Nemesis Coffee reaches top 15 globally, wins Vancouver's best

Nemesis Coffee, the Vancouver roastery that started with $32 in the till when it opened in 2017, has climbed to No. 15 on the World's 100 Best Coffee Shops list—the highest placement for any Canadian café. This year it also won Vancouver's Golden Plates awards for both best coffee roaster and best coffee shop.

The rise reflects founder Jess Reno's obsessive attention to detail. Early in a conversation at Bam Bam, Reno's newest downtown concept, he abruptly stops talking, reaches for his phone, opens Spotify, and starts tapping. The music had stopped. Most customers hadn't noticed. Reno did. "It changes the whole feeling," he says.

That fixation—on playlists, pastries, coffee programs, interiors—has shaped how people experience Nemesis across five B.C. locations. Reno, who grew up in Scarborough and moved to Vancouver as a teenager when his father was accepted to Emily Carr University, took a job at Caffè Artigiano at 14. He wasn't passionate about coffee then, but he remembers what cafés represented: "There was always this pipe dream in the house. One day we'd get a little shop and life would be good."

With his sister Dolly, Reno opened Lear Faye on Commercial Drive, a tiny café that famously banned on-site laptop use. The goal wasn't to be anti-technology but to revive the neighbourhood café culture Reno remembered from Toronto's Danforth—a place where people talked, lingered, and got to know one another. After Lear Faye closed, Reno travelled through Melbourne, Japan, and the U.S., returning determined to build something bigger.

Securing the Gastown location nearly didn't happen. When Nemesis opened in 2017, the team had stretched every dollar and had nothing left. Because they couldn't afford designers or consultants, they learned to do everything themselves. "We became our own designers, brand builders, project managers, financiers," Reno recalls. "We did the whole game." That approach remains embedded in everything Nemesis does today.