Can you believe there was a time Amber Poupore didn't know how to cut an onion?
That's where her decades-long relationship with Royal Oak actually starts: January 2000, with Amber at the back door of Inn Season, hired for whatever they needed and willing to do anything.
"Really. I didn't even know how to cut an onion,” she recalls with a smile. “I mean, literally. That is how new to food I was."
Within weeks she was running the pantry line.
“Working at Inn Season really showed me what I wanted when I did open my own business,” she says, tearing up at the memory.
In our previous feature article about Amber [“The Café That Heals”], she talked about how the depression she'd carried for years—the dangerous situations, the relationships that hurt her—began to lift when she started eating real food.
She thought she knew where she was headed. She completed an international Waldorf teaching certification in her mid-twenties, imagining a classroom and children of her own. Instead she’s been hosting cooking classes at Cacao Tree for years. And the restaurant she birthed is about to turn fifteen in October.
Amber once did a cooking demo for teenagers in a mental health unit on a Navajo Nation reservation. Afterward, she got back in the car and told her colleague: I could die today and feel complete.
But she’s not complete yet. She lost her second restaurant, Clean Plate, in 2018, and cried almost every day for a year. The Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program helped her find her footing… and led her to opening a new café in St. Clair Shores called Herban Grounds."
“It's the manifestation of my vision from my Goldman Sachs program and all the years I've been trying to do this,” Amber says. “I think this is really going to be the one that really unfolds."
The woman who didn’t know how to cut an onion has fed thousands, and taught hundreds how to feed themselves.
Complete? She’s just getting started.
Cacao Tree Café is at 204 West Fourth Street, Royal Oak — cacaotreecafe.com