Nobu Cafe

Espresso, brewed tea and matcha in an open-air lobby

The café works from the lobby of Nobu Hotel Los Cabos, which is open to the air, so drinks are made at the counter and carried out into a space with a sculpture garden and a water feature rather than into a closed room. Specialty espresso drinks lead, with cold brew and hot brew teas beside them, smoothies for the heat and soft drinks for anyone who wants something plainer. The matcha latte belongs firmly in the real ordering picture; it is one of the drinks guests carry away from the counter most often. Food stays light, a daily selection of freshly baked pastries and sandwiches, made to be eaten near where they were bought.

A hotel café, not the hotel restaurant

Keep the venues straight. This is the lobby café, separate from the main Nobu restaurant and from The Restaurant, the property's casual indoor breakfast room with omelettes, fresh-pressed juices and a broader morning menu. The café's role is arrival and circulation: the cup you pick up on the way through, the pastry before the beach, the tea in the middle of the afternoon. The hotel around it was the first Nobu property to open in Mexico and was designed from the ground up on the Pacific side of the Baja California peninsula, with Japanese design language softened by Mexican materials. That calm, desert-meets-ocean register carries into the café, which is quieter than a street coffee bar and built for pausing rather than for working.

What to order

Order a matcha latte if you want the drink most associated with this counter, and a specialty espresso drink if coffee is the habit. In the heat, a cold brew tea is the better choice than a hot one, and the smoothies are a genuine option rather than a menu filler. For food, keep it to a pastry in the morning or a sandwich in the middle of the day; this is not the place to plan a meal around, and the hotel has rooms that are. The best use of the café is the simplest one: a drink, something small to eat, and time in the lobby watching the property move around you, with the sculpture garden and the water on one side and the desert light on the other.