personal-writing

First written on 2021-10-24, and updated periodically afterwards

One of my favorite ways to pass a Saturday or Sunday is in a Third Wave coffeeshop with great ambience, paleo food, excellent pourover coffee, chill music, and my laptop (naturally, this is where I’m writing this article now). I’m not exactly sure why this appeals to me so much - perhaps a semblance of comfort/home, given how long I’ve been travelling? - but it resonates on such a level that for the past 7 years I’ve been building a Spotify playlist of music I’d play in the cafe I plan to open one day. I’ve formed a stable of preferred cafes during my last year in Mexico City (Blend Station, Cafe Curado, and Boicot Cafe), and I’ve mostly stuck to them during the past months.

That said, I’m always up for some exploring during my exploiting and yesterday I hit the jackpot: Cafe Curado was displaying an exhibit of Dia de los Muertos skulls, each designed by a specialty coffee shop in Mexico City and tagged with the cafe’s name.


The skulls were undoubtedly beautiful, but the real treasure was the list of names. Cafes with true specialty coffee - high-quality beans, prepared with a pourover method like V60 or Chemex - are surprisingly difficult to find as many cafes brand themselves “specialty” or “Third Wave” to freeload off the popularity of the movement while serving only espressos and whipped cream bullshit. In assembling their exhibit, Cafe Curado had inadvertently given me a wealth of new cafes who met my hard requirement. I wrote down the names, found them all on Google, removed the ones that didn’t have physical locations, and gathered them into a list that I could view on Google Maps.

Thus began The Great Mexican Cafe Adventure Of 2021. Over the course of the next few months, I’ll be visiting as many of these cafes as feasible and rating them on a 1-to-10 scale on the aspects that I care the most about:

2021-10-30: Alegre Cafe

Verdict: Overall, I like it! It’s better for a short-term visit than a long-term one due to the traffic noise and limited food options, but for an hour or two it’s very nice.

2021-10-24: El Ilusionista

My first cafe, and the one this article was started in.

Verdict: Definitely pleasant to post up for a while; food is the biggest weakness while coffee is the biggest strength. Would definitely come back.