Neighborhood Mainstay Good Cakes and Bakes Is Adding a NW Goldberg Outpost

The Avenue of Fashion’s laid-back neighborhood shop Good Cakes and Bakes is expanding to NW Goldberg, a neighborhood on the western border of New Center. The bakery is setting up shop at 1415 Holden St. near Marble Bar and the Recycle Here! facilities with plans to open this summer.

Pastry chef April Anderson and co-owner Michelle Anderson have been in eyeing opportunities for a second location for more than a year. The bakery, which opened in 2013 with signature desserts like ooey gooey butter cake, received a $200,000 investment through the Quicken Loans Detroit Demo Day in 2017 for the expansion. Initially the pair had planned to develop the NW Goldberg site as a production facility without a retail component, but April Anderson tells Eater that Good Cakes and Bakes has since revised its plans.

“We needed a larger kitchen because our catering is growing. We want to offer classes and Livernois just doesn’t accommodate those things the way we want it to,” she says. Since leasing the space on Holden, though, numerous major developments have cropped up in New Center and surrounding areas including a huge cancer wing for Henry Ford Hospital and the Motown Museum expansion. “As all the different things were coming over there, we were like, ‘This is not going to be fair to our customers.’”

The updated plan for the 1,967-square-foot building includes a sprawling 1,500-square-foot kitchen that will be used to host classes and workshops with a smaller bakery counter and very limited seating. Anderson says the space was initially expected to open last summer but work was delayed due, in part, to the amount of construction around the building that’s blocked off roadways to the property. The space has been gutted and Anderson says she’s finally preparing for the buildout, which should be completed by mid-2019.

Stay tuned for updates as the project moves forward.

Update: A previous version of this piece identified the address as New Center, but as a reader points out the location is actually in neighboring NW Goldberg.

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