06/16/2026
Our journey began in a much, much younger Toronto, back in 2006, still a little naive but truly sparked by a fiery passion and desire to open an espresso bar ☕️♥️
We were trying to find our place in Riverside, on the city’s East side. At the time, it was an up-and-coming neighbourhood, just starting to gentrify as cheaper than the trendy west end. There wasn’t much open, aside from some old mom-and-pop shops. It felt a bit like a wild new frontier, a natural beginning of something. It took a full year to find a place. It was as ugly as anything we had seen 😅🤣 with pink, yellow and blue tiles on the walls. A barbershop previously. We gutted the walls and took them down to the brick (horsehair insulation in the walls, behind the lathe and plaster, ironically!) 😉 🐴
It was the messiest job, and it probably took a few years off our lives to remove that stuff with a hammer and chisel. But we built the entire shop on our own, with no outside help. We didn’t have much money or time. We made it as homey and comfortable as we could within our means, and even built the communal table from a scrap-metal bin and some reclaimed floorboards. (P.S. We still have that table at Queen East.) We bought a 2-Group Electra on Kijiji and set up shop with the communal table we built from a scrap-metal bin in the window. Two months later, we opened the doors to the neighbourhood for the first time and spent the next eight months riding our bikes across the city every day at dawn to open up shop.
Not many people thought we could do it, not even ourselves at times, but we did!! 😭🥹🤩
