Café · Medellín · Colombia · 1495 m a.s.l.
Café Mattelsa
I am sitting by the window with a coffee, a lemon dessert and a kombucha in front of me, and I do not feel like getting up.
The coffee is genuinely good. Writing that Colombia has great coffee sounds like a cliché, and it partly is one: the best goes for export and in an ordinary Colombian café you get something that would not pass at home. Here they clearly decided to do it differently.
I would have the lemon dessert again. The kombucha too.
You can work at the back
A coworking space, and a good one. Not a cold open plan office with an entry card and a monthly fee, more a space where you sit down, plug in and nobody cares how long you sit over one cup. When your clients are seven hours away, this is exactly what you need.
The guys behind the counter speak English
In Medellín that is not a small thing. You will get by in English almost nowhere here, which I have written about elsewhere. Here the young guys served me in English without me having to try, and they were genuinely nice about it. You can feel it across the whole place.
A bit of history
Mattelsa is not a café that added T-shirts on the side. It is the other way round: it is a Colombian clothing brand and this is its home in La Candelaria, right in the centre of the city. A shop and a café belong to it.
That it started in Medellín makes more sense than it seems at first. This city was sewing for the whole of Colombia long before it made the news for entirely different reasons. Coltejer has been running here since 1907, Fabricato since the twenties, and Coltejer's needle shaped skyscraper is still one of the first things you see downtown. Every year Colombiamoda is held here, a trade fair half the continent comes to.
Cheap competition from Asia then hit the Colombian textile mills hard and many did not survive it. What they left behind cannot be exported, though: people who know the craft. And brands that, because of it, do not have their clothes sewn on the other side of the world. Mattelsa is one of them.
Entries from here
Photos from here
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