Juniper Cafe | Terra Verde

Raissa Sarkissian set out to open her own coffee shop. Instead, in 2019, she took over Juniper Cafe — a Kingston cafe that had opened at the Tett Centre in 2016 and become enough of a daily habit for Queen's students and downtown regulars that, when its future wavered, a petition to keep it running gathered thousands of signatures. Sarkissian held onto the made-in-house, farm-to-table approach the cafe had built its name on, then extended it: in 2023 she opened Terra Verde, a west-end second location with its own kitchen, bar, and retail shop.

Brunch is where the kitchen makes its clearest argument. The Breakfast Sandwich stacks a soft-poached Beking egg, Barriefield bacon, Wilton cheddar, and house tomato jam on a buttermilk biscuit — a compact tour of the local pantry in one hand. The Juniper Bowl goes fuller and greener, building buckwheat, avocado, curry chickpea, cucumber, pickled onion, pumpkin seeds, and feta under a lemon-honey vinaigrette and tahini. The Turmeric Tahini Sunrise sets poached eggs and bacon over greens with a turmeric tahini hollandaise; the Dutch Baby arrives as an oven-puffed pancake under Maplescapes Farm maple and berry compote. Shakshuka comes in a spicy tomato sauce with feta and house pita, and za'atar avocado toast lands on Lil Bakehouse sourdough.

By midday the menu turns to sandwiches and soup. There is Atwood Mennonite salami with olive tapenade and red-wine-braised peppers, a warm Wilton cheddar and bacon number with apple-dijon compote, and a Brie-L-T built on Forman Farm tomatoes and pumpkin-seed pesto. Salads pull their own weight — a fig and pecan with Kingston Olive Company balsamic, a Greek plate with Kalamata olives and feta, a roasted beet tossed in house beet tahini. The soups rotate through potato leek, roasted squash, and tomato basil, each served with house focaccia and sold by the litre to carry home. Pilot coffee and Sloane tea anchor the drinks.

What gives Juniper its character is that the sourcing is legible rather than declared. The suppliers turn up by name in the dish descriptions — Beking Poultry, Barriefield Meat Market, Forman Farms, Fungi Connection mushrooms, Wilton cheddar, Lil Bakehouse bread — so ordering doubles as a map of who grows and makes the food nearby. The same instinct pulls the menu toward the Mediterranean at Terra Verde, where an egg-and-cheese boat khachapouri, marinated olives, and dolmas sit alongside the biscuit sandwiches. Vegetarians get more than a token salad: a curried chickpea smash, a Mediterranean mushroom sandwich, and tahini-forward brunch plates that stand on their own. The cafe names Quality, Sustainability, and Community as its pillars, and the menu is where the first two stop being slogans.

Sarkissian brings an unusual path to a cafe counter: Armenian and French roots, a long career in the Canadian military, and a stated aim of rebuilding community around a table. The two locations carry that in different registers. The original sits on the ground floor of the Tett Centre, a repurposed brewery on the Lake Ontario shore near Queen's, with a cobblestone patio that gives Kingston one of its rare true waterfront cafe seats. Terra Verde, out in the west end, trades the water view for a fuller kitchen, a bar, and a wine-and-retail shelf that widen what the second location can do.

Day to day, Juniper stays first-come and unfussy — coffee and a sandwich carried out as readily as eaten in. The bookings are where it stretches: high tea ordered ahead for two or three, with house sandwiches, mini scones, dolmas, and Stone Kitchen jelly; box lunches and grazing platters sent to offices; a kids' school-lunch program; private gatherings that take a location for an evening. It closes before dinner and never pretends otherwise. What Sarkissian rebuilt around the table runs on daylight — brunch, lunch, and the slow social hours between them, then the lights off before most kitchens have started their night.