurant of any kind in the nation -- was Pizzeria Uno, the deep-dish pizza place that originated on the corner of Wabash and Ohio in Chicago. To this day, I'm still trying to get to as many Uno's restaurants nationally as I can. However, the Ann Arbor Uno's, located on South University, went out of business in the mid-90s. It was the site of many grad student gatherings (birthdays, dissertation defense celebrations, etc.) during my years at UM. When not with a group, I made a weekly take-out order from Uno's.
One of the more colorful local places is Pizza Bob's on State St., known for its exotic pizza toppings.
Ann Arbor is also, of course, the home of Domino's Pizza, which was embroiled in controversy over the political views of founder Tom Monaghan (if anyone is interested in this, you can go to the Google search engine and type in the keywords "domino's pizza" "ann arbor" "monaghan," which will bring up roughly 500 hits).
Besides pizza, another robust business in town is bagels. My favorite was always The Bagel Factory, which according to the linked document, is either gone from its longtime South U. location or about to be. In recent years, I have frequented two places in the State/North U. area, Einstein Bros. and Bruegger's. Bruegger's occupies the space of the former Drake's sandwich shop (about which, more below). In what I think is a classy gesture, Bruegger's has photographs of the old Drake's on the wall.
Drake's, in my mind, was the prototypical quaint, old-fashioned, college-town hangout. It closed in 1993, but there's a nice Drake's tribute page on the web. Drake's appears to go back to at least the 1920s. From the wooden booths to the hand-painted signs, even in the 1980s Drake's probably didn't look much different from how it did generations ago. Customers would come in, go up to the counter to write out their own order on the forms depicted on the tribute site, and then go sit down and wait for their order to be called out. Drake's also had an amazing assortment of candies for sale, displayed in these large glass jars (see the photos on the tribute site).
The aforementioned restaurants are/were largely in the central campus area. The more "downtown-ish" Main Street area a few blocks from campus has some more upscale places, but I tended to stick to the campus area.
I'm obviously just scratching the surface, even with what has now become a fairly extended summary. Please e-mail me with your dining favorites and I'll post an addendum.