Apparently the market is still not saturated when it comes to coffee. If there were a parlor game called “You Know You’re in Ann Arbor When …,” you could now finish the sentence: “… the coffee shop in the police station carries locally roasted espresso drinks and no doughnuts.”
The Tasty Green Cafe, which opened at the end of February in the Larcom Municipal Center (aka City Hall), sells no doughnuts, but instead sells Danishes, made fresh every day at Ann Arbor’s Mediterranean Market, as well as an array of its savory pastries like spinach and chicken pies; brownies from local wholesale bakery Tasty Footprints; coffee and coffee drinks from locally roasted beans (Coffee Express); some simple salads and wraps; and a wide variety of packaged convenience store-type treats: pretzels, gum, candy bars, bottled soft drinks, and juices. A large basket of 5-hour Energy drinks suggests that city employees need caffeine in the same pharmaceutical doses as students and truck drivers.
Tasty Green Cafe’s large and cheerfully painted picture window, which fronts on Huron (right behind the water sculpture on the plaza), is tantalizingly visible from cars driving down Huron, but the traffic doesn’t encourage quick stops. Owner Goitom Berhe (“most people call me G”) confirms that business so far is mostly from city employees. “We get a lot of lawyers too,” he says, pointing to the Justice Center next door. For now, his hours pretty much mirror the building’s hours, but he says he’ll be putting tables and chairs out on the plaza this spring, and if he attracts enough customers, he may add weekend or evening hours.
Berhe is not new to the Ann Arbor coffee scene. He owned the Primo Coffee that opened exactly two blocks south, in the space now occupied by AnnArbor.com. Berhe sold it to a partner, and it closed in 2009, but he still owns the Primo Coffee on Whittaker Road in Ypsi.
Tasty Green Cafe, 301 N. Huron, 657-4426. Mon.-Fri. 7:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Closed Sat. & Sun.
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While Tasty Green’s mission is to refuel and recaffeinate civil servants quickly and efficiently, a few blocks away, the espresso bar is offering coffee with fewer frills and some attitude. Owners Sanford Bledsoe and Anna Foster call theirs a “pop-up” coffeehouse, though not in the sense that it opens at unpredictable times, and certainly not in the sense that it’s in any way illegal. In fact, the building in Braun Court, which used to be a restaurant called Fuji, is blessed with some infrastructure many coffeehouse owners would kill for: a commercial kitchen. Bledsoe and Foster re-licensed it, and Foster uses it to make whatever treats she feels like. “She makes all kinds of different stuff,” Bledsoe says. “We have scones today. Yesterday we had biscuits. Sometimes on the weekends she makes French toast.”
Twenty-three-year-old Foster says she has no training, though that isn’t strictly true: “I studied at Washtenaw for a few weeks before deciding I was bored of it, then I worked at Zingerman’s Bakehouse for a couple of months.”
The espresso bar came about because their friend Ted Kennedy, who co-owns the similarly unadvertised Bar at 327 Braun Court, upstairs, was only occasionally using the downstairs for screenings of his experimental films. Bledsoe and Foster asked if they could put it to use as a cafe. Decorated with their own furniture (some wooden tables and what looks like the ratty corner booth from an old diner), the venture is, according to Bledsoe, “low risk and possibly short term”–a stopgap while he and Foster figure out whether they want to go into business in a more serious and permanent way.
the espresso bar, 327 Braun Ct., no phone. Tues.-Sun. 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Closed Mon.
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Though it’s not exactly a new business, over on Packard east of Stadium a couple of sandwich boards propped outside Morgan & York advertise what appears to be a place called “My Secret Coffee” somewhere in the little block of businesses that also houses Cake Nouveau and Morty’s Secret Garden.
A closer look at the calligraphy shows that the signs actually read M & Y Secret Coffee, the M & Y standing for Morgan & York.
Co-owner Simone Jenkins says the signs are meant to trick the eye into seeing “My Secret Coffee,” and what they advertise is Morgan & York’s foray into the early morning hours. Owners Matt Morgan (Jenkins’s husband) and Tommy York “are early risers anyway. And I’ve never seen Matt go for more than a few hours without an espresso,” so it was a no-brainer to open up the store to people on their way to work.
In February, they began opening (the back door only, hence the “secret”) at 7:30 a.m. Monday through Saturday. Coffee and pastries have been available for some time at M & Y, but they upgraded the espresso machine and positioned some of carpenter Joe Parker’s handmade tables and chairs in the back of the store, making it clear that you’re now welcome to enjoy your Cafe Japon croissant or your Elaine’s bagel and your cappuccino on-site. Jenkins says they’re looking into offering a savory breakfast too; they’re working to carefully gerrymander the menu around the health code to avoid having to put in a commercial kitchen.
If you haven’t been to M & Y for a while, you might not know that it also has an extensive lunch menu of sandwiches and soups, and space up front to sit and eat.
M & Y Secret Coffee, 1928 Packard, 662-0798. Mon.-Sat. 7:30 a.m.-9 p.m., Sun. noon-6 p.m. morganandyork.com