The Gazette’s picks for the city’s best study snacks
View Halifax Coffee Shops in a larger map
With files from Erica Eades
Welcome to Dalhousie University. I hope you’re having fun being forced into awkward conversations with strangers in an attempt to make a new group of friends as quickly as possible. These will be your new buddies. For the first week, you will have some laughs, participate in some social activities, and probably party a bit. Well, there will likely be lots of partying.
But after your weeklong bender comes to a halt and classes begin, you will make the startling realization that you are here to learn.
I know, shocking, right? And although you may have been on the honour role in high school, drifting through courses, handing in half-hearted essays you wrote in between breaks of Call of Duty – be prepared. You are about to study upwards of 30 hours a week outside of classes, if not more.
Luckily, you have a friend to get you through those long nights of cramming. His name is coffee, and with his slightly more flamboyant cousin, tea, the three of you are going to spend many nights together.
Here are the places where you are going to find the two of them at their best.
Coburg Coffee, 6085 Coburg Rd.
Basically, if you walk up any street on campus and take a right or a left, you will end up at Coburg Coffee at some point. A standard campus destination for King’s and Dal students, Coburg offers quality coffee and snacks at a fair price. Every day of the week they have a different specialty coffee on sale, ranging from a caramel red eye to a variety of lattes. They also have free Internet and a really good radio station that plays indie-rock hits on constant rotation, just in case you didn’t realize that they were cool.
Just Us! (multiple locations)
Just Us! is kind of like the east coast’s answer to Seattle’s Starbucks. Started in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Just Us! now has multiple locations on- and off-campus. Their specialty is fair trade coffee and chocolate, but they also sell fresh coffee beans, really badass samosas, and some of the best banana chocolate chip muffins in the city. Their location near campus at 5896 Spring Garden Rd. has recently expanded, offering ample study space and a stage where they host spoken word events and readings.
Paper Chase Newsstand and Café, 5228 Blowers St.
Located a few stores down from pizza corner, Paper Chase is an ideal location for drinking coffee and reading the most recent Dalhousie Gazette, which is easily acquired from their downstairs newsstand. It seems to be partly overrun by journalism students (because of the café’s newspaper theme) and journalists (because we’re too poor to afford desks at home), but Paper Chase brings people in everyday for their delicious tuna melts and chili, as well as a plethora of old books and board games that are available to the public.
Trident Café, 1256 Hollis St.
Rumour has it that the Trident Café is Ellen Page’s favourite coffee shop/bookstore in Halifax. That wouldn’t really be a big surprise, because what Trident does better than any other coffee shop in the city is offer authentic caffeinated beverages that taste like they were imported straight from the streets of Italy. These baristas are tough, delivering strong beverages the way they were meant to be made: correctly; which is something you can’t find at your local big name coffee shop.
Steve-O-Reno’s Cappuccino (various locations)
If you’ve ever wanted to drink liquid gold, but didn’t want to deal with that horrible burning disfigurement thing associated with it, step up to Steve-O-Reno’s, a place that makes – you guessed it – some of the best cappuccinos in the city. This stuff is addictive, which is why they even have a drive-thru location at 2854 Robie St. in the north end of the city for those on their daily commute. But for casual city-goers, the main location at 1536 Brunswick St. is the place to be. And hey, the Halifax Public Library is right across the street from it, so get studying.
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