Why is it that Toronto can’t seem to put together a decent cafe scene? There are plenty of hip people, and certainly a large enough population to support a wealth of good cafes, so why is there such a dearth of good coffee and good pastry?
To be fair, there are a number of places to get a decent baked good, such as Patachou or Pain Perdu, but both these places make their coffee in a French style, i.e., extremely dark, weak bodied, and bitter. The ambience is decent, but unexceptional, and the hours are distressingly short (one would have to run home from work to grab a coffee before they close, which defeats the point of having a nice cafe.
My Toronto coffee investigations have located only one cafe that produces good coffee. Bulldog Cafe makes excellent coffee and serves it with style and care. As far as I know, this is the only cafe in Toronto that can actually produce latte art, and it is very good.
My thoughts on why Toronto has so few good cafes comes down to weather. Although hot Italian cities are typically coffee-fueled, their consumption patterns are very unlike North America, and even there, the cafe culture is less about sitting around and reading a book, and more about standing, grabbing an espresso, and going on your way. The French are the sit-and-read cafe originals, however, given the poor coffee French cafes tend to serve more beer and wine than they do coffee—Jean-Paul Sarte sat in Deux Maggots with beer in hand while penning his existentialist fictions, plays, and philosophical tomes. So, the West Coast of North America (Seattle and Vancouver) established the modern cafe culture because like the French there is a lot of sitting and reading, usually because it is raining outside. But, unlike the French, the West Coast adopted a much more Italian style of making coffee (and adapted it to their own unique style). Toronto is too warm and too wet (as in humidity) to make for comfortable cafe going. Even worse, as I just experienced at Patachou, the high humidity reeks havoc with keeping pastries crisp and flakey.
