Beloved Wynwood Café Is Starting Over in Miami Beach

After eight years of serving some of Miami’s most beloved cafecitos in Wynwood, Suite Habana Cafe has closed its tiny shop and is preparing for a fresh start in Miami Beach.

The Cuban-inspired specialty coffee spot shuttered its Wynwood location at the end of April after losing its longtime lease. However, there’s good news. The beloved coffee shop and café will reopen in June inside the boutique Crest Hotel Suites, just off 17th Street and Collins Avenue. The new location will come with more seating, an expanded food menu, and weekend brunch in collaboration with Cuban chef Osmel Gonzalez of EntreNos and Emelina.

For co-owner and co-founder Nayelis Delisle, the move represents the end of a difficult chapter, but also the beginning of something bigger.

“Moving from Wynwood was very delicate for me,” she says. “After eight years, it’s hard to start again. But seeing that our customers are buying our coffee online and drinking it at home, waiting for us, willing to follow us during the transition…it’s beautiful.”

Beyond the Ventanita

Delisle and her husband, Manny Lopez, opened Suite Habana Cafe in Wynwood in 2018. Their mission was to create a place centered around hospitality and really good coffee. Born in Cuba, Delisle grew up drinking coffee with her grandmother, who brewed what Delisle describes as carefully guarded “real” coffee during the country’s difficult economic years in the 1990s.

Some of her earliest memories involve sitting beside her grandmother as she described the smoky, chocolatey flavors of the coffee she drank daily.

The café was also inspired in part by Cuba’s “paladares”, informal, family-run restaurants that people opened in their homes during the economic crisis of the 1990s. “My mom had one in my grandmother’s patio,” Delisle says. “I remember the noise, the people talking, the food coming out of our kitchen. That was real hospitality.”

Another Side of Cuban Coffee Culture

Those memories became the inspiration for the café. Instead of recreating Miami’s coladas and ventanita culture, Delisle wanted to introduce people to another side of Cuban coffee culture, one focused on quality beans, careful brewing, and long conversations around the table.

“In Cuba, coffee culture goes back 300 years,” she says. “When people think of Cuban coffee, they automatically associate it with Pilón or Bustelo, but we wanted to put specialty coffee on the table while keeping the Cuban soul.”

That philosophy is what guided Suite Habana from the very beginning. The café’s signature house blend, developed and roasted by Delisle and Lopez, combines Brazilian and Colombian Arabica beans chosen to recreate the bold flavor profile Delisle remembers from childhood. Lopez, who previously worked in high-end coffee, says the pair experimented with multiple roast profiles before landing on a darker roast with notes of chocolate and tobacco. “I wanted the coffee to be smooth, velvety, and leave that tobacco note in your mouth, almost like smoking a cigar,” adds Delisle.

Here, you will not find matcha lattes nor the latest TikTok trend in coffee drinks. Delisle says the café was never interested in chasing fads, and instead, she wants to follow tradition.“We come from a culture of ‘give me a dark roast, pon la cafetera, y vamos a chismear,’ and that’s the feeling I wanted to recreate here,” she says.

A Cult Following Built on Coffee and Community

The result has quietly earned the café a devoted following over the years, along with national recognition from Bon Appétit and Condé Nast Traveler. Just last year, New Times featured it as the best coffeehouse in Miami. In 2021, Joe Jonas spotlighted the café in a pandemic-era docuseries supporting small businesses and bought coffee for the next 500 customers after sharing the shop with his millions of followers.

Over the years, Suite Habana also built a fiercely loyal local following with its espresso drinks, cold brew, salted chocolate chip cookies, vegan banana bread, and café bombon, a layered espresso drink with condensed milk. The café’s small but popular pastry program is also a family effort, with the couple’s 20-year-old son helping develop and bake many of the goods in-house.

But Delisle says what has stayed with her most is the community support that followed. As the café prepared to leave Wynwood, customers stepped in to help. One offered warehouse space to store the café’s furniture and equipment during the transition, while another connected them to the Miami Beach location.

“The community came to the rescue,” she says. “After all these years, I still believe in this city. Miami is home to me.”

A Bigger Second Chapter

The new space will allow Suite Habana to expand beyond the six-item pastry menu it currently offers. Delisle says the food program will roughly double in size, with brunch becoming a major focus.

The café will also continue selling its coffee beans online, which has quietly become a major part of the business. Delisle says she loves seeing customers recreate the experience at home using traditional Cuban coffee makers.

That philosophy has shaped the business from the beginning. “We’re not a café that sells coffee with food,” Delisle says. “We’re a coffee company.”
And if Delisle is right, her customers will follow her wherever she goes.

“I think we do something very good for the city,” she says. “I just want to see Miami shine.”

Suite Habana Cafe. 1670 James Ave., Miami Beach, at Crest Hotel and Suites; suitehabanacafe.com. Opening June 2026.