Le Petit Zinc crêperie and cafe--a Detroit Community Success Story

As someone who has greatly enjoyed the food and hospitality offered by Charles Sorel's Le Petit Zinc creperie and cafe, I was glad to see it featured on the NY Times Op Ed page yesterday in an article by Toby Barlow. Along with Slows Bar B Q, Le Petit Zinc is one of the great signs of what is possible in Detroit for creative entrepreneurs supported by the community--

Toby Barlow's Oct 24 NY Times Op Ed piece begins:

I was recently sitting at the bar of Le Petit Zinc talking to the owner, Charles Sorel, when he said something I found shocking: “I can’t imagine opening a business anywhere but Detroit.”

From a local, I would have just written it off as city pride, but Charles is, as he himself puts it, a citizen of the world. Born in the French Caribbean and reared in Paris, he ran a French joint in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene and lived in Brazil before winding up here. When I pointed out the risks of starting up in a city as troubled as Detroit, he shrugged it off. “When I moved to New York in the late ’80s there was not a day when someone in the city wasn’t robbed or beaten or killed,” he said. “This is so much better than that.”

A year ago, Charles opened Le Petit Zinc with the simple belief that there was a market here for a crêperie and cafe that served fresh organic food at a decent price. But that was certainly no guarantee of success....

But as I also heard from Charles, the support of the community, including other food owners who could have treated Charles as a competitor, has made the success of Le Petit Zinc something for the entire community to celebrate:

The owner of Slows, a barbecue place nearby, not only helped him get his permits, but also built tabletops for him at no cost. Jordi, the owner of the Cafe con Leche coffee shop, hooked him up with his coffee supplier. Dave, who had recently opened Supino Pizza, even dropped everything one day to get the paper Charles needed for his credit card machine.

Most surprisingly, just as Charles was starting up, Torya Blanchard was opening another downtown crêpe place called Good Girls Go to Paris. Instead of treating Charles like a rival, Torya happily exchanged recipes with him, even coming in one day to help make his batter, an act of crêperie solidarity that would surely have made Detroit’s founder, Antoine de Lamothe Cadillac, extremely proud.

“They want their neighbor to make it,” he says. “It’s different from anywhere I’ve been. Here, your success is their success.” Even his suppliers have shown a generosity he finds surprising: the Avalon bakery charges him wholesale prices even if he orders just one loaf....

So cheers to Charles and to all who have helped to make Le Petit Zinc a Detroit success story in 2009!

Read the rest of Toby Barlow's article here, and a Model D article about Let Petit Zinc from February 2009 here.

Le Petit Zinc is located at 1055 Trumbull Street, just west of the Lodge and two blocks north of Fort Street.