Montreal Cafés

Montréal is certainly no Paris when it comes to cafés. But good cafés do exist in the city (just don't expect to find anything like Les Deux Magots here!)

The minimal criteria for the inclusion in this list are very simple:

• For cafés specializing in coffee:
  1. The establishment has to offer at least the most basic varieties of espresso drinks - i.e., espresso, café latte (=café au lait), and cappuccino.
  2. Coffee beans must be ground fresh for each order (i.e. no pre-ground beans in a dispenser).
  3. The supplying roaster's product has to be of high quality (needless to say, arabica coffee - not robusta).
  4. The baristas have to be at least moderately skilled in steaming and can't indistriminately pour milk into coffees from a giant jug whose contents is periodically augmented and reheated.
  Sound simple and commonsensical? (Assuming you're a coffee fan?) Well, those four criteria safely eliminate about 95% of cafés out there, including all chains.
  
  
• For cafés that are really more about tea, there's really only one requirement: there has to be at least 5 loose leaf varieties, all served in a pot. No teabags!
  
  
• For café-bakeries, the only requirement is that they be what they promise to be - in other words, that they make their own pastries.
  

Select Café Restaurants

• Café Myriad
  1432 Rue Mackay (Downtown Montreal), (514) 939-1717
  Opened in late 2008, this tiny café was immediately colonized by students of nearby Concordia Univerisity. Expertly brewed "third wave" coffee, friendly ambience.


• Camellia Sinensis
  351, rue Emery (Quartier Latin), 514-286-4002
  A tea salon / café founded in the early 2000's by a team that included four travel-happy "professional tea tasters." The core group of founders still regulary travel Asia in search of the best teas to bring to Montreal. An incredible array of teas, including dozens of varieties of black (of course), white, yellow, and green teas.


• Nocochi
  2156 rue Mackay (Downtown Montreal), (514) 989-7514
  Nocochi is a café-tea house specializing in light fare and offering something unique in addition to its relatively typical menu of omelettes, sandwiches and salads: the distinctive Persian cookies. These tiny multi-coloured Persian treats can be bought "to go" (by the box) or consumed on the spot. The cookies, the food, the tea, to a lesser extent the coffee, as well as Nocochi's clean and airy light-toned interior design attract an appropriately mixed crowd: museum goers, old ladies chatting after shopping, visiting Europeans and Concordia students.


• Olive + Gourmando
  351 rue St-Paul Ouest (Old Montreal), (514) 350-1083
  An extremely popular café-bakery (so popular, in fact, that sometimes it's difficult to get a seat as there are only about a dozen tables). Passable coffee and excellent pastries made in-house.


• Veritas
  480 Boulevard St-Laurent (Old Montreal), (514) 510-7775
  A modern café serving healthy food and first-class (but "third-wave") coffee.

Please keep in mind that our site does not attempt to provide comprehensive restaurant listings. These are simply the restaurants picked by our editors and contributors - subject to all the subjectivity such a method implies.

That said, if you think we're missing something - and that includes you, self-promoting restaurateurs - feel free to let us know!