On a Tuesday afternoon, The Only Café is already in full swing. On the café side, a senior couple snacks on food they brought in. Nearby, families with little ones cup hot drinks in their hands while a few professionals tap away on laptops. The chairs don’t match — last winter, the bar even put out a call for more, requesting “wooden and well-loved” donations — and the crowd doesn’t either. Random groups form easily here: a D&D crew one day, a mom-and-baby meetup or book club the next.
When we profiled Toronto’s most beloved dive bars in November, readers told us there was only one big miss: the Only Café. So we headed to the Danforth to visit the café–slash–dive bar–slash–cocktail spot–slash–hostel and see why this cosy community hub has inspired multiple generations to call it home.
It may have café in its official name, but The Only is far more than a coffeehouse. Open seven days a week, from 8 a.m. straight through to 2 a.m., it has been many different things to many different people over the past 45 years: a place for morning coffees and after-work beers, for live music and quiet afternoons, for regulars who’ve been coming for decades and newcomers who feel instantly at ease.
In an era when true third spaces are dwindling rapidly, The Only is increasingly rare in Toronto — not just for how all-ages it is, but for how beautifully unpretentious. It welcomes toddlers and retirees, students and seniors, drinkers and non-drinkers alike. The Only is for all.
Over on the darkened dive-bar side, lit in part by the neon-pink glow of the beer fridge and a couple of candles jammed into some wax-covered Jagermeister bottles, a young lady reads her book, drink in hand, while a gaggle of wizened regulars cackle over a round of beers upfront. (It’s become renowned as a beer bar; they only carry Ontario brews on tap, so imbibers can take their pick from 24 local options, Berg says.) The Only has tons of regulars, the joint is owned, in fact, by former regular James O’Donnell who loved drinking there so much that he bought the place more than two decades ago.
Paul LaRose is another frequent patron. He comes here multiple times a week. He heads to the café in the morning to grab a coffee and often comes after work to the bar for a drink. Every Tuesday, he meets up with a little crew of “older boys” that he met here. LaRose figures he’s been coming here for 30 years at least, he says. “It’s a very easygoing spot,” he says. “The diversity in this place, it’s incredible.” He also loves the tunes, the Only hosts live music on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, everything from acoustic jazz to the blues. “It’s just comfortable, it’s like home,” LaRose says.
A lot of this comes down to the staff, many of whom are long-time employees. “What made this place special was just how lo-fi and egalitarian it was. Nothing and no-one was pretentious. And the staff were always warm and inviting,” regular Jeff Wahl says. He remembers meeting Only bartender Tyler maybe twice in a six-month span. Once Wahl had kids, he wasn’t going out as much and four years went by. The day he walked back into the bar, Tyler was all smiles. “Hey, Jeff, been a while. Good to see you my, friend,” he said. “What will it be?” Anyone Wahl’s brought there for the first time has immediately fallen in love and became a regular, Wahl says. “With real estate prices getting continually out of reach for independent businesses and big corporate chains taking over the retail and entertainment landscape, a place like The Only is one of the rare places where your patronage is never transactional,” Wahl says.
Cathy Dandy was also brought there by a pal, then became an instant regular and started bringing others there too. “They know your name, they run a tab without a card if they know you, they laugh with us and it just feels like you fit in,” according to Dandy, who has spent many an evening debriefing with friends or working on political projects. She even named one of her advocacy projects Community Assets For Everyone (CAFE) as a nod to where the movement was born. “The Only has been there for decades and has preserved its intimate, inclusive, down-to-earth vibe in a city that seems to constantly change,” she says. “They continue to welcome everyone into the fold.”
This isn’t the first time The Only has inspired a moniker. Charlotte Schwartz met her partner at The Only on a blind date. “It was such a weird and eclectic place,” she remembers, “unassuming in its mismatched furnishings and artwork, including an obscenely large portrait of Fidel Castro, but with a diverse tap list and a crew of obvious regulars. The staff were all so kind.” She came back, again and again, even writing her book there over several years, then hosting her book launch there too. Eighteen months after that first date and visiting the café twice weekly, the pair welcomed a daughter into the world. Her name? Millicent Only.
“The Only is truly the only place like it. I have been everywhere, more or less, in the city and lived in most neighbourhoods too. Walking into The Only the first time was unique, unexpected and a bit magical, like our little gal,” Schwartz says. “Every so often there are rumblings on the Internet about The Only closing or selling, but I truly hope that never happens.” She daydreams about the regulars banding together to buy it if it came to that and, in the meantime, introducing her daughter to the one and only. “I want to be able to take her there with her dad,” Schwartz says. “So I really hope it’s there forever.”
