Old San Juan's Best Coffee and Pancakes

by Sun

I had an unusual trip to San Juan Puerto Rico about 10 days ago. The purpose of my trip was to see my best friend in college Edith who now lives in Australia. She came to San Juan last March for a wedding and fell in love with the place so she decided to return and rented a very charming condo apartment in the center of old San Juan for 3 months. Since it's not too far from Chicago, even though I have been to PR three times before, I didn't want to miss the opportunity of catching up on the last 25 years of our lives. Unfortunately, a couple of unexpected things happened.

The day before leaving for San Juan, I sprained my left foot while walking my puppy Kino. The condition of the foot looked pretty bad and my husband had to carry me up and down the stairs. I was mobilizing myself by jumping around using only one leg from room to room in a very painful and slow manner. But I was determined to make the trip and I did. Surprisingly things went pretty smooth at the airport with the assistance of a wheel chair, they take you right up to the plane.

To make a long story short, I was able to manage walking to the restaurants with Edith's help and we had a good first two days, but then hurricane Irene came. Looking back we were pretty lucky because things could have been a lot worse. The place Edith rented was traditional with modern features but didn't have air conditioner. The old house wasn't designed to have A/C. When we had a power outage from the hurricane, all the fans started blowing upwards to the ceiling instead of downwards. Oh, and did I mention the mosquitos? If you are not in front of a fan for a sec, you will be swarmed and get 3-5 bites instantly. So you can imagine how fearful we were when we were at the house. I don't think I've ever had this kind of thing happened during a vacation. Regardless, I'm glad that we got to spend some solid time and endure the hardship together and survived. In the process, we even managed to find what turned out to be my favorite pancake and coffee place 'Caficultura'.

Since I wasn't sure how good the pancake were going to be, I only ordered a kid size.


We were planning to go back the next day but hurricane Irene put stop to our numerous attempts getting there. When we finally got there, the restaurant wasn't taking customers because they didn't have power. You can imagine the disappointment on my face. I was more upset at being deprived of my newly discovered favorite pancakes then sitting in the airplane for 3 hours on the runway in PR returning back to Chicago.

So if you ever make it to old San Juan, please have the pancakes for me at Caficultura and send me a line!

From our partner: LO+JUNE

From our partner: LO+JUNE
Artisanal French products in our Swiss fine food boutique