Downtown cafe has earned a loyal following for its welcoming service and deep, smooth coffee
Mia Stainsby
Sun
Mario Trejier of Mario’s Coffee Express. Photograph by : Stuart Davis, Vancouver Sun
It’s not necessarily the coffee that jolts you into wakefulness here. It’s the staff. “Good morning!” rings out every few seconds as customers come in for their morning on-switch. With owner Mario Trejier, it’s more of a bass bellow. No matter how grumpy you are, you can’t help but buck up amid such cheeriness.
You don’t need the exact address on the street because you just follow the music, which spills onto the street from this narrow little coffee bar.
But more to the point, three cheers for the coffee here. You know, for a coffee-addled town, there’s not a lot of good coffee to be found. At Mario’s, you get lovely crema, even with a straight-ahead decaf Americano. The flavour is deep, smooth, just a hint of bitterness.
One of the reasons for the great coffee is Trejier uses more grounds than the average cuppa joe. The other is, he’s the barista. “For 12 years!” he says.
Mario’s passes another test that other places fail — bitterly — even when owner-operated. The service is so welcoming, they have ancient loyalties. Customers are welcomed by name, sometimes in unison by staff.
If his name has a familiar ring, it might be because of Trejier’s 15 minutes of fame, back in the early 1990s. He had a coffee bar in the long-gone Eatons at Pacific Centre. When they wouldn’t renew his lease, favouring a dumbed-down coffee chain, fans revolted en masse and media swooped in on the David and Goliath dust-up.
“My customers went ballistic,” he says. In the short-term, David lost; however, by the time Eatons went belly up, Mario’s was re-established and going strong where it still sits today.
Its proximity to the Four Seasons and Metropolitan hotels brings in some Hollywood types. Michael Keaton recently spilled some of his coffee and when a staffer went to clean up, the former Batman actor jumped in. “Pass me the cloth — I can do that. I used to serve coffee,” he said.
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MARIO’S COFFEE EXPRESS
595 Howe St., 604-608-2804
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
