Avalon International Breads

Start with what changed, because a lot has. Ann Perrault and Jackie Victor opened Avalon on Willis Street in 1997, when the Cass Corridor was a food desert, rent ran $500 a month, and — by their own telling — a landlord warned them the neighborhood wasn’t ready for windows. They opened anyway, on a triple bottom line of earth, community, and employees, and Avalon became one of the businesses most often credited with sparking the revival of what’s now Midtown.

That flagship closed in January 2023, after twenty-five years. The Avalon counter that replaced it inside Jolly Pumpkin on Canfield closed too, when Jolly Pumpkin shut its Detroit doors in March 2026. It’s a hard sentence to write about a bakery that helped make a neighborhood and then couldn’t stay in it.

What’s left — and where you should actually go — is the Woodward cafe downtown, open daily, still under the same name and the same mission, still turning out the sea-salt chocolate chunk cookies the company will happily tell you Yelp once voted the best in Michigan. Smaller footprint, same reason to show up. We haven’t sat down at Woodward yet. It’s high on the list, mostly for the cookie.