Sanborns: The Almighty Café

Every guide to Mexico City includes La Casa de los Azulejos (The House of Tiles) as a must-visit spot. Located in the Centro Historico, opposite the Torre Latino, this building is famous for the beauty of its blue tiles, imported from Puebla when the building was constructed in 1596 for the Count of Orizaba. Legend says the during the count’s reckless youth, his father said, disparagingly, “You will never have a house of tiles”; La Casa de los Azulejos was meant to prove him wrong. Since 1919, this edifice to the male ego has been occupied by a Sanborns, making it yet another location of the massive chain of family restaurants/department stores, albeit one worth-seeing because of its astonishing architecture.

It is impossible to separate the history of this chain and what it represents to chilangos, since Sanborns can be found in each corner of the city. There are eighty branches throughout Mexico City and sixty more across the country. The advantage offered by these kind of stores, is that you can have the same recipes and the same quality; it doesn’t matter where you are in the Mexico. Since 1985, Sanborns has been owned by Grupo Carso, managed by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.

The importance of La Casa de los Azulejos is not only the legend of its creation, but the fact that it was the first place in which the Zapatista Army had chocolate and some pan dulce when they took over the city in 1914.

Because of this branch’s historical link to the Mexican Revolution, Sanborns has tried to link its aesthetics to those of the revolution: the waitresses at all locations of this restaurant have to wear an uncomfortable cardboard collar meant to emulate the clothes worn by mythic revolutionary folk hero Adelita.

Foto: ArtMageda

Sanborns sells imported magazines both in English and Spanish that you can flip through for free. You can also find overpriced cigarettes, toys, pharmacy products, fancy-pansy chocolates, cd’s and a useful ATM. It’s best feature is that you can always use the bathroom for free. Sanborns’ ubiquity in the city makes it a convenient spot to look for in a middle of an emergency.

The most recommendable Sanborns for machas visiting the DF, is the one located on the corner of Londres and Amberes in the Zona Rosa. The most interesting time to visit this place is weekends, before the sun rises, when the little café transforms into a diverse people-watching show, in which a wide array of partying characters can be seen. Young fags, punks, darketos (goths), dykes, femmes… all looking for a coffee and some carbohydrates to replace those burned during the night.

The uniformed waitresses attend to this diverse population with indifference—the kind needed to work the graveyard shift. Flirtatious glances are exchanged between tables, the vestiges of the night’s glamour not yet worn off. If you are lucky, maybe someone will ask for your phone number before breakfast…