Drive Van Dyke Avenue through Shelby Township this month and you'll pass four separate construction projects, each one a different kind of restaurant, each one landing within a few months of the others. That's not a coincidence of timing. It's four different operators making four different bets on the same three-mile stretch of road, and the bets tell you something about how this corridor is actually filling in.
Start at 21 Mile, where a matcha bar called Kyuu Cafe opened this spring at 47051 Van Dyke. Drive north to 24 Mile and Schoenherr, where Joe's Kitchen took over the space vacated by the former Stuffed Bun. Keep going to 55208 Van Dyke, where the Baldwin Restaurant Group is installing grills and ovens for a New American concept called The Baldwin, targeting a mid-November opening. And at the southwest corner of 22 Mile and Van Dyke, Sheetz has begun clearing a site for one of fourteen new metro Detroit locations the chain is opening this year.
Four addresses. Four different scales of business. That's the part worth understanding before you decide which one changes your Friday night.
Four Mile Markers, Four Different Kinds of Bet
Kyuu Cafe is the smallest and most local of the group. Co-owner Martin Yono is opening the shop with two other locals, Fadi Elisha and Rivert Dali, and the business was already serving coffee at BC Pilates in the township before it had its own storefront. That's a business that grew out of existing local relationships rather than one that scouted the corridor from outside.
Joe's Kitchen sits one rung up in scale but still firmly local. Co-owner Joe Tinaj is opening the restaurant with his parents, and the Tinaj family has been in the Shelby Township area for around fifteen years. Tinaj told What Now Detroit the restaurant had been a long time coming.
"Joe's Kitchen is something that has been building for years."
The menu leans into dinner-table Italian-American standards like chicken piccata and chicken marsala, plus a house specialty the family is calling Joe's Salad. Tinaj also pointed to the specific reason the corner appealed to him: the 24 Mile and Schoenherr intersection already had foot traffic and name recognition from the restaurant that came before it.
The Baldwin is a different animal entirely. It's the third concept from Baldwin Restaurant Group, a company started by Chef Jeff Baldwin in 2004 that already operates J Baldwin's in Clinton Township and Testa Barra in Macomb. Executive Chef and Managing Partner Gabriella Baldwin, a Culinary Institute of America graduate with New York City restaurant experience, is targeting a Nov. 13 opening. This isn't a first restaurant testing an idea. It's a group with two working suburban locations placing its third bet on Shelby Township specifically, and choosing an address inside the township's commercial core to do it.
Then there's Sheetz, which isn't a restaurant bet at all in the traditional sense. It's a chain expanding across the entire region at once, and Shelby Township is one stop on a list that includes Royal Oak, Novi, Orion Township, Belleville, Eastpointe, Fraser and Ypsilanti this year, according to C&G Newspapers. Macomb Township, Taylor and Warren are each getting two locations in the same rollout. Shelby Township gets one.
What the Sheetz Math Actually Says
That single-location detail matters more than it looks. When a chain doubles up in Macomb Township and Warren but plants only one store in Shelby Township, it's reading the township as a market that can support steady traffic without needing redundant coverage. Public affairs manager Nick Ruffner said demolition on the 22 Mile site was set to begin within weeks of the June announcement, which puts a fall or winter opening in reach if construction holds to a typical convenience-store timeline. There's no confirmed open date yet, so treat that as a direction rather than a promise.
The Corridor Fills In By Daypart, Not Just By Address
Line the four projects up by what they actually serve and a second pattern appears. Kyuu Cafe covers mornings and afternoons with coffee and matcha. Joe's Kitchen covers dinner with a full-service, sit-down menu. The Baldwin, once it opens, adds a New American dinner option with more polish and a bigger name behind it. Sheetz covers the hours the others don't: early morning, late night, the stretch of road where you just need gas and something to eat without waiting on a table.
That's four businesses that don't compete with each other so much as divide the day between them. A resident who used to drive past 24 Mile and Schoenherr without much reason to stop now has a dinner option there. Someone who wanted a coffee shop with some personality behind the counter has Kyuu. And once The Baldwin opens in November, the corridor will have gone from one closed restaurant and a construction site to four working businesses in under a year.
The Timeline From Here
Kyuu Cafe and Joe's Kitchen are already open and running, both having launched in the first half of 2026. The Baldwin is the next domino, with Gabriella Baldwin telling What Now Detroit the group is hoping for a Nov. 13 opening. Sheetz is the one still furthest out, with construction only recently underway and no firm date attached beyond "later this year."
That puts three of the four projects on track to be fully operational before winter sets in, and the fourth close behind. If you've been putting off checking out the new spot on 24 Mile or wondering what's going into the old Stuffed Bun space, both questions already have answers. If you've been wondering what's happening at the corner of 22 Mile and Van Dyke where the demolition equipment showed up, that answer is coming, just not yet.
Van Dyke Avenue between 21 Mile and 24 Mile has spent the last year quietly becoming a different street than it was, one storefront at a time, with a family-run kitchen, a homegrown cafe, an established restaurant group, and a national chain all reading the same three miles of road as worth building on.
If you're weighing whether this stretch of Shelby Township fits what you're looking for in a home, Showtime Realty tracks this corridor as closely as we track the market itself. Schedule a consultation and we'll walk you through what's actually changing on Van Dyke, block by block.
