Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/90134
CAFÉ CROSSROADS BY DAN LEIF Banana Dang Rincon, Puerto Rico Mario Jimenez, co-owner ive years ago, Mario Jimenez and his wife, Thanh-Thanh Dang, were looking for a way to escape the traffic-choked rat race in Los Angeles. Their solution was dramatic: head to a beach town in Puerto Rico (Jimenez's How much thirst for good coffee is there in Rincon? There was an international surfing competition here in 1968, and that led to a lot of Americans coming and living here for generations. Aside from San Juan, this is the most Americanized part of Puerto Rico. It feels a lot like Hawaii. But when we were first coming here there was no sense of café culture or the spread of specialty coffee. At the beginning, the winter was really our bread and butter—this town gets slammed with Americans and internationals, and it goes from 15,000 people to 60,000. Now, five years in, we're not seeing so many extreme differences between off and on seasons. Locals are trickling in. And people from San Juan (about two and a half hours away) make a point to visit us because they're used to having some good cafés. To protect its own industry, Puerto Rico has high tariffs on any imported coffee over 50 pounds. Do you ever feel limited serving only beans grown on Puerto Rican farms? It's a double-edge sword. We'd of course love to be able to serve coffees from all over. But it's also one of our principles to really try to honor local flavor. We came in looking for farmers who were implementing specialty coffee ideas. We tried the coffees and had to nitpick and find which coffees were really working for us. We found a few that were amazing, and I can drive up and talk to the farmers. There's no distributor or importer. The main farm we work with—they cultivate it, process it and roast it. It's a family farm, and they just drive it down and deliver it to us. It's a really unique situation. continued on page 28 26 Fresh Cup Magazine freshcup.com family is from the island) and set up a quality- focused café with an apartment directly above it. Idling on the freeway instantly became a thing of the couple's past, and Puerto Rico's specialty scene got a boost in the process.