Toronto, CA: Freshly Brewed: Don’t forget your quarters for Parkdale’s Pinball Café

Okay, the article is mostly about pinball, but this location is also where a weekly Scrabble game is held - for my Toronto CA readers.

From National Post: Freshly Brewed: Don’t forget your quarters for Parkdale’s Pinball Café
The Pinball Café
1662 Queen St. W.; 416-402-7932;
Toronto
thepinballcafe.com

It’s not the usual soundtrack I’d expect to hear upon entering a café: In place of tapping on keyboards and ruffling pages, a din of snapping, bleeping and a deep chime filters towards me. When I look around at the brightly coloured walls and catch sight of a fully functional free-play 1973 Wurlitzer jukebox, I half-expect the Fonz to round a corner and ask me if I can spare a few quarters.

At The Pinball Café, it’s all about … the pinball. The vibe at this new Parkdale outpost is simply rad. Although, that three-letter adjective wouldn’t score you many points up front, where the Scrabble in the City group is having their regular Monday 6 p.m. meet. They’re a welcoming group, and a friend and I are invited to take over an empty board before we’ve even managed to order drinks.

Among themed cafés, this place marks a bolder move. The Pinball Café turns the anti-social work café and the parent/child meet-and-greet café model on their heads. (Although with free Wi-Fi and plenty to keep kids occupied, those two groups would be at home here, too.)

Open from 11 a.m.-11 p.m. on most days (9 p.m. on Sunday; closed Tuesdays), this is a joint that encourages interaction. Throw in a menu of milkshakes, retro chocolate bars and baked confections, plus a bar decorated with ’70s kitsch ephemera, and you’ve got the recipe for a dream clubhouse. It’s likely the way Jason Hazzard imagined it while he was growing up obsessively playing pinball in Woodbridge. Working as a professional mover more recently, Hazzard was finding (and buying) vintage machines increasingly often, says his wife, Rachel.

“But I was not going to let him collect any more and put them in our living room,” she says, laughing. So the idea for the café was born. “We wanted to do something fun together. And we both love coffee.”

If I had lowered my expectations for the cappuccino ($3), which is made using Faema Coffee’s Extra Strong Segafredo blend, I need not have. “I’ve been making coffee since I was 16,” Rachel says, noting her first job was at a Timothy’s. Her latest was working front of house at North 44. I add a chocolate peppermint patty ($1.50) to my order, mostly just because I can. House-made sandwiches ($5.95) are also on offer, with three rotating options. My cappuccino is nuanced, with a decent mixing of dark, deep cocoa-inflected coffee flavours and sweet foam, even if there is more than I’d like. (Critics might tell me to order a macchiato. To that I’d say, no, just a cap with less foam, please.)

When I return to my table, my friend is still struggling over the Scrabble board, feeling the pressure to play better with so many word nerds in attendance. I reassure her as I point to the back where, by this point in the evening, nearly every member of the Scrabble in the City club is poring over vintage pinball machines such as the Comet, Black Knight and Supersonic. There’s considerable buzz because former Canadian pinball champion Sean O’Neill was into the café recently and set a high score.

Quarters flow (most games cost only a single coin) and we join the posse on the nicely padded foam floor. In minutes, the laughter is infectious, and Jason Hazzard shows me what I’m doing wrong while launching.

Someone wanders in at 10:45 p.m., and asks if it’s too late for a milkshake. “Not at all,” Rachel replies. It’s hard not to feel like a kid again.