If you live in the student ghetto below College Street, you may have noticed a new bicycle-themed cafe in the neighbourhood. Located on Cecil street, just east of Spadina and a short hop away from campus, Sonic Cafe has added a burst of bright, spray-painted colour to the street since it opened this winter. And now that spring has finally arrived, Sonic Cafe is ready to launch into full gear.

Owner Anthony D’Arcy created Sonic as a stop for cyclists to come in and tune-up their bikes. The cafe, which is loosely affiliated with Toronto DIY cyclist groups Bike Chain, Bike Pirates, and Bikesauce, will hold a repair stand and tools for tune-ups on its front patio by April .

Not only is Sonic’s coffee organic and fair-trade, it’s environmentally friendly, too. Most local bean roasters emit a highly carcinogenic product, roasting their beans in residential areas with no emissions standard. Sonic is different. “We get our beans from this old Italian fellow who was an engineer before he entered his family’s coffee business. He built this absolutely amazing roaster. It’s highly efficient and has controls that you don’t see in a local roaster. You end up with a bean that is organically grown, fairly traded, and environmentally roasted,” says D’Arcy.

Visitors to Sonic Cafe will notice that the building has lots of character. Take the incredibly steep staircase to the upstairs sitting area, for example:

Mildly terrifying?

The structure of the building can be explained by its rich history. The building began as a coach house about 100 years ago. “The coach or carriage would have been downstairs, the horse would have been in the kitchen, and hay was stored in the loft that is now the upstairs seating area.” From there, the building went through several transitions: “People have come in and said, ‘I flopped here in the 60s,’ so it’s always had an underground vibe to it,” says D’Arcy. In the 80s, the building was home to Courage My Love, the celebrated vintage clothing store now located in Kensington market. It then became a band rehearsal space for several years, before Darcy transformed it into Sonic Cafe and welcomed a very special first customer: “Jack Layton lives around the corner. He was the first to come in. He really loved it.”

“The feng shui of the building is beautiful,” says Darcy. “If you want to come in quickly, there’s the downstairs patio. If you want to come in and mingle, there’s the downstairs seating area with the piano. If you want to stay longer, there’s the upstairs. And if you want to seek solace from the Cecil Street crazies, there’s the upstairs outside patio.”

View from the upstairs patio

Sonic Cafe is comfortable and unpretentious. The menu is simple and straight-forward: espresso, machiato, lattes, drip coffee, vegan muffins, bagels, grilled cheese. And the staff are very down to earth and friendly.

“The idea was just to make a coffee shop that I always wanted to come to. And I’ve always been attracted to places like this that were funky and small and quaint, with piles of character. Too many people are building coffee shops with that engineered, polished finish,” D’Arcy says.

“I kind of feel like it’s the kiss of death to do up a place perfectly. Because people don’t feel at home.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Food & Drink. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.