Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Best Breakfast
CAFÉ MILAGRO
ADRIENNE PELLIZZARI AND LANCE BYRON
All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.
John Gunther
Café Milagro's story is very much one of the little café that could, and winning Best Break-
fast reinforces for Adrienne and business partner Lance the assurance that their efforts have
not been in vain.
“We're honored to have won for Best Breakfast,” Adrienne says. “In addition to coffee
it was the original backbone of Café Milagro.” The business began with its signature cof-
fee roasting and then expanded as the need arose. “The coffee very organically moved into
baked goods, and then that moved into breakfast, which then piggy-backed into lunch, and
then dinners, and then to exporting our coffee all over the world.”
This successful business had less than promising roots. Adrienne originally visited
Costa Rica on a college vacation. She had envisioned herself becoming an ambassador
someday. “I was supposed to stay here about three weeks,” she says. “I ended up extending
my trip, quitting my job, cancelling my classes and I never left. About a year and a half later
I started Café Milagro; that was in 1994.”
Similarly,LancewasactuallydeportedfromCostaRicaforoverstayingafterhisstudent
workvisa expired, butfinishing hisstudies inWisconsin didn'tsatisfy him; Central America
had gotten under his skin. “I kept catching myself daydreaming about Costa Rica,” he says.
“It was in my blood.”
Lance abandoned his plans to become an attorney — or a secret agent (no kidding)!
Adrienne is the first to admit that her odyssey into Costa Rican business was a little
naïve. She had intended to stay just one semester, but by the middle of the second semester
she was establishing her own business in Quepos. “It was a naive ambition, thinking that a
coffee roasting company could work here,” she says. As she travelled by bus back and forth
to San Jose she saw people lined up at coffee roasters and thought to herself, “Wow, I bet I
could do that.” In retrospect it was probably a bit like deciding to sell megaphones to howler
monkeys.
