Wake up

Roasting at the end of the continent

Coffee roasted in Punta Arenas is the unusual part: a specialty programme built in Chile's far south, where nothing about supply is convenient. Wake Up opened in 2017 as a coffee and brunch room and has since grown into something wider, with Kosmos Tostaduría handling the roasting and the Wake Up Coffee Lab running the teaching side. The café is the front of that system rather than a buyer of finished beans, so the roasting decisions, the workshops and the cuppings all feed the same counter. Origin coffees are the focus of the roastery, and the point of the exercise is to give a city at the bottom of the map the same access to them as anywhere else.

A coffee lab as much as a café

The Coffee Lab is the clearest expression of how the business thinks. It is a space for experimenting, learning and sharing, with workshops, cuppings and events that treat coffee as a subject rather than a product to be moved quickly. That gives a visit a different tone from a standard brunch stop, because the people behind the bar can talk through origin and roast decisions made inside the same organisation. Ranked at number 74 on The World's 100 Best Coffee Shops, it has become the reference point for specialty coffee at the southern end of the continent, and the reputation rests on the coffee rather than on the room. The setting does no harm either. This is a café that leans on its own geography, and the phrase people use for it, the end of the world, is more description than marketing.

Coffee first, brunch around it

Order coffee first, and order it through the house structure: lots roasted in house, origin coffees explored through Kosmos, and whatever the Coffee Lab happens to be working on. Rather than chasing a fixed espresso recipe or a listed pour-over, treat the counter as the menu and ask what has just been roasted. Then eat. The kitchen cooks in house and the signature pastries sit alongside the coffee service, which is what separates this from a beverage counter. The brunch half is not decoration; the business has been coffee and brunch from the start, and the two sides are meant to be taken together. Come early enough to have both, and leave time to ask what is in the cup.