Ivan Solis stood behind his custom-made coffee cart in Candler Park on Saturday afternoon. It was the grand opening of Space Queen, a new vintage clothing store in the neighborhood. Thirty minutes before the celebration was scheduled to kick off, several people were already hovering around him, hoping to be his first customer.
They had good reason. Ivan is no ordinary barista, and no ordinary businessman. He’s the founder of Recuerdos, a pop-up coffee business he started in 2022, that seems to serve a dual purpose: specializing in carefully sourced Mexican coffees, and, serving as a “love letter to our immigrant families.”
With the precision of a surgeon (his parents thought he would go to medical school), he made one drink at a time. For each individual cup, he ground fresh whole beans, sourced from a farm in Veracruz, Mexico. He measured the coffee, then pushed down on the ground beans with a multicolored wooden tamper. Small glass cups collected the espresso, that he then poured into paper cups or clear glasses, and mixed with steamed milk, or not, depending on the drink. Ivan stood there for five hours with zen – like concentration. “I love people, I love sharing…I love doing this,” he said.
With his careful sourcing, immaculate tools, and customized drinks – it’s no surprise that Ivan has competed in a national barista championship. In a space that is generally not known for its diversity, Ivan is raising the profile of Mexican coffee, which he says is underrepresented, and sometimes misunderstood, in the world of artisanal coffee. The beans he was using on Saturday were sourced from his friend Marlen Mendoza of Amanezer Co, a small batch coffee company in Texas. “It has nice notes of melon, honeysuckle,” different from the chocolatier and nutty flavors Mexican coffee is traditionally associated with, he said.
The artisanal coffee scene is a far cry from the world of his parents, who Ivan said, don’t quite get his business.
“My mom…she drinks decaf. And my dad doesn’t drink coffee. He’s more of a Coca Cola type,” he said. “So it’s kind of weird how I ended up loving coffee.”
Still, their imprints are all over his business. His parents emigrated from Aguascualientes, Mexico in 1995, where “a lot of my family [were] entrepreneurs…they owned little shops.” His dad comes from a family of farmers.
Once they got to Georgia though, his father worked in construction and his mom worked in schools. As a kid, Ivan never realized how hard it had been for them. “My parents tried to love me as much as [they could] and gave me whatever they could, so that I couldn’t feel the struggles that they would later explain to me…that’s how much they loved me that I never really saw that.”
One of Recuerdos’ signature drinks, “madre,” is made with single origin chocolate from Chiapas that he sources from another Latinx small business owner in Texas. It’s a tribute to his mom and his obsession with Abuelitas chocolate tablets as a kid. “She used to hide them and I had to go to the top shelf to grab them. She’d find me and I’d be like covered, my mouth full of chocolate,” he said, smiling. “She’s just awesome.”
Ivan grew up in the Lithonia – Decatur area, very different, he said, from “barrios” in places like New York and California where Latinos have been living for generations and “where people can literally walk to each other [and] support each other’s business.”
“There’s nothing like that here in Atlanta… I think that still people are trying to find how to do that. Because you have these communities kind of like branched out, there’s not really a space for all of us to come together.”
That’s why Ivan’s ultimate vision for Recuerdos is to create a “third space”.
“You’ll have like a typical construction worker come in and then you’ll have like a businessman there in the same place,” he said, describing what it would look like. “So we’ll have people, just from different walks of life, come in and share coffee and talk to each other and communicate.”
On Saturday, more customers began to gather. One told Ivan about a regular gathering for creative entrepreneurs in Atlanta, another asked him about the meaning of Recuerdos. (It means “memories”). Children ordered hot chocolates.
It looked like his hope of a space that brings people together, through coffee, was already starting to happen.
Recuerdos will be at the Morningside Farmer’s Markets on Saturdays, starting April 6. To find out about future pop-ups and the latest drinks, follow Recuerdos on Instagram.
