The ice cream shop space has been leased to a home decor store, but a small Charlie's sign behind the counter pays homage to the couple's now-closed soft-serve parlor. Some Mexican favorites still dot the board, including breakfast tacos and burritos, green chile, and enchilada soup. The new menu lists a variety of salads and sandwiches for lunch and French toast, a granola parfait, and a short list of open-faced toasts for breakfast. See also: Tables, D Bar, Argyll: A Trio of Transformations in 2014 The rustic, Mexican theme has given way to a more modern interior, but the owners promise the same neighborhood cafe charm, with a few new items on the breakfast and lunch menu. The couple changed the name of the corner eatery to Cafe 44 and opened the doors earlier this month in the Berkeley neighborhood. Now, as exercise for you, Dear Reader, do you order a vaso or copa vino tinto (or is it rojo, given the other is vino blanco)?Īdded much later: And Antonio Banderas singing the famous song, Morena De Mi Corazón, uses copa simply to mean a drink.Matt and Rosemary Lopez closed Taza de Cafe, and Charlie's Ice Cream Social next door, late last year with a promise to reopen with a slightly new menu and design. In Germany, for breakfast, you want a portion (which is kinda pronounced, ports-zee-own) which is just a small pot brought to the table with a tasse, so about the small amount as a nice mug of coffee at a truck stop in the US. Now, just for fun, this sounds like the German word, tasse, which is a cup of coffee, but as I learned on my bike trip this isn’t the right amount for breakfast (you get a demitasse (which amusingly in Spanish is tacita, see the connection to taza, like hermanito is to hermano).

So, as Keenan’s book discusses ordering a copa de café will probably get a confused look (as in the breakfast place) or an alcoholic drink (with some coffee liqueur) in a place with a bar. IOW, a copa is usually the serving container for alcoholic drinks, not hot coffee. But the common expression (which Google Translate gets right), ir de copa does mean go for a drink. copa, OTOH, often looks like a wine goblet, or sometimes like a cocktail glass (some menus I’ve seen use this word for desserts ( postres) and the pictures often look like martini glasses with a luscious dessert. huevos con chorizo y una taza de caf detrs.

So taza is the traditional coffee cup we know and love, usually with the typical handle IOW, rather specific shaped to handle coffee (or té, yes the obvious cognate of tea). As que por la maana me haca la dormida para quedarme en la cama hasta tarde y poder desayunar con ella. I’ve also seen on menus copa de helado which took a little work to also discover copa can mean bowl, although says this translation applies in the context of a toilet bowl! So it seems (from pictures I saw on websites that also had text of copa de helado this is just a scoop of ice cream in a typical ice cream serving dish, which in fact, looks like the typical cup a copa really is. You’ll probably be understood with “school” (second-language) Spanish but you may get a better reception the closer you can come to native speaking customs.īoth taza and copa have one short definition of ‘cup’, although only copa says glass as well (which really should be vaso). The purpose of this book is to go beyond what one learns in class (or Duolingo) and also from casual dictionaries (both and Oxford (now /es) have sufficiently robust definitions that careful reading would supply the distinction I’ll explain) and speak more like native Spanish speakers. Well, actually I found out, not by looking at menus but from a fun little book, Breaking Out of Beginner’s Spanish, by Joseph J. Go figure!īut the obvious cognate copa is actually wrong, for this purpose. Yes it turns out, except an accent really is needed ( café), even though a café (the eating establishment) is also café even though we’d spell it cafe in the US. Google translates “cup of coffee” to taza de cafe?

Taza de cafe