Robert Encarnación was a Bank of America small-business banker in Miami before he moved to Detroit. He came up for a weekend in April 2019. By the end of June he had moved.
Fast even by Detroit-relocation standards. He spent the pandemic teaching himself latte art with a French press. In April 2021 he bought a building from the Detroit Land Bank at 8016 Kercheval in West Village and started planning two concepts inside one address.
La Fonda Street, the Latin American street-food restaurant, opened in summer 2024. Encarnación, the coffee shop, soft-launched in November 2024. The official ribbon cutting for both came March 26, 2025, with Deputy Mayor Melia Howard on hand.
The city marked it as Motor City Match's 181st brick-and-mortar opening. The restaurant is the louder of the two halves. The Dominican Bowl (rice, beans, Dominican stewed chicken, lettuce, sweet plantains) is the lunch order people come back for.
The pupusas, empanadas, cachapas, and Venezuelan-style arepas fill out a menu that runs a serious cross-section of Latin America. Most of it falls between $2 and $17. Taco Tuesday is $2 a taco, which is the kind of detail that builds a regular crowd inside six months.
La Fonda Street landed at number four on Detroit Free Press's 2025 Top 10 New Restaurants list, which was a heavy result for a restaurant most people had not yet heard of. The coffee shop runs out of the front of the same building. The Encarnación Original is a signature espresso drink with sweetened condensed milk, the kind of pull a Miami café would produce on muscle memory.
The bean program is strictly Latin American. Encarnación's longer point shows up in his interviews. He is a Dominican immigrant who bought a building from the city's land bank, self-funded the buildout through inflation-driven cost overruns, and ended up running two businesses on a corner that had been vacant before he showed up.
He has been pretty direct that he sees displacement coming for West Village if Detroit residents don't invest in Detroit. He has also said he came up through the bank's Detroit small-business book and knows a lot of people who could afford to put money into their own neighborhoods, and that they should.
The two concepts together count as Motor City Match's 181st brick-and-mortar opening, with Encarnación running both out of a building that had been vacant on the block before he bought it.
8016 Kercheval Ave., Detroit.
