Nile Coffee Club Is a Cafe by Day, a Club House by Night — and Little Portugal Can’t Get Enough
By day, Nile Coffee Club reads like any other neighbourhood café — specialty coffee, a laptop-friendly room, the kind of place you’d walk past without a second thought. Once the sun goes down, though, the whole thing flips into something else entirely, and that dual identity is exactly what’s gotten Little Portugal talking.
Situated at the corner of Dufferin and Dundas, Nile Coffee Club has only been open three months, but it’s already established itself as a genuine social hub. Open daily from 7:30 a.m. to midnight, the space is co-owned by Sandrine Somé and Taher Elsheikh, who built the brand years before this physical location existed, running pop-up events with music and DJ sets long before they had a permanent home. According to Somé, the plan going in was less about dictating exactly what the space would become and more about building something with a strong point of view, then letting the community decide how to actually use it.
That point of view starts with the coffee. The beans are sourced from across Africa — including Burundi and Ethiopia — as well as the wider African diaspora, spanning Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, ethically sourced and slow-roasted in small batches with an emphasis on building real relationships with the farmers behind them. Somé says the goal was never to gatekeep the experience for coffee purists, but to build an approachable menu anyone could find something in — hence drinks like a Brazilian limeade served alongside an espresso shot, a house riff on Tim Hortons’ Iced Capp called the NiceCapp, and a mango sticky rice and coffee jelly for people who aren’t even coffee drinkers to begin with.
Once evening hits, the menu pivots into specialty cocktails built around ingredients like bissap, okra and scotch bonnet, alongside a lighter food menu of baked goods and East African-style sambusas. But it’s not just the drinks keeping people around after dark — Nile’s communal tables regularly host events run by local community groups, from chess and dominoes nights to craft sessions, music nights, FIFA watch parties and even Love Island screenings.
For Somé, that community-first structure is deliberate, born out of a gap she saw in the city. As she puts it, Toronto simply doesn’t have enough spaces where people can experiment, express themselves and try new ideas without needing to spend a fortune to be there — which is why Nile operates as a coffee shop that gradually shifts into a full evening bar, rather than choosing one identity over the other.
There’s also a quieter gesture built into the space itself: the old Four Stars Café signage still hangs above the shop, left in place on purpose as a nod to the longtime café that occupied the space before Nile moved in. Somé is upfront about what that choice represents — an acknowledgment of the gentrification reshaping neighbourhoods like Little Portugal, and a way of honouring the place and the community that came before, even while building something new on top of it.
For a neighbourhood that’s had no shortage of daytime cafés or standalone nightlife spots, but rarely both under a single roof, Nile Coffee Club gives Little Portugal something genuinely distinct — and most first-time visitors, by the sounds of it, have no idea what they’ve walked into until well after dark.