The cafeteria where a 2014 indie folk duo wrote their debut EP

In the spring of 2014, on a narrow Plateau side street not far from where the snow gives way to grit and bicycle bells, two strangers with battered guitars ended up sharing a corner table at a small cafeteria called Café Bantam. By the time the espresso machine finished its evening cycle, they had sketched out three songs. Within four months those sketches had become a debut EP, recorded on borrowed equipment and released into a Montreal indie folk scene that was already paying attention. Learn more about Anime De Sakamoto Days Tudo Que Sabemos Até Agora.

The duo, performing as The Hollow Days, never expected the cafeteria to become a kind of unofficial studio. They had each come in separately, one chasing a quiet room to rehearse voicings, the other simply looking for a place to write after a shift at a used bookstore. What began as small talk about fingerstyle guitar turned into notebook pages, chord fragments, and a tentative plan to meet again the following Tuesday.

This is the story of how an unremarkable cafeteria, a few laminated menus, and a handful of regulars became the unlikely birthplace of a record that would later find its way into the headphones of listeners from Berlin to Brisbane.

The cafeteria on Rue Workman

Café Bantam sat on the ground floor of a triplex, wedged between a dry cleaner and a shop that sold nothing but buttons. It was not a place that advertised itself. The owners had run it since the late nineties as a daytime spot for office workers and a nighttime spot for musicians who needed cheap coffee and a power outlet.

The room had scuffed grey wood floors and a long communal table where the same handful of regulars gathered every week. A chalkboard menu listed the day's soup, a vegetarian chili that rarely changed, and a rotating selection of baked goods from a bakery two blocks over. There was no Wi-Fi password taped to the wall. The owner believed people came there to talk to each other, not to their laptops.

For an Australian reader who knows Brunswick or Fitzroy, the setup is familiar in spirit if not in climate. Montreal's independent food and music scenes have long overlapped the way they do in Melbourne's inner north, where a single laneway can hold a recording studio, a record shop, and a café that hosts Sunday open mics. Triple J listeners who discovered bands through those same kinds of venues understand the connection between a good room, a good cup, and a few people who care.

How the Hollow Days found each other

Marie-Hélène Côté had been writing songs for nearly a decade, but rarely in front of anyone. She had a quiet voice, a fondness for open tunings, and a notebook already half full of lyrics. She had come to Café Bantam that March because the library near her apartment had become too crowded with students writing exams.

Samuel Breau had walked in from the other direction, fresh from a frustrating session with a band that had decided to go in a direction he did not want to follow. He ordered a coffee, sat near the window, and began picking through a chord progression he had been working on for weeks.

They spoke for the first time about a poster taped to the counter, advertising a folk festival in the Laurentians. Marie-Hélène mentioned she had played there the previous summer. Samuel mentioned he had been rejected from the same bill. By the time their second coffees arrived, they were swapping chord voicings. By the time the owner began stacking chairs, they had agreed to meet again the following week.

Writing the EP between lunch and last call

The record that became known simply as Cafeteria Songs was not written in a single burst. It accumulated in fragments, written in the margins of lunch shifts and slow afternoons, then tested against the room's particular acoustics. The cafeteria had high ceilings and tile floors, which gave even softly picked guitars a bright, dry resonance.

The duo adopted a routine. Marie-Hélène would arrive around three, order the soup, and set up near the back. Samuel would come in around five, after his shift, and join her. They would work for two or three hours, taking breaks when the owner brought over tea or when a regular began a long conversation about local politics. The record took shape in those small windows, between the clatter of dishes and the soft hum of a refrigerator that had been there longer than either of them.

One of the regulars, a translator who spent her mornings reading Japanese manga on the train, kept an eye on their progress. She had no musical training, but she had an ear for the way a melody settled, and she would occasionally ask whether a particular line was meant to be spoken or sung. Through her, one of the duo's members first heard about a new series generating quiet buzz among manga readers, the kind of attention that would later inspire detailed Sakamoto Days anime updates for fans tracking the adaptation.

A sound shaped by the room

The four songs on Cafeteria Songs are short, most of them under three and a half minutes, and they lean heavily on acoustic guitar, close harmony, and lyrics that take their imagery from everyday life. There is a song about a bus route, a song about a neighbour's dog, a song about leaving a key under a mat, and a song about the cafeteria itself.

What gives the record its particular texture is the sense that it was made in a public space rather than a private one. You can hear the room in the recording. There is a faint clink of cutlery in one track. In another, someone laughs in the background during the take that was kept. The producer, a local engineer who ran a small studio out of his apartment in Mile End, chose not to over-clean the recordings. He wanted the listener to feel that they were sitting at the communal table.

For Australian listeners used to records from studios in Marrickville, the EP offered something different. It sounded like a room. It sounded like an evening. It sounded like a table shared with strangers who, by the second listen, did not feel like strangers anymore.

Reception beyond the Plateau

The EP was released in late summer 2014 on a small cassette label run out of a record shop on Saint-Laurent. The first run of one hundred copies sold out in three weeks, mostly to people who had either been in the cafeteria during the recording or had heard about it from someone who had. A community station in the Plateau gave the title track enough airplay to push it onto a few year-end lists.

Word spread slowly. A blog in Lisbon wrote about it. A college station in the Midwest played it once a week. By the following spring, the duo had been invited to play small festivals in Quebec and Ontario, and a licensing inquiry had come in from a small European label.

In Australia, the kind of attention that lifts a record like this tends to come through platforms like triple j Unearthed, or through curated playlists on streaming services that champion independent folk. A band that builds its audience the way The Hollow Days did, one cafeteria table at a time, resonates with listeners who still buy physical records at shops like Title in Adelaide or who line up for the smaller stages at the Laneway Festival in Sydney.

What the cafeteria taught them

Looking back, both members of the duo have said that the most important thing the cafeteria gave them was not a quiet place to write. It was an audience. Every song was tested in a room full of people who had no obligation to be polite. If a line did not land, the regulars would go back to their conversations. If a melody caught someone's ear, a stranger would glance over and nod.

This kind of immediate, accidental feedback loop is something Australian music communities, from the inner-city folk nights of Sydney to the regional touring circuits that pass through towns like Castlemaine and Mullumbimby, have long understood. The Hollow Days were not inventing a new way of working. They were rediscovering one.

The cafeteria is still there, though the ownership changed a few years ago and the menu is now mostly sandwiches. The communal table is gone, replaced by smaller tables. But the room still has the same high ceilings, the same tile floor, and on a quiet evening you can still hear the soft hum of the refrigerator that outlasted the band.

Tracks from the cafeteria sessions

• Bus Route 24
• The mat under the door
• Soup of the day
• Bantam lullaby

Cafés, listening rooms, and quiet stages

• The open mic at a Brunswick front bar on a Sunday afternoon
• A small stage at the Laneway Festival in Sydney
• A folk night in a church hall in Castlemaine
• A community radio booth in Mile End, Montreal

The Hollow Days have not released a second record, though both members continue to write and perform separately. What remains is the four-song document of a particular room, a particular spring, and the kind of accident that produces a record when you are not really trying to make one. It is a reminder that the most enduring music is often made not in studios with soundproofed walls, but in rooms where someone might be listening, or might not, and where it does not really matter either way. Sites like ladyindie.com have long made space for exactly this kind of overlooked, hand-built record, and projects like The Hollow Days are part of the reason that space matters.