Community, culture, and coffee combine at The Deep End Cafe & Gallery, a multifaceted spot that recently opened in Ypsilanti. Owner Candace Cavazos, who also goes by the name Oceania, hopes to use the space in multiple impactful ways: to promote local artists, make healthy eating affordable, and provide free meals to people in need.
While the shop is located in Ypsilanti, its background is very Detroit, mainly because Cavazos is a Southwest Detroit native. “I owe a lot to Detroit,” she says. “My family is from there. My roots are from there. I feel like that's the only place I can call home.”
Being from the city, she never really planned to open a store in Ypsilanti, but found out about the open space, at 310 Perrin St., and thought it was a good fit for her vision
Now, The Deep End bridges the two cities in many ways.
Cavazos was aided and inspired by Black-owned Detroit juicery The Squeeze Station. “Their mission is to basically bring healthy eating to the community, especially in Detroit where there’s a food desert,” Cavazos says. “We learned that this area in Ypsi has similar issues when it comes to getting access to affordable healthy foods.”
The Squeeze Station helped Cavazos put together a food and beverage menu that includes a variety of smoothies, fresh-pressed juice, breakfast items, wraps, salads, quesadillas, and tacos.
“If you’re in Detroit, go visit The Squeeze Station. If you’re in Ypsilanti, obviously, come to The Deep End,” she says. “Both places are very unique, and you’re gonna find some very cultural, excellent quality, educational, art and food and beverages. It’s really unlike anything until you get here. Every time people come here, or to The Squeeze Station, it’ll never leave their mind.”
Coffee is the real focus of a cafe though, right? The Deep End has plenty of caffeinated options, working with Southwest Detroit company Tuguava on providing coffee cultivated and roasted in Guatemala.
Tuguava supports sustainable farming practices and is partnered with a water filtration company, so every sale the company makes contributes to providing clean water to communities in need.
The Deep End, The Squeeze Station, and Tuguava work together as equal partners to create social impact, Cavazos says.
“The way we support one another is a great example of how small businesses can come together to build capacity,” she adds. “Our two partners are really about what they say they’re about. They’re very committed to community and food accessibility and ethical sourcing and supporting the communities that we’re actually getting these things from.”
Cavazos strives to do the same. At the start of July, The Deep End began a program called “Each One Feed One” to help provide free meals to people in the community. Customers can purchase any beverage, meal, or treat for someone in need and get 10% off of their order.
The Deep End is not just a cafe though, but also a gallery, as its name suggests. Apart from providing meals and beverages, Cavazos has the goal to promote local artists of all kinds, especially being a poet herself.
“My personal mission is to just make a space for underrepresented artists, make space for people that come from low-income or backgrounds,” Cavazos said. “My goal is to just really provide a high-quality experience to people that come and engage with the underrepresented artists that come through here.”
Every month, the cafe features a new visual artist, plastering their art all over the walls to create a gallery. The Deep End’s first featured artist when the store opened in March was Detroit’s Sheefy McFly.
“We got that, we made that happen, and he was happy about it afterward, but it definitely took a lot of pushing,” Cavazos says. “I’ve been in a lot of spaces with Sheefy. He doesn’t probably realize it because he’s always got people all around him but I’ve definitely been to multiple events where me and him were on the same flier… When I did reach out to him, he was familiar with me, but he just didn’t know me personally. But I convinced him, I kept bothering and bothering him like ‘Yo, you said you were gonna give me art. So I need that art.’”
For the month of July, Southwest Detroit artist Dillon Steele is The Deep End's featured artist.
Other ways that the cafe supports creativity is by selling art prints, books, and products made locally and holding events in the space hosted by local creatives and organizations.
The name “The Deep End,” comes from the feeling throughout Cavazos’s own life of being “in the deep end,” she says, and being successful in her creative pursuits anyway, which she hopes to show other people with hardships that they can do too.
“I come from a very low-income background, my parents both struggle with addiction and it was hard for me to achieve college and achieve all these things that statistics said I was not going to achieve, so I feel like I was born under pressure,” Cavazos says. “If you feel like you have to break cycles in your family, then I think that the pressure of that can sometimes be crippling. But if you are encouraged and you're in a community where people can inspire you and encourage you and validate you, then you can become a diamond and that’s kind of what the brand is for The Deep End — ‘Be where the pressure is and become a diamond under pressure, and let’s celebrate all the people that decide to keep fighting and keep swimming and not let the pressure fold them so that they can also become diamonds.’”
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