Sitting at Casa Acoreana
There are a few café terraces I really love, like Caffè Beano at 9th Street and 17th Avenue in Calgary, or Social Club at St. Viateur and Esplanade in Montreal. They’re perfect places to watch the city, but they’re also interesting social spaces in and of themselves, with regular customers and even little cliques that seem to claim sections of the terraces for themselves.
My favourite outdoor café, though, has got to be the Casa Acoreana at the corner of Augusta and Baldwin in Toronto’s Kensington Market. The coffee here is pretty good, and it’s certainly cheap, but what I really like about the place is the way it opens onto the street, becoming a sidewalk café in the truest of senses. With barely more than a dozen seats inside, all of them running along a narrow bar facing open windows that give out onto Augusta, most of Casa Acoreana’s seating space is on benches or at the bar outside. It feels open and accessible in the same way as Kensington as a whole.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so entertained by simply sitting at a café as I did when I was at Casa Acoreana. This part of Toronto has some of the most engaging streetlife I’ve ever encountered, diverse in every possible way. Across the street, I liked to watch people shopping at the Sun Wah Grocery while late morning cyclists rode past.
Montreal Apartments