Coffee is keeping Ottawa retail alive in unexpected ways

Calgary Herald

6 days ago

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By the time many Ottawa cafés switch on their grinders, the espresso machine at Birling has already cleared morning rush.
The skateboard shop on Somerset Street West opens at 8 a.m., hours before anyone comes in asking for hardware or grip tape, and pulls coffee shots for regulars on their way to work, most of whom have never felt the jolt of a board underfoot.
'At that hour, it's not skaters,' said Birling co-owner Kyle Robertson. 'It's people who just came in once or twice and realized we make a really good coffee.'
The drink program is an open secret, shared by regulars, invisible to passersby. Letters spelling out 'coffee' only recently joined 'skateboards' on a pillar at the front of the building.
Before it became part of the business, coffee at Birling was an internal perk, cups passed between employees and regulars on a first-name basis. When the Somerset space opened in 2017, a French press gave way to an espresso machine, and drinks began working the same hours as retail.
'I'd love to own a skate shop that you could only sell skateboards and survive, but these days that's just not realistic,' said Robertson.
His shop has weathered market swings and a pandemic shutdown. But in search of consistent income, a pricey professional-grade coffee machine became the answer to offering a product with year-round appeal.
'It's nice to have something that is constant. Skating goes through really big waves. Clothing, too, what's popular and what's not,' said Robertson.
Beans for the compact operation come from popular Ottawa cafe chain Little Victories, which roasts Birling's house blend, 'Curbs.'
Their relationship predates the collaboration: 'The very first time you could go purchase a Little Victories coffee was at a bike shop in Hintonburg,' said Robertson. 'Very similar to this kind of vibe.'
Robertson isn't trying to compete with other Ottawa cafés. The goal is to provide a local service, with extremely reasonable pricing ($2.80 for an espresso, $4.20 for a latte) and personalized interaction as part of the experience. 'We have time to chat a little bit,' he said.
Even so, Birling does not position itself as a hybrid space. The phrase 'skateboard café' was once on the table, but Robertson pushed it aside. The shop lacks the markers of a typical coffee destination, he said — no curated pastry case, no plush indoor seating — and focuses on takeaway drinks.
What the interior lacks in café trappings, however, the back compensates for with a concrete courtyard shaded by a massive willow tree. Skateboard ramps line the edges, poured during lockdown by the owners.
The patio sits well back from the street, buffered from traffic and easy to miss unless someone points it out, much like the coffee counter.
'The people who have ventured in here are stoked to find it,' said Robertson. 'And they come back a lot.'
Ottawa Bike Cafe
79 Sparks St.; ottawabikecafe.com
At first glance, Ottawa Bike Café looks like a coffee bar dressed in spoke wheels and steel frames. In practice, it's more like a chain and gear — two distinct parts turning in sync to keep the whole place moving.
Retro Rides, the vintage bike shop, handles repairs and restorations on cruisers from the 1940s through the 1990s. The café serves espresso, milkshakes, baked goods and toasted sandwiches during the day, then moves into evening drinks of cider, craft beer and cocktails poured from the same counter.
'They're like sisters,' owner Jason Komendat said of his two businesses. 'They take care of each other. They support each other.'
The hybrid format was a solution to overlapping constraints: inconsistent traffic, seasonal bike demand and the difficulty of maintaining a single-purpose shop in an unpredictable downtown economy. Komendat wanted a way to support the cycling side and, more than that, to reflect the kind of workplace he would want to enter each morning. The idea had been in the works since 2011, when his daughters were still in elementary school and the three of them sketched out a dream-shop concept in a notebook he still keeps today.
The café, which opened in 2021, appears to be the smaller operation, but has become the more visible entry point. 'People come into the café and they'll see some bikes and they'll go, 'Oh my gosh, I had no idea this existed,' or vice versa. They come in with a flat tire, and while they're waiting, they'll have lunch, they'll have a coffee, they'll have a beer,' said Komendat.
Artery Community Roasters supplies the coffee. Komendat praises their flavour, but the decision was also about alignment. 'Artery hires people with disabilities and treats them well, and that's a big reason we use them,' he said. 'They're mission-driven, and so are we.'
He has heard all of the advice: cut costs, buy cheap coffee, outsource baking to Costco, but he ignores it.
'I get our baked goods from Bread and Sons and Lunchbox. We make everything in-house — chocolate syrup with cocoa and cane sugar, vanilla with beans, fruit syrups from frozen berries. That's what I want to serve.'
The Booj
Between changing installations at the Urban Art Collective gallery in Hintonburg is the home of a café and dry bar operated by Kyle Ratchford, who runs the business under the name The Booj.
Ratchford worked for more than a decade across Ottawa cafés and bars, including Happy Goat and Arlington Five, contributing to espresso programs and developing drink menus that rarely bore his name. At The Booj, every element — from the beans to syrups — follows his vision.
The hybrid model of The Booj and the UAC helps with reach and sustainability. 'The actual aesthetics of my space, it's very much me,' Ratchford said. 'But it doesn't exist without the gallery and the people in it.'
Unlike traditional cafés, the gallery-bar structure reverses the function of both. The gallery gives visual context to each drink; the drinks give visitors something to taste and remember from their visit.
Gallery-goers find the bar by accident, or stop in during the Urban Night Market hosted on-site, and leave with a drink named after a McDonald's mascot or an obscure Jaws reference. 'I know not everybody is going to like everything that I like, and that's being human.'
Drinks feature unexpected combinations — passionfruit with butter pecan, chai colada with ube and sour sop — with names meant to amuse himself.
'I remember being in Toronto like five years ago and seeing tattoo shops with coffee in the front. Barbers with the same,' he said. 'I remember thinking, 'This is the future.' On so many levels, it benefits everybody involved.'
This is the future. On so many levels, it benefits everybody involved.
Kyle Ratchford
One batch of natural-processed Ethiopian beans rerouted the way Ratchford thought about flavour. It was fruity, slightly fermented, and made him question what coffee was even supposed to do. 'Everything changed after that sip. And I've been chasing that feeling ever since,' he said.
For Ratchford, it's the moment of pause, when someone tastes something they've never had before and loses their train of thought mid-sentence. 'If I can be somebody's only moment of whimsy in their whole day, then at least they had that moment,' he said. 'I just want to create moments.'
Miam Miam General Store
The espresso machine at Miam Miam shares equal billing with vintage jackets, handmade ceramics and repurposed furniture handmade from old skateboards. Owned by Andrew Szeto and Amber Flokstra-Radema, the Chinatown shop opened in April 2024 after a summer pop-up in Wakefield, QC confirmed there was appetite for a store that treated quirky home goods, fashion and coffee as parts of the same experience.
'We're multifaceted people with a lot of passions and joys, and it's really a store to house it all,' said Szeto.
Every shelf reflects Ottawa's tight-knit maker networks. Skincare products from Wind Blast Apothecary, Ash Posey and Boreal Folk line the shelves near the entrance. Glassware made at the Ottawa Glassblowers Coop, hand-shaped mugs and ceramic tumblers from Yarrow Ceramics. The back half is a collection of Amber's Vintage, curated by Flokstra-Radema. 'Sixty percent of our store is actually from the Ottawa–Outaouais region,' said Szeto.
The coffee counter, wedged between the till and the hand soap, tends to spark conversation the most. The bar functions as a service point and social switchboard, inviting shoppers to stick around and giving non-shoppers something to do. 'It kind of offers a micro third space where you can come in, sit down, have a conversation with us,' said Szeto. 'It's a nice to have if you're parched while you're shopping, or feeling under-caffeinated — hey, we can fix that real quick for you.'
Szeto doesn't come from a barista background, but his enthusiasm is obsessive. He collects espresso machines, makes espresso tampers by hand, and has rebuilt a vintage La Pavoni lever-style espresso machine from scratch, posting a full YouTube teardown for fellow hobbyists.
The machine behind the bar at Miam Miam runs on that same DIY ethos, though Szeto is quick to draw a line between amateurism and inattention. 'If you aren't going to come correct, you're doing yourself a disservice,' he said about adding a coffee service to an unrelated small business. 'You really have to make sure you're providing an elevated experience.'
The house espresso at Miam Miam uses beans roasted by Artery and features in a salted mocha inspired by Flokstra-Radema and Szeto's travels to Oaxaca, Mexico.
The signature salted mocha draws on the couple's travels to Oaxaca, where Mayordomo chocolate (stone-ground cacao mixed with cinnamon and sugar) is melted directly into the espresso shot and topped with salt from the same bar. The result is spiced and chocolatey, somewhat closer to champurrado than a chain café mocha.
Pop-ups by baristas like Tegan Goss (Nata Café) have drawn lineups out the door, flipping the store into a temporary café.
The spillover has been good for business and morale. Szeto sees it as an extension of what they're already doing. 'Ottawa is small,' he said. 'We don't necessarily have a huge global reputation. So if we can level up together, that's a huge part of what you're going to see in our store.'
Undergrounds at O-Frango
At least once a day on the weekends, someone stops short outside O-Frango and checks their phone. The Instagram post said banana, matcha and Cinnamon Toast Crunch; this sign says fried chicken. They stand on the sidewalk, recalculating.
Khaled Nabil, co-creator of Undergrounds, has watched it happen too many times to count. 'I've seen people going back and forth' he said. 'Then they decide OK, maybe we can go inside and ask.'
What they find is a specialty coffee bar operating within the chicken shop.
Undergrounds opened last November as a morning pop-up, the brainchild of Khaled and his sister Marwah. Neither had worked as a barista before, but he had a background in design and programming, and she had a knack for drink creation. Their family is originally from Yemen, a place often cited as the birthplace of coffee, which made the idea of building a specialty coffee brand compelling.
'We wanted to learn more about beans, about flavour and bring things we think people have never tried before in Ottawa,' said Nabil.
The banana cinnamon toast crunch matcha became an early favourite and has remained in rotation long past its intended seasonal window. Ube matcha and black sesame oat lattes draw on dessert traditions from the Philippines, Korea, Japan and the Arab world. Each was concocted through a slow cycle of brainstorming and small-batch feedback from customers who had asked to try new flavours.
The frozen drinks start dense, with stratified foams and toasted toppings, then settle into something colder and lighter as they mix. The black sesame hojicha opens like a tahini milkshake and finishes closer to tea.
The menu is intentionally stratified — visually and structurally. 'It's about the experience of texture,' said Khaled. 'You want people to be a little surprised. You want them to pause.'
The name, Undergrounds, refers to coffee grounds and the imagined world below them. The branding depicts the Mona Lisa in stippled dots, as if emerging from coffee sediment. 'We imagined a world under the coffee grounds. A museum, almost. Something that feels like it's below the surface — familiar, but rearranged,' said Nabil.
The plan is to stay interesting and create a space that feels like a secret, even when the line stretches to the door.
'We don't claim to be experts, but we're learning. And we want to take the community with us,' said Nabil.
Know another great spot serving coffee behind an unexpected storefront? Let us know in the comments.
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