A conversation Keisha Pinder owner of St B’s newest coffee shop that represents everyone no matter where you are rooted

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What does the word “Diaspora” mean? Ask Diaspora Cafe owner Keisha Pinder.

So, Diaspora means people who’ve left their home country either by choice or involuntary to foreign countries around the world. I chose that name because that’s basically sums up what the Diaspora is of the Afro-Caribbean or African-American, or wherever you come from and what you call yourself being black and living in this country or in a lot of other countries I should say. Diaspora encompasses everybody no matter where you are, even though we’re all rooted from Africa by some form of way, we ended up in different parts of the world.

The way I see it even though we all are from so many different places we have so many unique things that we can bring to the table that are very similar.

January 9th, 2021 was the day their doors opened for business the first time.

“We opened at 9:00 am and I had all my staff there, including my kids. Nine o’clock came and I was like where is everybody? It was a foggy morning. I remember the fog was thick. It was like out of one of those horror movies. You thought the zombies going to walk out of the mist and I thought nobody’s coming. I kid you not, 11:00 the fog cleared and person after person arrived. It was nuts. We can only have two people in at a time because of our occupancy limit but people were patient and the weather was nice. I think it was minus two that day and the lineup didn’t end until about 5:30pm.”

Diaspora Cafe takes pride in promoting and colaborating with other local businesses.

Nagash Coffee, an Ethiopian family located in Niverville, Manitoba. They make our coffee and we have our Diaspora blend, which is a medium dark blend with chocolate notes in it, and is only specific to Diaspora Café. It’s smooth when you drink it. When you drink coffee, you never want the coffee to taste bitter to the point where you have to add a bunch of stuff in it to make it taste good. If you can drink that coffee, black, it’s a good coffee. Our Diaspora blend, you can drink it black and it’s awesome. It’s a grade 1 coffee not premium. Premium is second grade to grade 1 coffee. It’s organic, there’s no pesticides in the growing of the coffee.  I have met the farmers who grow my coffee and I love to brag about the fact that it’s excellent coffee.

KNS Island grill, they do our rum cake, Pre Baked does our mini patties. They’re vegan so they did a mini vegan one, which is awesome and they do regular mini ones that are beef.

I also ended up stumbling across a girl at the Wolseley farmer’s market named Laura who is from Mauritius. An African island nation in the Indian Ocean. She makes a vegan baking. It blows my mind how her food could be vegan. She makes breads, cronuts and croissants and you name it. She makes it. So when I met her that day at the Wolseley farmer’s market, I wanted everything. She’ll be opening up her own space on Sargent next week and we’ll be carrying many of her products. 

Diaspora Cafe is located at 1-250 Marion St. 

Hours Monday – Friday 8am-6pm Saturday 9am-5pm