MIA Café Club: Ca Lem Creamery’s colourful café

Every summer since 2016, Ca Lem Creamery has been offering Vietnamese flavoured ice cream in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood. This year, the ice cream shop turns into a cute little café during the winter.

“In the summer, our mission is to cool people down. Now, in the winter, it’s to warm them up,” explains owner Stéphanie Le. From the moment Ca Lem opened, it has been embraced by NDG families. With the MIA Café Club, Stéphanie is mainly targeting students from Concordia University who study at the Loyola campus. The surrounding area is lacking in cafés and restaurants. The new counter offers caffeinated delights and lunches, to savour on site or to take-out.

As she did with ice cream before opening Ca Lem, Stéphanie became interested in the world of coffee. So it’s no surprise that MIA Café Club turned to Vancouver’s excellent roaster 49th Parallel. In addition to classic coffees, the small new café offers hot drinks inspired by popular summer flavours (in iced format). You can sip a taro latte, purple in colour and vanilla in flavour, as well as pandan, a sweet and nutty flavoured herb.

On the food side, MIA Café Club focuses on quick and fresh meals. The goal is to offer students a counter where they can savour delicious options before, between, or after classes. Here, you can enjoy soups, toast, salads, fries, and smoothie-bowls, and there are several vegan and vegetarian options. Stéphanie says that the salmon gravlax toast and the soba noodle salad have been particularly popular since the opening. The house also offers a few tasty pastries to accompany their various coffees.

The temporary conversion of the ice cream shop into a café required a lot of work, especially in the kitchen. The installation of a new café style counter was done without disrupting the friendly atmosphere established by Ca Lem. The space remains just as colourful and eminently Instagrammable (neologism required).

Note that MIA Café Club does not offer Wi-Fi or electrical outlets, making it a less ideal place to study.

Ideally, the café would coexist with Ca Lem as soon as May, but it all depends on the response of the customers, explains Stéphanie. On our side, we wish much success to MIA Café Club, a lovely addition to the neighbourhood.

Written by Samuel Gauvreau Des Aulniers
Photography by Photos MIA Café Club

Last update: August 31, 2022

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