Cafés in Argentina Buenos Aires

What Argentines brew at home

Coffee is part of the routine in 86.5% of Argentine households, by Nestlé's count, and breakfast accounts for 42% of the cups, against 12% after dinner.³ Roasted and ground coffee leads the market with 39%, just ahead of instant at 37%; capsules and whole beans have 8% each.³ The home cup is usually milky. In a study by the chain Café Martínez, more than 70% of drinkers chose café con leche at home.³

Delivery has become another way in. The app PedidosYa said in October 2025 that coffee orders had grown 42% in a year, with latte, black coffee, café con leche and cappuccino the favorites and 09:00 on Fridays the busiest hour.³

Tostado and torrado: two legal kinds of coffee

Argentine food law separates two products. Tostado is coffee roasted plain; torrado is roasted in the presence of sugars that caramelize onto the beans, a product the legal site Derecho en Zapatillas calls typical of markets such as Argentina's.⁵ Article 1166 of the Código Alimentario Argentino, the national food code, caps those added sugars at 10.0% and allows 8.0% moisture, against 5.0% for plain roasted coffee.⁵

Spain sells a similar product as café torrefacto, and Germany and Austria as glazed coffee.⁶ Little sweetness survives the roaster: a brewed cup of torrado holds less than 0.1 g of sugar, against 6.25 g in a standard sachet.⁶

Bares notables beyond Buenos Aires

Other cities now catalog their old cafés too. Córdoba held its first Semana de los Bares y Cafés Notables in June 2022 and recognized 13 places, among them Sorocabana, El Quijote and La Tasca del Paseo; the oldest, Café de la Plaza in Barrio Alta Córdoba, received the first plaque.⁸

In April 2024 Rosario's city council created a Catálogo de Bares y Bodegones Notables. A place qualifies after at least 30 years in business, as a neighborhood landmark, or through ties to the city's history and culture.⁷ The first list of 28 runs from Wembley, on Avenida Belgrano since 1903, to El Cairo, opened in 1943 at Santa Fe and Sarmiento, and includes Confitería Augustus, on Corrientes at the pedestrian Córdoba street, from 1964.⁷

Roasters, chains and the specialty wave

Café Martínez grew out of a roastery. The chain traces back to Atiliano Martínez, a Spanish immigrant who imported and roasted coffee; its flagship on Calle Talcahuano began selling coffee by the cup only in 1994. By 2023 it had more than 200 branches in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, 14 of them company-owned.⁹

Specialty roasters in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay buy mostly from Colombia, Peru, Guatemala and Brazil, and about 80% of their customers order milk drinks such as cappuccinos, lattes and flat whites.¹⁰ Training has spread with them: one barista school, the Academia MUMAC, had taught more than 2,000 baristas by October 2025.³

Buenos Aires

The capital's own catalog is the longest of the three, with 90 bares notables on the list the city validated in March 2026.¹¹ For specialty coffee, Sprudge's 2025 guide names Cuervo, founded by the musicians Pablo Tokatlian and Agustín Caro, among the pioneers, and credits The Shelter Coffee, opened in 2015, with raising standards; its best-known bar is on Uriburu, in Balvanera.¹² Prices run high here: a coffee averaged AR$3,800 in the city in July 2026, against AR$3,200 nationally and AR$2,500 in Santiago del Estero.¹³