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Roaster and coffee shop Café Saint-Henri is embarking on a big expansion, with the company opening an 8,000 square foot roastery and café in Villeray this winter.
According to Café Saint-Henri’s owner Jean-François Leduc, the space on Mile-End Street (pictured above, just south of Jarry Park and east of the Parc-Extension border) will serve as the six-year-old company’s new headquarters; it will also be their sixth café, with four others in Montreal (Verdun, Jean-Talon, Latin Quarter, and the St-Henri original), and one in Quebec City.
Leduc tells Eater that the large space will allow the coffee company to step up its operations, both in terms of roasting and on the business side.
“When I started St-Henri I was roasting the coffee, serving the coffee, delivering the coffee; we had no offices...six years down the road we need more space to sit down and have proper meetings, and expose our coffee in a better way.”
“Right now we’re a bit spread out, we roast at one site, store coffee at another site, use other people’s labs, we’re spread thin across too many places. We’ll have better control over how we can keep our beans fresher.”
The space will include a roastery and coffee lab, open to the public, and St-Henri’s biggest café, at 2,000 square feet. It’ll be Quebec’s first café to use a Mavam espresso machine, and will also get into food service more than ever before — the space will include vertical greenhouses, growing produce for beefed-up eating options. Leduc calls it “more complete, more sophisticated”, but notes that it won’t get into restaurant territory.
The interior of the post-industrial building will be designed by Arts et Metiers, a new design firm which includes hospitality designers about town the Gauley Brothers. Leduc and team are planning to open by the end of January 2018.