Cafebrería El Péndulo

This amazing chain of Mexico City bookstores normally follow multi-story floorplans incorporating café and restaurant facilities. A healthy serving of eye candy in the form of wooden floors, balconies with curvy green handrails, and living plants that seem to protrude from the shelves are common to the seven locations spanning the entire city. These stores will stir up your imagination, or at least give you something to look at as you stir your coffee.

Common items for sale include new titles or reprints of older books in both Spanish and English and music (CD and vinyl) sealed in plastic wrap. Designer items commonly with Mexican and literary themes—porcelain luchador-themed salt and pepper shakers, or plush toys of William Shakespeare for example—are abundant on the stores' gift sections. Don't expect to find old, rare books or to have to dig through dusty crates of trash and treasure in these chic establishments.

Two of the locations are small, single-story cafebrerías in the shopping malls of Santa Fe and Perisur. The locations on neighboring Roma and Condesa neighborhoods both feature 2-story floorplans in former mansions built in the traditional art deco style. In the Central Zona Rosa location on Hamburgo street, the dining gets less formal over each floor—table dining on the ground floor, sofas and reading for the cafe on the first floor, and a bar on the second floor.

Most of the pictures above are from the featured Polanco location on Alejandro Dumas street. The mid-south San Angel location in the Centro Cultural Helénico theatre also features fascinating architectural features over its wooden-paneled 3 floors, including a very tall palm tree that grows through the entire height of the building.