On the menu: arepas, tropical fruit smoothies, fruity teas, pressed sandwiches, Açaí bowls and plenty of café colombiano.
A tinto is a Colombian espresso sweetened with scrapings from an unrefined sugar cane block and whisked until foamy brown. It’s the tinto that fuels Bogota native Jaime Lara every morning at Salento Coffee, the coffee shop he opened in downtown West Palm Beach in December.
“The first thing we do [back home] in the morning when the sun rises is prepare a tinto,” Lara tells me as he grinds coffee beans at the new shop. “We brew it on a stovetop. The filter is a rag — this makes the coffee retain the original oils which can stick to paper filters.”
Lara says people in Colombia often make tintos in the afternoon too, at around 5p.m., to catch up with family members and friends after work. It’s a social drink.
Lara’s cozy coffee shop is dripping in Colombian folklore. He is as welcoming as his warmly tinted cafe that’s decorated with jute burlap coffee-bean sacks, Andean farmer hats and mochilas Arhuacas, the iconic Colombian artisan bags.
“The key to a good tinto is to sweeten it with raw cane sugar from a block,” Lara goes on. “We dissolve the sugar in water, or we boil it. And we add it to the coffee. This gives it a sweet and beautiful aroma.”
I was looking to grab a table to do some work and sip on whatever writer’s-block antidote they had. Lara was proud to show off all the treats offered on the menu: arepas, tropical fruit smoothies, fruity teas, pressed sandwiches, Açaí bowls and plenty of café colombiano which the shop imports from the Quindío and Huila regions of Colombia. The shop also offers some not-so-Colombian items, like paninis, iced coffees, Cuban cortaditos and coffee syrups like hazelnut, peppermint and caramel.
But before I can place my order, Lara pours me a small cup of the tinto he just brewed. Just what I need to awaken my typing fingers. Not that I”ll get much writing done — I’m more interested in soaking up the details of the place, watching Lara make his coffees and listening to his stories about his family’s coffee heritage as the rhythms of Carlos Vives’ “La Gota Fria” fill the background.
“In Colombia, we drink coffee as babies. They would give us café con leche on our bottles,” says Lara. “In my family, coffee runs in our blood.”
I close my laptop. I’m all ears.
Lara transports me to the late 1890s and early 1900s when his grandfather Felix Lara was at the forefront of the coffee industry in Colombia. It was grandfather Felix who worked the fields where his family’s love for coffee would bloom.
As the story goes, Felix started working in the coffee industry as a farmer, hand-picking coffee beans and bagging the crop in sacks that would be transported along the Magdalena River across the country. He later began working aboard the river boats, navigating northward to deliver the coffee sacks. These would later be transported to the towns on mule-back. As years passed, Felix became a coffee connoisseur and steward on private boats, tasting coffee and buying high quality beans for the boat owners and their visitors.
Lara speaks about his grandfather with pride, like a child admiring a superhero and then inheriting his superpowers.
“His love and knowledge for coffee was passed down to my parents, and then to me and my siblings,” he says.
Lara says he was always obsessed with the idea of working in the coffee industry. He says he was lucky to marry a woman who shared his interests and his roots. Clara’s ancestors also were Colombian farmers. The couple enjoyed exploring small towns in Colombia and learning about how their ancestors made a living in the coffee industry. Every trip became a drop of hope that they would one day own a coffee shop.
But it was a visit in 2011 to Salento, the classic Colombian coffee town, that inspired them to fulfill their dream.
“We fell in love with Salento, the coffee culture, and our roots,” says Clara Lara, who notes how life in the town was completely different from their busy lives in Bogota, where they both practiced as psychologists. “We spent a few days talking to people, visiting the farms and riding horses along the mountains. It was beautiful.”
As his wife chats on, Lara scrolls through his phone, displaying pictures of Salento, a colorful and colonial coffee town of less than 8,000 residents. Lara says the place transported him back in time: Locals lugged coffee bean sacks on their shoulders, traveled by horseback, lingered on their balconies as they sipped coffee. The stories he had heard as a kid about his grandfather’s day all seemed to come to life in modern-day Salento.
“After the trip, we dreamed of having a coffee shop that values quality of coffee and family traditions,” says Lara, who opened the coffee shop with his wife and brother Alvaro. “We wanted to be independent business owners. And what better business than doing what we love best, coffee?”
It took the Laras seven years of working in the United States to save money in order to buy the equipment, which they kept in a storage unit until they were finally ready to open the shop.
“I think my grandpa in heaven already knows we opened this coffee shop. I think he’s happy to see us succeed,” says Lara. “Now we want to share our culture and coffee beans with our customers.”
IF YOU GO
Salento Coffee is located in Downtown West Palm Beach at 120 S. Dixie Hwy, Suite 105, between Datura and Clematis streets; 561-841-6138.