Casa Margarita (Café Margarita)

What Casa Margarita is

Casa Margarita is a 1903 mansion at Cordoba 87 in Roma Norte, Mexico City, restored by Proyectos Publicos and now run as a four-suite guest house, a cultural venue and a cafe. The cafe is the part most visitors use. It is called Café Margarita, it occupies the patio and the front rooms of the house, and it is open to anyone, not only to guests.

The house was built in the Porfiriato, the building boom that produced most of Roma Norte, and it was the home of the writer Margarita Quijano, who lived there until her death in 2002. It has high ceilings with dark wood moulding, wooden floors, stained glass, a fireplace, two sitting rooms of antique furniture, and a third-floor studio and large kitchen added in later renovations. The patio garden is the counterweight: modern steel furniture in a courtyard, deliberately at odds with everything inside.

The house is not only a cafe and rooms. Proyectos Publicos runs a literature and music programme there, reported at more than three hundred events a year, including reading clubs, film clubs, workshops and poetry sessions, plus invitation-only artist residencies. Two shops operate inside the building, the fragrance brand Xinu Haven and the clothing label Serge Basics, and the walls carry pieces from the Proyectos Publicos collection, with works by Carlos Cruz-Diez, Salvador Dali and Pedro Friedeberg among them.

One practical note before anything else: on Google Maps the cafe is listed as Cafe Principal, not Café Margarita. It is the same place.

Who Margarita Quijano was

Margarita Quijano was a Mexican writer, teacher and scholar, known in her lifetime as la dama de la capital, the lady of the capital. Her salon in this house was one of the literary centres of early and mid twentieth-century Mexico City: the poet Ramon Lopez Velarde, the painter and writer Nahui Olin and the novelist Nellie Campobello are among the names recorded as passing through it.

That is the reason the restoration kept the drawing rooms rather than gutting them. The programme of readings and clubs in the house today is explicitly in her honour, and the guest suites and the cafe are built around the rooms where the salons happened rather than in place of them.

How the menu works

Café Margarita runs one kitchen that changes shape through the day. The drinks list is the long half of the menu and the food list is short by design.

• Morning: specialty coffee, house-made bread, and breakfast from light to full. This is also the working window.
• Afternoon: a more substantial casual menu, a short list of classics.
• Evening: sharing plates, including tinned seafood preparations, with cocktails and wine. The room turns social.
• Drinks: specialty coffee and coffee foams, wine, and classic cocktails. Alternative milk here is macadamia, which is a house signature rather than a substitution.
• La Cocina Azul: a six-seat bar with direct access to the kitchen, for people who want to eat at the pass rather than in the patio.

Staff told me the kitchen team came out of Sud777, Em and Quintonil. I could not find that in print anywhere, so take it as what I was told on the day rather than a published credential, but it matches the cooking.

What I ate

Tomatoes with macadamia pesto and a creamy shrimp ravioli, both good, and both from a menu of only a few options. The macadamia theme runs through the place, down to the alternative milk in the coffee. If you are deciding what to order, the short food list is not a warning sign here.

What it costs

The figures below are what I observed in August 2026, in pesos, and Roma Norte prices move.

Item	Price
A drink and something to eat, per person	About 310 to 500 MXN, roughly 17 to 27 USD
Specialty coffee	Roma Norte specialty pricing
Cocktails and wine	The long half of the menu, charged separately
Staying in a suite	A separate booking, four suites only

For Roma Norte this is mid-range: more than a neighbourhood coffee counter, less than the brunch restaurants a few streets over, and you are paying partly for the room. The cheapest way to see the house is a morning coffee, and the most expensive is a full evening of cocktails and sharing plates.

Do you need a reservation

Not usually. Café Margarita takes walk-ins and is listed on OpenTable if you would rather have a table held. Two situations are worth booking for: a weekend evening, when the patio fills, and La Cocina Azul, the six-seat kitchen bar, which is too small to leave to chance.

• Instagram: @cafemargarita_cdmx for the cafe, @archipielagomx for the wider house.
• Google Maps: search Cafe Principal, Cordoba 87.
• Staying over: the four suites are booked through Casa Margarita directly, separately from the cafe.
• Events: the house runs a busy cultural calendar, so a room you expected to sit in may be in use.

Getting there

• Address: Cordoba 87, Roma Norte, Cuauhtemoc, Mexico City.
• Neighbourhood: central Roma Norte, a few minutes from Alvaro Obregon and its bookshops and bars.
• Metro: Insurgentes on Line 1 is about a ten minute walk.
• Metrobus: Line 1 along Insurgentes, at the Alvaro Obregon or Durango stops.
• Driving: street parking is metered and scarce. A taxi or ride app is easier, and the house has no car park.
• Finding the door: it is a residential mansion, so there is no cafe shopfront. Look for the house number and walk in through the hall.

Before you go

• Search the right name on maps. The cafe is listed as Cafe Principal. Casa Margarita is the house.
• Mornings for working, evenings for drinking. The wifi and the quiet are both a morning proposition.
• Expect a short food menu. A handful of plates, well made, rather than a long carte.
• Ask about macadamia. It runs through the drinks and the food, including the milk.
• Check the events calendar. With hundreds of readings, clubs and workshops a year, part of the house may be booked out.
• Pair it with the opposite. For a loud, family-scale Roma Norte cafe instead of a quiet historic one, see my Café C review.
• Check the hours before you go. The hours on this page come from the venue’s public listings, which drift, so confirm on Google Maps or the venue’s own channels before a special trip.

Watch the visit

The reel above walks through the sitting rooms, the patio and the drinks, which is the quickest way to see whether the room is your kind of place. For everywhere else I have filmed in the city, open my map or browse the Mexico City recommendations.