For Molly Mitchell, Everything’s Coming Up Roses

MOLLY MITCHELL remembers the day in 2014 when she and her cousin peered inside the windows of the former Elmo’s Fine Food on Detroit’s East Side. The pair had hoped to grab a coffee and maybe a bite to eat, but the East Jefferson diner was obviously closed. For good.

The diner’s owners just happened to be driving by when they spotted the young women and decided to see if the pair were looking to rent the building— almost frozen in time since 1964. Before the cousins even knew it themselves, they were.

“I wasn’t necessarily looking to open a business,” says Mitchell, whose first job was at a Howell diner at age 14. “I just really like diners and wanted to eat here, but it was always closed.”

Mitchell set about refreshing the 960-square-foot building, careful not to lose its diner vibe, renaming it Roses Fine Food in honor of the abundance of rose bushes scattered across the city. Success encouraged Mitchell to purchase the building in 2019. By then, her cousin was no longer part of the business and Mitchell had stepped back from plans to expand her operations into nearby West Village, which enabled her to transfer that liquor license to Roses. Less than a year later, the pandemic changed everything.

“What can I sell in order to keep this building?” Mitchell remembers thinking. Roses’ business model shifted to being more about groceries, especially meats, cheeses and baked goods. Mitchell also introduced a bread and wine club. “It’s a very pandemicky thing to do.”

“All the wine we buy is rooted in good agriculture, good growing techniques,” says Mitchell, who brought on Diego Aliste as wine buyer. They like to showcase wines made in-state, including Mari Vineyards, Nathaniel Rose Wine and Neu Cellars, all from northern Michigan. “There are a lot of cool, exciting Michigan wines right now. We always have something different, which is fun for us too.”

With this new commitment to wine, Mitchell recently renamed the restaurant Roses Fine Food and Wine and added a rotating selection of bottled wines for sale, with shelves anchoring a wall. Roses is the same, yet different. Once tightly packed with tables, its interior is a little roomier now, with new round marble-topped bistro tables and a wall of bench seating in the front, against the former front door. Although the menu continues to focus on seasonal from-scratch offerings using local ingredients whenever possible, daily options are mostly panini, salads and soups, plus pizza on the weekend evenings, when Roses recently started opening.

“We stay flexible in our format, but veer off when it makes sense,” says Mitchell, whose specials sometimes lean into her Polish heritage, like perogi— “Who doesn’t like dumplings?”—or dishes suggested by Eggy Ding, who’s been a team member since day one. Ding is among the staff baking and decorating cakes, something that took off during the pandemic, says Mitchell, and continue to be popular today. Birthday and wedding cakes can be special ordered, but Roses regularly carries tidy four-inch-square lunchbox cakes that could serve one to four people, depending upon one’s ability to share. Flavors vary, but all come decorated with Swiss buttercream in a dreamy vintage look.

“A lot of people were doing cupcakes. These are a little more fun, a little more elegant,” says Mitchell, appreciating the tiny cake’s added versatility. Mitchell also sells small batches of her house-made hot sauces, made from fermented Detroit-grown peppers, and kimchee.

“It hits so many places with the spice and the garlic and the ginger. It’s really good,” says Mitchell, calling making sauces and pickles a carryover from the old Roses, and a way to deliver summer goodness all year-round. “Everything is sourced super close to Roses.”

The new menu is very conducive to takeout, she says. “It’s nice to offer something to feed people who aren’t ready to eat in buildings. We respect that.”

That’s where the expansive new patio comes in. Roses’ former parking lot is now a pastoral neighborhood oasis with seating for 30 among an array of raised garden beds filled with herbs, vegetables and flowers, planted and regularly tended by Root to Bloom by Nayomi Cawthorne. Mitchell and her crew harvest the vegetables to use in dishes, and incorporate edible flowers into salads and cake decorations. Mitchell herself appreciates cutting and arranging the diner’s tabletop bouquets from the garden.

“We designed the garden beds to keep people six feet apart,” says Mitchell, pointing out the diner’s old tables are out there too. “Sometimes when we’re really busy, you can’t tell [in here] because everyone’s on the patio.”

Mitchell jokes that Roses is coming out of a long, drawn-out, two-year remodel because of the pandemic, but what resulted was an opportunity to reimagine the business, making Roses a better incarnation in many ways, including being a better place to work for Mitchell and her staff of nine.

Perhaps the biggest difference would be to see it on a Friday or Saturday night—a time the largely breakfast-oriented diner had been closed until recently. Now customers are likely to find Aliste pouring wine on the patio, as they order up a pizza or a snack plate.

“We wanted it to be an inviting chill space. A lot of times people just sit out here with wine and read.”

Mitchell makes an effort to see that what doesn’t come from Roses’ patio does come from local farms like Beaverland, Ghost Acre and Fisheye Farms, to name a few.

“There are 1,600 farms and gardens in Detroit,” says Mitchell. “We’re a small business, so it’s important to me to buy from other small businesses. It’s an ecosystem. If I’m successful, they’re successful.”

Roses Fine Food and Wine
10551 E. Jefferson Ave., Detroit
313-822-2729
rosesfinefoodandwine.com