Reimagining Hess Village
One of Hamilton’s best-known destinations has been constantly evolving since a vision for a ‘boutique zone’ took shape in 1972. Now, it’s a place for day-long and year-round dining, entertainment, and wellness in a vibrant, historic district.
It was the Glenn Paul Trio that drew me out to Selo Cafe + Wine Bar on a Thursday night early in the spring. After navigating my way past the construction on Main Street and finding a space to park just in front of the Gown & Gavel, I took note of how quiet Hess Village was compared to the last time I was here. I could already hear the beats and bass of the jazz set as I approached the front door to Selo on a cool, gray evening.
The trio was set up in the window, in the middle of their first set. The ambiance inside – exposed red brick punctuated by green planters and lit by pretty golden lamps – was already making me feel at home as I sat at the bar among a few patrons and some friends of the trio. I ordered a negroni and chatted a bit with Simone Mekli, the owner of the place (a conversation that inspired this very article).
A friend from work walked up to get a drink at the bar. Glenn Paul came to say hello as we enjoyed our cocktails. Before long, it was 9 p.m. and dark outside, and the band started packing up as we settled up our tabs and got ready to go home.
As I walked back to my car, I looked around and thought once again of the last time I was here on a Saturday night. It was 16 years ago, and it was early July, one of those long and hot summer nights, the district filled with hundreds of partiers queued up at the doors of Sizzle, Koi, and other venues long since closed, the lights from the cars and streetlamps blurred by alcohol and the air filled with the murmurs of people and thumping bass, and the smell of tobacco and weed.
I got to my car and turned my attention back to the present day. All was quiet. This place seemed less like a party district, and more like a place to do some shopping and grab a bite to eat, but then again, it was a Thursday in spring, not a summer Saturday. Still, Hess Village had changed, and it is still changing.
The origins of Hess Village
Many readers, especially older Millennials who were in their late teens and early 20s during the turn of the century, may only think of Hess Village as a party district, but in truth, the area has been through multiple iterations over the years.
1972 saw two notable events: the arrival of a prominent law firm into the long-neglected part of Hess Street between King and George, and the proposal of a downtown “boutique zone” by the City in November. According to historical information provided by the office of Ward 2 City councillor Cameron Kroetsch, the initial work to modernize the area – long reputed as a hangout spot for biker gangs and the home of a few “flop houses” – would take a few years as the City and new property owners tried to reconcile issues with zoning, permits, pedestrianization, and traffic.
But the new restaurants and boutique shops began to draw younger visitors and patrons to the area, and by the end of the decade, Hess Village had developed into a trendy retail, restaurant, and residential mix. The Ward 2 office notes that “vegetarian food, ‘mod’ clothing stores, denim-related shops, and other ‘hodgepodge’ boutiques filled the streets. They created a casual “Parisian flavour" that defined Hess Village.”
Fast forward to the first two decades of the 2000s and the Hess many readers today are more familiar with, and we see the village shifting yet again after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I grew up in Hamilton too and frequently went to the clubs,” says realtor and Hess Village BIA president Adrian Mekli (who is the brother of Selo owner Simone Mekli). “I think at its peak, there were 10+ nighttime venues. Even though we’re still an entertainment district, and every city does need nightlife and places to go until 2 a.m., we really only have one pure nightclub now, and that’s the Gown & Gavel, which has a summer [weekend] patio, 12 p.m. to 2 a.m.”
Mekli says the goal is to be more than just a food and drink district, noting that Hess needs a bit of everything. Indeed, there are a number of new retail and service options in Hess Village, including an optical clinic, nail salons, hairdressers, and a tattoo studio to name just a few. “While you’re out shopping and getting your nails done with your girlfriend,” says Mekli, “you can grab a drink and food after.”
Challenges and opportunities
One of the biggest challenges has been to get people back to Hess Village to see the difference. Mekli acknowledges there might be a memory bias or a recollection of Hess solely as the party district, which has inspired the BIA to run events such as the Winter Market, a family-friendly event. “We run clothing festivals along the street. Run clubs go through Hess as well in the warmer months. It’s just a matter of getting people to come down here, and the overwhelming response has been, ‘Wow, I don’t remember Hess being this beautiful.’”
In 2023, radius, one of Hamilton’s top restaurants, relocated to Hess Village from its original location on James Street South. “It has been a positive experience,” says radius partner and CEO Lisa Mercanti-Ladd. “We have a community in Hess Village and have formed a business improvement area so there is a collective group that commits to priorities for the area.”
Mercanti-Ladd acknowledges the nostalgia that Hamiltonians have about the village and loves hearing stories from the past. “Also, we love that we are only an 8-minute walk to TD Coliseum, so that has been so instrumental to Hess Village and all of the businesses today. I’m also so excited about the new Hamilton Hammers, as, being a hockey mom, hockey is one of my personal passions.”
Q&A with Selo’s Simone Mekli
On a cool and sunny summer morning in July, I return to Hess Village for my interview with Selo owner Simone Mekli, just a few weeks shy of the café and wine bar’s two-year anniversary. We sit by windows where the Glenn Paul Trio played just a few short months ago on my first visit.
JA: You’ve been open almost two years. How are you feeling about the business today?
SM: Aug. 20 will be two years officially, and it feels good. I’m learning so much about business. Meeting so many incredible people, learning more things about food and wine and the logistics of everything. This is my first business, and I feel that my naïveté helps me. I don’t know, maybe something is looming in my future and I’m too naïve to see it, but I’m very optimistic for now.
I used to work in an office doing marketing and PR, and my work days were eight hours with a lunch break, but they felt so long, and my weeks felt so long. Here, I’m working three times what I was working before, but I’m not nearly as exhausted as I was doing desk work. Some days, I’m drained, and other days are more testing than others, but I’m still always excited to come in, always excited for new ideas that pop into my head. I’m never dreading coming in here, which is cool.
JA: What was it about this location in Hess that drew you to it originally?
SM: My brother Adrian is a realtor, and he had a couple of people who were looking at this place. I was nowhere near opening up my own. I knew eventually I wanted to, but I wasn’t actively looking at places. I was working at Le Tambour as a server, and Adrian teased me about the listing, saying, “The offer fell through, come look at this space.” I’d come in, see the vision for it, get excited, then he’d say, “Someone else is interested.” This happened a couple of times, then finally he said it was open. Next thing you know, I’m talking to the bank for a small business loan, I started the business, I’m renovating. It all fell into place. I’m a big believer that your path is going to get a little bit laid out for you and things will feel easier.
JA: What was here before Selo?
SM: It was The Masque Wine Jazz Bar. It had closed pre-COVID, so it was empty for a while and in really rough shape. I still get regulars from The Masque to reminisce from their time there. In its heyday, it was a spot for really good music and a group of people who all became regulars and friends. I liked that energy, so I wanted to continue that feeling in the space.
Prior to that, I had so many people come in to tell me about different iterations of the space. It was also called the Ragin’ Cajun, a Tex Mex eatery. I also have a sign from The Bite Beach Bar, where they specialized in shots. I had this sweet older German woman come in and take photos who said she had been an exchange student at Mac during the ’60s, and this place was called The 13th Page and was a bookstore, and she used to work here. She was very nostalgic about the space. It’s seen so many different faces. The Masque had the brickwork covered. The floor was just tiled, and when we were tearing it up, you can see remnants of herringbone, but it wasn’t salvageable.
A lot of people ask if the bar was original to the building. That was my goal, to make it look like it had been here for a while, but we built it. Aside from the espresso machine, the bar is the most expensive thing in the shop.
JA: Though not open as late as other spots in Hess, Selo caters to both early birds and night owls five days out of the week. Do you feel that this is an increasingly rare thing to find in many hospitality businesses?
SM: I do think, at least in Hamilton, it’s a hard thing to find. Hamilton has its own funny hours where so many things are closed, throughout the week, and you can only get what you want Thursday to Saturday it feels sometimes. I like that people are able to come in. You can be working on your laptop all day and then you can finish and have a glass of wine in the same place.
The liquor licence we got at the end of last summer, and we’re still feeling it out. Obviously, the patio is the best time for people to be out and about in Hamilton. The hours may be a bit different in the winter, but I like keeping things consistent for people in the cold weather months. It takes time for this to build and people to become regular. We’ve had fun with the wine bar, getting wine selections that people wouldn’t be exposed to unless they went to Toronto or other places.
JA: What are the advantages and challenges you’ve found?
There are definitely challenges. I don’t know if it’s just my lack of proper marketing of the space or people’s perceptions, or both, but I found we had a really hard time once we opened for the evening after we got our liquor licence roughly a year into the business. People still strictly see us as a café and don’t really know about the evening aspect of it, or that our menu changes, or that we carry different wines. We love our evening food menu and we only put food on the menu that we like to eat. I’m trying to bring more awareness of it.
We’re also not a restaurant, but more of a snack bar, but when people hear snack bar, they’re not thinking elevated tapas, so we’re working on that. You can hang out here for a while and people can have birthday parties and birthdays here, weddings, bridal showers. We had an après ski rave party here, they had a whole network of DJs and we had this in January-February with three or four DJs out back. It was snowing, everyone was bundled up and it was fun!
I feel that I’m that way. When people ask either what’s your style? Or what’s your personality?, I can never put myself in a category and I feel that I made that in this space as well: not a box. The business people I was meeting with for advice kept saying I needed a niche: are you a book café? Are you doing your own roasting? Photography? What’s your pocket? And I’m a little bit of everything. I don’t like pigeonholing myself.
JA: What’s the business ecosystem like at Hess?
SM: We have the hotels around us, and so we get a lot of people who are just trying to explore the area on one- or two-day stays in the city. When you’re staying here, a lot of people are just here as a halfway point on their way somewhere else. We get hotel guests in the morning looking for something to do or, in the evening, pre-dinner reservations. We get lots of that. We do get pre- and post-dinner drinks from radius and places around. Other than that, we have a lot of beauty places in the village: a spa next door, a nail salon on George Street. We’ll get a lot of people killing time before appointments.
JA: How has live music been working over the summer?
It’s been great. I think because this building had such a rich history of live music, we get a lot of people who’d come to The Masque who come to us when we say we have performances. I think COVID killed live music in the city compared to how it was before. I like bringing that back in, and it brings a very nice liveliness to the space. I was worried about the acoustics, but the musicians say it really fits the vibe for music. Glenn’s jazz performances have been great, and just having him as a regular part of the schedule has helped to build up an audience over time.
We were working with Brodie from the Casbah for bookings. He would send us some amazing acts that filled up the space. It’s a different energy when acoustic music comes in. It’s a feeling that you get of people all here enjoying it for the same purpose.
JA: In terms of Hess Village itself, is it fair to say that there is a transition away from predominantly nightlife entertainment and more towards a food and drink district?
SM: 100 per cent. I think that’s partly the new business owners coming into the space, but also the nature of the way that our city has transitioned. I grew up in Hamilton, and coming to Hess Village while I was in university, so I remember when the streets were closed off, the police horses were around, every bar had their music blasting. I don’t think that can exist anymore at the same scale. People aren’t going out like they used to. That nightlife caused so many problems: the police presence was vast, and there were so many not-good things happening: vandalism, littering.
With new business owners moving in, why would you want as a business for that to be the visual of your street? Everyone here has put so much of their own personal time and money into their businesses and growing this neighbourhood and making it feel and appear welcoming for Hamilton, that transition was bound to happen. This is my money and my time, and I put so much of my sweat and tears into this space. I want this to be not just for me but for the neighbourhood, and everything I do to better my business helps everyone else, and vice versa. It’s, therefore, a natural transition.
JA: What’s your favourite or most memorable service experience since opening Selo?
SM: I put on the FIFA [World Cup] final match at 3 p.m. Normally we close at 4, but I was committed to keeping it going until the end of the day. I had a couple on the patio doing work and they saw me roll out the TV, and they watched the game with us. The wife is Serbian and Bosnian, and she and her husband had been to Croatia. My mom was helping us close, and it turns out they live nearby and we had so many things in common. We have many Balkan items on our menu, and they ordered sataras (toast with a light vegetable stew and scrambled egg), and in Hamilton, there are a lot of different cultural foods, but not many Balkan foods, so she sent me a beautiful message saying that it felt so nostalgic for her to have that. She hasn’t had it in a while, and she can no longer get from her grandparents because they’ve passed on. The space makes them feel like they’re back in a café over there.
JA: What can readers look forward to from Selo in the colder months?
SM: We want to start getting more into catering, whether it’s for office events or special event catering. We’ve really been developing our pastries and we would love to get that to more people. I’m also trying to work on a wine club to bring more of our funkier wines to people, making them more accessible. I’m working on a Selo pantry that we want to stock with sauces that we make in our kitchen, along with more artisan stuff from our suppliers, whether online or physically in store. And also more music and events, continuing to be a space for people to get out and about.
The Future
I ended my conversation with Mekli by asking the question I’d asked the others who’d offered to be part of his story: what are your hopes for the future?
Says Mekli’s brother Adrian, speaking for the BIA: “We want the village to be the true sense of the word, a village, where people can come here from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. and there’s something for everybody.”
Mercanti-Ladd says her vision is for Hess to be “a world-class vibrant historic dining, entertainment, and wellness district, with a community of restaurants, retail shops, spas, hotels and bars, open day and night.”
She adds that they’re going to be working hard at building the Hess Village brand with Hamiltonians. People can look forward to more group events like the Hess Village Winter Market in support of Charity of Hope, Nov. 20 to 22. A tree lighting happens the first night. "The village transforms into a Hallmark-like postcard," says Mercanti-Ladd.
And as for Mekli and Selo? “I just love being a part of the neighbourhood and the community. We work with a tiny kitchen and we get creative with it, but I would love to expand our back-of-house so we can also expand our menu and offerings. And the pantry, I would love to be able to grow that and maybe find another physical space in the village to have a Selo Market that’s year-round, but that’s a pipe dream for now. I just hope as years go on, we become more integrated into the local vibes, for people who live here, and a space for them to know we’re here and they can always come here.”
