from “le détroit” · the strait
Martell Mason's Highland Park roasting company moved into the former Gathering Coffee Co. space on East Grand Boulevard, its first sit-down cafe after three years of wholesale and a global run through the coffee trade.
The Sepia Coffee Project opened its first sit-down cafe on Thursday, Oct. 3, at 2831 E. Grand Blvd. in Detroit's North End, taking over the storefront that until recently housed Gathering Coffee Co. The roasting company kept the bones of the space, reworked the exterior, and set hours of 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday.
For founder Martell Mason, the cafe is the retail end of a business he has been building since 2021. A Highland Park native, Mason came to coffee by an unusual route. His career carried him through the fashion industry in New York, English teaching in South Korea, and the green-coffee trade in Norway and Istanbul before he returned to metro Detroit in 2020 and started roasting. He has said the gap that pushed him into the work was a simple one: a majority-Black city with no Black specialty roaster.
Sepia supplies coffee wholesale to more than 30 businesses across southeast Michigan. Its blends carry names drawn from Detroit history, including the Paradise, Black Bottom, and Harmonie collections sold through the company's own site. Mason sources in part through the Black Producer Program, an initiative founded by Phyllis Johnson that connects buyers with Black coffee farmers in Brazil, and he works with the Coffee Coalition for Racial Equity, a nonprofit focused on Black participation in the industry. In 2023 he was a top-four finalist in the Hatch Detroit competition.
The North End shop is built to do more than sell coffee. To mark the opening, Sepia planned a free photography walkabout through neighborhood streets, pairing a tasting of three Brazilian blends with a discussion of equity in specialty coffee and a guided walk past landmarks along Woodward, Oakland, and Euclid. The cafe's broader purpose, Mason has said, is to show that the model can work where people assume it cannot.
The revenue from the cafe is meant to fund the next phase: a roastery and tasting room in Highland Park, which Mason has said would be the city's first espresso bar and would expand his roasting capacity several times over. He has framed the whole effort less as a coffee business than as proof of concept for Black entrepreneurs in disinvested neighborhoods.
"If Sepia was able to do that in Highland Park with all of its challenges, we can totally do this," Mason told Daily Coffee News.
The cafe is at 2831 E. Grand Blvd., Detroit.
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