“Both my mom and I love the food business, but it’s just very physical and just requires a lot of time and energy,” says Ann Arbor native Jenny Song. “So coming out of the pandemic, I would say that both of us were pretty burnt out.”
After running their Songbird Café for eleven years in the Plymouth Road Mall (and an outpost on Jackson Ave. from 2015 to 2021), they sold it last year, while continuing to use its kitchen for their wholesale bakery operation.
Song and her mother, Youn, have now re-emerged in retail with Two Songs Bakery & Mart. The South Industrial storefront, next to the Skymint dispensary, is the new home base for their increasingly gluten-free and vegan pastry, dessert, and confectionary preparations, while adding heartier premade offerings and shelves of primarily Korean packaged snacks and groceries.
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A Second Songbird Cafe Opens
More streamlined than the café, with counter service and seating for about a dozen, Two Songs is using such vendors as Raterman Bread from Dexter and Barry’s Bagels for a slate of breakfast and lunch sandwiches to accompany salads and side dishes that, whether hot or cold, make for convenient grab-and-go meals.
“I’m really excited, because it’s such a central location in Ann Arbor, but there’s not that much around here, which is interesting,” Song observes. “There’s a ton of residential areas” that seem underserved. “And this mall, I think, has really been revived in the past few years.”
Two Songs Bakery & Mart, 1958 South Industrial, ste. C. (734) 773–3120. Tues.–Sat. 8 a.m.–4 p.m. Closed Sun. & Mon
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