AHH!!! Coffee : Fun in a Cup

That jittery, buzzing feeling when your bones are trying to escape your skin because you’ve had one coffee too many? Somebody finally built a café around it. Ahh!!! Coffee takes its name from exactly that sensation, plus a healthy dose of 90s cartoon energy, and it belongs to Kyle Ratchford, aka The Booj.

The Booj has been making coffee in the city for about fourteen years, the last two under his own name, and he finally opened his own spot in Hintonburg recently. “My whole sort of philosophy is just play,” he says. “I spent years doing things the right way, and now I get to do them my way.” The classics are still on the menu, still executed with love, but nobody here is interested in doing a million cortados a day. “I believe there’s a lot more to be seen in the realm of coffee and tea, and a lot more work to be done.”

The drinks are where the whimsy comes in. Like his creation Captain Ron, which layers saffron, cardamom and vanilla syrup with orange zest into something that “bouquets incredibly well with the espresso.” Jesus Juice is a soursop-passion fruit-matcha situation that tastes like a “tropical fever dream”, named for Jesus Rivera, the artist behind the logo. That logo is a little plasticine coyote, a figure The Booj walked past at one of Rivera’s art shows on opening night, stopped in front of, and knew instantly was his.

Many years sober now, The Booj has spent a lot of time working behind bars that doubled as cafés, and that’s where the idea behind the extensive mocktail list comes from: “what if I just don’t put whiskey in this, and I put coffee in this,” as he puts it, “how do I find a seat at the table?” The menu features flavours that arrive with a memory attached, twisted just enough to keep you on your toes, like his house banana marshmallow syrup, or a tiger’s blood syrup inspired by that snow cone flavour from our childhoods.

Food arrives at Ahh!!! Coffee by way of friends: cookies from Johnny at Rude Pizza co., some two thousand of them since opening, cardamom buns, butter pastries most weekends. “That man makes a damn good cookie,” The Booj says. The retail shelf runs dry weekly, stocked with beans from Europe and across Canada. “I’m generally looking for something a little bit extra special, something that’ll really make people go, ‘what did I just drink?'” he says.

The room is shared with twelve artist studios and the Urban Art Collective, so the graffiti-covered walls are a group project. Fourteen seats, twenty if everyone gets friendly. As for what he wants people to take away, he keeps it to four words: “Just have more fun.”

Written by Marie-Ève Godin
Photography by Alison Slattery

Updated on September 22, 2026

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