Coral pink and marigold walls frame the space, while red, orange, and white flowers cascade down the walls. Sunlight pours through tall windows, catching the green plants, and a burst of colorful tile across the front counter sets the tone at Café Calaveras. The space feels warm, alive, and distinctly feminine.

Two years ago, founder Clarissa Griego was serving coffee under a tent with borrowed ice chests at a lowrider show in White Center. This summer, she opened her first brick-and-mortar cafe inside Vulcan Real Estate’s Batik apartment building on Yesler—where Tougo Coffee once was. The name honors the sugar skulls of Día de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday that celebrates ancestry, life, and death. For Griego, that tradition is the framework for her shop.

“Día de los Muertos is a celebration of life. I love how that can translate into the space overall,” she says. “It’s a celebration of our roots and our ancestors and where we come from—feeling proud and loud. Each person that comes in can relate to the space or even just feel warm and welcomed and a little bit more alive.”

That shift from hazy and half-asleep into feeling awake is part of what Griego loves about coffee. “There’s so many funny little phrases we say in the mornings—‘I feel dead’ or ‘I’m not alive yet until I’ve had my cup of coffee.’ This rich dirt water in a cup that we all really need to wake up, does create that crossover, from not so awake and alive to ready to take on our day,” she says. “As well as with Día de los Muertos, there’s this crossover that happens from the not so living to the living.”

The drinks are layered with the same kind of meaning. Café de olla, a spiced coffee brewed in a clay pot with cinnamon and  brown sugar, dates back to the Mexican Revolution, when female soldiers made it to sweeten bitter coffee. “It kind of tastes like Christmas in a cup,” Griego says. Another favorite is La chingona—Spanish slang for “badass woman”—a cold brew topped with salty caramel foam. “Cold brew is typically known to be stronger than most espresso drinks, because it’s brewed for 24 hours. It has salted caramel, so that’s that salty and sweetness. It’s kind of this play on like, we’re strong—we’re a little bit salty sometimes and we need to be—but we’re pretty sweet.”

Other menu items pay tribute to influences ranging from Mexican candies to Mexican-American singer-songwriter Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the late “Queen of Tejano music.” A latte flavored with mazapán, a peanut candy, has become a hit. Another, the glitter-dusted “Bidi Bidi Brew Brew” (cold brew topped with ube foam), nods to Selena’s iconic purple jumpsuit and her song “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom.” “We have a lot of fun making pretty drinks,” Griego says.

The cafe also offers small bites and Mexican baked goods like pan dulce.

Her story starts far from Seattle. Griego grew up in San Antonio, then lived abroad in Central America before moving to the city in 2018. “At first I wasn’t convinced I’d stay. It was a culture shock. Around San Antonio, in every direction I looked, there were brown people. Here, that wasn’t my experience,” she says. She worked her way into the industry, becoming the first manager at Ghost Alley Espresso in Pike Place Market.

“I quickly realized, as a broke woman, that opening a cafe was easier said than done,” she says. “I started with nothing but heart.” The pop-up years were hard due to vendor and permit fees, and she relied heavily on community support. “A lot of things were provided by my own personal community as well as my business community, until I was able to afford my own equipment.” The cafe also came together with help from local partners and organizations, including Ventures Nonprofit, Friends of the Waterfront Park, SCORE, and Aqui Mercado.

A residency at Pier 62’s pop-up promenade in 2023 gave her stability and consistent revenue, providing the foothold she needed to move toward a permanent shop. “I’m not sure I could be where I’m at without that opportunity, to be honest.”

The Yesler space, which had a soft opening Sept. 1, is deeply personal for Griego. A queer Latina, she sees the cafe as a place of belonging. “It feels as if I’m writing a long love letter to every Latinx in Seattle,” she says. All of the staff are BIPOC, and representation matters to her. “There’s so much we are told and laws that are in place that we don’t deserve certain rights,” she says. “And I want the space to feel like—no, you belong here. You have the right to be here and not only the right to be here, but we are celebrating you being here.”

A couple weeks into opening, she’s already seeing it happen. “People come in and see some of the names of our drinks, or walk up and speak Spanish and the barista can speak Spanish back to them, and they’re having that feeling of like, ‘oh, wow, that feels familiar, that feels like home to some degree.’”

For now, Griego is content with what she’s built. The cafe is busy and the community is showing up. When asked about the future, she smiles. “The sky is the limit,” she says. “If there’s an opportunity for multiple locations way down the line, that sounds great. But right now, the goal is just to have a successful business and let other dreams evolve down the road.”

Café Calaveras, 860 Yesler Way, is open 7 a.m.-2 p.m. daily.