Cafe Japon owner Miyoko Honma plans to keep baking after restaurant closes

Owner Miyoko Honma is not renewing the lease for Cafe Japon's current location at 113 E. Liberty St. in downtown Ann Arbor, but that does not mean Honma is through baking.

The café will close at the end of June, but Honma will continue to bake bread and sell at the farmers market in Kerrytown on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and she is also looking into going back to school for nutritional science.

"I want to know exactly how the ingredients are working together, so that I can correct my bread and make it even better," Honma said. "When I was learning, my teachers would tell me what to do to make different things happen with the yeast or the dough, but I want to understand why it works, how it works."

Honma also has plans to open an artisan bakery in the Washtenaw County Food Hub on Whitmore Lake Road. in December or January. She wants to focus on using locally sourced and organic ingredients to make top-quality bread and pastries.

It will be a return to what she intended to do when she first opened the café.

"All I wanted to do was bake the perfect baguette," Honma said. "And then people started telling me you should cook this and you should add that. I just wanted to make bread!"

Honma spent 23 years working for DENSO, an automotive parts manufacturer, and playing piano on the side before "retiring" to the restaurant business. After going to New York to study at the French Culinary Institute, now the International Culinary Center, she moved to Ann Arbor to pursue her career in culinary arts. She opened Cafe Japon in 2007, but it was not an easy endeavor.

"I am a very demanding person, and everything has to be exactly right," she said. "So I would end up doing a lot of the cooking, a lot of the baking, a lot of the everything myself. I would sometimes be cooking for 30 straight hours without getting a chance to sleep."

Her diligence in the kitchen won her a large fan base. But even with a following, it was becoming difficult to keep the business afloat.

"To make money in the restaurant business you have to make compromises," Honma said. "I don't like making compromises, I'm stubborn. I like to use 100 percent organic flour, and pure honey and flour to really make everything taste right. But it's hard to do that and run a full restaurant."

According to Honman, the combination of top-quality ingredients she was using, and the lack of suitable seating space in her current location led to the decision to close shop.