The Roma social club on Bernard Street
Two years ago, in the middle of August, Mentor Avdiu, then 42, was busy repairing the oven at a restaurant on Bernard Street in Montreal's Mile End. During his breaks, he observed the neighborhood. Across the street, you can see the iconic birdcage facade of Tammy, a florist from Hong Kong who operated several local businesses when rents were affordable and the children were young.
The store of Drawn and Quarterly, the legendary publisher of alternative comics, is just a minute away. And further afield, there's the Dépanneur Café, with its whimsical morning concerts, and the once-must-see Brazilian restaurant, which recently closed its doors.
Like the few other streets that connect the Mile End to the affluent borough of Outremont, this stretch of barely two kilometers has two sections, each with its own character. On the Outremont side, there is a wider avenue, lined with residential buildings, high-end shops and restaurants overlooking spacious sidewalks.
On this side, Bernard Street leads to the railway line that served local factories for much of the 20th century. For several generations, the surrounding residential buildings housed the immigrant working population, before they moved to the suburbs. There were Irish Catholics, traditional Jews who came from the Russian Empire in the early 20th century and further afield, where the two Bernard streets intersect, the Hasidim, the Italians from the south, and the Greeks who came here after the Second World War.
“This part of the city is a perfect example of its diversity,” says Justin Bur, a neighborhood historian. Starting in the 1980s, families of young professionals and high-tech businesses slowly replaced aging immigrant communities and abandoned factories.
Ten years ago, this gentrification became so visible that it caught the attention of German Generation X and New York Times, which further contributed to the rise in real estate prices.
However, this is not what Mr. Avdiu noticed when he was walking the street in the summer of 2020. What he saw above all was the culmination of his lifelong efforts, as a teenager, who had left his native Albania on foot for Greece and then started a successful home appliance repair business in Montreal. He had succeeded. He wanted to celebrate the fact that he had succeeded and, above all, to convince his son to come back and live with him.
That's how things happened, according to Mr. Avdiu. “You know, I could open a café here,” he told the manager of the restaurant whose oven he had just repaired. The latter pulled him to the next door. “Go talk to these guys,” he suggested.
The Lori coffee
Two former small shops, a shoemaker and a barber, were then adjacent to the restaurant. They belong to the same Greek family that moved to the neighborhood in the 1960s and are now considering moving to the suburbs. Mr. Avdiu, who speaks Greek, quickly concludes an agreement.
Over the following months, he set out to transform the space with the help of his family. He knocked down the wall that separated the two shops and replaced the front doors with windows. He covers the brick walls and covers them with lacquered wooden shelves. Wooden beams cross the white painted ceiling. On one side, he puts a counter, where he places an espresso machine, and installs a board, which indicates the menu. On the shelves, he has packages of the homemade coffee blend, coffee makers, black and white photos of the Old Continent. Bistro tables and chairs furnish the space, where there is also a sofa decorated with a shawl in the colors of the Albanian flag.
During the holidays, you can see a Qeleshe, the traditional Albanian headgear, and a box of Pandoro, an Italian Christmas cake. Across the room is a small empty counter and a large rectangular table. The owners will see later what they can do with it. And they did all that with their own hands. The place is so pretty that a friend of Mr. Avdiu, an interior designer, does not hide her surprise. He named coffee “Lori” after a well-known coffee brand in Albania, which is also the name of his own roasting company. The café opened its doors in December 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, and Dimitri, his son, left Greece to come and manage it.
Picture: Pablo Ortiz
The long journey
In January 2013, Mentor Avdiu arrived at Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau airport with the intention of seeking political asylum. “But what am I doing here? ” he asks himself as he sees winter. Within a month, he got a job as an appliance repairer in a workshop owned by Greeks. He goes there by bike until he understands how to get around by bus. His brother and son joined him at the end of the year and, in 2015, he regularized his situation. It is not the first time he has taken such a trip.
Albania, a Balkan country located in south-eastern Europe, has three million inhabitants.
It is bordered by Greece and former Yugoslavia, and is located opposite Italy, across the Adriatic Sea. Since the collapse of communism in 1989, hundreds of thousands of people, or even more than a million, have fled a declining economy and taken refuge in Greece and Italy to take refuge in precarious jobs. Even today, Albanians represent an important part of the immigrant communities in these countries.
Mentor recalls that in the fall of 1995, at the age of just 13, he went to a small town in Central Greece, a six-day walk away, with his father. He harvested olives there.
Later, he again took the road to Greece on foot, this time never to return. He became an apprentice in an appliance repair shop. He was so gifted that two years later, he travelled all over Greece and even went all the way to Italy to repair espresso machines. After a brief stint at the Greek subsidiary of Danesi, the Italian manufacturer of coffee machines, Mr. Avdiu started his own business. More than anything, he wanted to honor the advice his father had given him since childhood. He wants to have a suitable job, to own his own business.
“You have to go to North America,” his father often urged him. It's the land of possibilities. “In the United States, if you can. But Canada is good too,” he told her. Mr. Avdiu is trying by all means to reach America, but it is especially difficult for Albanians to get a visa. He does not have any Greek documentation that would allow him to enter Canada without having to provide a reason. He ends up getting a fake Greek passport on the black market and trying his luck at the airport. That is how he enters the country.
In the space of five years, Mr. Avdiu set up his repair business in Saint-Laurent, then expanded his activities to the transport of roasted coffee beans between distributors and businesses.
At its Saint-Laurent warehouse, business is going well, and the company employs a dozen people. His brother also owns his own construction business. However, his son, Dimitri, can't stand the winters. And above all, he left love behind. In 2016, at the age of 21, he returned to Greece and became a bouncer in nightclubs in Patras, a port city where he would live for nearly 10 years. Although he is worried about seeing his son away from him, Mr. Avdiu continues to build a life for himself in Quebec.
Because of the proximity to Italy, the Albanian population has gradually become a big fan of espresso, the joke being that Albania produces the best espresso outside of Italy. By specializing in the repair of espresso machines, an expertise that led him to go to Italy, Mr. Avdiu became a true espresso enthusiast.
And he couldn't be satisfied with the products offered here. So with the help of a friend, he started roasting his own coffee bean blend. He set about preparing a mixture that was both bitter and dense, similar to the one he was used to in Europe. A few cafés in the city have adopted it. But who could have said that one day, Mentor Avdiu would have his own coffee shop?
Dimitri got married in Greece, and his job as a nightclub bouncer ended up weighing on him. “You have to bring him back here,” advised him by a friend who had just visited his son in Patras.
Mr. Avdiu told me about having a long conversation with his son on the phone when he signed the lease on Bernard Street. “I said to him, “Are you ready to run the business? You can't disappoint me.” [Dimitri] hesitated a bit, but he finally made up his mind and accepted.” That's how he came back to Montreal. The two men started by serving muffins and Bureks, those savory pastries covered in filo pastry that the Greeks called Pitas, and bitter espresso enjoyed by members of the Albanian community. The latter are not necessarily regulars in the neighborhood.
The population, estimated at a few thousand people, is mostly scattered in the suburbs and neighborhoods where newcomers are more present, namely Saint-Laurent, LaSalle, Côte-des-Neiges and, further afield, Laval, Longueuil and even Terrebonne.
First came the French-speaking students or those who had studied in France and who already knew the language. The Greek crisis of 2010 led to hundreds of others, several of whom started looking for jobs in Greek businesses on Avenue du Parc. Then the construction workers arrived.
The Roma coffee
Last March, Dimitri expelled an Albanian coffee customer. He and his father unfurled the Roma flag on the counter in the unoccupied part of the room. This customer complained, “You're ruining everything with that,” he said. Dimitri, who may have short wicks, said to her, “You get out of here right away or I'll kick you out. I don't need your dirty money.”
Picture: Pablo Ortiz
The Avdiu are Roma from Albania. The country has tens of thousands of Roma, a number sometimes estimated at nearly 100,000. Mentor Avdiu is part of the Mechkars, a Roma people who, in the central region of Albania, specialize in agricultural work.
While many Roma have emigrated, Albanian Roma are few in Montreal. In Levan, the village where Mr. Avdiu grew up in Albania, 24 people were killed in 1997 during a conflict between Albanian Roma and non-Roma gangs. And even though he wasn't there — he was living in Greece at the time — he didn't want to suffer this racism anymore. In 2015, he even obtained his documents seeking political asylum, citing the endemic racism he had been the subject of all his life. Nevertheless, he knows how to navigate among Roma and non-Roma, and a large number of his friends are Albanians. The television placed in the corner of the room plays muted Albanian music and, in the speakers, another Albanian music channel can also be heard.
Seventy percent of Café Lori's customers are Albanian and include people who travel from the suburbs on Sundays, construction workers who go there for their coffee break and a French interpreter who advises asylum seekers in their administrative procedures. The coffee tastes “just like the one we have at home,” they say. Greeks also frequent the place, especially Dimitri's friends who have just moved to Montreal.
The entrepreneur starts his working day by calling his mother in Albania, his daughter, who stayed in Greece, and his spouse, also in Albania.
He hopes to be able to get them here one day. Then, he went to Saint-Laurent, to his home appliance repair shop. He then goes here, on Bernard Street, to Café Lori. He does not expect his sector of activity to recover any time soon. It is difficult to find permanent staff. The pastry chef who made Bureks had to stop working due to family problems, and at Lori, we now serve Spanakopitas And Tiropitas prepared by a Greek supplier.
The café has just obtained a permit that will allow it to create a terrace on the sidewalk during the summer. Things will work out well in the end. The most important thing for him is that his family stays close to him. Last year, Mr. Avdiu became the grandfather of a little boy named Hysni, whom he takes care of at the weekend when the family gathers on the couch in the café. Mentor Avdiu explains that, if the Roma flag has been displayed in his café since last February, it is out of pride. Being Roma is an identity that has determined his life, that of a hard worker, with good business sense and from a close-knit family, who, regardless of his background, will make it through.
What he wants is to organize a Roma party and for the whole community to be able to come to Café Lori. And they're starting to come in — slowly but surely. Nik, a 23-year-old chemical engineering student, is a Roma from Greece. He is sitting at the coffee table. Outside, the coming and going of young professionals, students, immigrant seniors who still live in the neighborhood, and Hasidim punctuate neighborhood life. “You might call this place an Albanian café,” says Nik, sipping on an espresso.
“You can hear Albanian speaking there, it's true. But for me, it will always be the Roma café, the place where I can speak my language, where people understand and respond to me in that language.”