LANSING — When PetalPop Cafe opens its doors off West Ionia Street next month the flavors of its menu will pay homage to its name, and the woman who inspired the business.
Lucile Belen, a former Lansing City Councilperson who died in 2010, ran Belen’s Flowers at the building in the 500 block of West Ionia Street for 60 years. She founded Belen’s School of Floral Design in the 1950s.
“She was a great lady,” said Syreeta Brown, one of the new restaurant’s owners. “She was right at the forefront for women.”
PetalPop Cafe’s aesthetic and menu honors her, Brown said. The breakfast and lunch spot will serve pancakes and biscuits infused with notes of lavender, rose or hibiscus. So will some of its sodas and mocktails. Expect “comfort food with a twist,” Brown said.
The cafe will serve breakfast sandwiches, shrimp and grits, chicken and waffles and burgers. There’s a house-made bacon jam and a “PetalPop salad” that Brown held back details on.
“You will have to come in and order it to know what I’m talking about because it’s a surprise,” she said.
Brown, a Lansing resident with Northern Michigan roots, has worked in restaurant management for years.
Opening PetalPop Cafe is her opportunity to give back to the community with her own recipes, she said.
“It brings community together to an area where they need something,” Brown said. “The community has kind of been great to me and I’d like to be great to it.”
‘All of them are my recipes’
The building at 519 W. Ionia St., once home to Belen’s Flowers and a century old, underwent a $1.4 million renovation about seven years ago. Most recently it was home to SaltRock Brewing CO., a restaurant that closed in May of 2025, less than a year after it opened.
The interior space has been transformed into a floral-inspired cafe, Brown said. It sports a bright color scheme, and a colorful flower mural will fill one wall.
“We want it to be something where people come in, they feel welcome, they want to hang out,” she said.
For Brown, who moved from Sault Ste. Marie to Lansing in the late 1990s and raised six children here, the cafe is her opportunity to be creative with food. She and fellow owner Lillian Schmidt have been testing recipes and sharing them with family to come up with the right offerings.
“All of them are my recipes,” Brown said. “My daughters have actually been going through them.”
Their yays and nays have been heavily considered, she said. Ultimately, the dishes that have made the cut are ones that ownership and her children agreed are the best, Brown said.
“We’ve kind of become a little blended family here,” she said.
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Cafe expected to open in March
PetalPop Cafe is expected to open sometime in the first half of March, Brown said.
The restaurant will offer dine-in seating for about 64 people, she said. The cafe will also offer patio seating.
Take out and delivery, through services including DoorDash and UberEats, will be available.
The cafe’s ownership is currently hiring, Brown said. The aim is to hire less than half a dozen staff to start, she said. Additional staff will be hired after the cafe opens.
To follow PetalPop Cafe’s progress look them up on Facebook at “PetalPop Cafe.”
Contact Reporter Rachel Greco at rgreco@lsj.com. Follow her on X @GrecoatLSJ.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: PetalPop Cafe to open in Lansing, offering comfort food ‘with a twist’
Reporting by Rachel Greco, Lansing State Journal / Lansing State Journal
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