Steve Kupferman

Café Tour #7 - All Things Tea (476 Bloor Street West)

Another café on my chosen stretch of Bloor is now out of business.  All Things Tea, a relatively recent addition to the strip (it opened last Summer), shut its doors at the beginning of this month.

There were many things about All Things Tea that could have contributed to its downfall.  For one, it wasn't a particularly comfortable hangout.  The space was narrow, so tables were bunched up next to the doorway, for the most part―except for a few that were clustered in the rear of the store, near the bathroom.

The space issues were exacerbated by a massive wall of shelving, to hold the shop's enormous tea collection.  Because the wall was devoted to displaying the tea, no tables could be placed up against it.

I'm not saying lack of wall tables was what ruined All Things Tea, but it could definitely have been a contributing factor.  I like wall tables; I don't think I'm alone in that.  The floors were some kind of shiny wood laminate, and the only comfortable seating was a pair of big puffy chairs—both of which, for some reason, were on a dais at the front of the shop, in the window.

The menu, as far as I know, was non-existent.  There were some cookies and pastries on offer, but All Things Tea definitely was not somewhere to go for lunch.  They had a side business in tea-related tschotskes, though.

And then there was the ordering system.  There's something irritating about restaurants and cafés that force customers to adopt their corporate patois just to place orders.  Starbucks is notoriously guilty of this, but independent cafés usually stick to the standard international coffee lexicon: small/medium/large, coffee/espresso/americano/etc.

All Things Tea was in a little bit of a bind, where naming conventions were concerned, because they had the aforementioned wall 'o tea, which held what looked like more than one hundred glass jars, each with a different flavor inside.  The teas all had names that were supposed to evoke their special flavor, or calming or healing properties, or whatever else happened to be special about them.  There were standard blends, like Earl Grey, but in some cases the nomenclature was a little undignified (a large Strawberry Tingle, please), or otherwise just a little hard to pronounce (one Tarajulie Assam, to go). 

These terms probably aren't daunting to the die-hard aficionado, but they're an obstacle to the entry-level tea drinker.  Moonbean Café, in Kensington Market, manages the problem by having customers just grab the glass jar of tea off the shelf and bring it to the counter.  I tried doing this on my first visit to All Things Tea and the counter person stopped me, and began explaining the ordering system:

1. Browse the wall 'o tea.

2. Open little sample containers in front of each jar to smell the tea, if you want.

3. Decide on a particular kind of tea and memorize the label on the jar.

4. Ask for the tea at the counter, by name.

5. Server checks to see if any of the tea is left behind the counter.

6. If not, then go back and grab the jar.

They could have printed up a flow chart.  The wi-fi was unreliable, too.

Oh, but the tea?  The tea was great.

Café Tour #6 - The Better and Better Bakery and Café (586 Bloor Street West)

This place has become a habit with me.

It's not because of the coffee, which is thick and strong to the point that it could probably be used to unclog drains.  It's not the music either, which as far as I can tell is just the same mix CD day after day, on endless repeat.  "Hey Jude" plays at regular intervals; you can almost use it to keep track of time.

No, neither of those things is what makes the B&BB&C so appealing.  It's a matter of several different subtle factors, ranging from layout, to clientele, to staff and prices.

This café is the perfect place to lounge.  It starts when you walk through the door and say hello to the ladies behind the counter: two Korean women, one of whom is the owner.  The other is either a relative, an employee, or both.  We greet each other, and they give me my usual order: one medium coffee, to stay, for $1.47 (after all taxes).  Adding milk and sugar makes it worse, so I take it black.

It's one of those places with a very distinct front/back division.  Front seats are either window seats, side counter seats, or there's a little table with some chairs that gets a lot of sunlight from the window.  I usually go with the front window seats, because they allow me to keep one eye on Koreatown at all times, which is a cheerful sight in summertime.

When I seriously need to get work done, or make lots of phone calls, I retreat to the back.  The great thing about the back is that it's rarely busy in the morning.  This is no Aroma, with hordes of regulars and lots of hivelike, caffeine-fueled activity.  It's a quiet place, and the lighting is soft.

There's nothing so special about the decor.  There are some paintings hanging on the walls.  They change from time to time.  The chairs have metal backs, but they're comfortable enough.

One area where B&BB&C really excels is affordability.  The sandwiches they serve are actually pretty inexpensive, which I can say with some authority is a rarity.  Why would you not drop $4 or so on a salami sandwich with some veggies and cheese?  Sure it's only a couple slices of salami, and the cheese is processed, but the roll has a nice crispy exterior and an appealing kind of compressibility, and... $4!  They bake the rolls on-premises.

Of course, this would all be meaningless if there were no wi-fi.  It can be unreliable at times, but there are lots of unprotected hotspots from surrounding stores, and it's possible to get on them in an emergency.  Electrical outlets are plentiful.

Verdict: With better coffee and more reliable wi-fi this place could be a true hidden gem.  Right now, it's more of a hidden semi-precious stone.

Café Tour #5 - A Three-in-One

It's been weeks since the last installment in my coffee crawl of Bloor Street between Christie and Spadina, but I'm making up for it today with THREE cafés squeezed into a single post.  Three!

And they're all Tim Hortons.

Tim Hortenses saturate the GTA, but my chosen stretch of Bloor Street is extraordinarily crammed with them.  The three locations are dispersed relatively evenly: one just west of Spadina, one at 527 Bloor Street West (pictured above), and one just north of Bloor, on Christie Street (meaning it's technically not on Bloor Street, but it does have a Bloor Street address for some reason, and in any case it's so close that it would be kind of doctrinaire not to include it).

Little needs to be said about the quality of Tim Hortons coffee.  It's the same everywhere: bitter, with a slightly fruity (I would say raisiny) aftertaste, and enough caffeine to help a customer build a nice, healthy dependence.  One imagines it being brewed in cauldrons somewhere deep underneath Saskatchewan and then shipped in giant tanker trucks to stores all over Canada and the States.  But of course that's not how it works; it all gets brewed in-store.  I have no idea how they achieve such consistency, but I imagine there's a three-ring binder somewhere in every franchise with a manual that explains the whole process step-by-step.

Incredibly, the donuts actually are all made in a single, giant facility.  Each store did at one time do its own frying, but now all Tim Hortons baked goods are prepared in one location—in Brantford, Ontario—and shipped frozen.

Tim Hortons donuts and coffee are uniform products, and this attention to uniformity extends to all aspects of the Tim Hortons experience.  The three locations on my slice of Bloor are, for the most part, cases in point.  But there are small differences that distinguish them one from another.

The store at Bloor and Spadina is the smallest of the three, and the most nondescript.  It's just a small, box-like space, with a counter, some tables and uncomfortable chairs, and some window seats.  There are only two detectable points of differentiation between this and the other two stores: a small caddy, made of fluorescent pink plastic, that holds some condiments on the counter; and an incongruous bumper sticker stuck across a poster advertising one of Tim Hortons' corporate philanthropic efforts, which reads:

"Please remove sticker and write in permanent marker the nationwide dollar amount raised..."

The store at 527 Bloor has furniture, fittings, and a color scheme similar to those at the Bloor and Spadina location, but the layout is slightly different, the space is larger, and there are small touches that make the environment perceptibly more lush.  Little tufts of greenery poke out of planters set into the tops of dividers between tables.  Can lights in the ceiling shed a dim, welcoming glow.  Since the space is relatively inviting, people linger.  An aging punk in a ripped black sleeveless t-shirt uses the fact that "Don't You Forget About Me" is playing over the in-store radio as an excuse to strike up a conversation about The Breakfast Club with a group of teenage girls.  "It just captured every single high school stereotype," he says, and the girls reply stiffly and leave.

Those girls weren't the only under-twenties in the store.  The clientele at this Tim Hortons is noticeably younger than at either of the others, presumably because of its proximity to Central Technical High School. 

The Tim Hortons on Christie Street is the most distinct of the three.  Its decoration scheme seems to belong to a different generation of renovations.  The walls here are maroon, whereas at the other two stores they're buff.  The floors are new-looking brown tile.

On the day I visit the Christie Tim Hortons, it's the busiest of the three locations, possibly because it's nice out and Christie Pits is just across the street.  The clientele has no organizing theme; people of all ages, races, and tax brackets are represented.  Nobody stays for long, except for a forlorn-looking old Asian man, who barely sips from his small coffee and stares blankly out the window.  I think every Tim Hortons has a forlorn-looking old man who barely sips from his small coffee and stares blankly out the window.  It's part of the uniformity.

Tim Hortons lacks atmosphere and uniqueness, but it offers something to everyone, which is important.  I would never go to any of these three locations unless all other coffee was poison, but I appreciate the need for them to exist.

Well, maybe we could get by with one less.

Verdict: It's mediocre.  But reliably so!

Café Tour #4 - The Bloor Street Café (600 Bloor St. W)

(Rotate up to see the place.)

The Bloor Street Café was fated not to be a stop on my coffee crawl of Bloor Street between Christie and Spadina.  Before I got around to paying it a visit, it closed.  Its last day of business was at some point late last week or early this week.  This is therefore a non-post, but I'm counting it anyway.

The whole situation is a shame, because the Bloor Street Café was one of the places I was most looking forward to writing about.  Solely on the basis of what I was able to observe through its front window, I can say that it was completely unique among the many cafés on my chosen stretch of Bloor.  Sadly, its uniqueness was its downfall.

What distinguished the Bloor Street Café was that it wasn't fighting for the same clientele as any of its ostensible competitors.  Places like Aroma, Lettieri, and even those internet-bogarts at the Green Beanery are after students and professionals, since those are the types of people who typically have money to spend on things like coffee and expensive sandwiches.  To lure this coveted clientele, cafés spend money on niceties like good espresso machines, or soy milk, or fancy decor.  The Bloor Street Café, meanwhile, served bubble tea and hot dogs, and was decorated like a hospital waiting room.

As a result of this, the customers who frequented the place were an entirely different breed of café rat.  Every time I peered into the front window, I saw what appeared to be the same group of older men, all fraternizing and slapping each other on the backs ("hanging out" would be too hip and youthful a phrase for what these guys were doing).  They'd spill out onto the sidewalk on warm nights, and smoke their cigarettes.  If I had to speculate, I'd say they were probably hiding from their wives.  They didn't seem like a bad crew, per se, but they did seem pretty insular, and the Bloor Street Café was theirs.  Nobody female or under the age of forty was going have anything to do with the place as long as they were still in it.

It was easy to see that the owners of the café weren't entirely pleased with the community they'd attracted.  There was a big, professionally-printed placard on the front wall, visible from the street, which read: "Counter and Table Patrons: 20 Minute Limit."

My assumption was that having such a dedicated following would have been good for business, but that was not the case.  I spoke to the owner of a nearby café (whose identity I'll protect, since she doesn't know I'm writing this), and she seemed utterly spooked by the notion that the Bloor Street Café crowd was now homeless, and might choose her shop as its next nesting place.  Other business owners have been telling her stories, and word is that the loyalty of the Bloor Street Café's ex-customers is surpassed only by their cheapness.  They order a single cup of coffee and stay until they're kicked out, displacing paying customers like a pack of café-devouring wolverines.

I hope they don't come for any of my favorite spots.  Although with my wi-fi leeching proclivities, I imagine it would be difficult to seize the moral high ground in any kind of café turf war.

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.

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.