Steve Kupferman

Café Tour #3 - The Green Beanery (Bloor and Bathurst, Southeast Corner)

(Rotate right to see the place.)

The Green Beanery is located directly opposite Lettieri (a.k.a. Café Tour stop number one), which makes them, I guess, Lettieri's arch coffee nemesis.

I will say this: their coffee is a lot better than Lettieri's.  It's that weird kind of coffee that's just a little bitter, with no lingering aftertaste—really clean on the palate.  They roast it themselves.  It's about $1.50 for a "regular" sized cup (as opposed to a large).  Also, their cookies are only about $2.25 each, after tax, which is a really good price considering how big these cookies are, and how tasty.  The flavors are really interesting, too.  Like, instead of chocolate chip, they sell "salted chocolate chip."  And the salt looks like that special salt that gets sold in little seven-dollar jars, with blurbs on the labels talking about how each grain was harvested by hand, in France, from sea waters that only tall, slim Western European people have ever bathed in.  Such value.  The cookies must be a loss leader for the drinks.

Those are the only nice things I have to say about this place.  Otherwise, I have only a litany of hate.

For starters, no wi-fi.  There are always people with laptops sitting inside, drinking their coffee and typing away.  What are they doing?  How do they concentrate without Gawker auto-refreshing every ten minutes in the background?

The interior is done up in the increasingly popular "luxury bomb shelter" style, with attractively, intentionally distressed brick walls and exposed duct work on the ceiling.  In the back, there's what looks like a former bank vault, with an actual vault door.  It's been repurposed as a conference room, and there's a sign nearby that invites customers to rent it by the hour. 

There's a big circular counter that takes up most of the front of the store, staffed by a rotating crew of young go-getters in aprons.  There's a computer behind the counter that clearly is connected to the internet; the management has just decided not to share.  Half the floor is occupied by racks of coffee implements and sacks of green, unroasted coffee beans (hence the name, I guess), all of which are for sale.

The crowd skews towards people in their early- to mid-twenties.  They perch  on the cushy leather seats and bask in the glow of the Honest Ed's marquee, which dominates the large windows on the space's western side.  With no free internet access, I can only speculate as to why so many of them come.  Maybe it's because The Green Beanery is owned by Probe International, a charity that apparently is engaged in improving conditions in the third world.  Or maybe they're there for the coffee.

Verdict: Feh.

Café Tour #2 - Aroma (500 Bloor St. W)

(Rotate right to see the place.)

Aroma is is a pretty popular place.  I've never seen it less than half occupied, even at 9 a.m., when the members of the rush hour crowd have already made it to their offices with their takeout coffees, and it's only us wi-fi leeches and newspaper readers occupying the tables and bar stools.  The place gets packed around lunchtime, and again around 3 p.m.

Aroma's popularity might have something to do with its lush interior design.  The seats are swivel chairs, covered in cushy red velvet upholstery.  The floors are done up in black tile, and the walls are black too—painted to match.  There are all sorts of dark corners near the back of the shop to hide in, and there's even a little faux fireplace bolted to the rear wall, that as far as I can tell does not emit heat, but looks nice in winter.  Some of the walls in the rear are lined with mirrors, so you can constantly reassure yourself that you are a fine looking human being, as you sit with your laptop and do important internet things.  Aroma is basically what would happen if someone set up a coffee shop in an executive washroom.

Wi-fi is password-free and extremely reliable.  They sell brewed coffee, but I prefer a small Americano, which costs $2.26 and is delicious (this from someone with no particular affinity for coffee).  All drinks come with bite-sized chocolate bars.  Be sure not to leave yours too close to your drink, or it will melt.  The food looks really good, but it's too expensive, so I haven't tried it.  A sandwich is almost eight dollars, but it does, at least, come on tasty-seeming house-baked bread.

The counter staff at Aroma are ruthlessly efficient and all female, seemingly the product of some kind of Darwinian training camp for espresso bar servers, from which only the most competent and the most beautiful emerge alive.  There are male staff, but they're all either in the kitchen or on janitorial duty, barely visible while they make sandwiches, bus tables, and perform other drone work.  The exception is the manager, a guy, who seems like he pretty much pitches in wherever he's needed.  Other patrons are a mix of young and old, with very few homeless-looking people in the mix.  The atmosphere is so wholesome that people regularly come in with their kids.  There's even a patio for people who like a little air and light with their drink or food.

The one thing I truly hate about Aroma is the music.  I'm no snob when it comes to these things, but it seems to me that there is really no excuse for hours of non-stop easy listening music from the '70's, '80s and '90s.  My theory is that this is some kind of psychological tactic, to keep wi-fi users from getting too comfortable.  This would be a sensible strategy for a café with as much throughput as Aroma has—a diabolical strategy, but a sensible one.

The shocking thing I learned about Aroma while researching this post is that it is actually part of an international chain that was founded in Israel, where there are currently something like ninety Aroma franchises (according to Wikipedia).  Aroma is, in other words, the Israeli Starbucks.  They have a couple branches in New York City, and three in Toronto.

Their Israeli logo is just the English words "Aroma Espresso Bar" spelled phonetically in Hebrew.  My Hebrew school education pays off once again.

Verdict: I like my coffee shops a little rattier than this, personally.

Café Tour #1 - Lettieri (Bloor and Bathurst, Southwest Corner)

(Rotate left to see the place.)

Today I made the first stop on my loiterer's tour of Bloor Street's cafés between Spadina and Christie, with a two-hour post-breakfast visit to Lettieri, on the southwest corner of Bathurst and Bloor, under the Honest Ed's marquee.

Lettieri has the distinction of being the only spot on the corner of Bathurst and Bloor from which Honest Ed's famous 40,000 watt self-promotion apparatus isn't visible, which is either a huge advantage or a huge drawback, depending on your opinion of Mr. Ed.  Me?  I vacillate.  It depends on my mood.  Today was an anti-Ed day.  Damn eyesore.

Lettieri is located at the corner of Honest Ed's, meaning it's exposed to the street on two sides.  Both street-facing walls are lined with large windows.  The windows have adjustable shades, so you can block the sun in the event of laptop screen glare.  The counter people are totally fine with it.  There's a stripe of green transparent stuff at the bottom of the windows that casts a pretty candy-colored shadow over the floor.

And about those counter people.  There are two who work in the mornings, usually―sometimes separately and sometimes together.  A guy and a girl, both in their late twenties, I think.  They're both polite, and they tend to talk amongst themselves when not handling specific customer requests.  Establish a friendly but not overly chummy rapport with them, because the wi-fi password changes every single day and you will need to ask them for it over and over again, several times a week.  It's always the name of a menu item, but there are like fifty to pick from, and you wouldn't want to have to go at it by process of elimination.

Wi-fi speeds are solid when the network is up.  Every so often something will go wrong with the router, though.  When this occurs, you will need to locate the manager, a middle-aged man who hovers around the front of the store on many days.  He will spend twenty or thirty minutes poking at his iPhone in a heartfelt but lengthy attempt to fix the problem, before everything resolves itself.  Frantic attempts to guess the passwords of the dozen or so nearby WPA-protected networks are never rewarded.  Power outlets are scarce, but there's one right behind the seat at the back of the store, which, for my money, is the best seat in the house, anyway.

The food is all really expensive, and so I haven't tried any of it.  Sandwiches are about $6.50 for what looks like two or three slices of meat, and a couple slices of cheese on some not-bad looking ciabatta.  Pastries and cookies look tasty, but possibly mass-produced.  In addition to coffee, they serve different kinds of flavored teas and lattes, which I stay away from.  They serve juice, too.  I know this because every time they turn on the juicer it sounds like they're revving up a leaf blower behind the counter.  Coffee is self-serve, and it's not bad.  A medium is $1.73.

But lest it sound like I'm totally against Lettieri, let me say that I find the place to be an extremely comfortable work environment.  The seating is on these great wooden benches with raised backs, covered in worn black paint.  They're not luxurious, but they're adequate for lounging, with plenty of extra space for bags and coats.  There are also chairs, if you like chairs.  The music comes from a little red boom-box, permanently set to the all-Jazz-all-the-time radio station.  It's pleasant.  And people stream by those huge street-facing windows continually, and you can sneakily eye them while they're distracted by the Honest Ed's spectacle above you.

Other patrons are a nice mix of young professionals who work in the area, semi-employed wi-fi leeches, and old people.  They keep mostly to themselves.

Verdict: This is a good morning haunt.  I hope they don't read what I wrote about their juicer and start unplugging the router when I arrive.

Today, I had a disturbing garage sale experience.

Garage sale season is officially happening now, in Toronto.  I enjoy getting up early on sunny weekends and doing a little bargain hunting on my bike.  It's a fun way to explore parts of residential Toronto that I wouldn't ordinarily think to visit.  And finding cheap, nice stuff gives me a weird kind of caveman-with-fresh-kill shot of endorphins that makes all the morning biking not so hard to do.  But garage sale items do have one major drawback, in comparison to shiny new stuff from the mall: they come with baggage.

Today I biked out to Danforth and Broadview for what was advertised on Craigslist as a multi-family street sale.  Multi-family sales are usually good to visit first thing, because you get to sort through the accumulated junk of multiple households and it's not all picked through by the time you get there.  But the Craigslist ad was misleading.  It wasn't families that were doing the selling; it was a bunch of cranky old antiques collectors hawking last season's leftovers on one of their buddies' front lawns.  One of them spent ten minutes trying to sell "vintage Ray-Ban" sunglasses to a credulous looking kid in a pea coat for $200.  Ridiculous.

On my way back west I noticed a sign advertising a contents sale.  Contents sales are like garage sales, but they're infinitely more desperate.  Where garage sales are conducted mainly by people looking to rid themselves of clutter, contents sales are usually put on by professional liquidators, hired by the owner of an estate to sell off the entire contents of a home, fast.  It's usually a matter of grandma or grandpa having just died, and none of the relatives wanting to bother dealing with the kitchen stuff, the shelves of imitation Staffordshire figurines, the ten old sewing machines in the basement, and so on.

Professional liquidators are understandably anxious to get decent money for their clients' possessions, so prices tend to be higher at contents sales than at standard garage sales, and bargaining is more difficult.  I sometimes skip them, because of this.  But today there weren't many garage sales happening, so I followed the signs and ended up in the driveway of a beautiful, enormous, multi-million dollar hacienda in Summerhill.  It was set back a ways from the road, and so I can't find it on Google Street View (sorry), but imagine if Pablo Escobar had a place in midtown.  The place was all pink stucco on the outside, with tasteful growths of vines and creepers.  There was an actual balcony overlooking the front yard.  There was a line to get inside, and it was long.

The way these types of sales work is that the professional liquidators enter the home a few days before the weekend, and take apart the entire house.  They sort out the contents, price them, and then arrange them in all the house's different rooms by category, until the entire house becomes a sad little flea market of someone's entire life.

That was more or less what I found going on inside this house, once I got inside.  Except the possessions were not grandma/grandpa possessions.  On the chopping block today were the personal effects of an entire, prosperous family, with children who were at most college-aged.

Everything was for sale.  Everything.  The entire house looked much as it must have when its owners were still living there.  There was a large living room with bay windows overlooking Chorley Park, and people were picking through the bookshelves, and eying the couch and chairs.  The kitchen was full of nice table settings, stemware, old seder plates, and even a box full of food that must have come straight from a cupboard.  Upstairs, a boy's bedroom was packed with electronics, mostly five to ten years old, including bits and pieces of five different video game systems, clearly once someone's prized possessions, judging by their condition and the care with which they'd been stored.  I was completely crestfallen when I realized that all the best games had already been cherry-picked by some earlier shopper.  All that were left were sports games, and a copy of Final Fantasy VIII, which I bought to resell.  If I'd arrived an hour earlier, I'd have spent the entire contents of my wallet on game stuff, and probably made two or three times as much back after a quick visit to my neighborhood retro gaming shop.

The quantity of stuff on sale was unreal.  The house was so large, and there were fifteen years' worth of accumulation inside, minimum.  Even the basement was open for business, with ice skates, skis, and pieces of luggage filling every corner.  The only reason I can think of that an entire family would suddenly have needed to divest themselves of everything like that is catastrophic financial trouble.  Hard times at the hacienda.  They were probably recession victims.  Or maybe mom and dad are just moving into a nice condo now that the kids are all grown up.  I don't know; I didn't ask.

I took home my copy of Final Fantasy VIII.  And then I took a shower.

Let's visit every café on Bloor Street between Christie and Spadina

It's time I came out to you, internet, as the café rat that I am.  I spend a lot of time in various coffee-slinging establishments―as, I gather, does a good a portion of Toronto's laptop-carrying underclass.

The truth is that I don't even like coffee that much.  I just like sitting in places that serve it―leeching their wi-fi, eavesdropping on their customers, and silently judging their decor and ambiance.

I used to have one particular place that was a perennial favorite, but I moved out of the neighborhood that it was located in, and now it's too far away to walk to.  I'm auditioning new hangouts now, and you, internet, are going to be privy to the process.

My aim is to review, in no particular order, every café on Bloor Street between Christie and Spadina.  At the end of the project, which I expect will span two or three months, I will crown a new hangout, and there will be some kind of ceremony.  Nothing fancy.

I'm aware that there are lots of other websites that review and document cafés in Toronto, but none of them are as neighborhood-focused as I'd like, and most of them judge by the quality of the food and the coffee―criteria that are of secondary importance to me.

Won't you join me on my loiterer's tour of my particular chunk of Bloor Street?  First installment coming Tuesday.  Because nothing good ever happens on Tuesday.