Review: Beezy's Cafe

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Beezy’s namesake creator is a thirty-one-year-old with a ferocious strength of will, a finely tuned business plan, and an angel investor—one of her favorite customers when she worked at Petoskey’s Roast and Toast cafe, who, she says, “turned out to be a gazillionaire.” Launched last November, with an aim of providing “simple, honest food,” and with dedicated service from an offbeat, friendly crew, Beezy’s attracted an instant, well-deserved following.

Mayhew’s communitarian cafe is housed in a graceful 1865 brick Italianate building next to a storefront Pentecostal music school, across from a strip joint, a couple of doors down from the Dreamland Theater, and not far from the local-food advocates at Growing Hope. Clearly, there are a lot of different constituencies in the neighborhood, but it feels like most of them could find happiness here, at least in the form of a sandwich and a cup of coffee.

It’s a handsome space, but not in a glossy-magazine kind of way that makes people feel insufficiently cool. Mayhew painted some of the plaster walls a sunny yellow accented with eggplant and steely blue trim but left unpainted the brick wall that runs the length of the dining room. She added floors of recovered ash wood—from trees felled by the emer-ald ash borer—and exposed the original tin ceiling.