[EID Feature] Voigt's Soda House is open in the Livernois Community Storefront through the end of the year

All photos by Nicole Rupersburg.

2013 Hatch Detroit semifinalists Voigt's Soda House has popped up inside the Livernois Community Storefront on the Avenue of Fashion now through the end of the year.

Though they didn't make it to the final four in the Hatch competition, owners Sarah Pavelko and Billy Shuman have been working on this concept for over two years now and continue to move forward in their efforts to open a soda and sandwich shop. They won first place in the TechTown Retail Bootcamp Showcase in November, which got them one month inside the Livernois Community Storefront rent-free through December.

After this pop-up ends, Voigt's will continue doing catering and special events. They are taking their time finding a permanent retail location, waiting for the right opportunity for their combination soup and sandwich spot, coffee shop, and old-fashioned soda parlor. Ideally they would like to be located in Capitol Park.

The pop-up coffee and soda shop is open Wednesdays through Sundays through the end of the month. (Click here for hours.) They are serving homemade soups and creative sandwiches along with their own trail mix, sweets from Treats by Angelique, and Better Made and McClure's chips. They also have a full espresso bar, but the real highlight here is their old-fashioned soda fountain drinks, for which the place is named.

They make all their own syrups from fresh, seasonal ingredients and their own homegrown herbs, then mix them with carbonated water and other items like vanilla ice cream and Angostura bitters. Seasonal syrup flavors include lavender lemon, cran-orange pomegranate, vanilla, Russian Tea (black tea, orange, cardamon), Hot Toddy (jasmine tea, lemon, honey), and Sinterklaus (cranberry shrub with cider vinegar). You can also purchase their syrups to take home and use in your own sodas, cocktails, or give as gifts. Order for pickup in-store; delivery is available for orders over $50. Syrups must be refrigerated and have a self life of 1-2 months.

Before voting started for the Hatch Detroit semifinalists, I interviewed Sarah about the concept behind Voigt's for Model D. Here is the Voigt's excerpt from that story about all 10 semifinalists:

Voigt's Soda House is a modern twist on the classic soda shop, featuring sodas and cocktails with homemade artisanal syrups made from seasonal ingredients and local herbs. With a particular mindfulness towards Detroit nostalgia – taking a trip downtown to Hudson's or visiting Stroh's and stopping for sodas and ice cream at their soda counters – Voigt's will have particular local appeal while also feeding the growing demand for locally-sourced homemade artisan products. Soda flavors will include things like peach Thai basil, cherry lime phosphate, and celery lime gin tonic. They will serve cocktails, food, and even "Detroit Coolers." (Vernor's is a Detroit product, after all.)

Voigt's was created by Sarah Pavelko and her husband Billy Shuman in their kitchen in Detroit's North End. Pavelko needed a way to use all of the herbs growing in her garden and started experimenting with syrups and cocktails. After considering more traditional concepts like a bar or coffee shop, they decided the soda shop concept was more unique. Named after Voigt Brewing Co., once the largest brewery in Michigan before Prohibition, the name pays homage to Detroit's history and one of the original urban planner families that helped shape the city we know now.

Co-owner Billy Shuman making a soda. 

Voigt's does not have a location but they are considering their home neighborhood of the North End, where they have lived for the last 10 years and where they hope to partner with neighborhood nonprofits to offer job training for local youth. With the money from Hatch, they would be able to purchase a liquor license and operate as a full cocktail bar. [NOTE: as they did not win the Hatch competition, this is no longer part of their business plan.] Otherwise Voigt's will open as a breakfast and lunch spot serving homemade sodas. Long-term they are looking to produce Voigt's own sodas and offer delivery of "adult care packages" filled with all the fixings for specialty cocktails (in lieu of flowers or fruit baskets for special occasions).

[Model D] Detroit Institute of Bagels now open in Corktown

After a long (yet worthwhile) wait, Detroit Institute of Bagels is finally open in Corktown, putting an end to Detroit's days as a bagel desert and bringing with it some much-needed breakfast bagel sandwiches, bagels and lox, and free Wi-Fi in a beautifully designed historic building on Michigan Avenue.

Read more. 

[EID Preview] A Boy and His Bagel Shop: Detroit Institute of Bagels

All photos by Nicole Rupersburg.

It's two days before Detroit Institute of Bagels officially opens to the public. Owner and chief bagel-maker Ben Newman looks tired. Scratch that: he's straight-up exhausted, wearing the expression of a man who has spent countless hours and sleepless days working on getting his business ready to open and now is finally ready to do it. It's a face I've seen before.

Ben has spent nearly three years and $500,000 to make his bagel dream into a bagel reality, and on Thanksgiving Day, Detroit Institute of Bagels will welcome its first official customers. Why Thanksgiving Day? Because there's plenty going on around downtown, like the Thanksgiving Day Parade – that's over a quarter of a million people right there. There's also the Lions game. But more than anything, after nearly three years of planning, nearly two years after acquiring the building at 1236 Michigan Avenue, and nearly a year since full-on construction started (they were delayed while waiting on Rehabilitation Tax Credits), Ben just needs to get the shop open. It's a story I've heard before.

It's been about two and a half years since Ben and I first sat down inside his Corktown flat and chatted about Detroit's emerging food start-up scene. Back then, Ben was a starry-eyed bagel maker, figuring things out as he went along but excited about the prospect of bringing fresh homemade bagels to Detroit's bagel desert. But it wasn't just that – bagels are and always were a means to and end, never the end in themselves. Ben is an urban planner by trade; his goal was always to take a vacant property and make it an active space, a place that would employ people in a city where jobs are still desperately needed. "Once there was traction behind bagels I knew they could be a vehicle to do those things I was passionate about," Ben says. "Now my thing is for [my employees] to be successful, and the bagels are their avenue to be successful."

In the time since Ben and I first talked, Detroit Institute of Bagels has gained a tremendous local following. Their clever branding endeared them to Detroiters, with wink-wink jokes of Detroit as a "bagel desert" and artwork that played up their name as an homage to the Detroit Institute of Arts (which Senator Carl Levin also winked at yesterday). They successfully funded a $10,000 Kickstarter campaign. They were a semifinalist in the first-ever Hatch Detroit competition, and lost as gracefully as anyone could possibly lose. Now, as of yesterday, DIB was officially announced as a recipient of a $50,000 grant from the Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy – a grant 18 months in the making, and a sort of coming full circle from their early days as a Hatch semifinalist. It seems that everyone in Detroit is rooting for their success.

But timing is everything. A lot has changed in these last two and a half years. Detroit has changed, and dramatically so. Which isn't to say that every new business that opens isn't still greeted with a whole lot of fanfare – they still are – but the time will inevitably come that every new restaurant that opens in the city of Detroit isn't treated as the second coming of Slows. It's not a bad thing; when we eventually get to a point where there are so many people and so much activity that the singular hive-minded enthusiasm for each and every new place peters out and a new business opening is just business as usual, well, Detroit will really feel like a REAL city, Geppetto. That being said, Ben is relieved he started this when he did. "Everything happened at a fortunate time," he says. "I'm glad we started this project two years ago because so much has changed since then. It just happened at the right time to get the support we needed."

Now the Michigan Avenue commercial stretch in Corktown has not only the Slows/Sugar House/Astro Coffee corner, but there's a whole lot more going on – Two James Spirits (another Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy grant recipient), Brooklyn Street Local, MotorCity Wine, Ottava Via, Bucharest Grill, Rubbed, and Batch Brewery have all opened recently or are opening soon. If Ben tried to buy this vacant building now, the asking price might have been a lot higher, perhaps prohibitively so.

But things have worked out for Ben and DIB so far, and just getting to the point of opening is a pretty big deal. The historic building, which sat vacant for about 40 years prior to Ben purchasing it, was completely gutted. Original brick walls, archways, and wooden ceiling beams were exposed and preserved, now a design highlight of this, the "best-designed bagel shop in the world" (a comment Ben once made in jest and then sort of became a thing). Windows were knocked out to let in natural light. A second building was added for bagel production. Wood that once covered the ceiling was repurposed for the interior. The floors were re-done with reclaimed wood from an old gymnasium. Bars and tables were made with reclaimed wood from old bleachers. Industrial restaurant equipment was reclaimed from restaurant supply stores throughout the city, which stock used equipment from restaurants that have gone out of business or upgraded their equipment. The entire space is a testament to sustainability and reclaimed urban environments, truly the very heart of Ben's personal ethos and a shining reflection of Detroit's culture of revival, of reclaiming what is old and forgotten and making something new and thoughtful out of it. Out of the ashes, and all of that.

There is also a pocket park out front, with windows that look into the kitchen at specific points in the bagel-making process. Again, from an urban planning perspective, the park was an important addition for Ben. "Taking the context of Campus Martius downtown and Roosevelt Park across from Slows, both less than a mile away [in opposite directions], there aren't really any good points in between where a pedestrian can relax," says Ben. "A three-quarter-mile walk elsewhere, no one would think twice about that, but here [you have to walk over a freeway]." He plans on programming the space in the warmer months with movie nights and other activities.

As a brand-new business owner, Ben is still figuring things out as he goes along. As any home brewer-turned-professional brewer will tell you, transitioning from home equipment to high-volume commercial equipment isn't as easy as doubling the recipe. Things like payroll, insurance, point of sales and credit cards, inventory expenses, finding distributors for every food item, and dozens of other details are all part of business pre-planning – things you don't necessarily consider when first starting out as a start-up – and more things pop up every day. Now Ben has people – about 25 altogether – depending on him for a paycheck; another of his urban investment goals that he can now make good on. After the New Year, Ben plans on making bagels for wholesale, which will undoubtedly be a huge boon for his business. But for now, Ben just needs to get open – and a good night's sleep, but that's probably a few weeks off still.

Detroit Institute of Bagels will be open 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day and 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day thereafter, seven days a week. They'll have seven standard daily bagel flavors as well as rotating "small batch" bagel flavors and over a dozen house-made cream cheeses and spreads. They have a full menu of breakfast and lunch bagel sandwiches – including a lox sandwich – and soup made fresh daily. There's free WiFi available with purchase for those who want to grab a bagel and coffee and hunker down to get some work done. The window behind the main counter is an operable service window that can potentially be used for late-night service and special events in the future. And Detroit's days as a bagel desert are finally over.

Want to see more? View the Flickr set here.

[NEWS BITES] Detroit Institute of Bagels opens this Thursday! (YES, Thanksgiving Day!)

We have waited. Oh, how we have waited. We have waited ever so patiently. We have waited since the building at 1236 Michigan Avenue looked like this:

And have watched it slowly but surely transform to this:

And now, after all that waiting, the time has come: Detroit, LET THERE BE BAGELS!

What are your plans this Thanksgiving Day? Are you going to head over to Woodward and watch the newly extended and expanded America's Thanksgiving Day Parade? Are you going to head over to Ford Field for the Lions game? Well, here is yet another reason to give thanks this Thursday: now you can start your day with a some hot toasted bagel action thanks to Detroit Institute of Bagels, which will be officially opening their doors to the public on Thanksgiving Day!

We have watched this for nearly three years now ("we" including both you, dear readers, and the royal we, as in EID personally) as DIB has evolved from just another spirited startup in a home kitchen in Corktown to a full-fledged bagel bakery and cafe located right on Corktown's main business drag on the fast-growing eastern end where Brooklyn Street Local opened last year, MotorCity Wine opened earlier this year, Rubbed will open soon, as well as a second Bucharest Grill location. We have watched them compete in the first-ever Hatch Detroit contest, and lose more gracefully than anyone has ever lost. We watched them raise a modest $10,000 via crowdfunding and move forward with their plans to open the best-designed bagel shop in the world. We have eagerly watched their progress on TwitGramstaBook, and now, after all that time - and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears out of owner Ben Newman, no doubt, while we've all just been all like, "WHY AREN'T YOU OPEN YET ALREADY NOW OPEN OPEN OPEN" - Detroit shall be a bagel desert no more!

That needs more exclamation points.

Detroit shall be a bagel desert no more!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Reading back on my first interview with owner and bagel maker Ben is almost like traveling back in time. It was spring 2011 - in those moments just as Detroit: The Renaissance was really starting to hit - and my, things were very, very different then, even just a short two and a half years ago. I mean, I wrote, "Not only are the greater downtown districts of Detroit sorely lacking in decent coffee shops…" AND IT WAS TRUE! It was so, so true back then. Now you can't swing a hipster without hitting a cafe of high design and varying levels of coffee quality. The whole idea of the local artisan food producer was still so new (so new!), and pop-ups were barely a glimmer in anyone's eye (except for Hugh's). 

A lot of people open restaurants. (And bakeries and cafes and whatnot.) Not a lot of people fight this hard for this long to make it happen. Ben's bagel dreams are finally becoming reality, and Detroit will never be bagel-less again. AS GOD IS HIS WITNESS, WE'LL NEVER BE HUNGRY FOR BAGELS AGAIN! 

[Model D] Coffee and (___) goes from pop-up to permanent in Jefferson Chalmers

We sure do love our pop-ups in Detroit. And beyond just the novelty of having an experience in a space that you wouldn't otherwise be able to have (a Guns + Butter dinner at Shinola perhaps, or an independent toy store on Woodward just in time for the holidays), pop-ups serve an important purpose: they vet new businesses for long-term sustainability, allow aspiring entrepreneurs to test out different neighborhoods, and activate spaces that would otherwise remain vacant. And sometimes – more and more often now – they lead to permanent businesses opening.

Read more. 

[Fox News] The return of café culture and the retaliation against coffee squatters

LAMILL Coffee Boutique, Los Angeles. 

This is the original version of a story that ran in Fox News with the much more dramatic headline, "Cafes declare war on Wi-Fi squatters." You can read the published version here. 

In the '90s (remember them? weren't they nice?), it was not uncommon to see hordes of teenagers and college students at your local Friends-style second-wave coffeehouse chain-smoking cigarettes and sucking down $1 cups of coffee. They would spend hours on end doing this, every single day. And they weren't sitting in silence staring mindlessly at their iPhones uploading "selfies" (now in the Oxford Dictionary!) on Instagram. They talked. To each other. As in, engaged in meaningful dialogue with other humans.

But a lot has changed in the last two decades. Now, we're all wired. Endlessly wired. Phillip K. Dick post-apocalyptic-cyberpunk-novel wired. We have our laptops and our smartphones and our iPads and we are on them ALL THE TIME checking Facebook and Twitter and Instagram or on Snapchat or playing Candy Crush. (Some people even do work.) Bars and restaurants are regularly filled with people blatantly ignoring each other, so much so that "phone-stacking" is a thing that now exists.

And cafes, the standard-bearers of quality social interaction amongst strangers and thinkers and activists and eager young adults since 14^th century Turkey, are now full of "coffee squatters" – those who set up shop with their laptops and spend interminable hours gobbling up the café's bandwidth and available seating, making it so that other customers can't find a place to sit and negatively impacting the shop's business, all so they can do important things like update their Facebook status and download new albums from iTunes.

It wasn't always like this. Cafés offering free Wi-Fi did so with the best of intentions, trying to provide their customers with an additional value in the hopes of bringing more business. It started innocently enough – college students researching essays; business people checking emails (bear in mind, smartphones with email access are still a relatively new thing on the timeline of human existence). But the service is now being broadly abused, and café owners are fighting back.

In San Francisco, Luigi Di Ruocco, owner of Coffee Bar, recently made headlines after restricting access to laptop users during peak times and creating "laptop-free" seating so customers simply trying to have lunch will have somewhere to sit. Fellow café owners all over the country have chosen to place time limits on Wi-Fi use, require an access code to the wireless network (available only with purchase), cover their electrical outlets, or eliminate Wi-Fi altogether. Ben Popken of NBC News writes, "While the measures may seem a bit gruff for coffee shops that have long promoted themselves as a friendly and counter-cultural alternative to the mainstream coffee joints, they're an economic necessity. Coffee shops rely on a high volume of low-price items. Stores can't afford to provide temporary real estate to people looking for a remote office for which they only pay $1.85 in daily rent."

Forbes also warns of the financial threat of squatting. "A coffee shop will never make enough money to pay the bills from coffee sales alone," says Peter Baskerville in answer to the question, "What's the secret to a successful coffee shop?" He instructs café owners to worry less about offering things like Wi-Fi and more about increasing turnover and takeaways. "Takeaway customers pay the same price as the sit-down customer, but without any of the occupancy costs, and you will serve ten of them by the time your sit down customer has finished sipping on their first cup of coffee as they enjoy a chat with their friends on Facebook using your free Wi-Fi."

Jane Shihadeh previously owned Shoe's Cup and Cork in Leesburg, Virginia, a café by day and full fine dining restaurant and wine bar by night. "It's difficult to generate profit from coffee sales alone," she says. "Ultimately it's more about your average check in general. You really need people coming in to eat." She wanted to balance the restaurant with a relaxed coffeehouse vibe, and offered free Wi-Fi to encourage that. "What we found was that there were lots of people that would come in – if you were lucky they would maybe order a large coffee but sometimes they would just demand water – and would sit there for hours." She found that these customers were also the most demanding, and some would even use her café to solicit business from her other customers, engaging them in conversation about their web design needs. Eventually she sold the café (it is now operating under new ownership) and opened a much more straightforward Wi-Fi-free sandwich shop, Philly Rabe's.

In the hipsterific Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake, LAMILL Coffee Boutique, referred to by USA Today as "the white-tablecloth restaurant of coffee shops," has a two-hour time limit on their wireless access because, as manager Dave Alfaro states, "It frees up space. We don't want people sitting there all day long while we have people who want to come in, get a coffee and eat their food." The Boutique also serves a thoughtful selection of wine, beer, and sake, as well as a full breakfast, lunch and dinner menu. Coffee squatters aren't just taking up space and bandwidth (Alfaro has noticed many use the café's free Wi-Fi for large file downloads) from other would-be squatters looking to do the same, but are actually turning away other customers who have nowhere to sit. At Abraco in New York, which also serves a selection of house-made small plates and baked goods, it's standing-room-only – ensuring squatting isn't an issue.

Coffee shops that don't serve food or have only a limited menu of pastries available, like Verve in Santa Cruz, seem to fare better than those that are also restaurants. Ashley Epia, shift lead at the 41^st Avenue location, says the Wi-Fi network is password-protected but the password is given out freely and there is no time limit for usage. The café has a small selection of pastries and does not offer table service. She says that "squatting" isn't really a problem and that people cycle out pretty well. But Verve is also a roaster with a strong wholesale business to support its cafés. Additionally, cafés like this that rely almost predominantly on coffee sales tend to be significantly smaller, thus offering significantly less seating – perhaps making the squatter a bit more self-conscious about taking up one of only a handful of seats.

But the hostility towards "squatters" isn't just about people taking up seats – though the lost revenue for businesses that rely on dine-in food sales is definitely a primary concern. For many it's also about the atmosphere they wish to create. New York's Café Grumpy doesn't offer Wi-Fi or allow laptops in four of their five locations. "For us, yes, it's a space issue, but it's also about the atmosphere it creates," says Café Grumpy owner Caroline Bell. Though the cafés only serve their own house-made pastries and don't face the same challenges as full sit-down restaurants, Bell wanted to create an atmosphere that was "more inviting," allowing for actual conversation to occur rather than the pitter-patter of laptop typing being the dominant sound. "It's less about turnover and more about the experience. People appreciate it." 

Walking into a café and seeing table after table of laptop zombies, faces bathed in blue from the glow of their screens, is a much different experience than walking into a café buzzing with excited conversation, whether it be about politics or the latest episode of Breaking Bad. In recent decades coffeehouses have evolved as much as technology. The ubiquity of smartphones has made the original intent of free Wi-Fi (as an additional service for customers to use sparingly as needed) obsolete, and third-wave coffeehouses are increasingly mindful of encouraging a sense of community – that centuries-old café culture in which cafés served as primary community gathering places.

While you could easily make a case that the squatters of decades past – the Beat writers of 1950s San Francisco, the postmodern philosophers of 1960s Paris, the goth and grunge kids of 1990s America – probably weren't producing high ticket averages, they were producing the kind of human interaction missing from the modern laptop mafia (and let's not get started on "co-working," i.e., ignoring each other in groups while taking up multiple seats). In an age of endless connectivity, sometimes people just want to feel connected; the retaliation against coffee squatting is just one manifestation of a growing social movement.

[Model D] Coffee, gelato and sweet shop Melt next up in Midtown

Of the many (and there are indeed many) new restaurants and retailers opening in Midtown this year, it appears that Melt is going to be the next one to open.

Melt is a coffee, gelato, and sweet shop located at 4150 Cass (at Willis). Owner Aaron Haithcock has wanted to open a candy shop since he was a kid, but decided to diversify his concept to include coffee and gelato to support a steadier clientele base, a model he saw work while employed at a candy store in Chicago that also sold cakes and ice cream.

Read more.

[Model D] Rubbed European-style sandwich shop to open in Corktown later this year

Corktown will soon have a new sandwich shop, but don't expect it to be anything like Mudgie's Deli. 

Partners Jason Frenkel and Abbey Markell have worked in the restaurant industry together for the past 10 years and have been planning their own concept for the past four. Frenkel spent a few years traveling for work, then decided to move back from San Francisco this past February to work on Rubbed restaurant and deli with Markell.

Read more.

[Model D] Woodward Gardens Block Development on track to be completed by end of 2013

Construction on phases III and IV of the Woodward Gardens project on the 3900 block of Woodward is humming along nicely. Eric Means, a representative of the Woodward Gardens Block Development, says that the project is on track to be completed by the end of the fourth quarter of this year.

The 32,505-square-foot Garden Theatre will be completed first, targeted to open by the end of the third quarter. The theatre will host live performances that "align with the Midtown energy;" more grassroots and indie performers "geared to attract the audience that makes up (the Midtown) demographic." The theatre will have a total occupancy of 1,300, with mostly standing room on the main floor and a VIP balcony for private functions. The front portion of the theatre will have a café.

Read more.

[Real Detroit] You Don't Know Shit from Shinola

Photo by Nicole Rupersburg.

The antiquated idiom "You don't know shit from Shinola" originated during WWII and referred to the American-made Shinola brand shoe polish (the implication being that a person is too stupid to know the difference between shoe polish and feces).

The original Shinola shoe polish is no longer made, but that doesn't mean the brand is dead. In 2012 the brand was resuscitated under new ownership. Tom Kartsotis, the formerly retired founder of Fossil (you know, that other watchmaker), established Shinola with the intention of bringing quality hand-crafted watch manufacturing back to America, and based it in Detroit – the heart of American manufacturing.

Read more.

[Model D] Coffee and (___) pops up for round two in Jefferson Chalmers

You might remember Coffee and (___) from its fall pop-up in West Village. Pastry Chef Angela Foster is back again with another pop-up, this time at June on Jefferson in the Jefferson-Chalmers commercial district through July 9.

Debuting last weekend during Jazzin' on Jefferson, Coffee and (___) was an immediate hit with the curious crowds. The impressive interior, featuring tables made of reclaimed wood and other salvaged and repurposed materials, was designed by volunteer architects from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Urban Priorities Committee in partnership with the Jefferson East Business Association (JEBA). (This place will give some permanent storefronts pop-up envy.)

Read more.

[EID Preview] The Cultural Living Room at the DIA

All photos by Nicole Rupersburg.

The newly-renovated Cultural Living Room inside the Kresge Court at the Detroit Institute of Arts opens to the public this morning at 10 a.m. Food media members were invited to a sneak peek of the new cafe concept and menu on Thursday, when we also got a first look at Patrick Thompson's stunning modern-meets-traditional design. This project was funded through a grant from ArtSpace.

For more detail about the concept and design, check out this story I wrote this week for Model D.

The space is meant to be a cultural hangout - a place to hold meetings, read a book, study, or do some work. All seats have access to an electrical outlet and there is free WiFi. There is also a cafe that serves a nice selection of sandwiches, salads, and small plates. Exquisitely-sourced seasonal items include micro greens and other beautiful produce from the Chef's Garden in Huron, OH (used by chefs all over the Midwest), organic hormone-free chicken, a variety of charcuterie and farmstead cheeses, and house-made desserts. There are also several vegetarian and vegan selections available. They will serve coffee and teas from Starbucks as well as a selection of local beer and wine and will have happy hour on Fridays. Food and beverage service is provided by Sodexo.

But, a picture is worth a thousand words so I will spare you further lengthy descriptions and instead give you this first look inside!

Assorted vegetables from the Chef's Garden.

'Wich Came First? Herb pulled chicken salad, free range egg, shredded kale, tomato, tarragon mayonnaise.

Artichoke, radish, black olive aioli, flatbread. Part of the Tasty Triptych selection.

Italian pudding - bittersweet chocolate and olive oil custard with caramelized pine nuts and sea salt.

For more photos of this stunning space, check out the Flickr set here.

[Model D] The DIA's Cultural Living Room in the Kresge Court opens June 14

Sneak preview.

After being closed the last two months, the Kresge Court inside the Detroit Institute of the Arts is about to reopen this Friday at 10 a.m. as the Cultural Living Room.

The Cultural Living Room is a concept that came about through Bradford Frost, a fellow in Wayne State University's Detroit Revitalization Fellows Program and special assistant for community and economic development at the DIA who wrote the ArtPlace grant that secured the $268,500 in funding for this project.

Read more.

[Model D] Always Brewing Detroit to open permanently in Grandmont Rosedale

When Amanda Brewington was a freshman at Michigan State University, she didn't know anyone else on campus. So she started hanging out at a local coffee shop that had an open mic on Thursdays. This coffeehouse was where she met most of her college friends, many of whom she is still close with.

This was the impetus behind her desire to open a coffeehouse in Detroit.

Read more.

[Model D] Anthology Coffee finds a permanent home at Ponyride

Anthology Coffee's new space (still under construction.)

2011 Hatch Detroit semi-finalist Anthology Coffee is continuing to build its brand and work on a permanent café in Corktown – happy news, as just a couple of months ago it seemed like they were going to cease all operations.

In 2012 Anthology signed a lease at 2051 Rosa Parks (an office building in Corktown). After some initial efforts were made towards build-out, progress stalled for months and Anthology owner Josh Longsdorf made the decision to leave. At the same time, Anthology also fell short on an Indiegogo campaign that was meant to purchase new equipment; Longsdorf had to use that money to pay off coffee contracts he had purchased in anticipation of being fully open at 2051 months early.

Read more.

[Model D] Whole Foods in Midtown gets ready to open, has distinctly Detroit flair

The new Whole Foods in Midtown – set to open on June 5 – is not just another grocery story. It's not even just another Whole Foods store.

Tremendous efforts were made to ensure that this Detroit store reflected the personality of the city itself. While the five other Michigan Whole Foods locations are relatively generic, this location aims to be deeply and distinctly Detroit. "We took the time and effort to really reflect Detroit," says Amanda Musilli, Whole Foods Market Community Liaison.

Read more.

[EID Preview] Stella Good Coffee and Good Design

All photos from Stella Good Coffee.

It could easily be said that the best-designed public spaces in Detroit right now are the new breed of coffeehouses that keep popping up. From the citrus-soaked modernism of Urban Bean Co. that looks like it could have been plucked straight out of the pages of Dwell (in fact, and this surely is no coincidence, issues of Dwell are displayed on a magazine rack – "displayed" really being the best word to describe it), to the west coast aesthetic of Astro Coffee (which looks like pretty much every uber-trendy coffeehouse in San Francisco, Santa Cruz and L.A. but with a distinctly Detroit flair) and the modern rustic design of Great Lakes Coffee Roasting Co. in Midtown, coffee houses are no longer the shabby chic student flopping grounds of the '90s but the aesthetically-appealing refuge of the design-obsessed MacBook set. As the coffee has gone from thoughtless drip to compulsively mindful pour-over, so too have the spaces been made over. Stella Good Coffee inside the Fisher Building is the latest example.

Stella Good Coffee, previously known as Stella International Café, closed last fall and is reopening today after going through a redesign that could easily qualify for a segment on Extreme Makeover: Coffeehouse Edition. Kevin Borsay and Shawn Santo, founders and owners of Pure Detroit, the Rowland Café, and both Stella Cafés (there is another location inside the Guardian Building), oversaw all of the work themselves, along with James Willer of Reclaim Detroit, which works with a number of local Detroit nonprofits to deconstruct old, abandoned homes and repurpose the materials for new projects – both a sort of philosophical and literal honoring of Detroit's past while looking forward to the future. (Willer also did some work at Great Lakes.)

This café has been open since 2007, at a time when Detroit's coffee scene was a bit … well, sad. ("Underserved" is a nicer way of saying it.) Certainly long before Detroit became the new Seattle. But in the last several years the coffee culture has been ramped up significantly, and to stay in the game, Stella had to step it up. Borsay explains that the old Stella "didn't have the look and feel we wanted," and that a redesign was always part of the plan. Finally, the time was right.

After a complete gut down to the bare walls and floor, the new Stella is about as completely different as it could possibly be while still retaining the same name (and even that is only partial). Gorgeous century-old wood comprises the completely rebuilt counter, tables and ledges. The floor is the original floor from 1928, buried under layers of concrete. "I saw a picture of that historic floor and wondered if it was still under there," says Borsay. He chopped through all the layers on top of it and "sure enough, it was there." Part of the renovation work included grinding down to the original floor and polishing it up, but the manual labor was worth it: "Albert Kahn had a hand in this floor."

Through Reclaim Detroit, Willer helped Borsay and Santo source materials and, since he is also an architect, worked with them on the new design and the construction. "Without him we couldn't have done it." The wood came from 2644 Cadillac Boulevard on Detroit's east side. The house was disassembled brick by brick and, instead of throwing it in a landfill, remilled it and sold it to Stella.

Willer explains that the wood from these historic old Detroit homes came from native Michigan forests. Michigan now only has about 5% of its original native forests left, which is all protected land. The only place you can get this original native lumber is from these old houses. Additionally, at the time these homes were built – the early 1900s – they used mostly old growth timber that was already 50+ years old. So the wood you see inside the new Stella Good Coffee is at least 150 years old. This Douglas fir is a completely different material than what you could buy commercially, almost an exotic species that is available for a relatively low cost locally (through businesses like Reclaim Detroit, who had to establish their own mill and train people to work it because no other mills could work with these old materials).

Borsay says, "This is a good balance of maintaining the look of the building while also bringing a more modern look. This is beyond just an amenity to the building and a place to get coffee, but about a larger mission: creating vibrant, active Place 3 locations in the city." "Place 3" refers to the places where people socialize, with Place 1 being home, Place 2 being work, and Place 3 being everything else. "For us it's these really cool café environments where people meet and socialize. The more you have in the city, the more vibrant it becomes. That's our mission: to create these sorts of environments to make the city more vibrant. Rowland Café was our first foray into that."

The historic wood and floor are complemented by design elements that include custom-fabricated lampshades from Detroit Wallpaper Company featuring designs by local artists that will rotate regularly. "Instead of having art on the walls, we will have this shades done by different local artists." The happy yellow cloud design currently on display was done by local painter and musician Davin Brainard, an artist whose most recognizable work is probably the "Cloud Bridge" overpass in SW Detroit (though you've undoubtedly also seen his concert posters). The neon "Drink Good Coffee" sign on the back tile wall was fabricated by Spectrum Neon Sign Company, a Detroit business that has been around for over 30 years. "We're trying to use as many Detroit companies as we can," Borsay says.

And that includes the items that they'll serve. They'll have a selection of soups from Russell Street Deli, baked good from Avalon Breads and Traffic Jam, plus a selection of high-quality juices and yogurts in the cooler. This year, to celebrate their seventh year, they are introducing a celebratory espresso called Stella Sonic, as well as some new craft micro lot, micro-roasted coffees which will rotate seasonally.

The new space also has more seating inside (with lots of additional seating in the Fisher lobby) and also offers free WiFi. But a new look also means a whole new identity: Stella International Café, so named because when they first opened they served all illy coffee from Italy and Panini sandwiches and had more of an "international" flavor, is now Stella Good Coffee. Over the years they have migrated more towards local producers and now serve their own coffees (roasted by Detroit's century-old Cadillac Coffee Company, with some additional micro blends from Populace Coffee in Bay City). They want this new iteration to be less grab-and-go and more about the coffee itself, reflected in the new name – and so they will serve only pour-over coffee made to order, certainly a much slower process but one much more in keeping with their own philosophies of slow food and slow design (which they joked about being the process by which the new design happened, only to find out it is an actual thing).

"In my architecture background, everything has to be about speed and is pre-planned," Willer says. "Compared to this where it was more an exploration of both our personalities and engaging local artists in the community. It was a slow evolution of the design." Borsay adds, "It took us awhile because we were building it all ourselves … [but with slow design] the quality at the end is actually better. It was almost like clay art; we were molding it as we [went] along."

Another new "slow" product they are excited to offer is their loose-leaf teas sourced directly from China.

But a new name also means a new logo, and this is something the math nerds, not just the design nerds, will enjoy: the new logo incorporates the Moravian star, also known as the Great Stellated (get it?) Rhombicuboctahedron (a complicated geometric form that is meant to represent a three-dimensional image and thus is asymmetrical when drawn flat).

The Stella location inside the Guardian Building will also undergo a similar renovation and rebranding in the coming months, though they won't be closing it as they did the Fisher Building location.

Stella Good Café is celebrating a soft opening starting today, with a grand opening coming later this spring when their lobby chairs arrive.

[Model D] Shinola to open flagship retail store in Midtown this June

The excitement surrounding the Detroit-based manufacturer of watches, bicycles and leather goods Shinola is palpable, and already the brand is getting buzz from national news and entertainment media outlets – not bad for a retailer whose products only just went online last month and hasn't yet opened a storefront.

Well, that will soon change. The Detroit store, located in Midtown on the ground level of Willy's Overland Lofts, will open this June. This will be the flagship store, and one of only two in the country (with the other in TriBeCa). The Midtown space is 5,000 square feet, with half dedicated to the company's bicycle assembly. Guests will be able to watch the bikes being assembled without walls or glass barriers. The rest of the space is designed as a retail store and community "hang out" – "A place not just to shop but more of a community hub," says Daniel Caudill, Creative Director of Shinola.

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[Model D] Urban Bean Co. set to re-open in Capitol Park next week

Detroiters will have another spot to grab a coffee and snack this week. Urban Bean Co. will open next Monday, April 15 at the corner of Griswold and Grand River.

For those of you who remember the old Urban Bean Co. that was located at the corner of Griswold and Grand River up until 2008, yes, this is the same one, and in the same location. With the redevelopment of Capitol Park now underway, its re-opening is also a comeback story. Co-owner Josh Greenwood has had the space since 2000 and operated the first incarnation of Urban Bean Co. for eight years.

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