In my neighborhood of Palermo Viejo on Calle Jorge Luis Borges is a café called Brownie. The small store – one table inside and two more on the sidewalk – has its menu of coffee drinks written in chalk on a cappuccino-colored wall behind the counter, and there’s usually a plate of brownie bites to nibble on. It feels like a bit like a coffee shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, aside from the brisk business it does selling cookies to the girls from the two nearby Catholic schools, whose plaid skirts and loud conversation remind me more of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But all of this is beside the point, because if you’ve made it to Brownie, you’ve found what might be the best espresso in Buenos Aires.
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Drinking coffee in BA is challenging. The espresso is quite bitter and it occasionally tastes chewy, even when you don’t find a few stray grounds at the bottom of your cup. Porteños don’t seem to notice: They mostly drink coffee with milk, more of it in their cafe con leche than in their smaller cortado. These two drinks can be ordered anywhere and cortado is a particularly wonderful creation, with a flexible definition: sometimes it’s piping hot, other times lukewarm, and the small cup, mug, or glass in which it is served may or may not be topped with frothed milk.
Judging by the reactions I’ve gotten when I order straight espresso, drinking it solo is a rarity here, and I have taken to smothering mine with one of Argentina’s huge packets of sugar. Except when I’m in the capable hands of César and Ornella, the co-owners of Brownie, that is. How do they get it right? According to Ornella: “We use the best coffee, the best chocolate for our brownies, the best of everything.” Their beans are domestically roasted and are used in other cafes, places whose espresso can’t compare with Brownie’s, which makes César and Ornella seem even more like alchemists. Whatever the reason, I’ll just keep supporting them at it, one tiny glass at a time.
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Brownie has been open for eight months. Its small location in a wealthy, touristy neighborhood, along with its decidedly Norte Americano name and fare mean that it is not only an exceptional joint in this city but an exception to the city’s general rules for coffee. Those rules are changing, however, as is the coffee market. Starbucks has been planning its entry into the Argentine market for over a year and now their future location at the Alto Palermo mall is marked with a sign reading “Muy Pronto.” (The store is set to open by the end of this month, but unless they’re offering soy lattes, I’m not that interested.) The company, which took its time to hone its business model to fit the local palate, has reportedly come up with their answer: the dulce de leche Frappuccino.
Our Lovely Green Lady of the Beans is hardly the only one changing the coffee game in town; Havanna, one of a number of coffee shop chains here, has just started offering coffee-to-go, in convenient and familiar-looking paper cups with plastic lids. Paper cups and plastic lids: just two among many things taken for granted in the US that are, for better or worse, being consciously imagined and carefully introduced here in BA.
This is a big change, and to understand just how big, you’ve got to know that coffee-to-go in this city is presently available in one of two ways: Folks who live or work close enough to a café can get delivery, which comes on a silver platter in a glass or mug. I don’t know how the used dishes get returned but the sight of a waiter walking down the street, as if the desk, cash register, or kitchen counter that is his destination is just another more distant table in his serving zone, is common enough to assume that they’ve figured that part out. Alternatively, you can buy an open-topped styrofoam cup of coffee from one of the many salespeople who troll the streets of Palermo every morning. They work regular beats, pushing wire-framed carts that hold between nine and twelve thermos bottles, the red ones filled with coffee, the blue ones with milk. Once you’ve made your purchase though, you’re trapped with a brimming cup of steaming coffee: It’s more like “coffee-to-stay” – until the level and temperature of the drink have dropped enough that you’re willing to brave the walk down the street.
One can’t say enough about how great the café culture in Buenos Aires is. The number of people sitting at sidewalk tables, conversing over coffee and medialunas at 9:30am on a Friday morning, is, simply put, an urban miracle. One might reasonably worry that if cafe para llevar catches on here, it might detract from that culture in some way. I’ll keep my eyes open.
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No account of Argentina’s hot liquid stimulants would be complete without mentioning maté.
It’s the country’s unofficial national drink, and although not everybody likes it, nearly everyone has an opinion about it. To understand this tea that is drunk throughout Latin America, just imagine the exact opposite of the “high tea” they serve at Chicago’s Drake Hotel. If English tea – that dainty hot drink in a porcelain cup that contains not a shred of leaf – is your WASPy mother-in-law, then maté – drunk in groups through a shared metal straw out of a hollowed-out gourd packed with leaves – is your stoned college roommate.
Walk through any weekend market and you’ll not only find the gourds (called matés) for sale, but you’ll also see them in near-constant use by the vendors. Any supermarket maté aisle (to find it, just follow your nose) will likely stock ten or more different brands of loose maté leaves in brick-shaped bags of varying sizes. The brands’ names and the packaging alone tell you a fair amount about maté: Some packages talk about the tea and its taste (many are called suave, or smooth), the names of others are often allusions, some geographical (one popular brand takes its name, Taragüi, from the indigenous name for Argentina’s maté-growing Corrientes province), others conceptual (Nobleza Gaucha, another brand, translates as “Gaucho Nobility,” the behavior expected of the Pampas’ cowboys as well as the name of an early Argentine silent film). From such an array, how can one choose? Go for a maté that has “less dust,” or one that comes “with stems?” One brand is is so insistent about the quality of its product that it resorts to repetition (“this smooth maté does not relax and does not relax and does not relax”) – is this better or worse than the one that is simply called “Romance?”
I had my first taste of maté one evening last week at the house of two friends of Rebekah’s, Mirta and Oscar. (Unlike coffee, you can’t order a maté in a café, not as far a I can tell.) The tea came with a much-needed lesson; maté may look a bit more laid back than Western-style tea but it has many more rules associated with its consumption. First and most important, the water must be heated but not boiled. The leaves, enough for about twenty pots of tea, are put into the maté and then shaken up to eliminate any air pockets and to evenly distribute big and small leaf pieces. The hot water is then added slowly until the leaves are saturated. There will be some extra watery tea – this is the first maté, and it is not to be drunk. The cebador, the person who serves the maté (this word is not used in any other context), must suck the liquid through the metal straw, or bombilla, and spit it out. Then he (or she – everyone drinks the stuff, and anyone can be cebador) adds water to make the maté and passes the vessel to the first drinker and the cycle begins. Each drinker drains the maté of its liquid and then returns it to the cebador, who then refills the maté for the next person. The cebador is last in the cycle to drink, after which the maté begins its way around again. People sit like this for hours.
We only drank our maté for about an hour, but that gave me enough time to learn a few interesting facts from our hosts. First, because the temperature of the water is so important and must remain constant, the best implement is a thermos, and you’ll see people carrying them all around the city. There are even signs in cafes advertising hot water where they’ll fill your thermos for a peso. I was told that maté should not be drunk on ordinary streets – only in Uruguay and Paraguay, where the drink is even more popular than in Argentina, is this considered acceptable behavior. As our cebador Oscar put it, you need three things to really enjoy maté: “a newspaper, sunshine, and to be sitting in a square.”
According to our hosts, the lower and middle classes favor the drink more than the rich, and the old drink more of it than the young do. Maté can also be flavored with bits of orange or grapefruit peel, coffee grounds, or even chocolate, but we drank ours straight and sweet, with Oscar adding a small spoonful of sugar to the brew before every pass. It had a pleasant warmth and a dull sweetness, and after eight cycles, I felt pretty good. Awake and aware, but not jittery, not buzzed. Not surprising: Maté has a type of caffeine in it, which is called “mateine.”
The taste of maté is tough to describe, but it has a definite burnt flavor, and it can numb your mouth in the same way as strong coffee or red wine. Perhaps I’ll get better at describing it as I get better at making it: I’m incorporating the occasional maté into my afternoons here, drinking it from my very own redwood maté and through a supermarket-bought, stainless steel bombilla. That’s me, Jonah: the gringo wannabe gaucho.
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