Get Lost Inside Plum Market’s Glossy New Outpost in Downtown Detroit

The first Detroit location of Michigan-based chain Plum Market opens today bringing new lunch options, a cafe, cold-pressed juice, groceries, and a casual bar to downtown. It’s a big deal for many Detroiters who work and live in the area. Although downtown developments have boomed in recent years, the growth in options for basic retail amenities like markets and flower shops hasn’t necessarily kept pace.

Only a handful of stores including grocery-bar combo Eatorí Market and City Market currently sell retail food in the downtown district. Plum Market, with its organic and natural-focused products, is seeking to fill that niche with this small format, 8,000-square-foot city location.

The store, which anchors a prime corner of the Ally Building overlooking Woodward Avenue and the Spirit of Detroit, features an edited selection of retail items from its larger stores including toiletries, cut flowers, snacks, wine, beer, and staple grocery items like eggs and milk. However, a large portion of the footprint functions like a restaurant with casual dining and drinking options. Customers walk into a seating area with tables for eating a sandwich or a chicken pot pie from Plum Market’s deli area. There’s also Mon Jin Lau grab-and-go sushi and two rows of hot and cold bars filled with salad fixings and options like build-your-own nachos and veggie samosas. The checkout area also doubles as a Zingerman’s Coffee shop with drinks, Avalon pastries, and bagels from New York Bagel.

The cafe is flanked by a small bar serving beer and wine by-the-glass or bottle. Happy hour is from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. and the wine corkage fee is $10. Patrons can also pick-up a token for $15 and purchase a mini bottle of chilled Moët Champagne from a vending machine — one of only a handful currently operating in the United States. For those who wish to drink on site, the bar will crack open the bottle right there and visitors can then sip their fizzy wine inside or on Plum Market’s sunny patio along Larned Street.

In the next few years, Plum Market is looking to develop more of these smaller format stores, which are about half to a third the size of standard Plum Markets. “It’s hard to bring everything in a big grocery store to cities, so this is our new version of that condensed format,” co-founder Marc Jonna tells Eater. A similar version of the downtown location is slated to open in New Center in October at the new Piston’s Training Facility. Co-founder and CEO Matt Jonna says the company also plans to open a condensed and a large-format Plum Market in Washington, D.C. and is exploring the possibility of expanding to Los Angeles.

Photographer Michelle Gerard took a tour of the new micro market ahead of Wednesday’s anticipated opening. Take a tour of the new downtown lunch spot in the gallery below.

Plum Market is located at 500 Woodward Ave.; open 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

• Detroit’s First Plum Market Throws Open Its Doors Downtown in July [ED]
• Plum Market to Open New Downtown Store in 2019 [ED]
• Plum Market and Zingerman’s Cafe Land Inside the Detroit Pistons’ Training Facility [ED]
• All Openings Coverage [ED]