The Coffee? Good. Business During the Olympics? Not So Good.

VICE Sports staff writer Aaron Gordon is in Rio for the 2016 Summer Olympics and filing daily dispatches.

On the second floor of a mall in Rio's Centro business district, in a small coffee shop tucked away in a corner, Romulo Martinez tells me to pay what I like for my espresso. Next to a set of speakers playing coffee shop guitar music—which may or may not be Spotify's Coffee House playlist—there's a set of bowls for bills and coins. Next to the bowls are three containers: one for espresso, another for cappuccino, and a third for bags of beans. Another bowl is filled with poker chips. Customers put however much money they want into the currency bowls, and then a poker chip—available for this purpose in yet another bowl—into the container corresponding to the product they bought.

As far as I can tell, Curto is about as spiritually distant from the Olympic bubble as one can get, if not geographically so. The cafe, a small stand on a few wheeling counters and a few benches in the mall's hallway, is co-owned by its employees, all of whom have an equal stake. They have their own fair-trade supply chain, starting in the fields of Espirito Santo. Every week, they roast some 200 kilograms of fresh beans at their own roastery, and they invested in the highest quality machines for their cafe. Still, when the fine product gets put in front of my nose, air wafting of the freshest coffee beans I have ever had the glorious pleasure of smelling, Martinez says, "Pay what you want."

Curto is one of those places that you'd never find if you didn't know about it; even if you do know about it, it's still pretty tricky. The cafe, their only retail location, is in a mall about five blocks from the Carioca metro stop. Once inside the mall, you have to wander the endless storefronts selling baked goods and junk food with Americanized names like California Coffee or Bob's Burgers to find one of the two escalators to the second floor. Taking the correct escalator will put you directly in front of Curto, albeit facing the wrong direction. If you take the wrong escalator, you will end up on the other side of the mall for a fair bit more wandering.

But the coffee is worth the meander. It took me more than two hours to get here from the Olympic Park in Barra da Tijuca, but was worth every second. Foreigners tend to pay at or above the suggested prices, Martinez says, because of the favorable exchange rates. For espresso, the suggested price is four reais, or about $1.25. A cappuccino runs at five reais, or something like $1.50. Both are absolute steals if you're used to paying American coffee prices.

Still, not many foreigners find their way here, and the Olympics have been no exception. Curto's clientele is mostly lawyers, IT technicians, and employees for big businesses like Petrobras headquartered nearby, Martinez told me during a quick lull before the afternoon rush. But the Olympics haven't been good for business. The City of Rio declared five holidays during the Olympics to help alleviate traffic on dates with lots of road closures. But some offices, like the city lawyers, have been off all month. Because of their pay-what-you-want model, it was easier for Martinez to measure the Olympic effect in cups of coffee sold versus revenue, but he says they're selling about a third fewer coffees than they expected for the month.

The few tourists who do manage to find the place—mostly through word of mouth—pick up some of the slack by buying bags of beans to take home with them. Martinez says most of the tourists are European or Asian, but mostly Asian, and very few Americans. Curto will get through the month just fine, but he'll be glad when the Olympics are over.

"Five holidays is a lot."

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