After the long-standing former Pepino’s in Sylvan Lake closed its doors in 2021, restaurateur Brad Cousens saw an opportunity. However, he found the idea of opening a new restaurant in the large, 6,000 square-foot space at 2440 Orchard Lake Rd. to be daunting.
So instead of opening one big restaurant, about a month ago he opened two smaller ones.
Goomah has a menu featuring New Haven-style wood-fired pizza along with other Italian-inspired fare, while Live Bait serves up seafood dishes like oysters, mussels, chowder, and fish.
“I’ve always wanted to do an East Coast raw oyster bar,” Cousens says. “And then I also wanted to do an Italian brick oven pizza joint.” One day, he says, the idea to do both came to him. “I thought, shit, I’m going to go back and look at that space again, I might just be able to split it.”
Cousens says he was inspired to aim for smaller spots following the success restaurateur Bill Roberts found with places like
Bill’s and Roadside B&G in Bloomfield Township. “In this area, in this climate, it’s great to have 300 seats,” Cousens says, “but when you’ve got 18 inches of snow, best of luck putting 300 asses in those seats.”
Both spots share a joint kitchen helmed by executive chef Jason Millross and chef Jesse Almodovar. “My chefs are ultra-talented, and they’re kind of cool because they’re not culinary institute guys,” Cousens says. “So they actually kind of have chips on their shoulders, or something to prove.”
Cousens grew up here, returning about a decade ago after stints working in restaurants in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, and Chicago, where he lived for about 20 years. “I came back just to buy a little lake cottage and be around all my oldest and best friends,” he says. “And I just kind of stopped going back to Chicago.”
Down the street from the former Pepino’s, in nearby Keego Harbor, Cousens opened the Mexican restaurant El Camino, and converted the long-abandoned car wash next-door into Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. (“I’m an instructor there in my non-existent spare time,” he says.) It was his landlord at El Camino who pushed him to move into the former Pepino’s space. “I don’t want to say he was putting the hard sell on me, but he was putting the hard sell on me,” Cousens says. (Moving into the building was a bit of a full-circle moment for Cousens; he says he worked there as a teenager in the ’80s when it was a pool hall.)
Cousens says he decorated both restaurants himself, sourcing furniture and other odds and ends from flea markets. Goomah features a tiled brick oven and an installation of hanging rolling pins, while Live Bait has a nautical theme including a marlin mounted on the wall. Cousens says he’s drawn inspiration from the other places where he’s lived, worked, and traveled. “You have to create the environment that you want to live in,” he says.
Filling the void left behind by Pepino’s is no easy task. “It was super popular over on this side of town,” Cousens says, adding, “They had a cult-like following, almost.” The family-owned restaurant opened in 1984 in Walled Lake under Joe Bernardi, a former executive chef at Ford Motor Co., relocating to Sylvan Lake after a 2015 fire. The owners told the Detroit News that they decided to close shop in 2021 amid a post-COVID-19 lockdown “labor shortage” in the hospitality industry, saying they could no longer find enough people to work there.
Cousens says he’s “on a mission” to help make Sylvan Lake and Keego Harbor — which are nestled among the lakes in this part of Oakland County — into a dining destination, joining other spots that have opened in recent years like the high-end Sylvan Table restaurant. He acknowledges that the communities are a bit out of the way for many local diners, and the presence of the large lakes mean there’s a lower population density than other parts of the metro Detroit area.
Cousens says the area is often overlooked, but charming. “It’s got an Up North feel, it’s got an East Coast feel,” he says, adding that he’s also working on deals on several other places nearby — and that he considers himself to be working alongside the other local restaurateurs, not against them. “We’re not trying to take a slice of the pie,” he says. “We’re trying to make the pie bigger.”
He adds, “I saw the potential for this little town. It’s neat. It’s like some weird hidden gem.”
Location Details
Location Details
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