Chocol Ha

Chocol Ha takes its name from the Maya words for hot chocolate, and cacao is the organising principle of everything it serves. The cafe sits on Calle 8 in the Centro Historico of San Francisco de Campeche, a small, cool, tiled room a short walk from the Parque Principal, and it functions simultaneously as a cafe, a chocolate workshop and a shop. Cacao was cultivated and traded across the Yucatan peninsula long before European contact, and the house draws directly on that lineage rather than on European chocolate-making traditions.

The defining order is the chocolate con chile, a hot Maya-style drink built on ground cacao, water rather than milk, and a measure of chilli that arrives as warmth at the back of the throat rather than heat on the tongue. In the Campeche climate the cold cacao drinks are more frequently ordered -- iced cacao, cacao with cinnamon, and a chilled version that sits somewhere between a chocolate drink and a coffee frappe. Coffee is served properly alongside, and the food is deliberately light: chaya empanadas, sweet regional breads, sandwiches and simple breakfast plates rather than full meals.

The shop side sells cacao tablets, chilli-spiked chocolate bars and horchata concentrate to take away, and these are among the more portable and genuinely regional souvenirs available in the city. Prices throughout are low: drinks generally MXN 45 to MXN 90, light plates MXN 60 to MXN 120, take-home tablets from around MXN 80.

The cafe also serves as the meeting point for the Campeche market gastronomic route, a guided walk of the Mercado Principal that begins with a chocolate tasting on the premises before moving out into the market stalls. That arrangement brings a steady flow of small groups through in the mornings, which is worth knowing for anyone hoping for a quiet corner. The room is small, air-conditioned and simply furnished, with an easy, unhurried mood that makes it a natural pause between the walled city's museums and bastions.