Confeitaria Rocco is Porto Alegre's great old café — not a café in the northern European sense but in the proper Portuguese-Brazilian tradition: a place for small cups of dark espresso, glass cases full of pastries and cakes, marble counters, and the comfortable noise of people who have somewhere to be. Since 1948 it has occupied a corner in the Centro Histórico near the financial district, and despite everything the city has changed around it, it has maintained its character as a place where the Porto Alegre that actually gets things done stops for coffee.
The food is genuinely good by any standard: the pastries are made in-house, the espresso is serious (this is southern Brazil, where coffee culture owes as much to Italy as to the rest of the country), and the savoury snacks — pão de queijo, coxinha, quiches — are better than the average commercial confeitaria. Come at mid-morning when the business crowd has been and the tables are free but the coffee is still fresh; or at 4pm when the cakes are at their best. It is not fancy and does not try to be, which is exactly the point. Knowing a place like this exists is one of the small satisfactions of spending time in a city rather than just passing through it.