Ashanti Coffee

The Arabica in an Ashanti cup begins a long way from Thornbury. It is grown on a farm in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, where the beans are hand-picked, washed and sun-dried before they are boxed for the long crossing to Ontario. Only then does the coffee reach the town it is now known for. It is an unusual pedigree for a small-town Ontario café — most trace their beans no further than a wholesaler's invoice — and it is the thing Ashanti builds everything else around, from the name over the door to the story printed on the bag.

In Thornbury the beans are roasted fresh, every day, then poured a few steps away at the café counter on Bruce Street and shipped on to the company's other cafés and retail shelves. That daily roast is the hinge of the whole operation — the point where a Zimbabwean harvest becomes a local cup. Ashanti calls the arc farm to cup, and for once the phrase is literal: the same beans are grown, shipped and finished under one name, with no anonymous wholesaler in the middle.

The coffee would be reason enough to stop, but Ashanti runs a fuller daytime kitchen than the roasting alone would suggest. Mornings turn on named plates: the Bruce Street Breakfast, a build-your-own omelette, Aussie Toast, quiche, a smoked salmon bagel, homefries on the side. Lunch moves to a long sandwich board — a Classic Grilled Reuben, smoked meat, Italian beef, black forest ham, a banh mi, a gourmet grilled cheese, tuna and egg salads, a garden baguette, and a veggie option for the table that cannot agree. Sausage rolls wait in the case for anyone who wants something savoury next to the cup.

The breadth is the tell. A shop content to move espresso and pastries would not carry a sandwich list this deep or a breakfast menu with this many anchors. Ashanti is built to be used for a meal rather than only a pickup — the kind of daytime room where the coffee draws people in and the food is what keeps them through lunch. It sits on Bruce Street South in the middle of Thornbury's small downtown, open seven days a week from morning until it closes at five, working on counter service for dine-in or takeout with no reservations to manage. For a town this size, that makes it one of the default daytime meeting places — where a coffee, a sandwich and a familiar face tend to land at the same address, morning through afternoon.

The coffee's origin is also its owner's. David Wilding-Davies started Ashanti after a chapter that reads more like farming than hospitality: he moved his family to Zimbabwe, bought a rundown coffee farm and rebuilt it, and in 2003 was named the country's Coffee Grower of the Year. The company that became Ashanti grew directly out of that work, and when the operation resettled in Canada, the Eastern Highlands beans came with it. Local reporting has since followed his path from a Zimbabwean farm to an Ontario roastery as the thread that ties the whole venture together.

Ashanti opened on Bruce Street in 2007, and the logic has not really changed since: start with the bean, finish it locally, and give the town a daytime table worth lingering at. It is a coffee company with a farm at one end and a Thornbury counter at the other, and the café is where the two ends finally meet — a cup set down a few steps from where it was roasted, beside a Reuben or a plate of eggs. Most cafés ask you to take the quality of the bean on faith; Ashanti can walk it back to the farm that grew it.