Happy Halloween! Although Halloween is always a bit of a stressful holiday for me – I am terrible at thinking of costume ideas and tend to be attracted to obscure, literal costumes that no one but myself would ever understand – I still can’t help but miss the festivities back home.

There’s merely a sprinkling of Halloween here in Chile. My mosaic instructor told me that Halloween is a new concept to the country, introduced only a few years ago. When it was first introduced to Chile, it apparently caused a bit of an uproar because so many people were afraid of what it stood for. It isn’t a fortunate coincidence that Halloween also happened to fall on the “Day of the Protestant and Evangelical Churches” holiday. Yes, you heard that right. In Chile, there’s a holiday reserved for Protestants and Evangelicals and it’s on October 31st. No wonder Halloween celebrations here are fairly subtle.

Then there’s November 1st, All Saint’s Day, a Catholic holiday in many countries including Chile. I have heard it is vigorously celebrated in countries such as Mexico, but in Chile it is not a major holiday. If anything, Chileans might use it as an excuse to get together with family or pay their respects to a deceased relative by taking flowers to their grave.

But back to Halloween. What better topic for today’s post than my favourite (or one of my favourites…) cafe that I visited in Buenos Aires, El Gato Negro. A cafe named after a black cat seems suitable for the holiday, doesn’t it? (There I go again, being all literal.)

Buenos Aires is peppered with grand historic cafes that have kept their original old-world ambiance and high standards. El Gato Negro, one of the city’s famous historic cafes, was located within a couple of blocks where we stayed. So how could a coffee and tea lover like myself resist dashing over there first thing? When we arrived in the city, we dropped out bags off in our room and I dragged my husband out onto the loud, dirty, buzzing Corrientes avenue. We were surrounded by tall art deco theatres, white buildings with high windows and wrought iron terraces that appeared transported straight from a Paris city block, and… bookstores.

Bookstores.

Endless bookstores.

Every other storefront was a bookstore.

And I’m not talking about tiny little cutesy bookstores. I’m talking about bookstores with sometimes two floors, stretching back a hundred feet, and crammed floor-to-ceiling with thousands of books. You could have fit the inventory of two Barnes and Nobles stores into just one of those many endless heavenly Avenida Corrientes bookstores.

So as a Porteño, you browse one (or several) of these bookstores, you find your books on existentialism, contemporary Argentine economics, the Düsseldorf School and Twilight (did I mention they had a staggering variety of subjects, too? -and in English, Spanish and French, no less) and then you make your way down to El Gato Negro to ponder your profoundly enlightening book over one of the cafe’s delectable offerings.

Slipping into El Gato Negro, like so many other places in the city, is like stepping back in time. Black and white tile floors, walls covered by floor-to-ceiling wooden cabinets with glass doors displaying the wonderful spices, jams, preserves and sauces for sale. The “soda fountain” counters are covered with a delightful variety of spices, dried fruits, teas and coffees from all over the world, also for sale, measured and packed into an adorable little tin adorned with the likeness of the cafe’s namesake, a black cat wearing a huge red bow. I think what struck me the most, though, was the lovely scent of all of the spices mingling together with the fresh smells of tea and coffee and the profound sight of the waiters, dressed in turn of the century clothes (crisp white shirts, red vests, bow ties, aprons, black pants, our waiter even had tiny turn-of-the-century spectacles), who quietly come up to your table and offer you the menu, neatly nestled in a leather cover.

Browsing the menu was a bit overwhelming. They had dozens of varieties of teas and coffees, flavours, mixtures, concoctions. I finally settled on the fruits and flowers tea, which was presented loose-leaf in a cast iron kettle. Teas and coffees are served with a complementary small glass of soda water and tiny butter cookies.

The cafe also had a wide selection of snack and light lunch options, and there was a full-service restaurant upstairs. On a subsequent visit (I just had to go back) my husband ordered a dessert that they dubbed “orange delight.” Delightful, indeed: it had a shortbread bottom layer with the most incredible sweet, floral orange top layer that is best described as the consistency of very thick, moist orange frosting. Um…yum.

I could have easily spent a week doing nothing but browsing the bookstores on Corrientes and lurking in El Gato Negro with likeminded Porteños who wear black, have impeccable hair and shoes, and sit for hours at the wicker bistro tables with their piles of books. Alas, we had limited time during our 5 days in Argentina and had to move on from the cafe’s early 20th century intellectual atmosphere and back to the streets of the 21st century.

El Gato Negro: Avenida Corrientes 1669, Capital Federal