Cafés in Uruguay Montevideo

Mate, the termo and the rueda

Mate is yerba steeped in hot water in a gourd and sipped through a bombilla, a metal straw with a filter. Since the invention of the vacuum flask, the termo (thermos) has replaced the kettle as the source of hot water, and mate is usually shared in a rueda (circle): one person, the cebador, prepares each gourd and passes it clockwise.¹

The anthropologist Daniel Vidart wrote that mate "empareja las clases sociales, porque a todos pertenece": it levels social classes, because it belongs to everyone.¹ Since 1978 the Museo del Gaucho y la Moneda in central Montevideo has held the country's largest collection of mates and bombillas, some from the colonial period.¹

Café torrado and the specialty minority

Torrado coffee is roasted with sugar until the sugar carbonizes, giving the beans a glaze. It is banned in most countries, and in 2021 Montevideo Portal counted only five where it is sold legally: Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Mexico and Uruguay.⁵

Specialty coffee started from very little. Verónica Leyton, who opened her first coffee shop in March 2016 at 23, recalled that roasters were only just appearing and that everything had to be imported: the coffee, the roaster and the machines.⁵ Cristina Sosa, a barista who arrived from El Salvador around 2018, found specialty coffee little known in Uruguay; by 2021 the specialty café had become the country's most copied food-business model.⁵

Tertulias, the Sorocabana and the Cafés Notables

Montevideo's café life ran on the tertulia, the regular table of talk. Francisco San Román founded the Tupí Nambá in the 1870s.⁶ At 18 de Julio and Yaguarón, the large Café Montevideo held a political table tied to the Partido Colorado and the nearby newspaper El Día, plus a tango one, while the Ateneo had a literary circle led by Paco Espínola and Manuel de Castro.⁶

Tango shared the rooms. In Juan Antonio Varese's account, Argentine musicians who came to Montevideo early in the 20th century to avoid military service shaped the local tango, and playing it in cafés helped it win social acceptance.¹¹

The Sorocabana opened in 1939 on the ground floor of the Palacio Montero, on the north side of Plaza de Cagancha, and served intellectuals, politicians and journalists for half a century until it closed in 1989; the building is still called the Edificio Sorocabana.⁷ Mario Benedetti wrote La tregua in the Sorocabana branch at 25 de Mayo 485, where a restaurant revived the name in December 2019.⁸

In 2026 the Municipio B and the Intendencia de Montevideo, backed by the culture ministry, began naming Cafés y Bares Notables. Bar Andorra received the first plaque in August, and the first eight also include Bar Marbella, Bar Paysandú, Montevideo al Sur and Santa Catalina Bar Café.⁹

Montevideo

More than a third of Uruguayans live in the capital: 1,287,452 people at the 2023 census, about 36.8% of the country.¹⁰ Montevideo keeps its old cafés in the Ciudad Vieja and along Avenida 18 de Julio, its newer roasters around Parque Rodó and Cordón, and its outdoor tables along the rambla from Punta Carretas to Pocitos.