Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday. Sign up for our free newsletter. A few minutes into our conversation at Bam Bam, Jess Reno abruptly stops talking.
The founder of Nemesis, Dope Bakehouse, and Bam Bam glances around the room, reaches for his phone, opens Spotify, and starts tapping. The music had stopped. Most customers probably hadn’t noticed.
Reno did. “It changes the whole feeling,” he says, explaining why he couldn’t leave it. It’s a small moment, but one that helps explain how a teenager from Toronto’s suburbs ended up building one of Canada’s most acclaimed hospitality brands.
Whether it’s a playlist, a pastry, a coffee program, or an interior, Reno has spent more than a decade obsessing over the details that shape how people experience a space. That obsession has taken Nemesis from a single Gastown café to five locations across British Columbia, and earned it a ranking of No. 15 on the World’s 100 Best Coffee Shops list earlier this year—the highest placement for any Canadian café.
It also landed Nemesis high praise from the Vancouver public, winning the Golden Plates Award for both Best Coffee Roaster and Best Coffee Shop. But the story starts long before the awards. And before the opening of Bam Bam, a downtown Vancouver concept built around what Reno calls “future nostalgia”.
Reno grew up in Scarborough in a family that moved frequently and faced its share of challenges. His parents separated when he was young. As a teenager, he moved to Vancouver after his father, then in his 40s, was accepted to Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
To help pay the rent, Reno took a job at Caffè Artigiano when he was 14. “I wasn’t really giving a shit about coffee, if I’m being honest,” he says with a laugh. What he remembers instead is what cafés represented.
“There was always this pipe dream in the house,” he says. “One day we’d get a little shop and life would be good.” A few years later, Reno and his sister Dolly opened Lear Faye, a tiny café on Commercial Drive. The business ultimately closed, but it revealed something that would become central to everything Reno built afterwards.
Lear Faye famously banned the on-site use of laptops by its customers. The goal wasn’t to be anti-technology. Reno and his sister wanted to create the kind of neighbourhood café culture they remembered from Toronto’s Danforth Avenue—a place where people talked, lingered, and got to know one another.
Today, Reno still describes his mission in simple terms. “I just want people to have a good time when they’re in the space,” he says. After Lear Faye closed, Reno travelled through Australia, Japan, and parts of the United States.
Melbourne’s coffee culture, in particular, left a lasting impression. He returned to Vancouver determined to build something bigger. Getting Nemesis off the ground was far from easy.
Reno had no formal business education and limited resources. Securing the Gastown location nearly didn’t happen. When the café finally opened in 2017, the team had stretched every available dollar.
“We had $32 in the till,” he recalls. Because they couldn’t afford designers, consultants, or agencies, they learned to do everything themselves. “We became our own designers, brand builders, project managers, financiers,” he recalls.
“We did the whole game.” That approach remains embedded in Nemesis today, where every function gets ample focus. Food matters. Pastry matters.
Design matters. Music matters. Hospitality matters.
Reno talks about all of them with the same intensity. “We’re kind of uncompromising in that way,” he says. It’s one reason Nemesis stands apart from many cafés.
While some treat food as an afterthought, Reno never wanted to separate the experience into silos. The company runs constant R&D sessions, sourcing coffee directly from producers, testing new dishes, refining pastries, and obsessing over details most customers will never see. That same philosophy shaped Bam Bam.
While Nemesis draws inspiration from global coffee culture, Bam Bam looks inward, pulling from the diners, fast-food chains, and comfort foods Reno grew up with. “We had no money,” he says, recalling his upbringing. “So we ate at Tim Hortons and McDonald’s.
If we went to IHOP or Denny’s, that was like, ‘Yo, this is nice.’ ” The result is a menu built around familiar staples—fried chicken sandwiches, donuts, coffee, cocktails—filtered through the same design-forward lens that made Nemesis successful. When Nemesis was named one of the world’s best coffee shops earlier this year, Reno says the recognition mattered less for him than for his team. For employees, it validates years of work and opens doors throughout the global coffee industry.
“I work now for the best shop in Canada—or at least on paper, the best shop in Canada,” he says, imagining how team members might feel. “That means something.” Still, he speaks less about awards than he does about the work that remains. “We’re resilient,” he says.
“A little bit stupid. A little naive. But we do it with the right intentions.” Which brings us back to the music.
Most customers never noticed it had stopped. Reno did. Nearly a decade after opening Nemesis, that instinct—to notice the details others miss and care enough to fix them—may be the clearest explanation for why people keep coming back.
GS Nemesis has locations in Gastown, Mount Pleasant, North Vancouver, Surrey, and Coquitlam.
