Photo by Jade Wulfraat, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Café and coworking in Old Montreal, Montreal
Crew Collective & Café
Coffee in the Bank
The old Royal Bank of Canada headquarters on Saint-Jacques was built to make you feel small and keep your money nervous. Today the grand banking hall belongs to Crew Collective & Café, and the people under that ceiling are mostly freelancers with laptops and visitors pointing their phones straight up. Half of them came just to stare at the ceiling. Fair enough.
As a former road warrior who spent too many hours in bank boardrooms, I enjoy watching a banking hall become a coffee bar. The beans come from Traffic Coffee, a Montreal roaster, and the house drink to know is the dulce de leche latte, a double espresso with house-made dulce de leche syrup, sweet enough to make a compliance officer smile. Brunch runs daily from nine to three. The rest of the operation is a coworking space with day passes and memberships, which explains the quiet focus in the room and the unwritten rule that nobody takes a phone call at full volume.
Come for the building. Stay because the coffee is good and the staff keep things moving under a ceiling that would make a cathedral jealous. Pick a weekday morning, when the light is kind and the room is calmer, order the dulce de leche latte, and look up. Then put your phone away and look up again.
- Order this
- Dulce de leche latte, An espresso drink on Traffic Coffee, Brunch, served until three
- The damage
- $$
- Go
- A weekday morning, for the light and a calmer room
- Find it
- 360 Rue Saint-Jacques, Suite G101, Montréal, QC H2Y 1P5