Folk Detroit

Andrea took her book club to Folk on a recent morning, and the whole thing worked exactly the way a book club morning should: four women, a reserved table on the front patio, nobody rushing anybody. The reservation is the tip — you can book a table online, which is a quiet mercy when you’re coordinating four schedules and four opinions about where to sit.

Folk is an Aussie-style daytime café at Bagley and Trumbull from chef Rohani Foulkes, and its whole personality is restraint. The seasonal menu is short on purpose and changes instead of sprawling; everything is cooked fresh, with a small à la carte breakfast for the picky, and vegan and gluten-free eaters are genuinely accommodated rather than merely tolerated. The coffee bar is extensive and the wine list — nuanced, biodynamic, drink-in or take-home — is the real flex. No Coca-Cola in the building either: you get Something & Nothing seltzers in flavors worth photographing. There’s a small retail corner of gifts and provisions that is dangerous on the way out, and it’s one of the genuinely good ones in Corktown. The second outpost, Neighbor x Folk, lives inside Michigan Central Station if you want to stretch it into an afternoon.

Honest caveat: the crew stayed on the patio, so we can’t speak to the indoor room beyond small and quaint.