If you find yourself in Toronto on a bright Monday morning in startlingly-early spring, you are likely to want coffee.

If you want coffee, you are obviously going to want good coffee.

If you want good coffee, you’re going to want someplace hip. I know, it’s not fair, but you and I both know that any random hole-in-the-wall with schizophrenic music is going to have way better coffee than Dunkin Donuts Tim Horton’s. And you didn’t really travel this far to go to Starbucks, did you?

So go ahead and try the place on the side street where the surly, bearded, flamboyantly gay barista actually asks of your non-coffee-drinking friend: “Is he actually going to sit there and not drink anything?” The espresso base will be outstanding and the pour will be more artful than any you’ll find in any business district in stodgy old America (oh look, a rosetta!). You’ll probably interrupt your thought experiment on what, exactly, that guy’s problem is to leave him a tip, and your friends will do the same while pondering where the sugar got hidden. Because face it: you got what you wanted, which was a good coffee, and the rest is just details.

There are probably two dozen coffee shops that fit that description in Toronto (or, really, any city worth a damn), but, for us, Bulldog Coffee did the job perfectly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 12:23 am and is filed under Coffee, Traveling.