Morning Coffee: Toronto’s Café Aesthetic

I Deal Coffee

The Communal Mule

I was looking forward to spending three days in Toronto last year: good food, fun times with friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, aimless autumnal wandering. Instead I was waylaid by a terrible cold I developed on the train from Montreal. I spent much of my time drowning my miseries in the city’s cafés — about five over the course of the weekend, if I recall correctly.

It turns out that drinking lots of milky, caffeinated beverages is the last thing you want to do when you have a horrible respiratory infection. (Also a no-no: hanging out in public places and spreading your germs.) Even if it didn’t make me feel better, though, I appreciated Toronto’s café aesthetic, which seems to lead towards messy spaces with rickety furniture, limited signage and casual, almost indifferent service.

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This Café is Seething! Guy-Concordia Station

DCorbeil | Passage, Montréal 2010

Guy-Concordia Station : 18h37. Il y à cette foule touffue, opaque, qui me traverse sans même me voir. Je suis là, pourtant, à multiplier les clichés de cette cohue fébrile et qui s’agglutine, comme le mercure qui se déverse sur le sol. Une tâche métallique, au reflet d’un soleil au bord du crépuscule.

Concordia University, un nom qui résonne et qui rebondit, de sa longueur et de son élan, le long des parois académiques de ces pavillons de verre éclaté. Mille milliers de ces étudiants qui piétinent et qui vocifèrent dans tous les sens. Étourdissement, asphyxie. Un tourbillon humanoïde.

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Morning Coffee: Café Olimpico

DCORBEIL | Un caffè et un rêve, 2009

« En chemin, la pluie reprend vigueur et me rattrape rue Saint-Viateur. Je plonge, tête première, au Olimpico. La terrasse, partiellement à l’abri de notre climat capricieux, est déjà bondée par une foule bigarrée de fumeurs, accrocs du caffè, de Bobos, de m’as-tu-vus et autres lesbiennes dépravées. Aussi quelques habitués : le fou du village, le boulanger du coin. Une petite fille seule, l’air débile. Et moi, un peu à l’écart, un peu inclus dans le groupe.

Caffè macchiato, que je commande dans un italien trop confiant. On me sert, et je demande un verre d’eau, pour authentifier mon origine catanaise. Je donne un pourboire généreux, nonchalamment, tout en jetant un regard rassuré sur la mine heureuse du barrista. Les affaires sont les affaires, et je ne suis pas un cheap. De toute façon, je calcule qu’on me sert ici un café parmi les meilleurs en ville, pour un prix dérisoire. J’investis donc dans le service, même si ce dernier est toujours un peu laborieux. Et pas très volontaire.

M’installant sur une des tables qui longent la large fenestration, je constate que je suis bien seul ici. Même le fou du village se retrouve au centre d’une petite bande d’hurluberlus. Il reçoit un appel, ça semble important. Peut-être brasse-t-il des affaires. Des trucs louches. La drogue ? je m’interroge. Je penche davantage pour la porno, avec son air de pervers, ses culottes noires et délavées. Son veston vieillot, trop petit pour son ventre protubérant. Sa tête échevelée. Son regard perdu. Il est grotesque et se couvre de ridicule. Malgré tout, le barrista l’interpelle comme on le ferait un ami. Malgré sa mine bête, il fait partie de la place.

Alors que moi je suis seul. Un imposteur, une imposture. Un voyeur même. Un autre type de perversion.

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Coffee and a Newspaper

Café Myriade, Mackay Street, Montreal

Morning Coffee: Bo(ok)hemian

Sometimes good things do come from the pages of Lonely Planet. Normally (in Southeast Asia, at least), visiting one of the bars or restaurants recommended in its pages will lead you to a place filled Lonely Planet readers of the most insufferable sort. Bo(ok)hemian is not one of those places. Despite its goofy name, it’s a nicely ramshackle hangout in the oldest part of Phuket, stocked with used Thai books and local art. The coffee is great, too, and cheap.

It was a quiet evening when I visited late last month. Most of the nearby shops had already closed for the day. Two Thai twentysomethings sat at a table on the sidewalk, eyes fixed on a white Macbook, while a Chinese couple looked through the books. Gig posters and indie CDs were on display near the cafe’s entrance. I couldn’t help but think that Bo(ok)hemian represented another face of globalization, the kind described in Andrew Potter’s book The Rebel Sell: a localized version of the same indie culture that can be found in Mile End, the Lower East Side and Kensington Market.

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Morning Coffee: Coffee on Demand

Coffee is a big part of the social life of Saigon, a city that somehow manages to be both languid and relentlessly energetic in nearly equal measure. Hundreds of cafés and coffee stands dot the city: relaxed neighbourhood hangouts with a few plastic seats out front to watch the city go by; leafy park cafés where middle-aged women chat and men bring birdcages; multistoried cafés with elaborate fountains and gardens, oases hidden in unremarkable lanes. But even when there isn’t a café, it’s still easy to get coffee.

On a warm afternoon earlier this week, a few friends and I found ourselves in a small park in District 1, just around the corner from the Notre-Dame Basilica and Saigon’s tourist hub. Not long after we sat down, a woman came up to us and asked us if we wanted any coffee. We ordered three cà phê sữa đá (iced coffee with condensed milk) and one black iced coffee. About five minutes later, a man on a motorbike arrived with the coffees in a wire tray and the woman brought them to us. We paid 26,000 dong (about $1.80) for the four drinks.

Somehow, the fact that the coffee woman was wearing a Parasuco t-shirt emblazoned with the words “Montréal, Québec, Canada” made the candy-sweet coffee even more delicious.

Hot Coffee on a Chilly Afternoon

Inside the Social Club café, St. Viateur Street, on a cold November afternoon in 2006

Chess, Mahjong and Pi

My friends always swore by Café Pi. I never really shared their opinion (its food isn’t great and neither is its coffee) but I could at least appreciate it, since Pi’s customers are an odd mix of students and chess players, all of whom pack into the café’s jarring red-and-black confines until they are kicked out at midnight — closing time. The chess players, nearly all men, are impossible to categorize by appearance or origin, but they all share the same seriousness and the same intensity. This becomes obvious a couple of times a year, during the St. Laurent street fair, when Pi spills out into the street.

Morning Coffee: Coffee on Cuba

Midnight Espresso Cafe on Cuba Street in Wellington, New Zealand

Wellington has more cafes per capita than Manhattan. At least that is what I was told numerous times by New Zealanders when I mentioned my impending trip to their nation’s capital. Upon arriving in late April, I discovered that the coffee houses of Wellington are indeed plentiful and quite cool, offering a great assortment of coffee and some absolutely delicious cafe fare. Some of Wellington’s best cafes are located along the city’s peculiarly named Cuba Street in the Cuba Quarter.

Cuba Street, and Cuba Mall in particular, is the hangout for many of Wellington’s university and college aged residents. The Cuba Mall refers to two pedestrianized blocks of Cuba Street, between Manners Mall and Ghuznee Street. In addition to numerous cafes, Cuba Street is also home to trendy clothing stores, record shops, small art galleries, ethnic restaurants, and a gay bar, each catering predominantly to an eclectic mix of students from the nearby Te Aro campus of Victoria University, and of course tourists.

Cuba street gets its name from a ship which arrived from Britain in 1840 carrying with it some of New Zealand’s early settlers. Despite it’s British roots, many Cuban flags are visible along the street and there is even a cafe called ‘Fidel’s Cafe’ who’s decor pays homage to the Cuban dictator. The oddity of this Cuban connection in New Zealand’s capital city gives the neighbourhood an intriguing, almost altruistic feel. The area is clearly the epicentre of Wellington’s counter-culture, where, local establishments, the cafes in particular, have cultivated a vibrancy not usually found in a city of its size.

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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: 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

Morning Coffee: 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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