Highly Likely is a modern coffee shop where Indonesian coffee gets the attention it deserves.

"It took many years for this to come to life," admits Azamat Nogoev, who owns Highly Likely with his wife, Fatima Nurrahma.

"In 2018, we were looking for Indonesian coffee in Toronto and couldn't find any except for at Starbucks. And that's where the idea was born. Where can I buy an Indonesian coffee that is not dark roasted, where all the antioxidants and the quality of the coffee are preserved?"

Although Indonesia has played a significant role in global coffee history, mainly for its Typica varieties, Nogoev says that people don't fully appreciate the variety and quality of beans grown in the archipelagic state.

"We wanted to show and bring to Canada a quality that is on the higher end. It stays in people's minds that Indonesia has low-quality coffee, but there are choices for great coffee."

Living in the city of Bandung, in West Java, Nogoev and Nurrahma befriended coffee farmers and gained a deeper understanding of Indonesian coffee.

"On my days off, I would ride motorcycles through these plantations and that's how I met and got to know those people," says Nogoev. "Over time, we realized that their coffee is of premium quality. We started learning about specialty coffees. Our goal was to bring some Indonesian green beans to Canada."

With the Indonesian government currently working to support coffee producers, promote the quality of Indonesian coffee, and increase exports, the couple's timing was also spot-on.

Working with the team at Ethica Coffee Roasters, the duo began importing and roasting beans to sell under the Highly Likely name. The café, opened in early May, came next.

Designed by Tatiana Tyushnyakova, the room melds a wealth of Indonesian accents with a modern, high-tech feel.

For every inch of poured concrete, there's warmth from aquamarine-tinted tiles, wood panels, jute fixtures and custom teak furniture. Ceremonial masks, meanwhile, represent Barong, the Balinese spirit of health and good fortune.

Whereas other coffee shops offer wi-fi and welcome harried workers trying to squeeze the most from their workdays, the team at Highly Likely encourages people to unplug.

"There's a lot of places in the city that get overrun by people with laptops and people working," says coffee director, Andrew Rohrbacher. "We'd like to shift people's mentality away from a coffee shop as an office."

To wit, the café's three main tables are "no laptop" tables, and, instead, are places to "focus more on the coffee, community and connection," according to Rohrbacher.

From the succinct menu, customers can choose from a daily selection of pastries, supplied by Geste. A favourite made exclusively for the café, pandan cream tends to sell out first. Happily, both a fruit Danish ($7.25) and pistachio chocolate croissant ($7.25) are just as flaky and golden, if not quite as tailored to the café's theme.

In the future, the team hopes to offer more pastries featuring coconut and kaya jam, egg yolk, and other Southeast Asian ingredients.

Beverages include seasonal drinks, such as calamansi lemonade and a range of coffees — from bracing pour-overs ($7) to savoury espresso tonics ($8.00), made with Fever Tree Tonic, lime and Indonesian espresso. Though Indonesian coffee is the focus, the team fleshes out the menu with a rotating list of brews, currently from Costa Rica, Rwanda and Colombia.

An Arabica Q Grader, Nogoev is well-equipped to handpick every coffee the shop sells. "You can be 100 per cent sure that it is the best," he says. "It's not just any coffee."

Order the Barong dance ($6.00) for the full experience. "We split a standard shot into two. Serve one straight up and one with milk," says Rohrbacher. "This one is just available with Indonesian coffee," he adds. "As a way for people to be able to experience Indonesian espresso."

Also on the menu, luwak coffee ($18) is available sans the not-for-the-squeamish, ahem, backstory. "We're the only coffee shop in Toronto that I know of that serves luwak coffee," enthuses Nogoev. "It's very famous, from Indonesia."

Sweet and smooth, its bitterness muted, the coffee is now produced using enzymes from the stomach of luwaks, or palm civets. This new technology translates to higher yields. More importantly, it means that you can savour your luwak coffee without being distracted by the journey it made from the animals' mouths to the other end of their digestive tracts.

Whichever beverage you order, the team has one specific mission: "We wanted to build a coffee shop that people really enjoy and that they remember," says Nogoev.

Highly Likely is located at 1189 Queen Street West.