CALEB NICKERSON
FORT COULONGE Jan. 18, 2021
Visitors to Fort Coulonge may have noticed that there’s a new business in on the main drag, Café Downtown. Located in the heart of the community on rue Baume, the swanky new coffee shop opened its doors for the first time on Monday.
Owner Rémi Bertrand said that he was excited to try his hand at a different kind of business. Having worked in the public sector as the director general of MRC Pontiac, and also in real estate, he said that he was hoping to . . .
offer something new to the residents of his home town. Being unable to travel for work due to COVID, he decided to do something local.
“Most of my work was in California in the entertainment industry,” he said. “So from then on, we went on to say ‘Ok well we’re doing some work online.’ We manage a little bit of real estate here in Canada as well, but I had some spare time, so I said … instead of helping others start up or grow their business, why don’t I do one?”
He spotted the building for sale in April and after some negotiation, began extensive renovations, replacing the electrical, plumbing and heating, as well as building a kitchen in the back. He praised the help he received from SADC and noted that all of his contractors were from the Pontiac.
“They were very, very good, they work very fast, no lag time at all,” he said, adding that there were some inevitable delays on equipment and other things due to the pandemic. If all goes according to plan he said there would Italian pizza ovens arriving in February, and he will be able to offer thin-crust pizza.
Bertrand said that rather than compete with the established businesses in the area, he was aiming to fill a niche that wasn’t being served. He deliberately chose a location away from the highway to get walk-in traffic looking to sit down and enjoy specialty coffee and other fare.
“We said there might be a little room to do something different here,” he said.
Though he has limited the store to only four customers at a time, he has big goals for when indoor dining is permitted. There is a stage set up for live music and the café’s windows retract for an open air, patio feel in the summer. The facility is also fully licensed for serving alcohol, and Bertrand said they would exclusively sell craft beer and specialty wines.
“So no Labatt’s, no Molson products, it’s all craft breweries,” he said. “We believe in supporting the smaller initiatives. The wine will be about 50 per cent from the SAQ, 50 per cent from private importation, so we’ll have natural wines, organic wines and just wines that you don’t typically find at the LCBO or the SAQ.”
