How to order coffee in Spanish from Mexico to Paraguay

Spanish runs from Mexico City to Asunción, but the coffee vocabulary changes along the way. The Real Academia Española's dictionary defines a café americano as coffee made with more water than usual and a café cortado as coffee with very little milk.¹ Those two words travel well. Others do not: ask for a tinto in Colombia and you get black coffee, while in Argentina the same word means red wine.³

Four countries show the range. Colombia names its cups by how much milk goes in, Peru brews a concentrate and lets you thin it yourself, Veracruz pours its lechero at the table, and in Paraguay the breakfast drink called cocido is made from yerba mate.²⁵⁶⁸ Tipping differs as much as the words, from a capped, optional suggestion in Colombia to a few thousand guaraníes in Paraguay.¹⁰¹⁴

Black coffee: tinto, americano and café pasado

In Colombia the plain cup is a tinto. Brewed at home the traditional way, ground coffee goes into water that is just coming to the boil, and after three or four minutes it is taken off the heat and mixed with agua de panela, water sweetened with unrefined cane sugar.⁴ A tinto made like that is sweet before anyone reaches for the sugar bowl.

In Mexico, order an americano for a long black coffee. The dictionary sense, coffee made with more water than usual, covers both an espresso lengthened with hot water and a long filter coffee, so either can arrive.¹

Peru's traditional cup is café pasado. It is brewed in a two-chamber pot with a filter in the middle: ground coffee and hot water go into the top, and a concentrated extract collects in the bottom.⁴ In Lima cafés it has long been served as a strong concentrate, often made from instant coffee, with hot water in a small pitcher so you dilute it yourself.⁵ For a pour-over, ask for a café filtrado.⁵

With milk: cortado, perico, café con leche and lechero

Cortado is standard Spanish, defined in the dictionary without any regional label as coffee with very little milk.¹ Colombia has regional names for the same idea. In Bogotá and the Cundiboyacense highlands, a perico is a small cup of coffee with milk that tends to come with something from the bakery. In Antioquia and the Eje Cafetero, ask for a pintadito to get only a splash of milk.²

Café con leche carries a larger share of milk. In Peru it is built from the café pasado extract, poured into a cup of hot milk.⁴

Veracruz, on Mexico's Gulf coast, makes a performance of it. At the Gran Café de la Parroquia, you order a lechero by tapping a spoon against your glass. A waiter arrives with two jugs, pours coffee to the level you choose, then tops the glass up with hot milk poured from as high as possible so that it foams.⁶ The usual partner is pan dulce, Mexican sweet bread.⁶

Paraguay: café con leche, and a cocido that is not coffee

Order a cocido in Asunción and you get yerba mate, not coffee. It is a breakfast and merienda (afternoon snack) staple, usually alongside chipa, a baked cheese bread. Early accounts by priests describe Indigenous people boiling yerba and leaving it to stand overnight, and the drink was sweetened with honey until the Spanish brought other sweeteners.⁸

For coffee, Paraguayans most often order café con leche, cappuccino and latte, according to Nestlé Paraguay in 2022. Its marketing manager described the traditional cup as café con leche with plenty of sugar, and said people now also drink coffee after lunch and dinner rather than only at breakfast and the merienda.⁷

Sugar, milk and sizes

Sugar is often assumed. A Colombian tinto brewed with panela is sweet before it reaches the cup, and Paraguay's traditional café con leche came with plenty of sugar.⁴⁷ If you want yours plain, say so when you order rather than when it arrives.

Size words follow ordinary Spanish: chico, mediano, grande (small, medium, large). OXXO, which has more than 24,000 stores in Mexico, marked the 20th anniversary of its andatti coffee on 1 October 2025 by giving away an americano frío grande (large iced) or caliente mediano (medium hot).⁹ Its andatti gourmet bars, in more than 500 stores, also list decaf and plant-milk versions, so sin cafeína and leche vegetal are worth knowing.⁹

Asking for the bill

La cuenta, por favor (the bill, please) works in all four countries. Colombians often phrase requests with regalar, to give as a present: ¿me regala un tinto? is a polite way to order, not a request for a free coffee.³

In Colombia, asking for the bill also brings a question about the tip. Under rules from the Superintendencia de Industria y Comercio (SIC), the consumer regulator, a business may suggest a tip of no more than 10% of the bill and must ask, when you request it, whether you want the tip included or prefer a different amount.¹⁰ You can decline it, and if nobody asked before the invoice was issued, you can still change the amount afterward.¹⁰

Tipping in Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Paraguay

In Mexico the tip is voluntary by law. Profeco, the federal consumer agency, says no café, bar or restaurant may add it to the bill without the customer's explicit consent, citing Article 10 of the federal consumer protection law on coercive practices.¹¹ Custom is firmer than the law: a 2020 comparison in Peru's Gestión said that leaving nothing in Mexico is considered in very poor taste, and that only bad service justifies skipping 10% or 15%.¹²

In Peru, 10% is the usual amount, or 5% to 7% if the service fell short, according to the same report, which quoted a former head of the hotel and restaurant association AHORA Perú saying a tip should not be treated as an obligation.¹² Some places add a recargo al consumo (consumption surcharge) for staff instead. It rests on Decreto Ley 25988, and establishments that charge it must state the percentage clearly in their price lists.¹³

In Paraguay, tipping is optional. In 2023 the president of the Asociación de Restaurantes del Paraguay said the country has no tipping culture and very few customers leave 10%; most leave ₲5,000 or ₲10,000 even on a ₲300,000 bill.¹⁴