Morning Coffee: Bombay’s Zoroastrian Cafes

Zoroastrian carving, Bombay. Thanks to Toreajade.

Bombay’s Zoroastrian community emigrated from Iran about 1,000 years ago and brought their religion along with them–the oldest living monotheistic faith. They are also known as Parsis, because of their Persian origin. Since they cannot marry outside the community, they have retained a distinct identity and appearance. They worship in Bombay’s towers of silence. where sky burials are also performed–a practice that has come under scrutiny in recent years because of the declining vulture population.

Though Zoroastrians represent a mere 0.005% of India’s population, they have had a considerable impact on the country. In the West, the best known Parsi is probably Queen singer Freddy Mercury, who grew up in Bombay. Indians are more familiar with the Tata family, who seem to own everything–you start your day with a cup of TataTea, pay your TataPower bills, drive to work in your TataCar, and make calls on the TataSky network. In recent years, the Tatas have moved outside of India, acquiring Tetley tea, Ritz Carlton Hotels, and Jaguar.

Kyani Café, Bombay

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Morning Coffee #10: Café Ekberg, Helsinki

Inside Café Ekberg, Helsinki

Most people don’t think of coffee when you mention Helsinki. The usual things that come to mind are death metal bands, formula one racers, and blonde people. Nevertheless, statistics show that Finns are the biggest coffee drinkers on earth. They drink almost twice as much coffee as the French, and nearly three times more than us. It is no surprise that Helsinki, the capital city, has loads of great coffee shops.

But I don’t drink coffee, though I still like to linger in cafés. So I stopped by the oldest café in town: Café Ekberg, which opened on February 3, 1852. It is small, yet quiet and sophisticated. More importantly, it provided me with the instant shelter from the chilly Finnish winter I was seeking.

I went for a delicious frothy hot chocolate. The place was full of formal Finns in evening attire. But then the sun rose and I remembered it was daytime, 10:00 AM, still somewhat dark, not really helping my jet lag. I looked around at the stiff elderly blond women and quiet gentlemen serving themselves heaping plates at the Nordic breakfast buffet table. I felt surreal, like an extra in a David Lynch movie, or should I say Aki Kaurismäki.

But that’s how I expected to feel in Finland, so there wasn’t any culture shock.

Outside the Bio Rex Cinema café, Helsinki

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.

“It Was Too Funky to Last”

McGill architecture students Jessica Dan (left) and Aurore Paluel-Marmont work at the Architecture Café, which is slated to be replaced by a corporate licensee. Photo by John Kenney

Like all good secrets, the Architecture Café is a bit hard to find, tucked as it is in the basement of McGill University’s School of Architecture.

Most students, unless they have a class in the lecture hall next door, are unlikely to come across it by chance. Yet this non-profit student-run café has long been one of the most popular spaces on campus, filled throughout the day with students and faculty from across the university.

At lunchtime, a line usually bends out the door and down a hallway as customers file in for sandwiches, pastries, zaatar and bargain-priced coffee.

Many see the café, started in 1993, as an alternative to the other cafeterias at McGill, which are run by such corporate licensees as Chartwells, a subsidiary of Compass Group Canada.

As students head back to classes, they might find that the last student-operated café at Montreal’s oldest university is packing up for good: McGill’s administration has ordered it closed.

According to Morton Mendelson, deputy provost of student life and learning, the move reflects the administration’s efforts to centralize food service on campus as a means to ensure health safety.

But since news of the café’s fate broke in early August, students have rallied behind a drive to keep it alive. A Facebook group called Save the Architecture Café, founded by the café’s student operators, drew more than 1,500 current and former McGill students as members within a week.

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Blood, Sweat and Tea

After Hong Kong, mainland China came as a major shock. Hong Kong is user-friendly with a Westernized veneer whereas Guangzhou (also known as Canton) was the real China: a difficult crowded place with no English signs and clouds of brown smog.

Ninety-nine percent of the storefronts in Hong Kong are spotless and air-conditioned, most of the filth relegated to back rooms. In Guangzhou, things come raw, in-your-face, and it’s all quite strange: sun-dried snakes; stretched-out sea horses; sliced up deer antlers; giant plastic bowls full of live scorpions; cat, dog, and owl butchers; barrels of chicken feet; steaming turtle shells. Somehow the Cantonese manage to find a culinary use for all this. Semiconductor shops sit next to dried seafood stalls. Two-storey ten-lane highways zoom next to quiet flagstone alleyways shaded by clotheslines where old people play mahjong. Life happens on the street, things flow organically, and interiors are indistinguishable from exteriors.

As I made my way out of the crowded alleyways of Qingping market, I came across a group of cops kicking a handcuffed old man in rags, scowls of anger on their faces as the victim yelled out obscenities in Cantonese. A circle of bystanders stood by, watching. The man was writhing in pain, yet the cops kept kicking him in the crotch. It was barbaric and unprofessional. I was horrified. God knows what he had done. He probably hadn’t paid his weekly bribe to stand on the corner selling pickled eel heads.

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Arriverderci Tivoli

Almost every city has a collection of neighbourhood institutions, businesses known and used by such a wide variety of people that they become convenient meeting places as well as local reference points, secure admist the great of spasms of change in the city beyond. Some of these places seem to be fuelled on nostalgia alone, their outmoded menu and decor sought by people eager to recall earlier days. The best of them, however, have lasted so long because they have never failed to provide the great food and memorable ambiance that made them popular in the first place.

The New Tivoli Restaurant seemed to fall into the latter category. For three decades, the Gardanis family supplied the corner of St. Clair and Dufferin in Toronto with coffee and comfort food; in return, they were rewarded with a loyal and diverse clientele from the surrounding neighbourhood. “It ruled the eastern boundary of Corso Italia, whatever the mood, fashion or World Cup Champion. It was like the old sweater that you couldn’t part with—a bit frayed and rough-around-the-edges, but a constant source of comfort and security,” writes the designer and photographer Mondo Lulu, who lived above the restaurant.

Thanks to his uniquely intimate relationship to the restaurant—he calls its staff and owners his “second family”—Lulu was able to create a particularly engaging collection of photos that document life at the Tivoli. Last fall, when rising rents forced the restaurant to close, Lulu’s photos became a record of its existence as a focus of life on St. Clair. Many of Lulu’s photos can be seen on Flickr. Those of you in Toronto, however, might want to check out his photos in person, at the “Arrivederci Tivoli: Photos from the Centre of the Universe” exhibit. It opened this weekend and runs until June 7 at the Side Space Gallery, 1080 St. Clair West.

“After the SOS/ROW row, it looks like the hood is in healing mode,” Lulu told me last month. “I’m hoping that my show will be key in that, since the Tiv was the place where all factions laid down their arms in the name of bacon.”

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Morning Coffee #9: Grounded

Manhattan, April 21, 2007: “My nose is going haywire this morning. Perhaps this is because when I travel I have to put off my morning brew until I can get from my hotel to a decent coffeehouse. Am I ever glad, then, that I discovered Grounded.”

I am a coffee fiend. Each day I venture out from work for an extended lunch break at my local coffeehouse, where I ruminate over a Fair Trade, organically-grown dark roast blend, a newspaper, and a notebook. Naturally, when I travel, I do not like to give up this daily routine. However, since finding a good independent coffeehouse is often left to word-of-mouth recommendation, I am sometimes forced to suffice with below-grade medium roast coffee or to chance it on espressos made by inexperienced baristas.

While my previous coffeehouse experiences in New York have been hit-and-miss, I seem to have stumbled over a great, unpretentious spot to enjoy a brew and gather my thoughts between bouts of aggressive phototouring. Lodged into a fifteen foot-wide crack between Victorian buildings on Jane Street in the West Village, Grounded is difficult to find amidst the brownstone rowhouses that fold over one another in this maze of a neighbourhood. To this travelling Canadian, though, it appeared as an oasis — an independent coffeehouse in the Village that serves fair trade coffee, isn’t overpriced, and hasn’t been overrun by scenesters or stroller moms.

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Morning Coffee #8: The Boss

Milk tea at a cha chaan teng in Hong Kong. Photo by Lisi Tang

It was the Saturday before the Lunar New Year and The Boss was crazy. People crammed inside the small bakery that fronts this old Chinatown restaurant, buying cakes, buns and cookies. Others stood around, waiting for their names to be called so they could finally be seated. Hungry, we pushed through the crowd and gave our name to the host. Then we waited. My girlfriend’s sister decided to buy a box of cocktail and curry buns. As she walked towards the counter, I stared at a large painting of a rosy-cheeked, contented old man that loomed over the bakery, flanked on both sides by festive red New Year banners with gold script. His long white beard flowed towards large pots of gold coins that rested at his feet.

“Who’s that?” I whispered to my girlfriend, Laine.

“Choi Sun wah,” she whispered back. “The, uh, god of wealth.”

When our name was called, we went to the rear of the bustling restaurant where there was a long dining hall with four rows of booths. My eyes wandered to the back of the restaurant, A strangely dour-looking jiu choi mao, or lucky cat, was perched on a ledge near the ceiling, its paw solemnly raised to beckon good fortune. As I stared at the cat, a remarkably fast-moving waitress placed four glasses of tea on the table and slapped down our menus before running off. I opened mine, stomach growling. My eyes widened as I perused the dozens of items: ox-tongue spaghetti, lovebird fried rice, baked Portuguese chicken, Hong Kong milk tea. Ah yes, this is what I had come for: cha chaan teng food.

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Retro Malls and Department Store Kitsch

Like many teenagers in suburbia, I spent too much time in shopping malls. Unlike others, there was a purpose to my wandering. My goal was to find the quintessential department store restaurant. This dream restaurant would have a somewhat dated charm: brown and orange wallpaper, faux-traditional 1970s furnishings, waitresses with Marge Simpson hair, Jell-O cube parfaits, and pumped-out muzak with French horns galore. I scoured the Quebec City region’s K-Mart Kafeterias, Woolco Grilles, and the sketchy department stores in St. Roch.

Then, sometime in 1994, I came across the Sears Café at Place Fleur-de-Lys. It exceeded all my expectations. The walls were dark brown, the lighting was muted and I dined enveloped in the sounds of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass. The furniture was the finest from Sears’ colonial revival series circa 1975. The menu was unreal: you could eat a “veal steakette” and top it all off with Jell-O parfaits in a variety of colours. The daily special even came with its own retractable plastic lid. My dream had come true. I had reached restaurant nirvana.

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Quebec City Tour #4: Rue Couillard

One of my favourite streets in old Quebec is rue Couillard. It is narrow, mostly residential, and less than 0.2 km long. The street lies on a wavy tangent off the main tourist strip. There are surprises around every bend: New France cottages built in the 1600s, Victorian-era monasteries, and early 20th-century apartment buildings. Let’s go for a walk.

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Morning Coffee #7: Cafés in Old Cairo

El Fishawy is the best known café in Cairo
and a favourite of Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz

Mention Cairo, and the first things that come to mind are the pyramids. Why do I consider this unfortunate? Because the pyramids are a remnant of a dead civilization, and Cairo today is a living city of 16 million people. Let me suggest a better symbol: the cafés of Khan-el-Khalili, a living microcosm of Egypt’s metropolis.

Cairo’s cafés are many things at once. Sometimes, they have the social buzz of a nightclub or pub. You can often count on the Egyptian smoking a shisha next to you to strike up a conversation. I even saw some French tourists at a nearby table who seemed to be flirting with two Egyptian women in conservative Muslim headgear. Somewhere beyond the shisha haze was a family in party hats celebrating their kid’s birthday surrounded by golden trays crammed with large frothy milkshakes. A café isn’t a café without, well, introspective café types: reading, quietly sipping their dark mint tea, or scribbling away.

Cafés are habitually doorless and windowless. The interiors spill out onto the streets and the suq spills into the cafés. Cairo’s most famous café, the Fishawy, is a series of mirrors and ornate doorframes crammed into a through street. The street is used by shopkeepers, trinket vendors, and pedestrians, who brush against the tables. Sometimes the people-watching seems a little too intimate but this is Cairo: dense, chaotic, and wonderful.

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Portraits of a Neighbourhood

They stare at you—seven faces, their expressions ranging from jubilant to amused to vaguely perplexed. They are portraits of Café Olimpico’s employees, pasted above a bookstore at the corner of St. Viateur and Waverly Sts., right across the street from the well-known Mile End café (also known as Open Da Night). They first began to emerge last winter, with a portrait of the baby-faced Phil; he was soon joined by the rest of the Olimpico staff.

The man responsible for them is Francisco Garcia, an artist whose posters have, over the past year, become fixtures in Mile End and the Plateau. “I’ve always liked doing faces,” Garcia said on a chilly November evening, sitting outside on Olimpico’s terrasse. “I guess I just thought it was funny.”

He explained his process for making the portraits. First, he took a photograph of each staff member. Then he reduced the image to two tones in Photoshop, projected it onto canvas, drew an outline and filled it in with shades of grey paint. After transferring the portraits onto recycled posters, he pasted them on the empty plywood space above the bookstore L’Écume des jours, opposite Café Olimpico, over a period of seven months.

The end result is seven striking paintings that draw the eye to an otherwise unremarkable white brick building. “It’s tough, you know. I’ve got to find the right shades of grey and everything. It’s not just paint-by-numbers,” insisted Garcia, smiling self-effacingly as he fidgeted with a cigarette.

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Morning Coffee #6: La Croissanterie

On a recent evening, I sat in La Croissanterie, a small café on Ste. Catherine Street in the west end of downtown Montreal. Before me was a café au lait and a warm apple turnover. Next to me sat a mousy English student whose notes were sprawled across the table. La Croissanterie is a strange little place, its wood-panelled, green-accented interior lost between an alpine lodge and a kitschy casse-croûte, but since I started working nearby earlier this month, it has quickly become my favourite downtown coffee shop.

Part of the reason for that is La Croissanterie’s unabashed, endearing hominess. Its mostly anglophone clientele, a mix of students and random downtowners, lounge in their seats as if they were in a basement rec room. The menu is decidedly quaint, with comfort-food staples like pâté chinois (a Quebec version of shepherd’s pie) cozying up to the café’s namesake: fresh, gloriously crispy croissants baked on-site throughout the day by the café’s friendly immigrant owners.

Another part of what attracts me to this unassuming café is, quite simply, its good value. In my years of drinking caffeinated beverages in Montreal, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a definite correlation between high-quality coffee shops and low prices. La Croissanterie is no exception. A mug of café au lait—the espresso rich and smooth, the milk thick and frothy—costs only $2.25, tax included. A croissant costs just one dollar. Best of all is the daily special: a ham, cheese and egg sandwich on a croissant, with a café au lait, for $4.25. My mouth waters just thinking about it.

The strange decor, the relaxed atmosphere, the good value—all of it give La Croissanterie the air of a throwback to the days before downtown Montreal was monopolized by bland chain cafés. More

Can’t Get Enough of Berlin

Warschauer Strasse, Friedrichshain

Kastanienallee, Prenzlauer Berg

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