Local coffee shops are expected to stand out now. Most chase the same Instagrammable look and end up blending together. What I appreciate most is when a café actually builds its identity around something real, like a genuine passion for the arts that runs through the whole space. Art cafés aren't a new idea, but a small one like Elysian Cafe & Arts, dainty and cosy, carries a spirit that it truly enjoys what it offers.
If you're from Cainta, Rizal, chances are you've already come across this small café on ROTC Hunter Guerilla Street in Barangay San Juan. They've been featured on TV too. But there's a difference between seeing a place on a screen and actually sitting inside it: a small art café with only a handful of tables, walls covered entirely in visitor sketches and paintings, and a ceiling wallpapered in book pages.
A Café You Read From Floor to Ceiling
The first thing you notice when you arrive is that this place is small . Inside, you'll find three, maybe four tables, each with a brass lamp. Just enough room for the people sitting at them. What the space lacks in size, it makes up for entirely in surface. Every wall is covered: sketches, drawings, notes, paintings, photographs, and collages left behind by everyone who has sat here before you. No two pieces are the same. No wall has a single blank stretch. It builds the way a place builds when it's been slowly claimed by the people who pass through it, each visit leaving something behind.
The ceiling is wallpapered in book pages. Not decoratively, not as an aesthetic gesture that stops at one panel, but all of it, covering the full length above your head. My girlfriend, who loves books, would usually flinch at seeing them discarded this way, but this one passed her taste. She got the purpose behind it, though a small part of her still mourned the books.
On one side, vinyl records hang on the wall alongside framed paintings and small collected objects. A sign near the ordering area reads "Paint on Cups." Books are stacked on the lower shelves. None of it is curated the way galleries are. It's accumulated, which is a different and more honest thing.
The Corner Outside
Out on the porch at the front, the walls are rougher and plastered, with a few folding chairs and framed paintings arranged in a loose gallery wall around a baroque mirror. A wall clock hangs on the left. Plants fill in the edges.
It was here that she spotted it, on the lower right corner of the gallery wall: Pumpkin 2000 (Red) by Yayoi Kusama, a screenprint published in 2000, bold red against black. Kusama's pumpkins are among her most recognized images, obsessive, pattern-filled, strange in the way her best work tends to be.
Finding it there, framed and hung in a small café in Cainta, was a moment that makes a place feel like it was put together by someone who genuinely cares about what goes on the walls.
The Food and the Feeling
We ordered the seafood marinara and the shrimp aglio olio, which felt right for a long, unhurried sit. To drink, a refreshing honey peach tea and a calamansi lychee that complemented the food well. And we wouldn't leave without dessert, so we got the cinnamon rolls and cheese rolls with my usual Americano alongside a Spanish latte for her.
The food has that homemade feel, the kind you just know when you taste it. That warm, made-with-heart kind of cooking. We appreciated the breads too. From what I know, the owner bakes her own.
Overall, it's the place I'd come back to now and then for something artsy and local around Cainta, when I'm craving a comforting, creative spot with food good enough to sit over while catching up with a friend.
Bring Someone Who Looks Closely
Elysian Cafe & Arts is one you'd be proud to bring anyone to, especially if you're from Cainta. It feels natural here. It blends into the culture of a small town that keeps building its identity as a gateway to Rizal. There are surely other art cafés around, but this one draws a younger crowd, the ones who lean creative.
They're active on social media and always posting what's happening, so a word of advice before you visit: check their updates, especially for how crowded it gets. The space is tiny, and they ask customers to keep it to around two hours so others get their turn with the food and the space.
And if you're going with someone who loves art and literature, let them lead. They'll find it before you do. She found this one first, the way she always does, and all I had to do was slow down and look.
Keep up with Elysian Cafe & Arts on Facebook.
