Why go
Light roast at Whymper and Orellana
The roast stays light in Pablo Mateus’s hands; as Founder, Chef and Roaster at FANKØR in Quito, he builds the café from coffee outward. Pablo Mateus opened the house in 2018 after looking closely at Scandinavian specialty coffee culture, then set the program around Ecuadorian coffees, bread, pastry, chocolate and cooking rather than treating the counter as a drinks station alone. His role here is not split neatly between kitchen and roastery. The same founder who sets the coffee direction also frames the food that sits beside it, which gives FANKØR its particular discipline: a roastery with a bench, a bakery with a pass, a café with a scratch kitchen behind the cup. The address at Whymper N27-55 and Orellana places the work inside the COSIDECO building, in commercial Quito, but the important geography is also agricultural. The menu names producers and processes, so the cup does not arrive as an anonymous roast profile. Mateus’s program points back to Ecuadorian lots and to the hands that grew them, then brings them through a contemporary café language without losing the trace of origin.
Producer names on the coffee menu
FANKØR’s coffee list uses the vocabulary of a roastery, not a generic café board. Ana María & Nicolás Crespo Typica Mejorado Lavado appears by name, as do Familia Morales Rivera Sidra Honey and Ana María & Nicolás Crespo Sidra Fermentación Anaeróbica. Those lines carry variety, producer and process in the same breath. Washed, honey and anaerobic fermentation are not decorative terms here; they are the method by which the counter tells the drinker what has happened before the grinder. The house identifies itself as coffee roasters co. fresh bakery specialty food, a plain statement that matters because it gives equal weight to roasting, baking and cooking. Light roasts sit at the center of the beverage program, with Ecuadorian coffees presented through lot language rather than roast-darkness shorthand. The bakery and food offering follow the same logic. FANKØR has cuisine, bakery and pastry alongside its roastery work, and Mateus’s biography ties the house to bread, pastry, chocolate and cooking. The result is a program built in parts, each one close enough to the others that the morning counter can become a small lesson in fermentation, crumb, extraction and heat.
The counter inside the COSIDECO building
The room reads as a modern specialty café, polished and contemporary, with counter service carrying the pace. It is not a hushed room, but the noise stays conversational, the kind of level where grinders, trays and service calls remain part of the texture rather than interruption. The official line, Drink Good Coffee, is direct enough to suit the place. Behind it is a fuller proposition: retail coffee, bakery, pastry and food under one roof, with the café setting designed to make those disciplines feel daily rather than ceremonial. In commercial Quito, that matters. A roastery can become a destination only if the counter still works for the person standing there before work, or between meetings, or carrying a bag of beans home. FANKØR holds that tension, design-forward but bench-led.
A Quito café measured by its lots
Recognition has followed the work, including a 2025 ranking as Ecuador’s leading coffeeshop and a placement among South American coffee shops in the same awards context. Producer names keep returning attention to the lot on the menu. If the next cup changes, the discipline does not: Ana María & Nicolás Crespo.
