Original Green Roasters
Rancagua 040, Providencia, Región Metropolitana, Chile
This cafe is located near Parque Bustamante.
Original Green Roasters is a small hidden spot in a converted house. I was looking for a place to get breakfast in Santiago, and almost walked right past it. It is hard to find nice places that are open early in the morning in this neighborhood. I wound up going here a few times, because almost all of the other places didn’t open until later. I also kept seeing some of the same other people – clearly tourists as well – going there repeatedly.
On the inside the main floor has a few tables, most of them with only two seats. The middle of the room had a giant high-tech espresso maker with digital displays. It was surrounded by glass containers of coffee beans.
Specialty chocolate bars were for sale, along a glass display case which held baked goods.
I had heard that they offered excellent coffees, and I was not disappointed. The menu featured a large variety of coffee drinks, both hot and cold. There was a lot of attention to detail in the drinks they served. The iced chai latte was served with a cinnamon stick and a paper thin wheel of dried orange on top, which made for a nice presentation.
For breakfast they offered a variety of eggs Benedicts, scrambled eggs, breakfast sandwiches, and waffles. I was surprised to see a Full English Breakfast available on the menu as well ($12,000 Chilean pesos), but maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by that – the first time I ever tried a full English breakfast was actually in a bar in Guatemala many years ago.
I ordered the eggs Benedict with salmon, which cost 7,500 chilean pesos. There was another version available with avocado, which I learned is called “palta” in Chilean Spanish, as opposed to “aguacate” how I am used to hearing it. Did I mention this place has very patient waitstaff?
In Texas, and other places along the gulf coast, it’s common for Benedicts to be served over a southern style biscuit. These were served over a fluffy bread that was like a cross between a dinner roll and an English muffin. Each was topped with a generous amount of flaky salmon and a poached egg. The whole thing was topped with hollandaise sauce and cracked black pepper.
After the meal I was able to pay by credit card. Tipping in Chile is fairly standardized at 10%, which seems to be the default option on all of the credit card machines.
The credit card machine that they used was Transbank, which adds their own foreign transaction fee for international credit cards in addition to any foreign transaction fees added by your own card company.