Melina’s is one of those places that’s actually as cool as your excited roommate says it is.
It’s not armsleeves, touques in the summer and their buddy’s band drifting over a sea of macbooks. It’s the type of place you walk into and want to stay for an obnoxious amount of time, which is actually what most of its customers do.
The surrounding streets are buzzing with an eclectic mix of Hasidic jewish people, tight jeaned, starry-eyed artists and packs of unaccompanied kids on tricycles. The neighborhood smells like Jewish pastries and old beer bottles fermenting in the sun.
Holding it down behind the counter is Joanna, the half-Greek, half-Haitian pillar of steel who will cut you open like a fish and make you wonder where she’s been all your life.
The place itself is about the size of a small shoebox, with flowers on the windowsill, posters on the wall for local starving artists and a handwritten chalkboard menu. A coke machine hums in the corner across from a collage photo tribute to 50’s Greek actress Melina Mercouri.
Somewhere in between melting a handmade Greek pastry on your tongue, chatting with Joanna about how everything’s gonna be OK because you’re still young, and folding your feet under your chair so more people can come in, you think: ‘Wait a second, did I just learn something? Is this pastry exceptionally good? Does Joanna have eyes softer than a mother’s kiss and make you feel like you’re staring into the glowing abyss of the universe? Did that man with the salt and pepper hair just order a Greek Phyllo snack like he stumbled out of his living room in Athens?’
Yes, he did. And you’re not the only one impressed by this golden ray of sunshine disguised as a café. The neighbourhood likes it so much they’re basically moving in.
“It’s sort of becoming like an Agora. Like the places in Ancient Greece where they’d get together and talk shit, like talk politics. I think it’s because it’s so small you have no choice, so you just start talking to each other.”
So why am I telling you this? Because you want Greek pastries made from scratch. Because you want to make friends with a woman named Konstantina and hear about her affair with a circus performer 50 years ago. Because you want a place that’s so honest and authentic that when it opens its doors it gets a cross section of the neighbourhood that makes you feel like you’re in some parallel dimension where your differences don’t matter. Because you want something real, not something buried in a mountain of its own clichés.
