Melville Café

Melville Café occupies the ground floor of the University of Waterloo's School of Architecture, where the Grand River slides past Downtown Galt a step or two from the patio. The setting does much of the talking: students with laptops and downtown regulars file in for coffee, and in summer the river-facing seats turn a warm afternoon into the reason to stay. What the quiet brick exterior hides is a kitchen that runs well past the espresso machine — thin-crust personal pizzas, pressed croissants, daily soup, all-day breakfast, and desserts, enough that one counter can answer a coffee run, a working lunch, and a casual dinner.

The pizzas are where the café stops being only a café. They arrive thin-crust and personal, and the most particular of them is the Hot & Honey: white sauce, spicy Calabrese, Rosewood honey, onion, feta, mozzarella, and a finish of arugula, sweet and hot in the same bite. The Melville Pizza is the house take on something more familiar, built with roasted peppers, pepperoni, mushrooms, and mozzarella, while a Margherita and a Tuscan of kalamata olives, goat cheese, and tomatoes round out the board. The all-day breakfast keeps its own corner — a breakfast pizza of eggs, bacon, and cheddar, a ham-and-Swiss western folded onto a bagel with fruit. Away from the oven, the pressed croissants carry the lunch hour: turkey, brie, and fig jam in one; ham, brie, and sun-dried cranberry in the other, each leaning sweet against savoury. Daily soup, a feature quiche with Caesar, grilled cheese on sourdough, and a house chili with cheddar in cold weather fill in around them, while the coffee — cappuccino, latte, matcha — comes barista-made in three sizes. Cheesecake and a chocolate truffle slice wait in the case for anyone not ready to leave.