Astro Coffee shop headed to Corktown

Astro Coffee is gearing up to complement Detroit's famous Slow's Barbeque restaurant in Corktown, and yes, it has heard what happened to the Mercury Coffee Bar.

Excerpt:

Construction is underway on Astro Coffee, the shop Daisuke Hughes plans to open on Michigan Avenue in Corktown late this summer.

Hughes left Michigan in 2002. He lived in various cities around the world but kept tabs on Detroit. Working at highly-regarded Monmouth Coffee Co. in London, he got hooked on coffee culture. A Model D article about what was to be the Mercury Coffee Bar was the impetus he needed to make the move to Detroit in 2008. "The timing was perfect, coming back and walking into a job that I was qualified for," he says.

While Mercury did not last, Hughes plans to take lessons learned and apply them to his own venture. "Now I have a fraction of the rent, which cuts overhead. And staffing at the Mercury was very high -- it will be a much smaller scale at Astro," he says, noting that coffee drinks will likely overlap with Mercury offerings, but food options will be scaled way back. "I've tried hard to keep what was good about it and retain that, and what was clearly not working, shave away and eliminate that."

Read the rest of the story here and how This Old House picked Detroit's Villages community as one of the nation's best places to buy a historic home here.

Astro Coffee shop headed to Corktown

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