![]() The fundraiser garnered more than $10,000 in donations. In the early months of the pandemic when indoor dining in Michigan and elsewhere was banned to curb the spread of COVID-19, Roy organized a GoFundMe campaign asking for support so that he could continue to pay the cafe’s team during the lockdown. That days-long event showcased the culinary talents of several food businesses owned by women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community. In addition to providing an arts venue for the neighborhood, Cass Cafe has experimented in recent years with developing a more inclusive landscape for restaurants and food makers when it served as the headquarters in 2018 as the Dream Cafe, a collaborative effort between the Allied Media Conference and FoodLab Detroit. He bought the building from a woman on a land contract in the late 1980s and spent the next few years working toward opening the restaurant and gallery space. ![]() Roy told Eater that he first got to know the Cass Corridor in 1978 when he attended Wayne State as a football player. ![]() Roy opened Cass Cafe in 1993 to serve as a laid back space for community where guests could enjoy a vegetarian and vegan-friendly menu, take in an indie art installation, or converse with academics from nearby Wayne State University at the bar. “I loved everything about the Cass Cafe, except that it was it just was kind of subsidized for a while, you know and the current climate didn’t help.” It’s not something that I wanted to do,” said Roy. He pointed to struggles related to shutting down during the COVID-19 pandemic exasperated the struggles he’d been experiencing to keep the restaurant in operation all these years. Roy told Eater that once word got out about the fate of Cass Cafe, he’s received an outpouring of support from regulars and former employees alike.
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