New cafe in Tower brings Latin coffee, Mexican food and hint of ‘back home’ to Fresno

Fresno’s newest coffee shop and eatery has a breakfast plate designed to look like the Mexican flag.

The Tower District business also has lattes made with Mexican candies, the kind the owners’ kids grew up scrambling for after busting open piñatas.

Clearly, Mi Cafesito isn’t your average coffee shop.

It opened last weekend on Van Ness Avenue in the northern part of the neighborhood often called Van Ness Village. It’s in the former Loving Hut vegan restaurant across the street from the bar Spokeasy.

You can get all kinds of coffee and espresso drinks here made with Latin American flavors. There are also tacos, and six kinds of chilaquiles for breakfast.

But there’s so much more than food and drink going on here: Family, heritage, and an optimism that literally spills onto the walls and the coffee cups.

It’s the third location of Mi Cafesito for the Gutierrez-Macedo family. You may know the business from its 2-year-old coffee shop inside Manchester Center.

There’s also a location in Easton, but that’s temporarily closed.

This business is truly family run. Evelyn Gutierrez-Macedo and Ruben Macedo run it with their five kids. Anyone you see behind the counter is family.

Their path to opening the Tower location was a bit like going through a pinball machine, but it’s finally here.

The menu

You likely won’t find drinks like Mi Cafesito’s anywhere else in Fresno. Most are flavored with Mexican candies.

There’s a popular mazapan latte with the peanut candy crumbled into the espresso and milk. Another is inspired by Duvalin, the hazelnut-flavored candy.

The churro and tres leches lattes are popular, along with a horchata latte made with scratch-made horchata. The coffee comes from several Latin American countries

“You don’t have to be Latino to enjoy those flavors,” Macedo said.

This is the first Mi Cafesito location with food.

It’s open for breakfast, lunch and early dinner and everything on the limited menu is homemade.

There are six kinds of chilaquiles for breakfast. That’s the dish with tortillas slathered in sauce, eggs, cheese and sour cream.

The chilaquiles Mexicanos designed to look like the Mexican flag has green and red sauces on either side, white eggs in the middle — even carne asada to represent the eagle.

And there’s breakfast tortas — a bit like breakfast burritos but with meat and scrambled eggs served sandwich style.

For lunch and dinner, there’s tacos de guisados.

These are tacos filled with about six different kinds of rotating stews, including steak with jalapeños, shredded pork, chicharrónes and more.

A simple vegetarian option is made with rice and a hard-boiled egg.

“It’s the most amazing thing when you’re hungry,” she said, adding that most of the recipes are from her grandmother.

Macedo and her husband were both born in Mexico. The kids were all born in the United States, but they visit Mexico three times of year and have tight ties to their Mexican heritage.

So much so that once when they were crossing the border to go home to California, one of their young sons blurted to an immigration official, “I’m Mexican. I don’t want to go back.”

So it was easy then to incorporate their Mexican heritage into the the coffee shop.

“We’re always looking for something that makes us feel like back home,” Macedo said.

The family

To say this is a family business is an understatement. Mom and dad have five kids (technically, two are a niece and nephew, but they’ve been with them long enough they consider them their own).

There’s 21-year-old Diana, who greets Evelyn with a quiet kiss on the cheek. Khotan, 18, who says he’s shy but then talks your ear off about the business. Isaak, 16, who looks good in trucker hats and is quick to explain anything you want to know about an unfamiliar Mexican flavor. Maya, who is 10 and the “little princess” of the family, who you might see dancing around the dining room.

And there’s Hassan, now 24, who is the reason this whole business started. As a senior at Edison High School, he came up with the idea for a coffee shop for a class project.

His parents thought it was cute at first, and then switched to taking it seriously before he did, he recalled.

They said, “’All right, let’s do it,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah right,’” he said.

But when his mom traveled to Portland for a two-week coffee training, he realized this was actually happening.

Originally, the family rented a spot for a coffee shop near Edison, paying rent for two years before they were ready. The night before an inspector was coming to hopefully give them the OK to open, a drunk driver crashed into the building.

The landlord said he wasn’t going to fix the damage and they thought the dream was dead.

The family ended up opening in Manchester instead, after dealing with code-related challenges.

The Easton location is closed for now because the well ran dry.

Even the Tower location had more than its fair share of hurdles to get past. During the months it was empty, people broke in repeatedly. They stole $700 blenders, wrecked doors and required about $30,000 in repairs, Macedo said.

But now Mi Cafesito is open in the new spot, running both locations, and a sense of optimism pervades the new place.

The wall art proclaims “Today is a perfect day to be happy.” Little messages of encouragement are written on the cardboard sleeves slipped around hot coffee cups too.

Even the business name has its own cheerful spin. Mi Cafesito translates to “my little cup of coffee,” though technically it should have a “C” in the middle, not an “S.” Macedo wanted the word “Sí” in the name, which means “yes” in Spanish.

Van Ness Village

It opened in a neighborhood that already has its own sense of community and people working to make it better. Across the street, businesses and organizations frequently hold events together, including the bar Spokeasy, maker space Root Access Hackerspace, the Sour Milk gift shop and the LAByrinth Art Collective.

“We just tend to have a sense of home there — and real community collaborating,” said Alicia Rodriguez, founder of LAByrinth, an arts and performance space that hosts various events.

It will be nice to have another space — Mi Cafesito — to gather, she said.

“We all will stand outside when we’re running into each other and (say), ‘Man, I could really use a cup of coffee right now’ and nothing’s open,” she said. “I’m excited about it.”