The Drink of the Summer Is…
…possibly one of these things we drank this week.
A Cafecito (or Two) in Miami
To explain cafecito culture to anyone from South Florida is like explaining the sky is blue. But for the uninitiated: Cuban cafecito is a pull of espresso, heavily sweetened, and whisked into submission for a foamy, frothy cap the color of caramel. It’s a drink you linger over, sipping until it’s cool in its teeny tiny cup and the sugar crystallizes around the rim — the antithesis to the pre-workday, bleary-eyed, utilitarian caffeine chug from the office coffee pot.
Hand-in-hand with cafecito are ventanitas, small windows, the mini storefronts that serve up Cuban coffee and treats that are omnipresent in Miami-Dade County. Like Anna Maria Arriaga writes in her newsletter, Azucar, “The long story short: in a car-dependent city, ventanitas provide community. For a place that outsiders typically associate with plastic surgery and the Alix Earles of the world, there are pockets of community hidden in strip malls and cafeterias.”
I spent last weekend showing some friends around Miami, and we stopped at Tinta y Café in Coral Gables. There was a heatwave in SoFla, 96 degrees by mid-morning. So we sat indoors, which gave us prime viewership of the ventanita operating at breakneck pace supplying runners, bikers, and families on errand runs an endless stream of coffees, croquetas, pastelitos, and ice water.
