Kitab Cafe

We came looking for Avalon and found this instead. Avalon International Breads left 422 W. Willis in January 2023 after twenty-five years, and Kitab Cafe took the room over about a year later — which, if a bakery has to go, is a decent outcome for the block.

Kitab started in Hamtramck in January 2023, opened by married co-owners Asma Almulaiki and Ahmed Alwhysee. Kitab is Arabic for book, and that’s the whole premise: specialty coffee at deliberately non-specialty prices, sandwiches and pastries, and shelves of hand-picked books weighted toward social justice, spirituality, and self-improvement, a good number of them from Middle Eastern perspectives. The owners describe the goal as a room built for real conversation and honest debate, and they program community events to back that up. There are halal options on the menu, which is still rarer in this part of Midtown than it ought to be.

Full disclosure: we haven’t been inside. We saw it from the street on the afternoon we went hunting for a bakery that had moved on, so this is a note-to-self rather than a verdict. But it’s open from 6:30 in the morning until ten at night, seven days a week, which makes it one of the more forgiving stops in the neighborhood — and a bookshelf is a promising sign in a coffee shop.