Nemesis Coffee Gastown ★9.1

Some cafés grow slowly out of a neighbourhood. Nemesis Coffee arrived in Gastown in 2017 as a bet placed by a founder barely out of his early twenties, with a float in the till so small it has become part of the origin story, and turned into one of the defining coffee brands of British Columbia. This is the room where all of that started: the original Gastown bar, at the point where the historic district runs into the downtown business core.

Highlights

• The original room — the first Nemesis, opened in 2017, and still the reference point for everything the company has built since across the Lower Mainland.
• Direct trade with a named-farm habit — the green-buying program is built on knowing where the coffee comes from and saying so, rather than buying anonymous lots off the commodity market.
• Its own pastry brand, Dope Bakehouse — the viennoiserie is made in-house by a sibling bakery and delivered fresh daily, not bought in from a wholesaler.
• Recognized internationally — Nemesis was placed fifteenth on the World’s 100 Best Coffee Shops list for 2026, the highest-ranked Canadian entry.
• Ground floor of a university innovation centre — floor-to-ceiling glass, white walls, light wood, communal tables, and a daytime crowd of students, founders and office workers.
• An inverted heart for a logo — the founder’s shorthand for something made by people for people, deliberately against the grain, and the reason the name reads as a challenge rather than a threat.

What’s in the cup

Nemesis built its reputation as a café first and a roaster second. For most of its history the bar has run a rotating list rather than a single fixed house coffee, with local roasteries such as Luna and Harken among the influences the team openly credits, and the company has since moved into direct-trade roasting of its own, with a dedicated coffee lab and roastery as the next step. What that means in the cup is a bar that has spent years tasting other people’s work before committing to its own — which is a much better order to do it in than the reverse.

The buying side is where the ambition shows. Green coffee is sourced on direct-trade principles under a dedicated buying program, with the emphasis on transparency about which farm the lot came from. That is expensive and slow compared with buying through a broker, and cafés only do it when the coffee itself is the product rather than the packaging. Practically, it means the filter list moves with the harvest and a returning guest gets something new rather than the same cup on repeat.

On the bar itself the balance is normal for Vancouver: espresso and milk drinks carry the volume, filter carries the interest, and the staff are used to explaining what is on today because the list keeps changing. Nothing about the service is precious — this is a busy corner room, not a tasting laboratory — but the answers are there if you ask for them.

Who’s behind it

Nemesis is the work of Jess Reno, who opened the Gastown room in 2017 when he was still in his early twenties. The idea did not begin as a café at all — an earlier magazine project failed to get off the ground, and what survived from it was the underlying goal: to build something that gathered people. The financing was as unglamorous as it sounds. A small-business loan from a local credit union, emptied personal pockets, and family and friends who put money in because they believed the founder rather than the business plan.

That start explains the company’s tone. The logo is an inverted heart, which Reno describes as standing for something real, made by people for people and set against the grain — the same instinct that produced the name. And the growth has been in that spirit rather than a franchising one: a second bar inside a North Vancouver art gallery in 2019, a large flagship on the city’s east side in 2021, later additions further out into the suburbs, and a standalone home for the bakery brand. Five sites across the province, all recognizably from the same hand.

Who it suits

This is the most laptop-tolerant of Gastown’s serious coffee rooms, and the address explains why: the café occupies the ground floor of a business school’s innovation centre, so the weekday crowd is students, startup people and downtown office workers, and nobody blinks at an open screen. Communal tables make a solo working session socially easy — you are sharing a surface rather than occupying a table meant for four. Common sense still applies at peak: a single person spread across a large table during the lunch rush is the one thing that will earn a look.

It is equally good for the meeting that is too informal for an office. The room is bright, the tables are big, and the noise level sits in that useful middle band where a conversation is private without anyone having to lean in. Two people can sit for an hour without feeling pushed out, which is not true of every café on this stretch.

The takeaway run works well because the bar is set up for volume and the pastry counter is genuinely worth stopping at. And the solo visit — one person, one filter, a window seat and the whole of the downtown crossroads going past the glass — is arguably what the room does best. The only scenario it does not serve is the evening one: this is a daytime café that closes long before dinner.

The room

The space is modern rather than heritage, despite the neighbourhood: floor-to-ceiling windows on a corner site, white walls, pale wood, and enough daylight that the room barely needs lamps until winter. It seats around forty across a compact footprint, with communal tables doing much of the work, so a full house feels sociable rather than cramped.

The contrast with the older Gastown cafés is the point. Where the district’s classic rooms trade on brick, beams and dark storefronts, Nemesis reads as bright, clean and contemporary — closer to a gallery lobby than a saloon. That suits the building it sits in and the crowd it draws, and it is the reason the room photographs so consistently well.

It is a busy corner and the acoustics are live: hard surfaces and glass mean the sound of a full house carries. Mid-morning on a weekday, the room hums with laptops and low conversation; at peak it is properly noisy. If quiet is the requirement, come at the edges of the day.

With your coffee

The food side is unusually well sorted for a coffee bar, because the pastry is not bought in. Nemesis runs its own bakery brand, Dope Bakehouse, which supplies the cafés with laminated pastry made fresh daily and has since grown into a standalone shop of its own. That vertical arrangement is the difference between a counter of yesterday’s wholesale croissants and a counter that is restocked from a kitchen with the company’s name on it.

Beyond the pastry there is a proper daytime food offering rather than a token one — the kind of café menu that can carry a lunch rather than just a snack. It is still a café, not a restaurant: expect a plate that arrives quickly and pairs with coffee, not a cooked-to-order brunch with a waiting list. For the neighbourhood’s working population, that is exactly the right calibration.

When to come

Nemesis opens early enough to catch the commute and closes in the late afternoon, so plan it into the first two-thirds of the day. The predictable rhythm is a downtown one: an early wave of people getting coffee on the way in, a mid-morning laptop tide that settles for a couple of hours, a lunchtime peak, and a calmer late afternoon when the working crowd thins out.

Weekends read differently. The office traffic disappears and is replaced by people walking Gastown, which makes late weekend mornings busy in a leisurely rather than a hurried way — the queue moves, but the seats are the constraint. If you want a table with room to spread out, the quietest windows are the first hour after opening on any day, and mid-afternoon midweek.

Getting there

The café sits at the meeting point of Gastown, Victory Square and the downtown business core, on the ground floor of a university innovation building at a busy corner. Every rapid-transit option downtown is within a short walk: Waterfront station for the harbour lines and the SeaBus, Granville station a few minutes south, and Stadium–Chinatown a similar distance east. Trolleybus routes along the main downtown arteries stop essentially at the door.

On foot it is a natural stop on a Gastown walk — the steam clock, the cobbled blocks and the waterfront are all a few minutes north, and Chinatown is a short walk in the other direction. As everywhere in this part of the city, driving is the least convenient option: metered street parking is scarce and the surrounding blocks are heavily restricted.

Good to know

The honest caveats: the room is popular and the seats are finite, so at peak you may be waiting for a table rather than for coffee. The acoustics are bright and the space is glassy, which means a full house is loud. And the coffee list moves, so the cup you loved last month may simply not be there — that is a feature of the buying philosophy, but it does frustrate people who want the same thing every time.

Against that: this is the original room of a café that has since been ranked among the best in the world, run by a company that buys its green coffee directly and bakes its own pastry. Very few cafés control that much of their own supply chain, and almost none of them started with a founder in his early twenties and a nearly empty till.

Questions and answers

Is this the first Nemesis?

Yes. The Gastown bar opened in 2017 and is the original location; everything else — the art gallery café, the east-side flagship, the suburban sites and the bakery shop — came afterwards.

Do they roast their own coffee?

They have moved into direct-trade roasting of their own after years of running a rotating list of other roasters’ coffee, with a dedicated coffee lab and roastery as the next stage of that.

Where does the pastry come from?

From Dope Bakehouse, the company’s own bakery brand, which delivers fresh daily and now has a standalone shop as well.

Can I work here?

Yes, more comfortably than at most Gastown cafés — the building is a university innovation centre and the communal tables make solo screen time normal. Just do not monopolize a big table at lunchtime.

Is it good for a meeting?

Very. Big tables, good light and a middling noise level make it a reliable choice for a conversation that is too casual for an office.

How large is it?

Compact — around forty seats in a bright corner unit, with communal tables carrying much of the capacity.

Is it open in the evening?

No. It is a daytime café that closes in the late afternoon, so evening plans need a different address.

What has it won?

Nemesis was placed fifteenth on the World’s 100 Best Coffee Shops list for 2026, making it the highest-ranked Canadian café on that list.

Opening hours