Detroiters will have a new permanent home for healthy food when the long-awaited LOVE Building opens at 4731 W. Grand River Ave. in Core City.
Paradise Natural Foods will be one of the tenants couched within the ambitious administrative building, which is in the home stretch of its construction and expected to open in August.
Paradise Natural Foods has established itself as a full-service catering and events vendor with a well-founded presence in Detroit. It’s community-based concept is poised to bring a café-deli to the LOVE Building that will serve plant-based dishes along with a marketplace shelved with a curated lineup of locally produced products. In addition, the shop has a ghost kitchen that it will use to host nutrition classes and cooking showcases in collaboration with local chefs like Ederique Goudia, a.k.a. “Chef E,” founder of Taste of the Diaspora.
“It’s not your traditional thing, like we’re just opening a restaurant,” said Paradise Natural Foods owner Chef Nezaa Bandele. “It’s not a restaurant. It’s a lifestyle space that happens to have a deli-marketplace with hands-on cooking and nutrition education.”
Paradise will use locally sourced produce from D Town Farm, Deeply Rooted Produce and other local farming vendors throughout the Midwest. In addition to the chefs, Bandele said she will work with the Justice Center to have immigrants do pop-up cooking classes showcasing food options from their respective homelands.
Known by her nickname “Mama Nezaa,” Bandele is a native Jamaican who settled in Detroit in the 1980s. From the time she moved to the city, she’s preached the gospel of wellness and healthy eating.
The Paradise Natural Foods menu includes some seafood and poultry recipes, but Bandele primarily offers a steady diet of plant-based options with a “very natural Caribbean type vibe,” she indicated.
“Education has always been a foundation of what we do, and the food is just an outgrowth of that,” Bandele said. “The food is how you bring people in. You offer the food, and it’s easier to talk to people about their health.”
The build out at the LOVE Building is still underway. The facility was originally slated to open last spring, but crews encountered delays during the pandemic and supply-chain issues pushed the timeline back even further.
Bandele said they’ve been waiting two years for an elevator to be installed due to a shortage in manufacturing equipment. The elevator is expected to finally arrive soon. Now the goal is to complete the building and open in late summer.
Along with Paradise, the four-story brick structure will serve as headquarters for the Detroit Justice Center, Detroit Disability Power, the Detroit Community Technology Project and Detroit Narrative Agency.
The building’s veneer will be covered in artwork by local muralists, including a centerpiece on the front facing depicting four hands shaped to spell out L-O-V-E.
The LOVE Building is envisioned as a synergetic hub where each of the community organizations will converge. Most of them will literally be feeding off the offerings from Bandele’s kitchen.
“We’re going to be on the campus,” she said. “It might not be us doing an event, but we’re part of the campus. So if something’s going on, we’ll always be providing food for it.”
Allied Media Projects, a nonprofit currently based in Midtown, is the driving force behind the LOVE Building. It will move its operation to the new facility.
Bandele said Allied was one of her clients for more than a decade and approached her a few years ago with the idea of moving into the incubator for local activist groups.
Paradise Natural Foods will occupy the ground floor of the building. It will be their first brick-and-mortar home.
Bandele noted Paradise Natural Foods is prominently featured in a Netflix documentary that is slated to be released in January.
The move is a natural progression for Bandele, who’s used food as her platform to educate the Detroit community for the past 30-plus years. She estimated over 90% of her clients are nonprofits and social justice organizations.
“We’re just part of that whole ecosystem of activism in Detroit and always have been,” Bandele said. “People come here from all over to see what Detroit activists are doing, especially in the work of food sovereignty and addressing food insecurity in the city. We’re an active outgrowth of that. I always say that we feed the movement.”
