24-Hour Party People

It’s 10 p.m. on Friday night, and the Breka Bakery & Café location at Davie and Hornby is alive with activity. So much so, in fact, that after I grab my tea, I have to wait for an empty table to turn up.

There are students sitting alone, working on their laptops. There’s an older retired couple chatting merrily. There are three young women catching up over tea and cheesecake. There’s a guy and a girl on a date, sharing bites of a chocolate tart. There are three older men, clearly longtime buddies, ribbing each other (and ribbing me, too, when I finally find a seat). A guy in scrubs walks in on his break to grab a pick-me-up. A paramedic does the same thing. A couple in their fifties takes a box of goodies to go. Two sets of couples in their mid-thirties excitedly grab treats and wait for a spot to open up.

Behind the bakery counter, a whopping eight staff members are bustling back and forth, taking drink and dessert orders from the seemingly never-ending stream of people.

This is not an anomaly. Drive by any Breka location at basically any time of day and you’ll find a bustling café with people of all ages. Assistant manager Mojan Forouz has worked at Breka for four years.

I ask her to confirm if it’s always this busy.

“Yes,” she says without hesitating. “This is not as busy [as it could be], even.”

With this particular downtown location, Forouz mentions that special events like fireworks nights and New Year’s Eve see lines around the block. And while she adds that she notices a lot of young people coming to Breka either before or after the nightclub — the bakery is open 24 hours, after all — I’m more interested in the groups of people who are choosing Breka not for the pre-drink or the after-party, but for the main event.

Drinking less, still hitting the town

During my visit to the café, certainly, no one is dressed for the club. Instead, I see people of all backgrounds who are happy to have somewhere to go late at night that’s not a bar — somewhere that doesn’t revolve around alcohol.

As life gets ever more expensive, late-night cafés and bakeries — places that don’t even serve liquor as an option — offer a cheaper way to be social. They also, for many people, provide relief from the societal pressures of drinking. This is being fuelled by a general drop in alcohol consumption across the country, led in particular by gen Z.

A Statistics Canada report released last year found that 67 per cent of younger Canadians (aged 18 to 22) reported not having a single drink in the past week; by comparison, that number for older age groups ranged from 51 to 57 per cent. In addition, an estimated 40 per cent of gen Z Canadians have non-alcoholic options in their regular rotation. Overall, Canadians’ consumption of alcohol has dropped a reported 12 per cent since 2008.

Restaurants and bars are getting better at tailoring to this shift in mindset. Strange Fellows Brewing on Clark Drive in East Vancouver has a line of non-alcoholic beers, and it’s apparently the brewery’s best-selling product. Shops like the Drive Canteen in Grandview-Woodland have entire sections dedicated to the non-alcoholic market, and restaurants like Elem in Mount Pleasant are offering zero-proof versions of their craft cocktails.

But there are still plenty of people who are looking for something else: something more laid-back and affordable, but that still offers the chance to get out of the house. That’s where late-night cafés come in.

Breka is far from the only option in the city. French patisserie Thierry has three locations (Mount Pleasant, downtown, and West Van), each one open until 10 or 11 p.m. every night. Winter Bear in the West End serves Korean fruit parfaits until 10:30 p.m. or later. On weekends, Passion8 Dessert Café on Cambie slings fancy shaved ice until midnight. At Main Street’s Bean Around the World, café-goers can snag coffees and teas until midnight, too.

At Cheesecake Etc., things don’t even kick off until 7 p.m. — and don’t shut down until 1 a.m. The live jazz venue, opened in the 1970s by current owner Daniel Sims’ parents, serves hot drinks and cheesecakes with various flavour and topping combinations.

According to Sims, most people who visit his establishment are happy with the small menu offering. “Some people ask, ‘Hey, can I get a drink?’ And we say, ‘Sorry we don’t have a liquor license,’ and they seem satisfied with the cheesecake,” he tells me.

“I think for them, the important experience is that ambience, that jazz culture, that we bring to the place, and the experience that comes with it. People don’t really seem to miss the fact that we don’t have a liquor license.”

His main clientele is university students and young adults.

“We’ve always attracted 20-somethings looking for something different,” Sims says. “We’re an inexpensive night out.” After all, a slice of cheesecake — with the splurge of adding fruit toppings — and a hot beverage at Cheesecake Etc. costs less than $20.

Sims says he has no plans to apply for a liquor license anytime soon, musing that he doesn’t subscribe to the belief that getting one is “a license to print money.” In his eyes, a café or bar’s value proposition needs to go beyond the drinks.

“I think offering alcohol on its own is just not enough of a special experience,” Sims reflects. “How do you get people to turn off Netflix, leave their house and get together with friends? Just offering alcohol: I just don’t think that’s enough of an experience.”