(Cherise Letson: Huddle)
An entrepreneur from Syria is bringing Mediterranean treats to uptown Saint John with his new cafe.
Located on the ground-level of Brunswick Square, Pistachio Cafe offers customers a place to sit down and enjoy signature treats from the other side of the world. The cafe serves traditional Turkish tea and snacks like baklava and a variety of other pastries popular in Turkey, Syria and surrounding areas, all made on-site.
The cafe opened a week ago and is owned by Mark Aljabban, who moved to Toronto from Syria in 2007. He moved to Saint John in 2017. When he got here, he noticed the variety of sweets and snacks in the city was lacking.
“You only have two choices, Tim Hortons and McDonald’s. There is nothing of Mediterranean taste, even Italian, Greece, Turkish.”
Aljabban lived in Turkey for five years and Pistachio Cafe is modelled off the kinds of cafes he used to frequent there.
“This cafe has culture from the Middle East. It’s a mix of Turkish, Syrian, Jordan and Greek food,” he says. “We have a menu of around 15 items. We have six items for lunchtime, which are pastries or something like a sandwich.”
He chose to open the business in Brunswick Square because of its access to things like parking and foot traffic.
“Pistachio Cafe is a place where you can sit and enjoy. We chose Brunswick Square mall because its covered in the winter, there’s parking here and there’s traffic. People come and go,” he says.
“After somebody eats some food and they would like to take home a sweet, they need a place to come, that’s the idea.”
Aljabban says he doesn’t have any solid plans for the future but says if the cafe is successful, he’d consider opening a second location in the city, somewhere like the West Side or just out of town in Rothesay. Until then, he hopes to provide something new for locals, and perhaps a taste of home for new immigrants.
“This is a multicultural community now. New immigrants come here from different nationalities, so they’re looking for something else,” says Aljabban.
“This kind of service exists in big cities like Toronto, but here it does not. With something like this that brings something from the Mediterranean here, this will [create] a new atmosphere and make people feel something different.”
A version of this story was published in Huddle, an online business news publication based in Saint John. Huddle is an Acadia Broadcasting content partner.
