What makes the perfect working café?
It’s 8:30 am on a Tuesday morning, and you’ve found the perfect café to get some work done. It’s bright, there’s plenty of seating, and Yelp says they’ve got great drinks and snacks. So you step in, order your latte (soy milk, no sugar) and a breakfast sandwich on a nice, buttery, croissant. Then you pick a table in a quiet corner, open your laptop, and connect to the wifi. You’re ready to take on the day.
Shit. The wifi’s only got 2 bars.
No biggie though, right? Email and Twitter are mere distractions, and you’re here to get shit done, not dilly dally on social media.
30 minutes later, your laptop needs some juice. Pull out your charger only to realize the only way you’ll be able to top up your battery is if you unplug their coffee maker, which, apparently, they aren’t cool with. Awesome. Now you’ve spent $10 on food and drink, but you have to pack your bag and hopefully find another spot to work. Hopefully that place will have better wifi and an outlet to spare.
We’ve all been there, frustrated with lousy internet connections or having to disrupt your seat-neighbours to move their feet so you can plug in. But since we’ve all been there, we’ve all also found our go-to cafés that have the trifecta: great coffee to power us, plenty of outlets to power our laptops, and lightning-fast wifi so we can send work to clients and managers.
To find the best working cafés in Toronto, we asked our community for their go-to spots. Sharing these may come back to bite us, but it’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all, right?
So here goes: here are our favourite working cafés in the city.
It’s always good to have a rotation of spots to avoid getting too comfortable:
Looking for ‘grammable cups? The Alternative Cafe has got you covered:
For long days, start with a strong coffee at Propeller then end it off with a pint (or two, we won’t judge) at Field Trip:
And it comes as no surprise that we’re a bit snobby when it comes to finding a café to work out of:
What about you? What’s your café of choice when you need to get some work done? Share your favourites below, or let us know if there are any places we should be sure to avoid.
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