Cardinal Casa de Café

Cardinal Casa de Café — usually shortened to Casa Cardinal — is a pour-over-led specialty bar on Córdoba 132 in Roma Norte. The shop doesn't roast in-house; instead it runs a guest-roaster programme, pulling Mexican beans from Once Once Coffee Roasters, Café Shunuc, and Guadalajara's Café Sublime — a curated rotation that lets the bar play across multiple Mexican roasting styles in a single visit.

The barista programme is the calling card. Cardinal is run by Shak Zapata, runner-up at the Mexican AeroPress Championship, and the bar discipline shows. Hand-brew is the headline — Kalita, V60, Chemex and AeroPress all on the menu — paired with espresso pulled on a La Marzocco Linea Classic for the milk-drink crowd.

The room is calm by design: wooden tables, soft natural light, an acoustic level that doesn't push you out after a single cup. It's a useful counterweight to the more performative side of the Roma specialty scene — Cardinal's pitch is the cup itself, every time, and the easy conversation at the bar is part of the offer.

Worth crossing the city for if you care about clean, well-roasted Mexican filter coffee.