Fawkes Café & Bakery ★9.3

There is a scale by the door that once weighed pelts. It dates from 1911, and it is standing in the building where it was used, because Fawkes Café & Bakery occupies the old Great West Saddlery premises in Edmonton’s downtown warehouse district — a place that was, in its day, the largest saddle manufacturer in Western Canada. The café that moved in did not paper over any of that. The bar was built from reclaimed wood milled in 1910, the mirrors came out of a defunct yoga studio, the framed menus over the washrooms are older than most of the customers, and the room reads as deliberately old-world in a way Edmonton’s coffee scene had not really tried before.

Highlights

• A heritage warehouse interior with provenance for nearly every object — a bar top of 1910 reclaimed timber running a full seventy-five feet, and an antique scale by the entrance from the building’s saddlery era.
• They roast their own: Fawkes Coffee is the house line, roasted in small batches, which puts the café in the roaster-owned category rather than among the multi-roaster bars.
• A bakery that actually bakes — pastries, sandwiches and sauces made from scratch on site, with focaccia baked twice a day.
• No surcharge for substitutions, with vegan, vegetarian, gluten-friendly and dairy-friendly options treated as normal rather than as an accommodation. That policy is stated outright, and it is rarer than it should be.
• A second act by people who know the city: the owners ran one of Old Strathcona’s best-known café institutions for well over a decade before this.
• A pet-friendly lobby and a spacious room, which together make it one of the easier downtown cafés to walk into without a plan.

What’s in the cup

Fawkes roasts its own coffee in small batches under its own name, which changes what the café is answerable for. A multi-roaster bar can blame the bag; a roaster-owned bar cannot. The upside for a visitor is coherence — the espresso, the milk drinks and the beans on the shelf are all one house speaking with one voice — and the practical advantage of buying from the people who did the roasting, which is that they can tell you exactly what you are drinking.

The stated posture is approachable quality, and that phrase is worth taking at face value here rather than treating it as a hedge. The owners spent nearly two decades in coffee before opening this, most of it running a busy neighbourhood café, and that experience shows in a house style built for a room full of ordinary customers rather than for a competition table: espresso that behaves well under milk, a properly covered range of milk alternatives including oat, almond and lactose-free, and house-made syrups rather than pump bottles — the vanilla is made in the kitchen and has a small local following of its own.

What that means in practice is that Fawkes is not trying to out-technical the city’s most doctrinaire filter bars. Edmonton has roasteries whose bars exist to demonstrate a roast profile, and there is a place for that. This one is built the other way: the coffee is the anchor of a room that also feeds you, and the ambition is that everything is good, not that one thing is startling.

Who’s behind it

Jorel and Mikayla Pepin founded Fawkes in 2020, and they were not newcomers. From 2006 to 2019 Jorel and his family ran a long-standing café institution in Old Strathcona, with Mikayla as general manager — a place woven into the daily life of that district for well over a decade. They sold it, spent a couple of years out of the industry, and discovered what they actually missed was not coffee but the social function of a café: the room, the regulars, the thing a good counter does for a neighbourhood.

The way they came back is the part worth knowing. Fawkes started in the summer of 2020 — the quietest possible moment to start anything in hospitality — as a pop-up selling coffee and vegan cake doughnuts while a permanent home was being found and built. That pop-up ran for 843 days and sold more than seventy-five thousand doughnuts, which is not a soft launch; it is a business built in public, in the worst conditions the trade has seen in living memory. The permanent café opened in November 2024.

The name follows the same logic. The owners describe it as being about renewal and rising again, which anyone who catches the reference will read as a phoenix — an unusually literal name for a second act. Given how the last few years went, it is also unusually earned.

Which visit it suits

The room’s shape does a lot of the work. A seventy-five-foot bar is a huge amount of solo seating, and bar seating is what a person working alone actually wants: a defined slot, a place to put a laptop, no negotiation over a four-top. Combined with a spacious floor and a downtown location surrounded by offices and a university campus, this reads as one of the more plausible working cafés in the core — with the honest caveat that the café does not publish anything about Wi-Fi or power outlets, and a heritage warehouse conversion is exactly the kind of building where sockets are where they are rather than where you want them.

For meeting someone, it is straightforwardly good: the scale of the room means you can talk without broadcasting, and the food is substantial enough that a coffee meeting can become lunch without relocating. For coming alone without work — a book, an hour, a slow morning — the interior rewards that more than most, because there is genuinely something to look at.

Takeaway is well covered too, and it is worth remembering that this business spent 843 days as a walk-up window. The habits of that period are still visible in how the counter handles a queue. And if you have a dog with you, the lobby is pet-friendly, which downtown is not a given.

Space and atmosphere

The aesthetic has been described by the owners themselves as dark academia, and the room delivers it: deep tones, old wood, antique mirrors, a general sense of a place that has been here longer than it has. The critical difference from the many cafés that buy this look wholesale is that here most of the objects have provenance. The timber in the bar was milled in 1910. The scale by the door weighed furs when the building manufactured saddles. The decorative menus above the washrooms are decades old and came from somewhere else entirely. It is a collection rather than a mood board.

Scale-wise the space is generous, which matters downtown, where most independent cafés are squeezed into narrow retail units. The long bar gives the room a spine and keeps the traffic legible even when it is busy. The noise sits in the comfortable middle — conversational, not cavernous — and the lobby’s pet-friendly policy adds a note of movement near the entrance that some people love and a few will not.

What comes with the coffee

The bakery half of the name is not decorative. Nearly everything is made from scratch on the premises — pastries, sandwiches, sauces — and the focaccia is baked twice daily, which is the detail that tells you how the kitchen thinks about freshness. You can eat properly here rather than choosing between a croissant and going somewhere else, and the doughnut lineage from the pop-up years has left the counter with a strong sweet side.

The inclusivity policy deserves its own line because it is stated so plainly: vegan, vegetarian, gluten-friendly and dairy-friendly options across the menu, and no extra charge for substitutions. Anyone who has spent years paying a surcharge for oat milk will understand exactly how much goodwill that single decision buys.

When to come

This is a downtown café in a district that changes character by the day and the season. Weekday mornings belong to the working core — office traffic, students from the nearby university campus, people getting fuelled before the day begins. Midday is the food peak. Late afternoons on a weekday are usually the calmest stretch and the best time to get a good seat at the long bar without competing for it.

The warm months change the block entirely, because this stretch of the warehouse district hosts the city’s downtown outdoor market and turns into a pedestrian crowd on market days — excellent if you want the neighbourhood at its liveliest, less excellent if you wanted a quiet table. In winter the equation inverts: the district empties out at street level and a warm heritage room with good baking becomes a genuine refuge rather than merely a nice option.

Getting there

The café is in the downtown warehouse district, in a named heritage building that is a landmark in its own right, a short walk from the university campus downtown and from the arena district to the north. Two LRT stations sit within a few minutes on foot, which makes this one of the easiest cafés on this list to reach without a car.

One practical caveat for the cold half of the year: Edmonton’s downtown pedway network — the system of covered walkways and underground links that lets people cross the core without going outside — does not deliver you to this door. The building is a street-level heritage unit, so however you arrive, the last stretch is on the sidewalk. In January that is a meaningful thirty seconds. Bring the coat you would bring for a walk, not the one you would bring for a car park.

Good to know

• It is young in its permanent form. The pop-up ran for years, but the café itself opened in late 2024, so the room is still settling into its habits.
• The long bar is the best seat for anyone alone, and it is the reason this works better for solo visits than most downtown rooms.
• Wi-Fi and outlets are not documented publicly. The building is a 1910s warehouse conversion — check before you plan a working day around it.
• Substitutions are free and the menu is built around dietary options rather than treating them as exceptions.
• Dogs are welcome in the lobby, which is a rarity downtown and worth knowing if you are walking one.
• Market days are loud. In summer, the surrounding block draws crowds — plan around that in either direction.

Questions and answers

Who opened Fawkes?

Jorel and Mikayla Pepin, who from 2006 to 2019 ran a well-known café institution in Old Strathcona before selling it and stepping away from the trade. Fawkes is their return.

Why the name?

The owners describe it as standing for renewal and rising again — a phoenix, essentially, and a fairly direct comment on starting over after selling their first business.

Do they roast their own coffee?

Yes. Fawkes Coffee is the house line, roasted in small batches, so the beans in the grinder and the bags on the shelf come from the same operation.

Is the food made in house?

Almost all of it. Pastries, sandwiches and sauces are made from scratch on site, and the focaccia is baked twice a day.

What is the building?

The former Great West Saddlery premises in the downtown warehouse district — once the largest saddle manufacturer in Western Canada. The 1911 scale by the door is a survivor from that period.

Is it good for working on a laptop?

The seventy-five-foot bar gives an unusual amount of single seating and the room is spacious, which helps a great deal. Wi-Fi and power are not documented publicly, so confirm before you commit a full working day.

Are there options for dietary restrictions?

Yes, and this is a point of pride: vegan, vegetarian, gluten-friendly and dairy-friendly choices are built into the menu, with no extra charge for substitutions.

Can I bring a dog?

The lobby is pet-friendly, which for a downtown café is unusual and useful.

How long has it been open?

The business began as a pop-up in the summer of 2020 and ran that way for 843 days, selling more than 75,000 doughnuts; the permanent café opened in November 2024.

Opening hours