When the Jonas Brothers come to town, social butterfly Joe Jonas is notorious for making appearances around the city. Fans have already become accustomed to running into him at his city regular, Cherry’s High Dive, but after his recent fall visit, we may have another spot to add to the list.
When the Jonas Brothers returned to Toronto in September, there was plenty happening behind the scenes before Joe, Nick and Kevin took the stage. Hidden backstage, fuelling the army of people responsible for pulling off the massive arena show, was a much smaller operation: two best friends and a portable coffee cart.
While Saturday Cafe may not be a familiar name to the people of Toronto yet, it will be soon.
Saturday Cafe is the brainchild of Kate McDevitt and Victoria Lauren Da Silva, two locals who met after moving to Montreal for university in 2017. What began as an excuse to get their friends together on a cold Montreal weekend has grown into a travelling café concept with public pop-ups, private events and, apparently, a famous fan in Joe Jonas.
The Toronto Jonas Brothers show marked Saturday Cafe’s first-ever Toronto pop-up — but the pair tell Streets of Toronto they already have their sights set on coming back.
“It was the first time,” they say. “It’s something that’s been on our minds. We’ve wanted to come and pop up and explore what types of collaborations the city has to offer, because the coffee scene and the food scene here is a different ballgame than Montreal.”
And there’s a particularly fitting reason Toronto is next on their list: Saturday Cafe may have been born in Montreal, but both of its founders are Ontario-born girls. McDevitt from Toronto, while Da Silva grew up in Newmarket.
“We’re just ready to come to Toronto, ready to try different things and explore this new city,” they say. “We’re really excited to be able to bring the cafe to so many of our friends and family who are in Toronto.”
Saturday Cafe started almost three years ago inside Da Silva’s one-bedroom Montreal apartment.
She was going through a particularly brutal Montreal winter and missing the feeling of having a larger community around her. While she had friends from work, school and different areas of her life, they didn’t necessarily know each other.
So she decided to invite everyone over for coffee on a Saturday.
“I was feeling like I was missing my friends,” she says. “I hadn’t hosted people in a while. I also was feeling like I didn’t have a group of friends; I had a lot of individual friendships.”
The first gathering clicked immediately.
“I think we quickly realized when we were hosting that first home cafe that this is something that we would want to do on a monthly basis,” she says.
The formula has remained as simple as it began. McDevitt, who lives just a street away from Da Silva, bakes, while Da Silva handles the coffee. Friends crowd into the apartment for something between a coffee shop and a dinner party, but significantly easier and cheaper to host.
As the pair began sharing those gatherings online, strangers wanted in too.
Within months, Saturday Cafe had expanded into public pop-ups at restaurants, pottery studios and other spaces around Montreal. Eventually, the pair built a collapsible mobile coffee cart that could travel with them.
That little cart has since made it somewhere neither expected when they began: backstage at the Jonas Brothers concerts.
Joe Jonas, a secret coffee connoisseur, has apparently been following content creator Da Silva on TikTok for a few years and watching Saturday Cafe grow through her account.
The pair first got the opportunity to serve coffee at a Jonas Brothers show at Montreal’s Bell Centre last December, where they became connected with the tour team.
When the stars aligned again this fall, Saturday Cafe was already in Toronto while the Jonas Brothers were playing here, so they brought the cart along.
Which brings us to the question every woman born between 1996 and 2004 has for the cafe owners: How does Joe Jonas take his coffee?
“Joe is a cortado guy,” the pair confirm.
At the Toronto show, Saturday Cafe kept the menu relatively straightforward, with a honey-lavender syrup available for anyone wanting something a little sweeter. The real focus was the coffee itself: beans from Good Grief Coffee Roasters in Thornbury, Ont., where McDevitt previously worked as a barista.
“They were a big hit throughout the day,” DaSilva says.
The cart wasn’t only there for the brothers, either. McDevitt and Da Silva spent the day serving the enormous crew required to put on the show, from tour staff to venue workers.
“It takes so much work to set up a show,” McDevitt says. “They’re setting up one day, they’re tearing down, they’re at another city the next day. It’s really cool to be able to cater to these people and get to give them something and make them a nice coffee.”
And apparently Jonas isn’t simply a coffee obsessive, but really a tour guide for every city. The pair say he has a knack for finding the kinds of local places residents themselves frequent whenever he arrives in a new city.
“He has his finger on the pulse of every city that he visits,” McDevitt says. Toronto certainly knows the phenomenon. Jonas has developed something of a reputation for actually exploring the city when he’s here rather than disappearing into a hotel between appearances. This time, one of those discoveries came with him.
Despite the celebrity clientele, Saturday Cafe still operates remarkably close to its original premise.
McDevitt and Da Silva continue hosting their monthly home cafes, developing menus together based largely on the seasons. Da Silva has become what McDevitt affectionately calls the “syrup queen,” while McDevitt handles the pastries.
Past creations have included caramelized banana lattes, honey-lavender drinks and a pumpkin loaf made from a recipe passed down through McDevitt’s family.
For both founders, the food and coffee are almost secondary to what happens around them.
Saturday Cafe was built to bring people together; first their own friends, then strangers across Montreal and now, potentially, a new community in Toronto.
And while there’s no Toronto permanent location to announce just yet, the pair are very clear on one thing.
Their first pop-up here won’t be their last.
“Whenever we visit the city, it’s always a conversation of, ‘Come on, we want to experience it too,’” they say of their Ontario friends and family. “To bring it to Ontario would be really fun in a public capacity. So, we’re looking forward to it.”
In other words: Toronto will soon get the chance to find out what Joe Jonas already knows.