And Some Flower Cafe ★9.3

Most cafés decide early whether they are a place to work or a place to be taken. And Some Flower Cafe decided something stranger: it is a working florist that also pulls espresso, and a coffee room where the bouquet on the counter is for sale. In a low corner building in Hillhurst-Sunnyside that spent two decades as the neighbourhood’s convenience store, that combination turned out to make far more sense than it sounds on paper.

Highlights

• A real flower shop, not a decoration. Bouquets are cut and wrapped to order at the same counter that makes the coffee, so the room smells of stems and cold water as much as of espresso.
• Coffee from Rosso. The espresso comes from Rosso Coffee Roasters, an established Calgary roastery with its own cafés around the city. And Some does not roast, and has never pretended to.
• A Korean reading of what a café is. The founder arrived from Daegu, and the drinks list follows the Korean café tradition rather than the Italian one — colour, fruit, herbs and chocolate on top of milk, dessert treated as the reason for the visit.
• Croffles and cruffins. The pastry side runs on croissant hybrids that are ordinary in Seoul and still a curiosity across most of Calgary.
• Afternoon tea on a Ferris wheel. The tiered service arrives on a small mechanical Ferris wheel rather than a cake stand, and it is not held back for weekends.
• It stays open into the evening. Almost every specialty café in Calgary shuts in the afternoon; this one carries on as a dessert and date room long after the coffee crowd has gone home.

What’s in the cup

The espresso is Rosso’s, and that is worth saying plainly. Calgary is a city where the roastery behind the counter is usually the entire argument, so choosing to buy rather than roast is a position in itself. Rosso roasts in Calgary and runs a small chain of its own cafés, which means the beans here are local in the literal sense — they travel across town rather than across a border — and the profile is a settled, milk-friendly one, built to behave the same way on a quiet weekday and on a Saturday when the queue reaches the flower buckets.

What you will not find is the apparatus of a filter bar: no rotating single origins chalked up by lot, no brew-method menu, no conversation about fermentation. The café is honest about this by omission — it publishes no origin sheets and makes no terroir claims. Espresso and milk are the backbone, and coffee is one voice in a much wider drinks list rather than a solo performance.

That wider list is where the place shows its hand. Non-coffee lattes are finished with fruit, chocolate or herbs; teas are brewed in house and served cold; the lemonades are built to be looked at as much as drunk. If you have only ever met the Italian model of a café, the logic can look purely decorative. It is not. This is the ordinary grammar of the Korean café, where a drink is expected to be an object as well as a stimulant, and where the pastry counter is never an afterthought bolted onto the espresso machine.

Who’s behind it

And Some was opened by Reina Moon, who came to Canada from Daegu in South Korea and had spent roughly a decade here before she signed the lease. She had wanted a café of her own for about six years, and she had already run a flower business with a partner before the two went their separate ways — which is precisely why the flowers are not a gimmick grafted onto a coffee shop. The floristry came first, or at least came with equal weight, and the café was built around a skill she already had.

The address carries its own history. For more than twenty years this corner was Samie’s Food Store, a family-run convenience shop with groceries, fresh produce, a laundromat and a wall of video rentals, and it closed in 2015 when running it daily became too much for its owner. In a neighbourhood as settled as Hillhurst-Sunnyside, a corner store closing leaves a hole that people notice. The building sat quiet for years, and neighbours watched the renovation through the windows before the doors opened again in the spring of 2022 — a soft opening at the very end of March, the proper one about a week later.

What it’s good for

This is the axis that decides whether you will like the place. And Some is a room for being with someone. It suits a first date, a birthday that needs a cake and a bouquet in the same trip, a catch-up with a friend who wants brunch and then dessert, a gift errand that turns into sitting down for an hour. The evening opening makes it one of the very few places in the inner-city northwest where “let’s go somewhere for dessert” does not automatically mean booking a restaurant table.

It is a weaker fit for the laptop shift. The café publishes no policy on working and nobody will move you along, but everything about the format points away from it: the traffic is social, tables turn on food rather than on refills, and the visual busyness that makes the room photograph so well is the opposite of what you want at hour three of a deadline. Calgary has better rooms for that, several of them a short walk away in Kensington. Come here to talk, to celebrate, or to be handed something wrapped in paper — and treat any quiet weekday hour you happen to catch as a bonus rather than a plan.

The takeaway case is a third mode, and an underrated one. A coffee and a small bunch of flowers is a complete errand, and the counter is set up to do both in a single stop.

The room

The building is a single-storey corner box of the kind that used to anchor every residential block in the northwest, and the conversion leans into the light rather than fighting it. Plants sit on most surfaces, the furniture is wooden, there is a mix of stools and proper tables, and the flower displays do a great deal of the decorating — which means the palette shifts with the season and with whatever arrived on the last delivery. On a clear Calgary morning the room is genuinely sun-soaked, and that, more than any single design detail, is what people photograph.

It is not a large space and it does not pretend to be a quiet one. At peak, a café queue and a florist queue share the same doorway, which makes for a lively room; the flip side is that off-peak this is one of the calmer corners in the neighbourhood. Seating is arranged for pairs and small groups rather than for laptops in a row, and there is no separate back room to retreat into.

With your coffee

There is a kitchen here, not just a pastry case, and for a café of this size that is unusual. Full breakfast plates are cooked to order — the kind with eggs, bacon and shrimp on the same plate — alongside French toast and a cauliflower bowl for anyone who wants something lighter, so the place functions as a brunch room and not only as a coffee stop. The sweet side is the louder half of the offer: cakes, croffles and cruffins, plus the Ferris-wheel afternoon tea that turns dessert into a small event.

What the café does not state publicly is how much of the baking happens on site and how much arrives from a supplier, so it is fair to leave that question open rather than guess at it. What is clear is that the food is not a token gesture attached to a drinks counter — a good share of the tables are here to eat, and they order accordingly.

When to come

Weekend late mornings are the crush, and for two reasons at once: the brunch tables fill and the flower orders stack up behind them. If you want the room rather than the queue, a weekday outside the brunch window is the better bet, and the light is at its best earlier in the day. The evening is the genuinely distinctive slot — coffee traffic has thinned, the mood shifts to dessert and conversation, and the flower counter is quiet.

The floral calendar matters here in a way it never does at an ordinary café. The days around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and graduation season put enormous pressure on a small florist, and that pressure is felt at the coffee counter too. If your visit falls on one of those dates, order flowers ahead and expect the café side to be working hard.

Getting there

The café sits in Hillhurst-Sunnyside, on the north bank of the Bow River, a few blocks uphill from the Kensington shopping strip and an easy walk from the Sunnyside CTrain station. From downtown it is a pleasant crossing of the river on one of the pedestrian bridges through Prince’s Island Park, which makes it a realistic lunchtime or after-work destination without a car at all.

Driving is the least good option. This is a residential grid with permit zones and the usual inner-city scarcity, so budget time for circling — or arrive on the pathway that runs along the river. Calgary’s cycle network passes very close by, and in summer a large share of the room turns up on two wheels.

Good to know

Set your expectations by format rather than by category. If you are chasing Calgary’s best filter coffee, the roasteries a short walk away in Kensington are the correct destination and nobody here would argue the point. And Some is competing on something else entirely — a florist’s eye, a Korean dessert tradition, and evening hours that almost nobody else in the inner northwest keeps.

Two practical notes. First, the flowers are a real business with real lead times: custom arrangements are worth ordering in advance rather than hoping on the day. Second, the room’s popularity is visual, which draws photographers, families and celebration groups in numbers; if you are hoping for a silent corner, choose your hour carefully rather than assuming one exists.

Questions and answers

Does And Some roast its own coffee?

No. The espresso comes from Rosso Coffee Roasters, a Calgary roastery with its own cafés around the city, so the beans are local without being roasted on the premises.

Is it a café with flowers, or a flower shop with coffee?

Genuinely both. The founder ran a floristry business before opening this place, and bouquets are made to order rather than sold ready-wrapped from a bucket by the door.

Can I work here on a laptop?

Nothing stops you and nobody will hurry you out, but the format is built for conversation, food and gift buying. For a long working session, the specialty rooms nearby in Kensington fit better.

Is there proper food, or only pastry?

There is a kitchen. Breakfast plates and brunch dishes are cooked to order, with cakes and croissant-based pastries covering the sweet side.

What is the Ferris wheel about?

The afternoon tea is served on a small mechanical Ferris wheel instead of the usual tiered stand, and it is available on ordinary days rather than only at weekends.

Is this a good spot for a date?

It is one of the reasons the place has the reputation it has. The evening opening, the desserts and the option of leaving with flowers add up to an unusually complete evening for a café.

Do I need to book?

Not for a table. Custom flower work is a different matter and should be ordered ahead, especially around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and graduations.

How busy does it get?

Weekend late mornings are the peak, when brunch and flower orders collide in the same doorway. Weekday afternoons and evenings are considerably calmer.

How do I get there without driving?

It is a walk from the Sunnyside CTrain station, a short crossing of the Bow River from downtown on foot, and directly reachable by bike from the riverside pathway network.

Opening hours