Some Reviews of The Seaside Café Metropolis

January 10, 2026 ~ Antanas Sileika

Above – in conversation with Wodek Szemberg at the October 28, 2025 launch of my latest novel, The Seaside Café Metropolis and below a long shot of the audience.

Here are 3 reviews of the novel:

Pickle Me This

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November 14, 2025

The Seaside Cafe Metropolis, by Antanas Sileika

“How is it possible to live under tyranny? One must create a sort of fantasy world to shield at least part of oneself from the oppression. And under this shield, people can make alternative lives for themselves, real or imaginary ones.”

There is no seaside at the Seaside Cafe Metropolis, and there is no metropolis either, instead Khrushchev-era Vilnius, Lithuania, to which Toronto-born Emmett Argentine has followed his idealistic socialist mother and still can’t seem to be unravelled from her apron strings, never mind that he’s the one in the kitchen now, or at least overseeing the kitchen, and the rest of his restaurant, the Seaside Cafe Metropolis, which is indeed a cafe, if nothing else. And also the centre of Bohemian life in Vilnius, although there isn’t much competition for that distinction, and Antanas Sileika’s The Seaside Cafe Metropolis is a rich, funny, and quietly poignant chronicle of this most distinguished undistinguished establishment, where KGB agents listen from the basement to microphones installed at the tables so that nobody can ever say in so many words just how much the Soviet reality has failed to lived up to its promise, but also everybody knows, so nobody has to. And in the meantime, Argentine (not in fact from Argentina) contends with informants trolling for dissidents, securing a jazz band, the mediocrity of Soviet champagne, the dramas of his young patrons (the poet, the philosopher, the sculptor, the artist), a visit from Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, protecting his employees from the terror of the state, and a one unforgettable chain of tragedies involving a lion, each chapter complete with a recipe (“Buckwheat Groats,” “Potato Kugel,” “Herring and Onion on Warm Potatoes”) rounding out this culinary experience, which turns out to be a celebration of community, solidarity, and the transformative power of imagination.

The Seaside Café Metropolis by Antanas Sileika

Miramishi Reader – November 16, 2025 by Alison Manley

There’s a certain wry tone in Soviet comic fiction — sly, humorous, incredibly bleak, resigned, and also still managing to delight in the absolute absurdity of it all. It’s very specific, and if you’ve read any Soviet writers, you’ll know what I mean. This is the tone of The Seaside Café Metropolisby Antanas Sileika – a book published in 2025, but managing to capture the tone of Soviet fiction from these few decades after the formal end of the Soviet Union.

Set in Lithuania in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Emmet Argentine is the son of a Canadian woman who decided to commit to her ideals and go live in Vilnius, the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the USSR and still resistant to rule from Russia. Emmet, a trained chef who worked in the top hotels in Toronto, he finds himself an oddity in Vilnius. Useful to the regime, he’s allowed some freedoms, but also toes the line, keeping himself, his mother, and his staff safe. When he’s assigned to run a new café, modelled on the things that people might want from the West, he embraces it, even though the Seaside Café Metropolis is none of the things the name claims it is.

This novel reads more like a collection of connected short stories: each chapter is a self-contained tale about Emmet, the café, and the cast of characters who haunt the place. Each story is shaped around a meal – usually Emmet’s attempts to make something that appeals to Lithuanian tastebuds, reflects the limited ingredients he can get his hands on in the country, and also characterizes the kind of bohemian café he wants to run. Each chapter ends with a recipe for the central dish, usually with some commentary thrown in about how it had to actually be made in Lithuania.

This novel was so darkly hilarious that I spent the whole time reading it and chuckling. It was wildly entertaining and Sileika’s ability for such sly, dark humour is fantastic. Sometimes we need to laugh, and sometimes we need to laugh with a shadowy hint for a shadowy moment. This book is perfect for that latter need.

Details:

Antanas Sileika is a Canadian author of six previous books of fiction, as well as two memoirs. His collection of short stories, Buying on Time, was shortlisted for the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Toronto Book Award, and longlisted for CBC’s Canada Reads in 2016. His books have repeatedly received starred reviews from Quill & Quire and have been listed among the one hundred best books of the year in The Globe and Mail. One of his novels, Provisionally Yours, was adapted into both a feature film and a television serial in Europe. He currently lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Publisher: Cormorant Books (September 27, 2025)
Paperback 8″ x 6″ | 294 pages
ISBN: 9781770868106

49’th Shelf.com

The Seaside Cafe Metropolis, by Antanas Sileika

Cormorant Books

There is no seaside at the The Seaside Cafe Metropolis, and there is no metropolis either, instead Khrushchev-era Vilnius, Lithuania, to which Toronto-born Emmett Argentine has followed his idealistic socialist mother and still can’t seem to be unravelled from her apron strings, never mind that he’s the one in the kitchen now, or at least overseeing the kitchen, and the rest of his restaurant, the Seaside Cafe Metropolis, which is indeed a cafe, if nothing else. And also the centre of Bohemian life in Vilnius, although there isn’t much competition for that distinction, and Antanas Sileika’s The Seaside Cafe Metropolis is a rich, funny, and quietly poignant chronicle of this most distinguished undistinguished establishment, where KGB agents listen from the basement to microphones installed at the tables so that nobody can ever say in so many words just how much the Soviet reality has failed to lived up to its promise, but also everybody knows, so nobody has to.
And in the meantime, Argentine (not in fact from Argentina) contends with informants trolling for dissidents, securing a jazz band, the mediocrity of Soviet champagne, the dramas of his young patrons (the poet, the philosopher, the sculptor, the artist), a visit from Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, protecting his employees from the terror of the state, and a one unforgettable chain of tragedies involving a lion, each chapter complete with a recipe (“Buckwheat Groats,” “Potato Kugel,” “Herring and Onion on Warm Potatoes”) rounding out this culinary experience, which turns out to be a celebration of community, solidarity, and the transformative power of imagination.

Two New Books out This Fall and a Launch October 28

September 28, 2025September 29, 2025 ~ Antanas Sileika

The Seaside Café Metropolis will be launched in October in Toronto at the Lithuanian House at 1573 Bloor Street West. Detailed date and time to follow. An extract of this comic novel can be read at this site.

And don’t forget to look for another new publication, Buying on Time Again, a collection of humorous stories that first speared in 1997, and which has now been added to and reissued.

Winter-Spring 2025

April 20, 2025August 4, 2025 ~ Antanas Sileika

I am very pleased that Stonehewer Books has decided to update and reissue my 1997 book of linked short stories, now called Buying on Time Again in the fall of 2025. See the proposed cover below.

This collection was serialized on CBC radio, and short-listed for the Leacock Medal for Humour and City of Toronto Literary Award. We added Again to the original title and I have also added an essay and a prequel I wrote a few months after the book first came out.

In other news Cormorant Books has picked up my latest novel, The Seaside Café Metropolis, also for publication in the fall of 2025,. Here is a summary I provided to the publisher:

The Seaside Cafe Metropolis is a comic novel set in Khrushchev-era Vilnius – it’s like a cross between The Grand Budapest Hotel and A Gentleman in Moscow. It tells the story of a Toronto expatriate from the Royal York Hotel stuck in Vilnius with his determinedly communist mother circa 1958. He tries to make the best of it by running a fashionable bohemian restaurant while the KGB listens in from the basement.

Food is a major concern in the novel, and each chapter includes a Soviet-era recipe.

Some of the plot elements are taken from true history, such as the visit from Jean-Paul Sartre, and others come from the novel upon which the opera, La Bohème, was based. I stayed in the real cafe that inspired this novel in 1975, and its interior has been preserved, so I recently dined there on Chicken Kiev. Some historic photos can be found at this site.

As well, I continue to work with a few students from The Humber School for Writers,..

A Visual Walk through a Few Scenes in Some Unfinished Business

November 20, 2023November 19, 2023 ~ Antanas Sileika

The novel is set in rural and urban Lithuania in the Soviet postwar era, and as a friend said to me, “Why don’t you show some of those sites?”

So here are visuals of some of the settings in the novel.

1) My young Martin, the protagonist of the novel, is a youth living in a remote village called Lynežeris in 1947, in the south of the country, not far from the Byelorussian border. It’s a poor place where people live by subsistence farming. Here is a photo of one of the finer houses, taken a few years ago.

2) After years in the Gulag, in 1956, Martin finds himself in the city of Vilnius, where he goes looking for a job while walking down a major thoroughfare, called Vilnius Street. Here’s a modern picture of that street, all touristy now, but rather crumbling back then.

3) Martin applies for a job in a strange place, St. George’s church, which had been turned into a book depository for rare and forbidden books in the Soviet period. Here are a few photos. First the exterior, and then three interior shots of the bookshelves.

4) Kostas, the former village teacher in Martin’s youth, later becomes a famous writer who has an office in the fine Writers’ Union building. It was a former urban mansion with a modest exterior, but with some opulent decorations in the interior, including a grand staircase which Kristina will mount with complicating outcomes.

5) Kristina was adopted as a girl after being found shell-shocked in the Rasu cemetery, a short distance outside the city gate of Vilnius. It is a rambling old cemetery that runs over a couple of hills and a valley. It’s a place that comes alive on All Souls’ eve when people light candles and visit the graves of their dead.

6) Martin will have a basement apartment very close to the old food market, which continues to function to this day.

7) The Dawn Gate in the remnants of the old wall of Vilnius gets mentioned twice in the novel. First Martin and Kristina will simply go for a walk through the opening. Of the two photos, one shows the exterior and the other shows the interior, with the painting of Mary Mother of God behind a window on the second floor. Originally, another building stood outside the gate. Kostas describes this place going up in flames, as it really did near the end of the second world war.

8) Martin and Kristina will go for a walk down to what used to be called the Youth Park in the Soviet era. It’s a place where he will reveal some of his past. They walk by a fountain with elephants, but this fountain no longer exists in what is now called the Bernardinų Park.

9) Feeling burdened by the past, Martin and Kristina will go to an illegal bar for drinks in the old Užupis neighbourhood. This place is now very fashionable, but it was run down in the Soviet period.

And here’s a shout-out to Richard Martin-Nielsen, the former attaché at the Canadian embassy office in Vilnius. He suggested I do this last spring, before he moved on to another posting in Belgium. It only took me six months or so to get to it! Thanks, Richard, and good luck with the new assignment.