Little Victories Coffee Roasters – Glebe ★9.5

Two friends who had been pulling shots since they were teenagers started selling their own roast out of the back of a bicycle repair shop. That was 2016, in Hintonburg, and it is the least likely origin story in Ottawa coffee. A year later they took a small room on the Glebe’s main commercial street and turned it into the first proper home of Little Victories Coffee Roasters — the shop that came before the flagship, before the brew bar, and before the company turned up on the world’s best coffee shops list. It is still the neighbourhood room: cozy, minimalist, and entirely uninterested in being your office.

Highlights

• The original — this is the first bricks-and-mortar Little Victories, opened in 2017, a year after the founders started out of a bike shop. Everything the company has done since started in this room.
• They roast their own — Little Victories is a roastery first and a café second, supplying its own shops and a list of Ottawa restaurants and cafés besides.
• Australian coffee culture, in Canada — the house style is Antipodean, and the board carries drinks that barely exist elsewhere in the country: the magic, the Aussie-style cappuccino.
• No Wi-Fi, on purpose — the company has been openly against being a remote-work room. Bring a person, a notebook or a newspaper; leave the laptop plan at home.
• World-ranked — Little Victories landed at number seventy-one on the debut edition of the World’s Best Coffee Shops list, one of only three Canadian entries.
• Every bean, three ways — the single origins and blends are offered as filter, as espresso, or with milk, so you can drink the same coffee in whichever format you actually like.

What’s in the cup

Little Victories roasts, and that changes the nature of the conversation at the counter. This is not a café buying wholesale and hoping for the best; the people choosing the green coffee and the people serving it work for the same company. Jeremie Thompson, one of the two founders, is a certified master roaster and espresso technician with more than a decade in Ottawa behind the bar and at the drum, which is a rarer combination than it sounds — plenty of roasters have never had to make four hundred flat whites in a morning, and it shows in what they send out.

The house offer is built so that the same coffee can be met three ways: as filter, as straight espresso, or in milk. That sounds obvious and is not — most cafés push you into the format that suits their workflow. Here you are invited to try the dedicated single origins and the blends in whichever guise you prefer, which is the closest a café can come to admitting that preference is not the same as ignorance.

The style is unashamedly Australian. That means espresso built to survive milk without turning to ash, sweetness ahead of shrieking acidity, and a menu that carries drinks most Canadians will never have seen: the magic, a short milk drink built on ristretto in a small cup, and a cappuccino made the Australian way rather than the Italian one. If you have spent time in Melbourne, the board here will read like home. If you have not, this is the easiest place in Ottawa to find out what everybody means when they talk about Antipodean coffee.

The recognition has followed. The company placed on the first edition of the World’s Best Coffee Shops list, one of three Canadian names on it, and has been written up by the international specialty press. For a business that began behind a bicycle repair counter, that is a considerable distance travelled in under a decade.

Who’s behind it

Andrew Bassett and Jeremie Thompson had both been working as baristas since their teens when they decided they wanted to do it on their own terms. Rather than borrow heavily and open a café, they did the sensible unglamorous thing: they roasted, and they sold beans out of whatever space would have them — which in 2016 meant the back of a bicycle repair shop in Hintonburg.

That sequence matters more than it seems. A roastery that opens cafés is a fundamentally different animal from a café that later starts roasting. The bean comes first, the room second, and the room exists to show what the roastery can do. It also explains the company’s willingness to say unpopular things out loud — that they do not want to be a remote-work venue, for instance — because their business does not depend on selling one more latte to somebody occupying a table for four hours.

The Glebe shop is where that idea first got a roof. Two more followed: a larger flagship downtown near Parliament in 2021, and in 2024 a brew-bar format elsewhere in the core built around pour-over and AeroPress with takeaway at the front of the design. Three shops, three deliberately different jobs — this one is the neighbourhood one.

Which visit it suits

Start with what this café is not for. There is no Wi-Fi, and that is a position rather than an oversight — the company has said publicly that it does not want to be a room full of people working remotely. If your plan for the afternoon involves a laptop and a deadline, choose somewhere else and do not take it personally. It is one of the few cafés in Ottawa where the absence of a network is a feature the owners will defend.

What it is for is the oldest use of a café. Two people at a small table, talking, with nothing on the table but cups. It is very good for that: the room is compact enough that the conversation stays between you, and the coffee is interesting enough to be a subject in itself if the conversation stalls. It works equally well for the twenty-minute meeting that does not deserve a boardroom, and for the kind of catch-up that people keep postponing because dinner feels like too much commitment.

Takeaway is a large part of the trade, as it should be on a neighbourhood shopping street. People walking to work, walking the dog, walking to the canal — they come in, order, and go. If you are on your own, the play here is a filter and something to read on paper. Sitting alone in a small minimalist room with a good cup and no screen is a genuinely underrated way to spend half an hour, and this café is designed, whether it says so or not, to make exactly that easy.

The room and the mood

The shop describes itself as a cozy and minimalist neighbourhood haunt, and for once the self-description is accurate rather than aspirational. It is small. There is no second room, no mezzanine, no hidden back area with sofas. The design does not shout; the visual interest is the bar, the bags on the shelf, and whoever else came in.

Being the original rather than the flagship gives it a different temperature from the downtown sites. The Glebe is a residential neighbourhood with a shopping street through the middle of it, so the crowd is people who live within walking distance, not office workers on a schedule. Mornings are busy in bursts. Middays are calmer. On big event days at the stadium at the south end of the neighbourhood, the whole street changes character and the café fills with people in team colours who would not otherwise be there.

Because there is no Wi-Fi, the acoustic profile is unusual for a modern café: it is a room of conversations rather than a room of keyboards. Some people find that noisier than they expect. Most find it a relief.

Beyond the coffee

Food is deliberately a supporting act here. The business is a roastery and the café is its shop window; the counter carries pastries and things to have alongside a cup rather than a kitchen turning out plates. Nobody is pretending this is a brunch destination, and the Glebe has plenty of those within a few minutes’ walk if that is what you want.

The other half of the retail offer is the bean itself. Whole bags of the house single origins and blends are on the shelf, and buying a bag from the people who roasted it — with the option of asking what to do with it — is a materially better experience than picking up coffee at a supermarket. If you like what is in your cup, the answer to where to get more of it is about a metre away from the till.

When to come

The shop opens early enough to catch people on their way into the day and runs through until the end of the afternoon, so it is a daytime rather than an evening proposition. Weekends start a little later than weekdays, which is the usual rhythm for a neighbourhood street.

For a quiet table, aim for the middle of a weekday, after the commuter push and before the school-run wave. Weekend mornings on this street are busy by nature. And be aware of the stadium: when there is a football match or a major event at the park at the south end of the Glebe, the neighbourhood’s main street is a different place entirely, and the café will be busier for hours either side of it.

Getting there

The café sits on the Glebe’s main commercial spine, in the middle of one of Ottawa’s most walkable inner neighbourhoods, roughly between the downtown core and the stadium. The Rideau Canal is a couple of minutes away on foot — in summer the pathway alongside it is the nicest possible approach, and in winter, when the canal freezes into a skateway, it is one of the few cafés in the world you can reasonably reach on skates and then walk a short block to.

Cycling here is easy and the neighbourhood is built for walking. Public transport along the Glebe’s main street is frequent and connects straight to the downtown transitway network. Driving is the weak option: on-street parking on a shopping street in a dense residential neighbourhood is competitive at the best of times and effectively impossible on event days.

Good to know

Say it once more, because it is the thing people get wrong: no Wi-Fi. If you turn up expecting to work, you will be disappointed, and it will be nobody’s fault but the plan’s. There is a Little Victories downtown with a different format if you need the core-of-the-city version, and another built around pour-over and takeaway — but none of the three is a co-working space.

The room is small, so groups larger than two or three should think twice, and there is nothing to book. If you are new to Antipodean coffee, ask about the magic at the counter rather than guessing from the board; it is the drink most worth trying here and the one most likely to be unfamiliar.

Finally, if you are comparing the three shops: this is the original and the most domestic of them. The downtown flagship is bigger and more architectural, the brew bar is more of a technical exercise. Come here for the neighbourhood version of the same coffee.

Questions and answers

Is there Wi-Fi?

No, and that is deliberate. The company has been open about not wanting to be a remote-working room. Plan on conversation or reading rather than a laptop session.

Do they roast their own coffee?

Yes. Little Victories is a roastery that opened cafés, not the other way round, and it supplies beans to other Ottawa businesses as well as to its own shops.

What is a magic?

An Australian milk drink — a short cup built on ristretto — that is common in Melbourne and rare in Canada. It is one of the signatures here and worth ordering if you have never had one.

Is this the same as the downtown one?

Same company, different job. This one is the original neighbourhood shop from 2017; the downtown flagship opened in 2021 and a third, brew-bar-format site followed in 2024.

Can I get the same bean as filter and as espresso?

Yes — that is the stated approach. The single origins and blends are offered as filter, as espresso, or with milk.

Is there food?

There is something to eat alongside a coffee, but this is not a kitchen-led café. It is a roastery’s shop, and the coffee is the point.

Can I buy beans to take home?

Yes, straight from the people who roasted them, which is the main advantage of buying at a roastery’s own counter rather than in a shop.

Is it big enough for a group?

Not really. It is a small, minimalist room with no second space and nothing bookable. Two or three people is the comfortable maximum.

When is it quietest?

The middle of a weekday. Weekend mornings are busy, and event days at the stadium at the south end of the neighbourhood change the whole street’s traffic.

Opening hours