EVENTS   |   NOVEMBER 2025

The café that brought Retiro back to life

Facundo Olabarrieta is a chef, pastry cook, gastronomic advisor and the creator of Cora, the café that brought movement back to a sleepy corner of Retiro. And not just anywhere: in the Kavanagh building, a National Historic Monument, the one that in 1936 was the tallest concrete building in the world.

Cora reimagines the classic Buenos Aires café. Guatemalan coffee beans, a great espresso, medialunas, palmeritas, fosforitos, little ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Vinyl playing on a 1970s Danish sound system. Books, magazines, afternoon light. It’s not a grab-and-go café: people come, stay an hour and a half, take photos, browse the records. As Facu says, “coffee is the support for the experience, and so is the food.”

Facundo lives on the move. His profession keeps him always walking, standing, going from one place to another. When we asked what his shoes would say if they could talk, he didn’t hesitate: “they’d be curious and eager to go to new places.” If he were a shoe, he’d want to discover new streets, new paths.

And that’s where we connect. Because Cora x POSCO is born from the same search: respect for the classic and for roots, but with the drive to keep walking forward, to dialogue with history without standing still. His favorite drink, the double espresso, sums it up well: “it’s an infusion that concentrates many of the variables of coffee in just a couple of sips.” Intensity, craft and simplicity.

We asked him to imagine his future self, and he left us with a line that stayed with us: “I’d love to be in the shoes of my future self, many years from now, and to be happy with everything I’ve walked.”

US TOO, FACU. THANK YOU FOR OPENING THE DOORS OF CORA.