It took a gut remodel of a windowless former HVAC shop to bring Espy Cafe to life, but for Peter Littlejohn, labor is at the heart of the newly launched third space near West Park.
Espy started as a subscription-based coffee roastery in 2019 and recently opened a café on W. Huron. Owner Peter Littlejohn, pictured above with his wife, Julia Knowles, says the operating principle of the business is democratic centralism. | Photo: J. Adrian Wylie
“It’s work that gives things meaning and purpose, and it’s also work that gives things value,” he says, crediting “a big team of friends who put this whole place together” by contributing time, talent, and treasure.
Generous sunlight from a wide southern exposure now permeates the standalone space at the rear of an eclectic commercial complex off W. Huron. It’s also infused with an egalitarian ethos and the fruits of relationships with suppliers, from local farmers to small-scale coffee producers in the Global South.
Littlejohn and his wife, psychotherapist and cellist Julia Knowles, celebrated their marriage on-site in 2024, well before architect Sahba La’al’s draft came to fruition, Jim Pudar’s carpentry furnished the space, Melissa Pudar designed the merch, and Anna Schwartz’s Ypsi Clay House handmade pottery topped the tables.
The couple met as music students at U-M, where lessons from a course on the creative process continue to inspire. “I think there’s an intentionality at every level,” Knowles says. “You just hope that people feel what we’ve been putting into the space. And the proof of concept is there. It’s been just stunning to open the first day and be busy ever since.”
Filling more than a few of the café’s forty-five seats are friends from the Regenerate! Orchestra, a community ensemble spanning all skill levels. Littlejohn cooked their monthly dinners for a few years. “A lot of those people were volunteering here and donated money, and are coming in now as customers,” he says.
Related: Regenerate! Orchestra (Nov. 2022)
Espy started as a subscription-based coffee roastery in 2019, its name formed by the sound of its founders’ first initials, Littlejohn and Detroit-based Sam Schaefer. Littlejohn jokingly offers “socialist project” as an alternative, but it ties into the word’s dictionary definition: to catch sight of.
“I talk about catching a glimpse of a better world,” says the longtime barista and aspiring baker. “And I want that to be what Espy Cafe is, which is a pretty lofty goal for a café to have.”
A $240,000 Small Business Administration loan necessitated his LLC ownership structure, but the operating principle is democratic centralism. At the outset, “because we have such a small staff—it’s only three people—we’ve agreed to basically make unanimous decisions on operating hours, menu, hiring, that kind of thing,” he says.
Everyone, including him, earns the same base wage, $27.50 per hour. Tenure will be rewarded by allotting net profits according to workers’ cumulative share of hours worked, what he calls a “sweatquity” percentage.
The living wage model means higher menu prices, tempered by a no-tips policy. “Even as a customer, we’re sort of tip fatigued,” he says. “So if everybody pays the fair share, then you don’t feel pressured to tip $3 on a $3 coffee. And my experience, having worked these jobs, it’s my friends who work in other cafés and bartenders who are tipping the highest percentages.”
Littlejohn lauds his former employer, the highly rated Comet Coffee in Nickels Arcade, while also noting that hospitality workers generally top out of the pay scale after only a few years, a challenge to career continuity. “I want to see what a space looks like when people aren’t pushed out economically,” he says. “Right now, I think this is a good café. I can’t imagine what this café will look like in five or six or seven years, if we have a five- or six- or seven-year-old staff. That could be really special.”
They’re ramping up the hours and offerings deliberately with an eye to the long term. Relying on all local produce makes for menu variation, centering around soups, breakfast and lunch sandwiches, sourdough pancakes, and pastries. Whole grain stone-milled wheat and A2 all-fat pasteurized milk come from regional producers, and they make oat milk in house.
There’s still work to do outside by both the café and the landlord, but seasonal outdoor seating is planned out back, near the train tracks, canopied by trees, and sufficiently far from road noise. Littlejohn says the landlord was eager for a long-term anchor tenant for the complex—which includes Theatre Nova, Common Cycle, and others—so their extensive building rehab efforts earned them a rental rate of just $20 per square foot per year, “which is about as cheap as it gets in Ann Arbor!”
Espy Cafe, 404 W. Huron. (734) 328–2960. Thurs.–Mon. 8 a.m.–3 p.m. Closed Tues. & Wed. espy.cafe
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