Detroit is getting a new restaurant that will be doing double duty: Encarnacion will be both a coffee shop and a Latin American eatery.
“You can walk into the lobby, you’ll find the coffee shop or a small version of a typical coffee shop,” owner Robert Encarnacion told What Now Detroit. “On the farther side of the building, you’ll have a second counter where you’re going to find Latin American food.”
Encarnacion said he expects the coffee component to be open within the next few weeks, with the restaurant hopefully opening no later than November.
“The restaurant will take a little longer because of the additional amount of equipment we need to have to properly run a restaurant,” he said.
The casual-dining concept will focus on Latin American street food. The menu will come together with help from the chef, but Encarnacion is eyeing everything from tacos and quesadillas to empanadas and pupusas. Expect favorites from the Dominican Republic, where Encarnacion is from, like fried plantains.
“The idea is to bring a few countries from Latin America that have popular street food items,” he said.
That is a theme carried through to the coffee component as well, where the plan is to serve exclusively Latin American coffee. The coffee shop will bring together a variety of influences from Encarnacion’s journey with coffee. He wasn’t a regular coffee drinker until college, and following that, he enjoyed discovering Cuban styles of drinking coffee when living in Miami.
“The idea is to stick to the heritage, bring the values and the cultural influences that I picked up from Miami,” he said.
During the pandemic is when the idea struck to open a business. That’s when Encarnacion started looking for locations, eventually landing on the West Village.
“It’s the perfect location,” he said. “Close access to the highway, eight minutes away from downtown Detroit.”
They broke ground last November, and now they’re finishing with the remaining pieces: getting equipment, developing the menus, and putting the patio together.
“It’s going to look really nice when we put in tables,” he said.
Encarnacion said that despite the costs and challenges that come with opening anything commercial in Detroit, he wants people to see it as opportunity. He was living in Miami when he realized how much he enjoyed Detroit, making a pretty swift move to a city in which he saw major potential.
“I actually came to visit in April 2019 for a weekend,” he said. “By the end of June, I was a Detroiter.”
