Café BRUT Wants to Be Griffintown’s Living Room

Zoé Duval and Joshua Monroe-Blanchette are, by their own admission, impulsive people. In November, they were walking through their neighbourhood when they spotted a new commercial corridor opening up in Griffintown. By May, it was a café.

Café BRUT occupies a small space with big aspirations in the street-level covered passage of a mixed-use development on Murray Street, a corridor of bronze window frames, brick, and stone that reads more European than the glass-tower Griffintown most people picture.

The interior was designed in collaboration with Dimanche Design around the building's existing bones: raw concrete, a 16-foot marble counter that lights up, custom steel tables, and a warmer mid-century seating area anchored by a fuzzy brown carpet. There’s a Brutalist edge to it alongside warmth to tempt a stay.

Capacity is about 24 between the interior and the dog-friendly terrace, and the partners were deliberate about keeping it that way. The focus here is on flow and curation rather than volume, to create a neighbourhood hub for Griffintown's young professional crowd, with run clubs and matcha clubs already circling.

The coffee program runs on Café TorQué, a Quebec roaster that macerates its beans with banana peels to produce the flavour in BRUT's signature banana bread latte. Matcha gets equal billing: the Matcha BRUT pairs the green tea with a house-made whipped coconut cream that took some development to get right and avoid curdling that can trip up coconut milk applications. The full signature menu runs to six drinks, including a strawberry matcha and a salted maple latte built on Quebec maple syrup. Classics are available too, though, for anyone not ready to commit to banana-infused espresso before 9 a.m.