Full City Coffee House

Full City Coffee House is where Buenos Aires's specialty story really begins. In 2012 — two years before LAB — co-founders Victoria Angarita and Allan Dorgan opened the first room in the city committed to third-wave specialty coffee. Sprudge ran a feature on the opening called "Real Coffee Has Finally Arrived." It wasn't an exaggeration.

The angle that makes Full City distinctive is in the family tree. Victoria's father, Parmenio Angarita, is a major figure in Colombian coffee — an expert roaster, educator, and founder of EduCafés, a Bogotá barista school. So the menu at Full City runs on something that almost no other BA specialty bar can claim: a deep, family-line connection to Colombia's coffee infrastructure. Everything is 100% Colombian, all of it roasted in-house, and the rare-lot programme includes experimental processes you don't normally see in the city — including a mango-fermented Colombian micro-lot that's worth ordering on sight.

The Palermo Soho flagship is on Thames 1535. The room opens up to a leafy patio and terrace, which makes it one of the rare specialty cafes in BA that's actually pleasant to sit at outside. Brunch is part of the menu, but the coffee is the lead. Start here if you want to understand where the scene came from.