Helen Harding and Blake Reetz opened Eat Catering and Carryout in the former Marcano’s space on Packard in mid-November. Harding, twenty-six, and Reetz, thirty, met as teenagers working at the Jefferson Market on Jefferson. Harding continued to work there part time while she earned a degree in American Culture at the U-M, and Reetz stayed full time until it closed in 2007.

Pastry chef Mary Rasmussen revived what’s now the Jefferson Market & Cakery the following year, but by then, Harding had moved on to Zingerman’s, and Reetz, originally from West Branch, Michigan, had moved to Asheville, North Carolina. “I was just looking for a change of pace,” he says. He stayed a year and a half, working in restaurants and studying cookbooks, before moving back to Ann Arbor in 2008 because he missed his friends, not the least of whom was Harding. He says he also remembered a dream they’d shared: to open a catering business together. “So I moved back, contacted her, and said, ‘Let’s do it.'”

They started out renting a commercial kitchen near the Ann Arbor Airport from Stacy Williams, who used it for her home delivery meal service, What’s Cooking, from Sunday afternoon through Wednesday afternoon. “We were able to cater out of there from Wednesday evenings through Sunday mornings,” Harding says–ideal timing, since “ninety percent of catering happens on weekends.” In September 2010, they started cooking retail out of a cart at the Farmers Market; last spring, they moved over to Mark’s Carts.

By then, “we were outgrowing our What’s Cooking situation,” Harding says–when Williams needed her kitchen, they had to shift their operation to Mark Hodesh’s commercial kitchen on Liberty. So in August they started looking for a place of their own, and when they found the Marcano’s space, they jumped at it.

Most business is carryout, but there’s a four-top table and three stools at the counter. Menus include dinners like braised beef brisket and coq au vin (both $16), as well as sandwiches like the “green B.L.T,” made of house-cured green (unsmoked) bacon, pickled green tomato, lettuce, and house-made mayonnaise on grilled farm bread ($7.25).

“All summer long we were running back and forth between our two kitchens, and we were literally spread out all over town,” Harding says. “It’s really nice to be in one place where we have all our stuff and not be really spread thin.”

Eat Catering and Carryout, 1906 Packard, 213-7011. Tues-Sat. 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Closed Sun. & Mon. eatannarbor.com