Café Pamplona

Café Pamplona, located at 12 Bow St. beside the intersection of Bow and Arrow Streets near Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, is a café. When it opened in 1959 it was the first café in the Square. The owner, Josefina Yanguas, claimed the café had the first espresso-maker in the city. Down a short flight of exterior stairs, past a patio with tables, customers enter the café's subterranean interior. The once austere decor includes bright yellow lights which make the thickly-plastered walls glow under low ceilings, and a black and white checked floor. The café survived the changes that have taken place since the mid-1980s.

Josefina Yanguas, who arrived in America in 1947, roughly modelled the café after those of her native Pamplona, Spain. From 1959 until her death in 2007, Yanguas was the only owner of the café.

Shortly after the café opened Yanguas and her Cuban chef Juana Rodríguez began preparing and serving food. As business grew Yanguas began to hire only men, in accord with the usual Spanish practice of having a single-sex staff, until 1999. In the Fall of that year this policy was revealed by the Harvard Crimson. Manager James Timberlake hired Jenny Follen in late 1999, the first female employee in the cafe's 40 year; since that time the café has observed standard hiring practices.

The café attracts both bohemians and academics from both nearby Harvard University and the greater Cambridge community. Notable patrons of the café include Al Gore, and Amanda Palmer.

The small mural on a wall in the cafe was painted fresco-style directly on site, by local artist Conger Metcalf, a friend of the owner. Completed some time in the late Sixties, its yellowed background is due to years of exposure to cigarette smoke. During this period the walls in the café needed to be repainted every four years as they would significantly yellow from smoke. While the central figure looks strikingly like Yanguas, she said it was not her portrait.

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