Engineer-turned-baker Rachel Liu Martindale has found no prefabricated recipe for turning her passion into career success. A key ingredient is emerging, though, in the form of Q Bakehouse & Market, the new home base and retail showcase for her Asian-inspired culinary creations.
Career changer Rachel Liu Martindale was excited to find a spot at the Dexter/Jackson/Huron fork. | Photo: J. Adrian Wylie
As the calendar flips into February, the thirty-year-old U-M alum is soft-opening in the small westside plaza at the Huron/Jackson/Dexter split, offering sweet and savory pastries, a coffee bar, and a selection of frozen and shelf-stable elements for at-home meals.
She’s excited about the location not only for its large basement kitchen and “really cute” ground-floor space with its wooden ceiling, but also for the amenity it provides midway between downtown and the West Stadium/Maple shopping district.
“The pull of this spot is that it’s in the middle of all these neighborhoods, which are lovely,” she says. “There’s thousands of homes in just this small vicinity. There’s nothing really like this in terms of a little coffee/bakery place in this spot.” (It was most recently a storefront for Sunburst Blooms, Sophia Antoinette’s sustainable floral design studio and micro–flower farm, which switched back to exclusively online retail and pop-ups.)
Born and raised in Troy to parents—one Taiwanese and one Chinese—who met in the U.S., Liu Martindale got an engineering degree, only to realize at her first job out of college that she didn’t enjoy the work. She took on a barista gig and rekindled a college interest in baking and food blogging. Soon friends were “randomly” asking her to bake cakes for special events.
She and her husband Jonathan were also inspired to minister to homeless members of the community at Liberty Plaza. For nearly a year, they spent Sunday mornings serving eggs made to order, buttermilk pancakes, sausage, bacon, fresh fruit, and coffee. Word spread fast, so those custom cake orders became a side business—Milk + Honey—to support their unwieldy grocery bill.
Her growing pastry prowess manifested variously at pop-ups (including a weekly residency at Bløm Meadworks), an ill-fated tiny storefront that opened in Milan as Covid struck in 2020, an online ordering and delivery model, and wholesaling wares at such shops as Hyperion Coffee and Cahoots Cafe. When the couple had their first child in 2021, she tried to add a commercial kitchen to their home’s garage, but encountered “unexpected hassle” from Lodi Township. Lately she’s been renting kitchen space at Sweet Heather Anne in the Westgate shopping center.
The business’s new name refers to a Taiwanese culinary term for the “chewy, springy” texture of such foods as mochi and tapioca pearls. “If you walk through the streets of Taiwan, you’ll see the letter Q mixed in with the Mandarin characters in the street vendor stalls to describe their food,” Liu Martindale explains. “It’s actually pronounced with a cutesy-like sound.”
One core product is a $4 savory scone, more tender than the English style, loaded with cheddar cheese, an aromatic chili-crisp sauce, and scallions. Patrons will also find an array of milk-bread buns and cinnamon rolls, chiffon-style whipped cream cakes, puff pastries, loaf cakes, cookies, and fancy French-inspired tarts. Take-home options include frozen dumplings, both vegan and meat.
The coffee bar arrives by way of a partnership with Strider Coffee Stop, run by her Redeemer Ann Arbor church friend Caleb Ingalsbe, an award-winning latte artist. Liu Martindale expects most business to be takeout, though there’s some seating, including at a counter along the front window.
Q Bakehouse & Market & Strider Coffee Shop, 1608 Jackson Ave. (734) 210–1683. Tues.–Sat. 7:30 a.m.–5 p.m. Closed Sun. & Mon. qannarbor.com
