Nashville has no shortage of good coffee, and still, a wave of new spots has sprung up this year, opened by my fellow Latinas. You know I’ve got to support! We Latinas take our coffee quality very seriously, so you can rest assured that everything from the beans to the flavored syrups has been thoroughly vetted at the following shops … or our ancestors would come back to haunt us. I don’t make the rules.
🦪 LA PERLA
The new coffee window at Galería Paloma in East is co-owned by Latina business partners Bree Chavez-Sparks and Monica Guel. The menu includes flavors like tiramisu, banana pudding and salted vanilla fig lattes, as well as desserts from fellow Latina-owned business Doris Bakery. Recent mini cake flavors have ranged from salted caramel brown butter pumpkin spice to almond vanilla cake with white chocolate ganache and raspberry compote, but stay tuned, because they’re ever-changing!
Sarah Gallego moved to Nashville from Colombia five years ago and brought those flavors with her. The menu at the Midtown shop includes a twist on the trendy espresso tonic, where instead of a lemon or orange in the drink, it’s lulo — a beloved Colombian nightshade that tastes somewhere between a sweet tomato and a lime — and is sweetened with panela, what Colombians call those hard blocks of unrefined cane sugar. Plus, the shop serves classics like buñuelos (sweet cheese fritters), arepas (corncakes stuffed with your filling of choice), and almojábana cake (a kind of cheesecake).
Freshly opened in July by Ivanna Forero and her father Alberto, the standouts for me so far have been the evergreen La Latina (a sweetened condensed milk latte, often falsely labeled a “Cubano” at other local shops — not naming names!) and the seasonal Caribbean Christmas latte. (I see the love of coquito has reached Venezuela!) The South Nashville cafe has a full food menu, from breakfast burritos to pancakes and bowls, but I’m guilty of sticking to Venezuelan classics: cachitos (brioche-like croissants stuffed with ham) and cachapas (the arepa’s softer and sweeter cousin).
I’ll let you in on the pun my bilingual besties have already chuckled at: “Cállate” means “be quiet,” and “té” means “tea.” So co-owner couple Natasha Muñoz and Kerollos Masoud moving the accent over gives away to Spanish speakers that Callaté is a tea and coffee trailer, not just a sign telling you to shut up. (Though the “Shhh…” stickers on every cup lean into it for sure.) They can be found at events around town serving drinks like sweet cream hojicha, pumpkin horchata, and black sesame maple lattes.
