Tinto Coffee House
89 Roncesvalles Avenue @ Marion

Roncesvalles is littered with coffee joints, yet we’ve never ventured out there for our Caffeine-Buzzing purposes. What’s up with that? I don’t know, but it was something that needed to be rectified and rectified it certainly was. The Chief and I, we hopped on the 501 at Gladstone and got stuck in traffic. Shit, we could have walked to Roncesvalles in the time it took for that streetcar to lurch its way over there, and I can assure you that we were mighty surly when we finally made it. We walked into Tinto Coffee House and were delighted to find that this large, split-level café was not just one to be lost amongst the sea of like-minded small businesses along the quaint West End strip. Despite being only a few doors down from the more well-known-but-with-limited-seating-space, Cherry Bomb, Tinto manages to carve out a cool, DIY sort of niche in a heavily saturated area.

With ample seating space – including a few couches – readily available power outlets – thank Christ – and some fine eats and drinks, Tinto is a bright, warm and fuzzy kind of place that almost made me wish it was colder, so that I could justify getting a hot chocolate because it would be a great place to have one of those. But seriously folks, Tinto is great for hanging out and reading a book; it's inviting without being too overbearing (read, it has just the right amount of scuzz) and it has a real flavour of its own that keeps it from being like every other quaint and comfortable coffee shop. My favorite part was that on their fridge there was a sign that read "No Pop! Not Sorry!" - it made me chuckle something fierce, I can tell you.

My least favorite part about Tinto was that while WiFi is available, it is not the fastest or most reliable. It kept cutting out every few minutes, which ended up fucking some serious shit up on a couple of occasions. I still want to hang out there though, so I would suggest that if you make a special trip over to Tinto, be sure to bring a book and curl up in one of their sofas, rather than trying get any serious surfing done because that will not come easy for you as far as I can tell.

The layout of the place is great, I really dig the split-levels and the separate rooms with the bright red chairs and brick walls - it's all very lovely. The people that work there are super-nice and, most importantly, the coffee is pretty good. I didn't catch what they were packing, bean-wise, but I did enjoy it, in addition to my time there in general.