This local bar is the first to ever become a co-op in Toronto

Toronto just got its first ever co-op bar, and it’s on a mission to change the hospitality landscape in the city as we know it.

Danu Social House just officially became a co-op, and had a launch party to celebrate. Danu was first opened in 2022 by founder Josh Zachariah, who was inspired by old school Viennese salons that his great grandfather actually attended in person.

Zachariah has had the idea for Danu since his teens, and while he thought his vision might come to life a little further down the line like during retirement, a self-proclaimed quarter life crisis had his speeding up his timeline.

“The idea of Danu was a place where people could gather and learn, not just be a place where you came with the one person you were with and kind of interacted only with the server and then left,” Zachariah tells yourcitywithIN. “We were gonna have a lot of events around learning, you know, these talk nights.”

Similar to the unexpected way that Danu was founded, the events at the bar didn’t necessarily go in the direction of the dry philosophical lectures of yore. Instead of quiet intellectual talks, there are lively Power Point presentation nights, poetry readings, karaoke jams, Super Smash Bros tournaments, fun support groups for harm reduction workers, communal meals and regular “house parties” that Danu has become known for.

Bulletin boards are plastered with community messages, and Danu even functions as something of an informal library that operates on an honour system with books lining the walls.

Danu came together entirely with the help of Zachariah’s team, along with friends and family who helped build the bar from the ground up both physically and financially. His sister had even been secretly squirrelling funds away on the side to help out with the Danu dream if he needed it, and the bar never had to approach a bank, raising around $140,000 initially.

“Numbers that are interesting for people to know. Very small numbers. You open a bar these days and you have less than a million dollars and people think you’re crazy,” says Zachariah.

“I knew that I would never make money. Like this is a terrible business move for me. The only people who make money in this business are restaurant groups and very, very lucky other bars like cocktail bars, or you started in like the 1970s.”

Zachariah’s vision was always to have Danu be a community-run space, and now that the bar is a multi-stakeholder co-op, it’s that much closer to that. Anyone can sign up for a membership for $10 a month which gets you a free drink, so basically for the price of a drink you get a say in the direction that Danu takes, like input on the menu for example.

“Both here and in New Brunswick, I’ve worked in hotels, I worked for small bars, I’ve worked for big bars. I’ve worked for restaurants. Two of them have now closed because of just general capitalism reasons. So it’s it’s not necessarily that those are even a sustainable form of of business. I think maybe the question that is better asked is why a co-op instead of a union or a nonprofit, because those are two other alternative worker structures that we’ve looked at as well,” staff member and stakeholder Lu Bradley tells yourcitywithIN.

“The multi-stakeholder co-op means that the board, which in this case is split up into seven different seats, is wholly responsible for the day-to-day operations. So that would include making sure that the bar has money to pay rent, that the bar has money to pay its staff, and all the revenue things. Our treasurer just finished our financial presentation of the month. So we were highly attuned to all of the pressures and everything that goes along with being financially responsible, but it means that even more so than like a regular bartender, who will make tips and that’s sort of their sales incentive, we have a much higher incentive to make sure that our bar is sustainable.”

“We’ve had chats with some other organizations as well that are interested in sort of taking the same sort of steps or just learning more about what we’re doing here and sort of implementing that into their own sort of framework,” bartender and co-op board co-chair Nick Mackenzie tells yourcitywithIN.

“A lot of it has just mainly been letting it be known that this is something that is possible to do, and just having a business sort of be, hey, we’re not trying to make money per se. We’re trying to give back as well. There’s a lot of underserved communities in Parkdale as well. There’s a lot of initiatives that can help with that. Food banks, a lot of neighbours that are unhoused.”

“People are sick of this game we’re asked to play,” says Zachariah.

“I think people think that like a lot of these more like socialized anarchist structures get really wishy-washy, and I think what what we want to show is, you can have a business that makes sense, that’s stable, that does the thing, and still say we’re not gonna play that game. This is going to be a different game, and I think that’s the thing we want to show.”