Opened in 1970 by his grandfather for “a bunch of old Italian men playing cards,” it’s now internationally known as hipster central for indie alt-rock bands and soccer viewing.
Whenever he has to make a major decision about Café Olimpico, owner Jonathan Vannelli always asks himself the same question. What would Rocco think?
Rocco would be his late grandfather Rocco Furfaro, a guy from Calabria in southern Italy who arrived in Montreal in the early 1960s and in 1970 decided to open a coffee shop near his home on St-Viateur St. in Mile End. At first, it didn’t really have a name and was known informally as Rocco’s bar.
Vannelli is set to open a fourth Olimpico outlet, this one in the space formerly occupied by Café Crème, just south of the Metro grocery store on Victoria Ave. in Westmount. There are also Olimpico cafés in the Old Port (in the William Gray Hotel) and on Robert-Bourassa Blvd. downtown.
“I think if my grandfather was around he’d probably first say: ‘Hey, what’s happening here? Four cafés?’” said Vannelli, 31. “But I think he’d be super proud. I just want to make him proud. That’s important. Everything I do, I think of him first.”
When Rocco first opened the place at the corner of Waverly St. and St-Viateur, he bought a coffee machine, a pool table and a satellite dish and, in the early years, it was really mostly a hang-out for him and his Italian buddies to watch European soccer and knock back cappuccinos. For ages, it was known as Open Da Night, a reference to the café’s sign ‘Open Day and Night,’ which had lost a couple of letters over the years.
“Back in the day, it was a bunch of old Italian men playing cards,” Vannelli said in an interview this week in his “office,” the corner table at the back of the café, which inevitably has a long lineup of locals and tourists looking for a hit of the place’s legendary coffee.
“Then in the ’90s, the area started gentrifying and my grandfather was like ‘Who are you people?’” Vannelli said. “He was a bit confused. It was his home and it was his social hangout. Then it opened his eyes and he thought: ‘This café is becoming a bigger community than just Italians. It’s becoming so multicultural’.”
The late ’90s/early oughts was when Mile End was not only being gentrified but, more importantly, transforming itself into ground zero for the city’s indie alt-rock scene thanks to the presence of bands like Arcade Fire, The Dears and Stars. Many of the musicians spent their days sipping coffee and penning songs at the back of Olimpico. That made Rocco’s hangout something of a legendary café and it’s still not uncommon today to bump into tourists from around the globe who understand a pit-stop at Olimpico is a key part of any visit to Montreal.
Rocco’s daughter Vittoria Furfaro took over the ownership from her father and now she’s passed the Olimpico torch to her son Jonathan. He has a one-year-old son, Rocco, named after Jonathan’s grandfather, and the proud dad is already talking about how he hopes his kid will become the fourth generation to helm the popular coffee shop.
But that’s at least a couple of decades off. Meantime, Vannelli is slowly, but surely, expanding the Olimpico empire. When his mother decided in 2016 to open in the Old Port, she suggested Jonathan helm the project. Fresh out of Concordia’s John Molson School of Business with a BComm in marketing and finance, that was his first experience managing a café. But given he’d literally grown up in Olimpico, it was hardly unfamiliar territory.
Then came downtown and soon — likely early September — Westmount. But Vannelli has no interest in getting bigger for expansion’s sake, saying he’s had offers to open outlets across Canada and he’s turned them down.
“It’s important to continue our tradition,” Vannelli said. “It’s a family. It goes beyond business. Continuing my grandfather’s legacy is super important to me. I want to keep it very tight and small. I don’t think my grandfather would’ve wanted me to franchise.”
The flagship location on St-Viateur is still hipster central, but it also remains one of the neighbourhood’s go-to spots to watch soccer. That’s Olimpico in a nutshell. The too-cool bands put it on the map, but the family running it aren’t about to forget their roots. Vannelli installed an 85-inch screen on the terrasse for the Euro soccer tournament this summer and says “the Euro vibe has been insane, even if it sucks that Italy is out.” You can be assured there will be a massive crowd inside and outside the café for Sunday’s Euro final pitting Spain against England. There may be a state-of-the-art TV screen, but the coffees are still made with the exact same recipe — a mix of six types of coffee beans from Italy — that Rocco invented 50 years ago.
In other words, it’s a family affair and it ain’t just business.
“At the end of the day, it goes beyond coffee,” Vannelli said. “We’re not opening coffee shops, we’re opening communities. And when we go to Westmount, it’s like, how can we enhance this community, make it better. What’s cool is every time I go to Westmount, to check up on the work, I come outside and there’s a bunch of people and they’re saying: ‘Oh my god, when are you guys opening? This is amazing.’ So for me when I open a café, it’s like I’m buying my forever home. I’m not opening an Olimpico to be there for five years. I’m opening it to stay there a hundred years.”