The evolving ritual of Buenos Aires coffee

“Who was the first person to serve you coffee?”

Coffee expert and journalist Sabrina Cuculiansky always poses that question when trying to explain the evolution of coffee drinking in Argentina. 

Chances are, most people will answer they had their café con leche when they were kids, at home, either for breakfast or an afterschool merienda. 

“For us Argentines, ‘coffee’ means a lot more than just the drink itself,” Cuculiansky tells the Herald. 

An experienced gastronomic journalist who became a spearhead for coffee culture in Argentina, Cuculiansky is getting ready for Exigí Buen Café, the coffee fair she created more than a decade ago and will have its 13th edition this weekend at La Rural. 

The event will gather 100 exhibitors from four continents, more than 1,500 baristas, coffee producers from Latin America and Africa, and host national compeitions, workshops, conferences and tastings.

In Argentina, the single act of having a cup of coffee can mean many different things. It can be taking a pause from a busy day for a quick cup of coffee (tomar un cafecito) or getting together with friends (juntarse a tomar un café). It can also be a synonym for a work meeting— as in a journalist “sitting down for coffee” with a source — or even a not so subtle invitation to a romantic date.

“The typical café porteño was always more of an icon, a ritual, a habit,” says Cuculiansky. In fact, Argentines have never been huge coffee consumers, averaging less than a kilo per year per person before the pandemic. Steady consumer countries, she explains, can double or triple that number.

Sabrina Cuculiansky (center) In the city of el café de la esquina (the cafe in the corner), coffee was not only a synonym for  social habits but also a specific kind of place. A tradition inherited from Spanish immigration, cafes in the twentieth century were mostly social places, gathering sites, where the quality of the coffee was not even an issue. It was a place where a big chunk of Buenos Aires life occurred. 

One of the most popular tangos ever written, “Cafetín de Buenos Aires” by Enrique Santos Discépolo and Mariano Mores, was basically an ode to the cafe as a main source of social education, a place of comfort and upbringing (“the one thing in life that was similar to my mother,” wrote Discépolo), and, in all, an entire philosophy of life. Coffee, as a drink, was absolutely irrelevant.

“Back then the café de la esquina served the same, lower-quality coffee that came from Brazil. But there was no point of comparison,” Cuculiansky says. “No one thought about whether it tasted good, bad or burned. It was just the coffee people drank at cafés back then.” 

The same thing happened with torrado, a popular form of coffee created in Spain in which coffee beans are toasted at high temperatures with added sugar. Vilified in today’s world of wide-spread specialty coffee and amateur baristas, torrado is, technically, not coffee.

“Coffee, as a category, is the result of toasting natural beans. Torrado coffee (i.e., toasted and sugared) is a different type of drink,” she explains. 

Cue the specialty coffee. A global trend that expanded in waves and eventually landed in Buenos Aires almost two decades ago, it focused on quality and serving conditions. Daniel Cifuentes’ Café Lattente in Palermo pioneered a new perspective 14 years ago: coffee quality was above everything, even customers. 

Temperature became an issue for the first time, as Lattente had to put up a sign explaining why coffee was not supposed to be served very hot, and that they wouldn’t change that to please customers.  

Around that same time Cuculiansky, still a gastronomic journalist more focused on food and wine, was asked to be a jury member in a barista competition. “I didn’t even know what the word meant,” she remembers laughing.

There were only 5 competitors. “I thought, if there are only five people concerned about making good coffee in Argentina, when am I going to drink a good coffee in my nearest café de la esquina?” 

Exigí Buen Café Fair She began taking pictures of coffee cups on Twitter with the hashtag @exigíbuencafé (“Demand good coffee”) More than a decade later, the fair she named after that expects around 30,000 visitors this weekend. 

With the spread of lattes, flat whites, and cold brews, consumer awareness grew, driven mostly by social media. Argentina’s top local toasters then began to realize that people were demanding better quality. And while the typical porteño cafe resists, they were forced to improve quality and train their cafeteros. The gap narrowed. 

Far from that old fundamentalism, specialty coffee joints now offer the chance of having excellent coffee in a place that also serves great pastry and the chance to sit down and work remotely at ease. 

“Today people get together in these places like they used to in the old cafetín porteño,” Cuculiansky says. “But now they can also enjoy quality, thanks to the growth that took place in the last decade.”