Café Corazón in the Tower District now offers food choices to match their coffee. Café owner Leo Rios purchased an oven and hired a chef to help create new offerings.
Offerings include focaccias and something Rios and Chef Jacob “J” Martinez invented and call quiche au cru. Rios describes the invention as a quiche wrapped in croissant dough, making it portable for on-the-go snacking.
The focaccias are made daily and adorned with multiple toppings, usually in two varieties to suit customer preferences. Rios says, “We usually try to have one vegetarian or one meat option” daily, depending on the fresh ingredients they have available.
Both vegetarian and meat focaccias are made with different varieties of cheeses such as Fontina, Manchego, and Stilton and sauces ranging from an Italian-style pomodoro tomato sauce to a hummus made with black beans instead of traditional garbanzo beans. Café Corazón tries to make sure that everything they create is very flavor oriented and well balanced. This is so that customers can “get a little bit of this and that in every bite” according to Rios.
The café has also creates custom loaves of artisan style bread. Chef Martinez has made bread using rye, quinoa and the ancient grain amaranth.
Chef Martinez even made challah with amaranth instead of egg batter. The breads are not made often though. Rios says “We kind of make them sporadically” and customers buy them just as often.
Both Leo Rios and Chef Martinez emphasize on the need to make their food offerings using the freshest ingredients possible. The dough used to create all of their food products is made with flour that is freshly milled every week at the café.
This relationship didn’t just begin with Chef Martinez’s hiring; Rios and Martinez have known each other since the days of when Café Corazón was on the Fulton Mall.
Leo Rios and Chef Martinez share a standard for quality and that is how they met. Rios says that Jay has always been quality oriented and “he was looking for a really good coffee and stumbled upon us.”
Since they share the same philosophy for quality, Leo Rios and Chef Martinez have clicked, working as a culinary team. Both Rios and Chef Martinez are very detail and quality oriented. Rios describes how in-depth they get when talking about what makes food good, “When we start talking, we get down to very specific things about what makes something good.”
They share the philosophy that food just needs to be very good, high quality and fresh.
Over the years, customers have come to expect this high level of quality from anything that comes from Café Corazón. “Whatever we make, people just know its good,” said Rios. “They just come and whatever we have they just like and buy because it’s good.”
