The espresso machine at Acé of Cups on Central Avenue has never been turned off during business hours — not once in the four years since Mariela Brocway opened the place. That’s not a boast, it’s just how she runs things. The machine stays warm because someone is always about to need it.
Brocway grew up in Havana and moved to St. Petersburg in her late twenties, spending a decade waitressing at other people’s restaurants before she decided, around 2019, that she was finally done doing that. The spot she found on Central — a narrow room with pressed-tin ceilings, a single long bar, and a back corner that fits maybe six stools — had been a succession of struggling things before she took the lease. She painted the walls a deep ochre, hung a handful of her mother’s oil paintings, and opened on a Thursday with no advertising. The regulars found her by Friday.
The menu is small on purpose. Coffee drinks lean Cuban — cortaditos, café con leche made with whole milk steamed properly, coladas sold by the small styrofoam cup the way they’re meant to be shared. A rotating board of cocktails changes with the season and Brocway’s mood; in cooler months she tends toward rum-and-coffee combinations, bitter amaro, things that reward slow sipping. A late-spring menu might feature a clarified milk punch alongside a simple Aperol situation she calls the Naranja, which has become, despite her ambivalence about making the same drink twice, something close to a signature.
She makes a pressed sandwich — usually one kind, whatever she feels like that day — and sells slices of a dense guava-and-cream-cheese cake that her aunt ships from Miami in a cooler roughly every two weeks. When the cake is gone, it’s gone. Regulars learn to arrive early on a Tuesday.
The crowd at Acé of Cups tends toward the local and the deliberate. It is not a laptop café in any meaningful sense, though people do occasionally open one. Brocway has a gentle way of steering the vibe: the music she plays — mostly older Cuban son, some bolero, occasional Coltrane — keeps the room from tipping into co-working-space territory. There is no loyalty app. The wifi password is written on a card behind the bar and changes monthly. She seems to find both facts quietly funny.
On weekend mornings, the line sometimes extends briefly onto the sidewalk. Brocway handles it herself, usually with one other person behind the bar, and the wait is rarely more than ten minutes. A cortadito runs about four dollars. A cocktail will be somewhere between eleven and fourteen. The sandwich, when available, is around nine.
What sets Acé of Cups apart from the proliferating coffee scene on Central isn’t the menu or the decor, exactly. It’s the feeling that the place was built for Brocway first and the public second — and that that order of priorities is precisely what makes it worth seeking out. She is there most mornings by seven-thirty, wiping down the bar before anyone arrives, the espresso machine warming steadily in the background.
