Fluffy’s opens at a moment when new cafés are increasingly asked to do more than pour coffee. From the start, Jérôme and Eduardo have framed the project as something in progress: a place shaped through adjustment, listening, and showing up consistently. The result is this Verdun café–bakery.

The menu keeps things focused. Coffee anchors the drink program, with pour-overs alongside familiar espresso-based options. Donuts are made in-house and entirely plant-based, treated as a companion to the coffee rather than a novelty. The atmosphere follows suit—cozy, modern, and intentionally low-pressure.

Palmieri arrives with a clear point of view: Italian-inspired, but not performative. Opened in December, the café frames coffee as a slower ritual, one meant to stretch a moment rather than rush it. The result feels considered rather than romanticized: "Sip. Slow. Live. Slow" isn’t branding here so much as instruction.

Inside, the atmosphere leans warm and convivial, with a coastal palette that brings a hint of summer into the colder months. The menu stays approachable, pairing espresso-based drinks with pastries, viennoiseries, and light sandwiches. Standouts like cappuccino alongside citrus-forward desserts reinforce the café’s easy balance between comfort and polish.

When Les Joyeux Naufragés opened its doors in late 2025, it quickly became a neighbourhood fixture rather than a novelty. Manu André, already well known for Le Loup Bleu, chose a quieter commercial corner near schools and daycares, betting on daily rhythms over destination traffic. That instinct paid off.

The café draws inspiration from sailing and the idea of a shared refuge, expressed through a bright, maritime-inspired space by Nony Famili and a colourful mural by Aurore Danielou. The menu matches the mood: coffee drinks, viennoiseries, sandwiches, grilled cheese, and lunch-friendly plates that are easy to return to during the week.

Maison BaultBerri is the 2,500-square-foot café that serves as the main entrance to Empire's new Berri Street location, created in partnership between Phil Grisé and longtime friend Laurent Dagenais. Named as a nod to the building's Archambault heritage, the café operates on different hours than the retail space—opening earlier and closing later to serve the neighbourhood beyond just shoppers.

The menu features hot and cold beverages (matchas, coffees, smoothies), sandwiches, salads, soups, and pastries, all made with fresh daily ingredients from local suppliers. Designed by Daniel Finkelstein's studio Finkel', the space balances warmth with a subtle edge—low lighting, comfortable seating, and a layout that welcomes students looking to work, friends meeting for coffee, or shoppers needing a place to relax.

Velora isn’t shy about what it does best. Walk in and you’re met with a counter lined with Tres Leches cakes—pistachio, saffron, dulce de leche, coconut—made the slow way and soaked until it reaches that just-right softness. The place runs on the kind of pastry that usually comes with a long lineage, and you can feel that in everything from the Biscoff tiramisu to the Persian sweets tucked between the cakes. The coffee’s there to keep pace with the sugar, but dessert is the headliner (plus solid savory options like a Dutch baby shakshuka). Montreal gets a lot of new cafés, but few arrive this fully formed.

Café Cin Cin is Vancouver’s handshake to Montreal: a roomy, quietly stylish café where the focus is squarely on the cup. Rocanini, the West Coast roaster behind it, brings a lab-level respect for precision without losing the pleasure of a good coffee break. The drinks lean clean and balanced, the pastries do their job, and the space has that easy “come hang out for a bit” energy that every neighbourhood tries to claim. Three weeks into their soft launch, the team already sounds smitten with the area, and the feeling’s mutual.

Café Nook arrived on the Plateau in the middle of the STM strike, which is exactly the kind of chaotic timing that ends up defining a place. Even with half the city walking everywhere, people still found their way in for the Korean desserts: soft, rolled cakes; mugwort injeolmi (Korean sweet rice cake); tiramisu topped with tiny bear-shaped madeleines; and drinks that lean playful without losing craft. Gingerbread lattes, pistachio milk, strawberry matcha—it’s all part of the mood.

Owners Bruno and Vincent run Flers Café with a focus on small pleasures: well-made espresso drinks, house-baked pastries, and their growing lineup of flans that borrow ideas from different parts of the world. The space on Mont-Royal East has an unforced warmth—enough room to sit with a latte, but equally suited to quick takeout runs. Nothing about it tries to reinvent the format; it’s the consistency and the easygoing atmosphere that make it work.

Not every new café arrives with a built-in community, but Hobea practically opened with one waiting at the door. What looks like a calm spot for a cappuccino on weekends is, underneath it all, a creative house with a basement built for anything: pottery workshops, stand-up nights, small concerts, you name it. The coffee counter keeps things simple—espresso drinks and viennoiseries—but the real draw is the mix of people using the space. Students camp out with laptops, friends take over tables with board games, and workshop groups drift in and out.

Café Raphaël’s café and workspace feels right for Villeray, a neighbourhood where half the regulars seem to be on to something creative. The space has a lived-in charm: vintage furniture, scattered work nooks, steady light, and just enough background noise to make focusing easier. People drop in for a few hours of deep work, stay for meetings, or simply treat it like a café with extra outlets. The coffee holds its own, and the setup naturally encourages small collaborations and long afternoons.

FroidÔchaud landed on Saint-Denis with a simple promise: warm crêpes, cold drinks, and enough room to linger. It’s the kind of café where someone is always debating between sweet or savoury — a cinnamon crêpe with ice cream, a tiramisu version with a hit of espresso, or something loaded with cheese and za’atar. The menu leans playful, but there’s a real hand behind the coffee, too; the owner approaches it with the focus of someone who actually cares about extraction, not just aesthetics. Students tend to claim the corners, juice orders keep the blender busy, and the place settles into an easy rhythm.

The team behind Candeur has expanded into coffee with Jumeler, a café designed around the idea of bringing people together. The name says it all—this is a space built for gathering, whether that means catching up with a friend, working through the afternoon, or just pausing with a cup in hand. The room itself is generous and bright, giving it a different rhythm than the tighter corners of many downtown cafés.

The offering is straightforward but well executed: espresso drinks alongside pastries and viennoiseries from Candeur’s bakery program, with the carrot cake standing out as a favourite already. Seating is still being added, but the café is open and operating, easing into its role as a neighbourhood stop.

After a short stint as a kiosk in Brossard, Café 2nd Gen has landed in Griffintown with a space that feels like a reset button: clean lines, natural light, and drinks that stand out from the pack. The café takes Vietnamese coffee culture as its base and runs with it, offering playful creations like matcha Melona, ube lattes, and knafeh coffee, alongside a matcha tiramisu that already has regulars buzzing. It’s not just about novelty—the execution is sharp, and the drinks feel carefully considered. In a city where café menus can blur together, 2nd Gen brings both a cultural anchor and a fresh dose of imagination to Montreal’s coffee landscape.

In a city full of third-wave cafés, Hectare takes a different route that runs through the Caribbean. Located on Notre-Dame in Old Montreal, this new spot centres its menu around beans sourced from across the Antilles: Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. The coffee is roasted locally but carries the imprint of the islands, with bold, low-acidity profiles and a focus on organic sourcing. Light snacks and tropical-inspired bites round out the offering, though the café’s strongest presence is in the cup. The space is compact and low-key, free of design gimmicks or lifestyle branding, but with a clear point of view.

Mama C Café moves at its own tempo—espresso in the morning, apéro by night. Tucked into the Hotel Nelligan and linked to the neighbouring MAMA C restaurant, it shares the same Mediterranean throughline, but trades fine dining formality for something more fluid. The counter offers freddo espressos, Greek pastries, and viennoiseries early on, followed by a lunch menu built around bowls, salads, and sandwiches. As the day stretches out, cocktails and small plates ease into the mix, borrowing flavours from MAMA C’s kitchen without replicating the format. The space is bright, polished, and unfussy—designed as much for solo afternoons as for early evening drinks.

Just off Beaubien, Horizon Matcha Café adds a calm counterpoint to the usual café circuit. The focus here is Japanese tea—matcha, hōjicha, and other low-caffeine brews served hot or iced—but the menu extends well beyond that. There’s a short list of bánh mì sandwiches, with lemongrass chicken or marinated tofu and mushrooms, plus house-made pastries like rose macarons and strawberry muffins with cream cheese. The drinks lean earthy or floral, depending on your mood, and Vietnamese coffee is expected to join the lineup soon.