London Free Press:
What’s in a name?” the love-smitten Juliet asks.
How about William? As in Shakespeare, the bard who wrote Romeo and Juliet (creating both Juliet and the question) and who, 393 years after his death, inspired the official title for a chain of Ontario coffee shops.
Williams Coffee Pubs was born in Stratford in 1993 after Bill (there’s William again) Giannakopoulos and his brother, George, sold their successful but time-demanding Mediterranean Cafe and bought what George recalls as “a dumpy little coffee shop.”
“We started wondering what to do with it. We thought this could be interesting.
“Well, this is Stratford, home of the Shakespearean festival, so there’s the name William. And in England, the pub is a gathering place. So we came up with Williams Coffee Pub,” he says.
Continue reading this story.
Photo: Scott Wishart / Sun Media.