An Asian Bakery Gets Off To A Lightning Fast Start
Rachel Liu Martindale posted Q's progress on Instagram Stories
There’s a little strip mall on the west side of Ann Arbor that motorists have long zoomed past, barely glancing at the liquor store or hair salon. I’m willing to bet that in the past couple of weeks, it’s seen more business than at any time in the past.
The shop on the end is now home to Q Bakehouse and Market, and it includes a booth for a second business, Strider Coffee House. The pair share a small storefront space that wouldn’t be uncommon in Europe or Asia, but is less usual in America.
Rachel Liu Martindale has spent months documenting Q’s development on her Instagram account. Like some of the other businesses I’ve written about recently, Q has gotten off to a lightning fast start, thanks to a waiting fan base for her baking.
Flexibility has become a watchword. She’s already sold out several times in her first few weeks, adjusted her hours to meet the unexpected demand, and posted a help wanted ad.
“We're just gonna kind of feel it out and see,” Rachel says.
Rachel is familiar to the area’s sizeable Asian community, as well as fans of artisanal baking. Before Q, Rachel operated Milk + Honey Baked Goods, which specialized in custom order cakes (if you scroll back through her Instagram, you can see some of her beautiful designs).
She sold her baked goods through local coffee shops, and operated a permanent pop up pre-Covid inside Blom Meadworks. Based in Milan, a small town near Ann Arbor, Rachel set up a tiny cafe in 2019, and was planning to expand when Covid hit.
The struggle to open
A first generation Asian-American (her parents are from Taiwan and China), Rachel tread water for several years. She banked her income, concentrating on cakes and supplying wholesale customers, taking her time to find an affordable space. After a lengthy search, the little strip mall location became open last summer, and she took over on Sept. 1.
Then came the struggle to get the storefront into shape. There were multiple mishaps: the oven that Rachel ordered wasn’t right, and she had to sell it and fine another one. Her husband took on the task of building the bakery’s counters and display cases from scratch. She ran into “delay after delay after delay” getting the required permits and inspections from city officials.
To fill some of the time, Rachel held a couple of pop ups last fall. One offered mooncakes for the mid-Autumn festival; the other was an innovative box of Christmas cookies, above, which was my introduction to her baking.
Rachel, who has a degree in engineering, expected to finance the operation with her own savings, plus money contributed by her parents and other family members. She saved outlay by reusing the equipment on hand from her earlier operation.
But as construction went on, and the wait for approvals continued, money began to run out, prompting Rachel to launch a Kickstarter for the final funds required to open. That raised $23,000, far beyond the goal she set. In all, the bakery probably cost around $150,000, including the cost of lumber for the counters that was purchased by her husband, she laughed.
A name change
The new location gave Rachel a change to start fresh with a new name. With so many places called Milk and Honey, including an ice cream shop in Traverse City, and another spot in Detroit, she decided to choose something more Asian in nature for her shop, as well as a letter that could easily be remembered
In Taiwanese cuisine, the letter Q represents a soft but chewy texture, like that of mochi or boba, often expressed as QQ. Some cooks think of it as the Asian version of al dente — firmer than mushy, with some resistance to it. “It’s actually a really desirable texture,” Rachel says.
The texture is represented by her Nian Gao, a sweet rice cake. While it looks baked on the outside, the inside has that comforting, almost gummy texture that’s familiar from butter mochi cake. You can pull the cake apart and it stretches a little, and is full of flavor.
Each morning, Rachel offers a full lineup of Asian-inspired pastries, all made in the tiny kitchen downstairs. Many shapes will be familiar even to people unfamiliar with Asian baking.
She sells scones flavored with chili crisp and two types of buns every day, one sweet and one savory. On the day I visited, the flavors were pineapple and Everything, filled with scallion cream cheese.
There are loaf cakes, such as black sesame, cookies, slices of cake, muffins and individual tarts. A freezer case is stocked with dumplings, which sell fast, and there’s a big display with various types of Asian groceries, from noodles and sauces to rice vinegar.
Rachel is also selling a small selection of cookbooks. Her own favorites are on a shelf above the bakery case. They include Made In Taiwan, the smash-hit cookbook published last year by Clarissa Wei; Bravetart, by Stella Parks; The Food of Sichuan, by Fuchsia Dunlop; and Mooncakes and Milk Bread, by Kristina Cho.
There are a few seats where patrons can stay to eat their pastries and sip a latte (more on Strider in a future Food News).
Future ambitions
Having just opened, Rachel is preoccupied with making sure Q runs smoothly. Down the road, she would like to focus on offering more savory foods, and she’d like to hold breakfast pop ups on Saturdays featuring typical Asian dishes. “There’s nowhere that you can get a traditional Chinese breakfast,” the kind she grew up eating.
Her ideal menu would include scallion pancakes, dan bing, which are Taiwanese egg pancakes, congee porridge with all the toppings, and braised pork over rice, which she has sold in one of her pop ups. “That’s the hope, down the road, to incorporate more of those things,” Rachel says.
But, she isn’t anxious to grow her operation’s physical space. “I don’t think I’m ever going to expand to more locations or anything like that,” Rachel says. “It’s not really in my sights to be big. I want to be small. I want to pour my heart into this (cafe) and have that be it.”
Her Asian upbringing has made her “very risk averse,” Rachel says. “So I wanna take everything very, very slowly.”
Q Bakehouse and Market, 1608 Jackson Avenue, Ann Arbor, Mich., 48103.