Testarudo Café

What Testarudo Café is

Testarudo is a small specialty coffee bar at Nápoles 47 in Colonia Juárez, Mexico City. Its distinguishing feature is that you cannot see it. The café occupies the back garden of a heritage-listed Porfirian mansion, and the way in is through the front of the building, past a boutique at the entrance, and down a long passageway lined with plants that opens into the garden at the rear.

The garden is the room: a small planted courtyard among the trees, with a good number of tables, and additional seating indoors when the weather or the crowd requires it. The effect is that you step off one of the busiest, noisiest street grids in Mexico City and, twenty metres later, are sitting in greenery. That contrast is the whole product, and it is the reason to come here rather than to one of the loud, visible, trendy openings a few blocks away.

Colonia Juárez is full of buildings like this one. The neighbourhood was laid out during the Porfiriato, the decades before 1911, as a European-styled district of large houses, and a good number of those houses are now catalogued heritage buildings. Most have been converted to offices, boutiques or apartments. Testarudo is the version of that conversion where the commercial front stays a shop and the garden behind it becomes a café.

The name is Spanish for stubborn, which is a reasonable description of opening a coffee bar somewhere nobody walking past will ever notice it.

How the menu works

The offer is narrow and it is a coffee list, not a café menu with dishes.

• The beans: Mexican, from Chiapas, Veracruz and Oaxaca, the three states that produce most of the country’s coffee. Chiapas is the largest producer, Veracruz the second, and Oaxaca is the source of much of the high-altitude specialty crop.
• The brewing: fresh, to order, rather than held in a batch urn.
• To eat: a small counter with a solid range of pastries plus light breakfasts. The croissant is the standard order, and they will warm it, which is not universal in Mexico City specialty cafés.
• The Wi-Fi: fast, and offered as soon as you order rather than printed somewhere you have to hunt for.
• What it is not: a lunch spot, a brunch restaurant, or a full kitchen.

What I found

The pull of the place is the contrast. The passageway is long and green, the garden at the end is small and quiet among the trees, and the coffee is fresh Mexican beans with a genuine choice of pastries alongside. The counter is small but what is on it is good, and when I ordered a croissant they offered to warm it without being asked. The Wi-Fi came with the order, which is why the tables were full of people escaping the noise of the Mexico City streets with their laptops rather than only with a cup.

One complaint, and it is a real one. The coffee itself was good, but it came in disposable cups. In a garden you want to sit in, drinking from paper is the wrong end of the experience, and it is the only thing I would change about the visit.

What it costs

Testarudo had not published a price list at the time of writing, so the figures below are neighbourhood context rather than a menu.

Item	Price
Espresso-based drink, typical Juárez and Roma specialty café	about 60 to 100 MXN, 3 to 5 USD
Pastry, same benchmark	about 50 to 90 MXN, 3 to 5 USD
Testarudo’s own published prices	none at the time of writing

Either way this is an inexpensive stop by the standards of Colonia Juárez, where the same money buys considerably less at a restaurant table. Coffee and a warmed croissant should land well under 200 pesos.

Do you need a reservation

No. Testarudo is walk-in only and there is nothing to book.

• Instagram: @testarudo_cafe is the only channel the café publishes through, and the place to check whether it is open.
• Hours: not published at the time of writing. Cafés in Juárez typically open between 08:00 and 09:00 and close in the late afternoon or early evening.
• Getting a seat: the garden is small. Early morning is the reliable window, and mid-morning on a weekday is when the laptop crowd has already taken the good tables.

Getting there

• Address: Nápoles 47, Colonia Juárez, Cuauhtémoc, Mexico City.
• Neighbourhood: central Juárez, in the block grid between Paseo de la Reforma and Avenida Chapultepec.
• Metro: Cuauhtémoc on Line 1 is about a ten minute walk. Insurgentes on Line 1 is a similar distance in the other direction.
• Metrobús: the Paseo de la Reforma and Avenida Insurgentes corridors both stop within walking distance.
• On foot: roughly ten minutes from the Ángel de la Independencia and five from Calle Versalles.
• The door: go in through the building front and past the boutique. Do not look for a café facade, because there is not one.

Before you go

• Walk in, do not scan the street. The entrance is through the shop, then a long green passageway.
• Go early for a table with power if you plan to work. The garden is small and it fills.
• Bring a reusable cup if disposable cups bother you. Mine came in paper.
• Order the croissant warmed. They offered to do it without being asked, and that is the difference between this and most specialty counters.
• Ask for the Wi-Fi when you order. They hand it over straight away, which is half the reason the garden is full of laptops.
• Check Instagram for hours before crossing the city. The café does not publish a schedule anywhere else.
• Pair it with the neighbourhood. Wok’ando is a few streets away on Versalles for lunch afterwards, and Niddo is the Juárez breakfast option when you want a proper plate.

Watch the visit

The reel above is the short version of the passageway, the garden and the coffee. For the rest of the city, open my map or browse the Mexico City recommendations.