Here's how we're building our wellness cafe brand one delicious mini-muffin at a time!

Listen to the behind the scenes interview with Josh, Melissa, and Mya as they launch Ralia's Cafe

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A few weeks into building Cafe Ralia, our team sat down at a table to agree on what the cafe stood for. What would the cafe value, the big stuff, what we love about cafe culture and what we do not love about it.

We spent a good amount of time debating people’s music taste. It is quite an opinionated topic.

That early meeting kicked us off. It was the honest beginning of building something really special. Josh puts it in a way that reveals our truth. Nothing is random in this project, nothing is automatic, and nothing just shows up. Everything that ends up in our cafes is intentional.

It was that day we decided our cafe would be a wellness cafe, it’s one purpose: nourish people.

So this is the story of who decided, and what they decided, across two wellness cafes in Montreal.

Meet Joshua

Joshua Bouchard has been in coffee for ten years. He has helped open cafes, been a head roaster, selected beans, helped with green importing, and he competes in Barista competitions, partly because it is fun and partly because competition keeps a person honest about where their standard actually sits.

He says the reason he took this job and keeps saying yes to it is that from the beginning, the answer to almost every question here was yes, let’s do it. Not yes we will look into it. Yes, bring it in, let’s workshop it. He has watched how easy it is in coffee to drop to the lowest common denominator, because going the extra distance takes effort and most people are never asked for it. Here he was asked, on day one, and he has not been asked to stop since.

The thing he most wants to pass along is this. Most people think coffee is caffeine. Josh thinks coffee is closer to wine. Where it grew, the conditions that year, how it was processed after picking, all of it shows up in the cup, and almost all of it gets buried by the way coffee is usually sold. Watching somebody taste that for the first time and understand what they are drinking is his favourite part of the job, and he says he loves training people into it as much as he loves serving it.

Picking our roaster was, by his account, the easy part. Once he understood who this brand was, the right roaster was close to self-evident to him. He is clear that if we had been a different company he would have chosen somebody else. Our beans come from Porte Bleu.

The part that got him stressed was the design choices. Which cup shows the coffee best, what colour should we paint that wall, and the infamous wall sconce placement challenge of 2026 where Josh was left to decide the location. He is happy to tell you he would rather not decide on lights and chairs and has enormous gratitude that somebody else was handling that side.

That somebody else was Melissa Walsh.

Meet Melissa

Melissa Walsh has worked in restaurants, hotels and cafes for years, and she also taught yoga for four years and works with Reiki, energy healing, sound healing and the Akashic records. She has said that she is grateful to be somewhere both halves of her background get used at once, because although this is a cafe, Ralia is a wellness company.

She is the one who named the problem we are actually trying to solve, and she named it while talking about groceries. She said you cannot get groceries in this city these days without somebody not looking you in the eye. She has lived in a lot of smaller cities across Canada, and she was not being hard on Montreal. She was describing our everyday reality, sadly, accurately.

So customer service is not a soft item on our list. It is at the top of it next to the best coffee in Montreal.

Melissa will also tell you, and she was a little embarrassed the first time she said it out loud, that she had never had a pour over until she started working here. Now she is a convert. We think that is worth repeating, because the pour over table (which we will have in each location) can look like it is for people who already know things. It is not. It is for people who have not tried it yet.

What she is most looking forward to is knowing your name, and then your order. She has always treated the place she works as an extension of her home, so what she pictures is welcoming people into her home away from home. Josh is looking forward to your dog. He points out that you end up learning the dog’s name and never the owner’s, which is true in almost every cafe in the world, but ours.

Why two cafes, and what is in them

Serendipitously, we had the opportunity to build out 2 cafe locations in Montreal at once.

This came about because we manage properties and operate businesses in the properties simultaneously. The cafe spaces both opened up at around the same time. So, this time, instead of finding a new cafe concept to rent the vacant spaces, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work on creating Montreal’s Best Wellness Cafe.

One Cafe Ralia is at 4281 Saint-Laurent, inside La Maison Ralia, in the Plateau. The other is at 525 Rosemont, directly in front of métro Rosemont. They have their own character because their neighbourhoods do, and you will recognise the brand in both.

Here is what is in them.

Coffee from Roaster Porte Bleu, made by people Josh has trained. A pour over table for anyone who wants to slow the whole thing down and explore coffee’s depths.

Spaces designed to give more connection between the barista and the person ordering.

A wellness focussed food offering we call our “mini-bar”, where the pastries are deliberately mini.

Plants. Lots of them!

A bookshelf carrying books of impact, authors of impact, and colouring books.

Art from local artists, which links back to our earlier project of launching our first hotel offering in 2025.

A place designed with moms and dads in mind with a large changing space in the washroom, and a fun space just for kids.

Music that was chosen with care, with sound frequency activations sometimes booby trapped within the mix, and a scent that is designed to elicit memories.

Oh, did we mention there are rewards for people who keep coming back.

Where the food philosophy comes from

Before Founder, Mya Chisholm-Nerenberg started re-designing buildings, she spent more than a decade as a performance dietitian, coaching elite athletes and other high performers. She reinvented her career focus at forty and went into developing real estate, but she brought her nutrition career with her.

7 years of nutrition research, a decade of teaching, and she figured out the one greatest problem we all have when it comes to nutrition.

It’s how we speak about food. The literal purpose we give our food.

We call food healthy, protein, carbs, good, bad… but none of these are purpose driven.

Food is not healthy or unhealthy. People are healthy or unhealthy. Food is simply molecules with a purpose. I eat this nut butter and I can build strong muscles.

Mya discovered food mastery came with knowing a foods’ superpowers.

A carrot will not save you and a croissant will not ruin you. Both are powerful. Do you know the powers of each one? The answer is what you will find at Cafe Ralia.

We think the same logic applies to a room. A cafe is not healthy. A cafe is a room with chairs in it. What we are offering is to create an adventure through the room with the very purpose being to delight in your own health.

Which is why the list of what we offer in our cafe is longer than a simple coffee menu. You take a room in through your eyes, your ears, your skin and your breath, not only your mouth, and all of those channels are running whether or not you are paying attention to them. So we went through them one at a time, combed over the details, and decided how to serve each sense.

And there is one more input on that list, which is how connected you feel to the people around you.

The doors

There is a specific kind of loneliness that comes with working in public. You get four good hours done with your headphones on, and two tables over there is somebody who might have been worth meeting. You pack up. You leave. Neither of you finds out.

We are not going to pretend we solved that with a gimmick or something we are selling, because that would take away any authenticity.

What we do is ask. Our team will find out who you are and what you are working on, not from a script but because they want to know, and if what you say lines up with somebody else in the room, we often have an introduction that follows.

You never have to do anything. Come in, put your headphones on, say nothing to anybody, and you will still be looked after.

Our co-working community is where this is most concentrated, because a room full of people who chose to work beside each other is the easiest room to make an introduction in. It runs at La Maison Ralia, and is an elevated extension of our cafe we like to call “The Cafe of Dreams”. You can join the next open one at ralia.ca/upcoming-events.

The invitation

We are a women-led company, and what we are working toward is a place where women, especially the ones carrying more than they feel they can carry, walk in and feel less need to perform. Men are part of that invitation, because when the women in a room feel held and safe, everyone else in it tends to be as well.

Melissa was asked what she thought people would feel walking out of a Ralia space. She said nourished. Mind, body and soul… a cup filled back up.

Josh said he hopes you can come in for an exquisite cup, and he also hopes you can come in and just chill, and that the coffee does not have to be the point of your visit.

Both of those are on offer. So is the door.

You are invited to the table.