Inside the new Anticonquista Cafe location in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. Photo by Lauren Reese, courtesy of Anticonquista Cafe.
Central America-connected roasting company Anticonquista Café opened its first brick-and-mortar coffee shop in Chicago this month, following five years of mobile and pop-up operations.
The new Pilsen neighborhood cafe aims to liberate the local scene from monochromatic coffee experiences and cookie-cutter chains by offering bright bursts of color and culture. The new location also expands the company’s efforts to highlight the difficult work of farmers and farmworkers in bringing coffee to the Global North.
Customers entering the shop will see a giant quetzal bird mural by local artist Czr Prz on the bright blue back wall. Vinyl text in both English and Spanish accompanying the mural explains the Mayan legend and importance of Guatemala’s national bird, whose red and green colors continue throughout the shop’s walls.
Photo by Lauren Reese, courtesy of Anticonquista Cafe.
“While Chicago is known for its summers, it only has about a 23% chance of being sunny on any given day of the year, so our winters can be quite brutal,” Anticonquista Café Co-Founder Lauren Reese told Daily Coffee News. “We wanted to combat this with the bright sense of colors found in [co-founder Elmer Fajardo Pacheco]’s hometown in Guatemala.”
Cutouts in the brick wall opposite the bar are reminiscent of ancient Mayan architecture still standing in Guatemala and Honduras. Anticonquista turned to local builders and artisans in remodeling the shop, creating custom oak window stations for remote workers, while large community tables and individual seating provide options.
Breads and bagels from Chicago’s Dorothy’s Bakery are piled high with local produce, house-made cream cheese and toppings such as a Salvadoran-style curtido cabbage slaw.
Photo by Lauren Reese, courtesy of Anticonquista Cafe.
Additional dishes created in collaboration with Chef Lucas DePerry include a vegan ceviche made from mixed mushrooms, hearts of palm, avocado, mango and pickled onions. The jocote en miel parfait is a full-fat yogurt topped with house granola, toasted pepitas, mango and a drizzle of cardamom panela syrup made with cardamom grown on the Pacheco family farm.
“The menu concept was to focus on the fruit trees that grow in my coffee farm — mango, passionfruit, oranges, limes, güisquil, avocado to name a few — and vegetables that my family grows in our gardens as the highlight ingredients,” Pacheco told Daily Coffee News. “We’re not importing fruits and vegetables from the farms yet. We hope in the near future we can begin experimenting with freeze drying some fruits that we grow on my farm.”
For coffees, the company’s original Arc 800 roaster now sits in the new cafe for small-batch roasts and upcoming monthly roasting workshops that will be available in English and Spanish.
Photo by Lauren Reese, courtesy of Anticonquista Cafe.
Anticonquista sources the brunt of green coffees directly from Pacheco’s family farm in Guatemala and its neighbors near the Honduras/Guatemala border. A Diedrich IR-12 machine supports production roasting in West Town, where Anticonquista made capacity upgrades in 2023.
“We knew this transition was going to be crucial before we could ever open up a cafe brick-and-mortar,” said Reese. “May 2024 is when we received our wholesale licensing to begin wholesale operations, which is a big goal for us for 2025.”
At the Pilsen shop, a 2-group Victoria Arduino Eagle One espresso machine paired with a Mazzer Kony S grinder powers espresso drinks, while batch brews come via a Bunn GVH-3 grinder and Fetco CBS-52H-15 brewer.
One key menu item is the Café de Olla, which is made with a Breville induction burner behind the counter. The coffee company also maintains its own system of 10-gallon stainless steel pots for ready-to-drink cold brew, which is sold by the glass or in returnable glass bottles.
On the family farm in Guatemala, cardamom production has become a primary focus, with exports to the U.S. planned for this year. At the same time, the farm has faced numerous production-related challenges due to extreme weather conditions.
“When visiting this past December, my mom told me it had been a constant month of rain from November into December,” said Pacheco. “This has been hard on us, as some of our lower-elevation farms will be in the middle of harvest, causing the coffee cherries to over-absorb water and fall to the ground and is a big loss for us.”
Transparently addressing such realities to customers in the U.S. remains a large goal of Anticonquista Café, which celebrates the beauty of coffee while also recognizing the harsh realities of its production.
In Pilsen, the shop will soon host the monthly bilingual book club Cafe ConTextos, roasting workshops run by Pacheco, and Taller de Café, a free, hands-on green coffee sorting workshop that offers perspective into labor.
“After being a mobile business for five years, we’re really excited to have a permanent home and to really grow our roots into the soil,” said Pacheco. “It’s been challenging as a mobile business, especially during the peak years of COVID, to host the events that are core to our mission of bringing coffee farmers to the forefront of the coffee industry. The shop will give us that safe space to have tough conversations that we think have been missing in this industry.”
Anticonquista Café is located at 952 W 18th St. in Chicago. Comments? Questions? News to share? Contact DCN’s editors here. For all the latest coffee industry news, subscribe to the DCN newsletter.
Related Posts
Howard Bryman
Howard Bryman is the associate editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine. He is based in Portland, Oregon.
Comment