As the Toronto International Film Festival gears up for its 39th year, a landmark Yorkville restaurant that was a casualty of the festival’s move away from the neighbourhood has announced it will shutter its doors for good.

Toronto’s Coffee Mill eatery, where publicists and celebrities and filmgoers could stop for a café latte or a plate of Hungarian goulash, will close Sept. 7.

“It’s a bit upsetting,” said Mashi Kerenyi, who’s worked at the Coffee Mill for the last 18 years. But, she says, the business has had trouble drawing new customers, particularly after TIFF — which starts next week — moved farther downtown.

The decision comes a little more than a year after it celebrated its 50th anniversary in May 2013.

Started by Hungarian immigrant Martha von Heczey in 1963, the restaurant in its heyday was a favourite haunt of Hungarian-born journalist and poet George Jonas and writers like Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields and Greg Gatenby. Leonard Cohen would stop by when he came to town in the 1970s.

Now 86 years old, von Heczey was working as a salesperson at Creeds, an upscale retail store, when she set about creating the city’s first outdoor coffee and sandwich shop.

“People kept asking her where to have lunch,” Kerenyi said. It was the 1960s and there “was nothing,” she said. “It was Anglo-Saxon, 9-to-5” and empty on weekends.

When von Heczey first asked for a patio license, she was mocked. “They poo-pooed her, they said ‘nobody’s going to sit outside in Canada,’” Kerenyi laughed. “Look at us now.”

By using $1,500 borrowed against her first husband’s life insurance policy, von Heczey was able to set up shop and, in the spring of 1963, the Coffee Mill opened in the Lothian Mews courtyard, tucked behind Bloor St. W.

It was a surprise success.

“She sold sandwiches and it grew and grew and grew,” Kerenyi said. With its sandwiches, lattes and relaxing patio, the Coffee Mill outlived even the courtyard in which it was born.

And in 1967, four years after its opening, it was where von Heczey met her second husband. Laci von Heczey, a Hungarian former champion wrestler, walked in on a summer day, with a flamboyant shirt and a cheetah on a leash like a dog. It was part of a nightclub act, but it captivated von Heczey.

“He was the greatest luck in my life — when he appeared with the cheetah, that was something,” von Heczey told the Star at the start of the Coffee Mill’s 36th year, five years after Laci’s death in 1991.

In the Coffee Mill’s heyday, Yorkville was a bustling place to be. Having moved to a mini mall on Yorkville Ave. in 1973, it offered respite from the city with its secluded patio, trees, fountains, live weekend entertainment, and an expandable awning in case of rain.

“The secret of my staying power is simple,” von Heczey told the Star in 1998. “I try not to change too much. I have the same people coming in, the same staff, the same kitchen. You come in here, you feel at home.”

But Kerenyi said the area has become very residential and struggles to attract new interest. “Not many people come anymore,” she said. “They go to Queen West, King West or the Distillery District.”

Closing was a “hard decision,” said van Heczey’s lawyer Robert Wappel. “It’s just unsustainable and she’s not young enough to do the things that are necessary to turn a business like this around.”

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A final dinner or celebration of some sort is in the works to mark the passing. Longtime customers have been stopping in all week, Kerenyi said, for a final coffee or goulash or just to say goodbye.

Kerenyi herself will say goodbye with a slice of the shop’s dobos torte. “It’s very thin layers of cake with a cocoa butter cream. So good,” she said, sighing into the phone. “If I could I’d eat the whole 12 slices.”