Lost + Found Café

Lost + Found has been pouring coffee in the historic Elora Mews since 2021. The café is a daytime room — open from breakfast through mid-afternoon — and what sets it apart in a village with no shortage of coffee stops is how much of the menu it makes itself. The syrups, the tomato jam, the tofu bacon, the cured salmon, the cured peameal, the lemon-dill cream cheese: all of it comes out of a small kitchen rather than off a supplier truck. EloraFergusToday readers have named it a runner-up coffee shop three years running.

The breakfast side runs all day. The House Breaky Sandwich builds egg and cheddar with arugula, in-house cured peameal and homemade tomato jam on a sesame or cheddar bagel — a counter sandwich with more construction than the format usually gets. The Classic Breaky keeps it simpler with egg, thick-sliced bacon, cheddar and a hot-and-honey aioli. The Smoked Salmon is the brunch order: in-house cured salmon with homemade lemon-dill cream cheese, pickled red onions, capers and greens on a toasted bagel. The Yogurt Parfait layers homemade pecan-and-maple granola with fruit, seeds and homemade spiced honey. Fresh-baked muffins rotate daily, the scones come as cheddar or cranberry white chocolate, and even the toasted bagel carries a homemade herb-and-garlic or lemon-dill cream cheese.

The lunch menu carries the same house habit. The TLT is the plant-based anchor — homemade tofu bacon with tomato, greens and vegan mayo on toasted sourdough, a BLT shape without the compromise. The Mediterranean wraps come two ways, chicken or smashed chickpea, both built on homemade tzatziki, pickled vegetables, kalamata olives and naan. The Reuben runs corned beef, Swiss, sauerkraut and house pickles; the Turkey Club stacks oven-roasted turkey with bacon and chipotle aioli; the Apple & Brie Melt pairs Granny Smith apples and caramelized onion with fig jam and brie. A weekly soup rotates alongside, with toasted sourdough and herb butter on the side.

The drinks are where the house-syrup identity shows most clearly. Vanilla, lavender, spiced honey and brown sugar cinnamon all get made in-house, and they turn up across the menu: a Salted Honey Latte built on organic honey and a pinch of salt, a Lavender White Mocha, a Taro Cream Iced Matcha with homemade taro whip, a Vanilla Cream Cold Brew, a London Fog on a homemade Earl Grey concentrate. A short list of spiked specialty drinks — a Baileys hot chocolate, an espresso build with Fireball and cayenne — rounds out the back of the menu. Owner Emma Smith built the café around that kind of detail. A Collabs interview traces her path through university hospitality work and a year in New Zealand, where she trained as a barista in a high-volume café before coming back to Elora to open a room of her own.

Lost + Found runs daily from seven-thirty in the morning to four-thirty in the afternoon, with the kitchen closing an hour before the café does and no reservations taken. The Elora Mews setting makes it a tucked-away stop rather than a streetfront one — the kind of room locals fold into a work morning and visitors find on the way through the village. Five years in, it has become what the Mews needed: a daytime café small enough to make its own syrups and steady enough that the village plans its mornings around it.