Fall means a few things around here.
The weather turns, the patio comes inside, and a good chunk of our summer team, many of them students, head back to school. It’s always the time of year we take stock of the season and figure out what’s next. This year, that conversation is a bigger one than usual, and we wanted to bring you into it.
What Chef Alicia and Her Team Have Already Shown Us
Anyone who’s joined one of the ten-course long table dinners run by Chef Alicia and her team already knows what they’re capable of. It’s some of the most thoughtful, locally-sourced cooking happening in the neighborhood, full stop. They’ve built a menu people plan evenings around.
That’s exactly the point. They’ve already shown us what’s possible, and we want to give them the room to do even more.
Menu Development Is Our Future
Here’s the thing we keep coming back to: growing the menu isn’t a nice-to-have for us, it’s core to how we stay sustainable as a business long term. So we’re looking seriously at bigger changes and upgrades, the kind that take real planning to get right, that would let Chef Alicia and her team keep building on what they’ve already started.
The Fork in the Road
So we’re weighing two real paths, and want to be upfront that we haven’t picked one yet. One is a full retool of the kitchen space, done properly, in partnership with our landlord: upgraded range, upgraded ventilation, more room for the menu Chef Alicia and her team have built to become everything it’s already capable of being. The other is doubling down on traditional café hours and a focused, seasonal menu, built around the kitchen we have today.
Both are real ways forward, not consolation prizes, and we’d rather choose deliberately than rush a decision just to have one to announce.
Our New Hours, Starting Now
With fall here and a lot of our summer team back at school, we’re shifting to new hours while we work through what’s next: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Sunday from 9am to 4pm, and Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 9am to 9pm.
9am might read like a late start for a café, but that’s always been intentional. We never set out to be the spot you grab a coffee from on your way to somewhere else, we wanted to be the place you actually stop, sit down, and spend some real time in. If you need that early commuter coffee, our neighbours at Reset, Black Walnut, Sidetrack, Saga, and Hasbeans have you covered, and we mean that as a genuine compliment, not a consolation prize. This neighbourhood is lucky to have that many good independent cafés within a few blocks of each other.
Thursday through Saturday, those later hours are for a proper night out, dinner service done right. The other evenings, when we’d normally be closed by 4, are where we’re making room for events and community collaborations. Think of this less as pulling back and more as matching our hours to where our team, and this next chapter, actually is right now.
The Menu Isn’t Going Anywhere
Here’s the good news, said loudly: no matter which path we end up on, the menu you already love stays put. Soup, sandwiches, salads, and pastries are all still here, made the same way, by the same team.
And yes, obviously, the kroketten stay. We wouldn’t dare touch them, and honestly, we’re not sure the regulars would let us.
This isn’t a menu standing still, it’s one we plan on giving even more room to grow, and none of it is going anywhere while we figure out how.