Café Le Hibou

Café Le Hibou Coffee House was a renowned coffee house in Ottawa. Founded by Denis Faulkner, who ran it until 1968, it was in business from 1960 to 1975. It was an important venue for the folk music scene of the early 1960s. The café helped establish the ByWard Market as Ottawa’s trendy neighbourhood at a time when the city’s nightlife was virtually nonexistent. By the end of the 1960s, it was a frequent stop for big-name artists, musicians and celebrities. It entrenched café culture in Ottawa and helped major venues establish themselves nearby.

Origins and Development

Café Le Hibou Coffee House was created out of necessity. There were very few places available to young adults in Ottawa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Many bars still had strict age and gender restrictions. Few offered food, and fewer still offered live entertainment, especially the kind that would appeal to a younger audience. The café was opened by Faulkner and several friends in October 1960 while they were still in university. The idea was to create a place for students and others to enjoy coffee and quality food, exchange ideas and listen to folk, jazz and blues.

Major Cultural Centre

Originally located in a rented space above a chiropractor’s office, the venue proved to be so popular and successful that in 1965 it moved to a larger location on Sussex Drive in Ottawa’s ByWard Market. It not only helped establish the market as trendy and hip, but it also further helped bring arts and culture into the downtown area. Within a few years, many of Ottawa’s leading arts venues would be located nearby.

The venue played a key role in the development of Canadian music icons such as Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Murray McLauchlan and Ottawa native Bruce Cockburn, among others. It was also important to the development of Ottawa’s cultural scene during the counterculture years of the 1960s and 1970s. It hosted a wide variety of performances in a range of different artistic styles: theatre (featuring such actors as Luba Goy, Jeanne Sabourin and Saul Rubinek), poetry readings, film presentations, dance and live music. Irving Layton and Gwendolyn McEwen read poetry there. Gordon Lightfoot gave some of his early performances there. George Harrison stopped by on his trip to Ottawa in 1969. A young Dan Aykroyd frequented the venue while in university and credited it with instilling his love of the blues.

In 1968, the café was visited by the recently elected Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. The following year, Irish singer Van Morrison played there for several nights. Other notable acts to perform there included Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, T-Bone Walker and Buddy Guy. “It wasn’t a moneymaker,” Aykroyd told the Ottawa Citizen in 2015. “They were bringing in top talent and charging nothing for it, and letting everyone in. It was a magnanimous time. I benefitted so much from that experience.”

Legacy

Faulkner sold the café in late 1968. It then went through several owners before closing in 1975. A book about the venue in its heyday, We Are as the Times Are: The Story of Café Le Hibou, was written by journalist and former patron Ken Rockburn and published in 2015.

(See also Coffee Houses.)