10 cafés in 7 citys. Places change: check opening hours before you go.
Founded in 1879 by José Domingo Torres, a butler so famous for his pastries that his employers set him up in his own shop. It has been in the Palacio Íñiguez on the Alameda since 1904. The Barros Luco sandwich was invented here, named after a president who ate here regularly.
Order: Barros Luco sandwich · Chilean pastries
Since 1947 Café Haití has been the classic Santiago stand-up coffee bar, with its branches in the historic centre built around the long counter. In 1982 it put its servers in miniskirts, setting off the city's "café con piernas" culture, and it still trades on the Ahumada, Estado and Huérfanos pedestrian streets.
Order: Espresso at the bar
💡 Drink it standing at the counter, the way office workers in the centre do.
A café-restaurant on Cerro Concepción with sweeping views over the bay of Valparaíso.
💡 Get a table by the windows for the view.
Fewer recent sources for this one: check it's open before you go.
A specialty café built into a traditional palafito, one of the stilt houses of Castro's Pedro Montt heritage quarter on Chiloé Island. It sits right over the water.
A café and roastery in the centre of Puerto Natales, the gateway to Torres del Paine and one of the southernmost towns in the world. It imports green beans and roasts them on site.
💡 A good warm-up before or after a Torres del Paine trip.
A café and roastery in the centre of Puerto Varas, a lakeside town at the start of Patagonia. It roasts its beans locally.
It bills itself as Chile's first coffee-and-cocktail bar: a specialty café by day, then a lab for coffee-based cocktails at night.
Order: Espresso · Coffee cocktail
💡 Come back after dark for the coffee cocktails.
Café Calderón started in 2021 as a food truck and became a Providencia café with a terrace. The menu changes with the seasons and covers brunch and cocktails as well as coffee.
Ranked number one on the South America list of The World's 100 Best Coffee Shops. It mixes specialty coffee with flavours of southern Chile, and its founder, a Latin American latte art champion, pours designs of Chilean plants and animals.
Order: Latte with signature latte art
A seaside-road café pouring specialty coffee through V60, Chemex and Japanese siphon, with a menu built on local Chilean products.
Order: Siphon coffee · V60