Avalon International Breads Is Dropping Another Cafe in Midtown

Bakery expansions

Rapidly expanding Detroit-based bakery Avalon International Breads is preparing to drop another cafe in Midtown. The cafe and grab-and-go station is opening inside the new Wayne State University Mike Ilitch School of Business along Woodward Avenue in late August, Crain’s reports. The new 700-square-foot outpost will offer traditional Avalon baked good, salads, sandwiches, and coffee. The bakery, located in Cass Corridor, has undergone some major expansions over the last few years, opening a restaurant in downtown, a location in Ann Arbor, a satellite location at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a cafe at its bakehouse, and a New Center biscuit bar.

The story behind southwest Detroit’s budding food truck empire

The team behind one of southwest Detroit’s most delicious food truck empires, El Parian, is testing out a new food stand called Wicho’s Burgers at 1633 Lawndale St. in Springwells. Wicho’s offers options like Hawaiian burgers and Mexican burgers with grilled onions and jalapeños, cheese, avocado, and chimichurri. There’s even loaded “choripapas” — french fries topped with chorizo, lettuce, avocado, and chimichurri sauce. Learn more about El Parian and its fearless leader Nancy Lopez in Tostada Magazine.

Neighborhood restaurants get national buzz

Bon Appetit gave Flowers of Vietnam some deserved love in its recent package highlighting America’s best neighborhood restaurants. “Flowers of Vietnam is a blissful exception to Detroit’s segregated landscape,” author and filmmaker Dream Hampton writes in her love letter to chef George Azar’s West Vernor establishment. “Some of us native Detroiters are relieved to see a place whose kitchen is brilliant and consistent and where the floor looks like we’re in the D. As to why his fellow local restaurateurs can’t seem to find even a black dishwasher for their open kitchens: ‘I don’t know, maybe they’re scared that women from Birmingham [MI] will turn around and head back to the suburbs. Not me. I put Vera right up front at the host stand. She’s as Detroit as it gets.’”

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