Zwart Cafe — Restaurant in Cóbano

Eat don’t paint. *hope it gets better I’ll say the owner and staff super friendly and sweet. This is a unique place I heard about to take my 2yo son to paint while eating and enjoying coffee. I heard you buy a canvas and paint is free but they only had large canvases which was $30. The owner offered for us to bring drift wood etc to paint on bc it’s free so we did. She gave us a piece of drift wood to start the first day and we left it to dry and came back to finish and eat and drink some more. We did also bring more driftwood to leave for the next person. Although, they never charged me for paint I wanted to offer to pay for the paint we used and was told it was $35 per paint session which is really steep. Although she only ended up charging me $20 for my 2yo who basically finger painted it sort of put a bad taste in my mouth. I would suggest ppl should be paying for paint by the size of whatever you’re painting and for a small rock and small drift wood it should have been $5-10USD max. This way you would have had a returning painter and we are here for a month and you would probably get more than $20 long term from me. But I won’t be back to paint. The food is great, we were looking for some simple rice and beans with eggs and we found it! It was excellent and reasonably priced!

It’s too bad for a family friendly place Santa Teresa could use more kid friendly activities like this. Great idea but not executed well. I also think kids should be able to paint where they sit on easels to help with the mess. More work but that’s what I...

BEWARE OF THIS BUSINESS!! My boyfriend and I visited in January 2025 and purchased 4 mass printed (IKEA quality) coffee cups.. regularly $20 each, but they had a sale 2 for $15 and I wanted to help them out, even though the coffee cups were of cheap quality. I gave the woman my credit card, she charged it but said she was unable to give me a receipt but assured me she charged me $60. When I got home I checked my credit card statement and she had charged me $120.00. I called my bank and they told me that without a receipt they couldn't refund the $60 l was overcharged. I then tried messaging Zwart Cafe on Facebook and Instagram, and when I didn’t get a response, my boyfriend called Zwarts Cafe and spoke to Margarit, the American owner who spoke English. Margarit told him she did not know how to issue a return, and that she was too busy right to do so and then she hung up on him. My bank advised me to put this review on Google to warn future customers to use cash only in the exact change for this business, so they aren’t...

Could be so good with so little change! Vegan pancakes where, sad to say, really bad! Rubbery and nothing like pancakes at all. I have eaten plenty of good vegan pancakes and Zwarts does not fit in there.

The rest of the food and drinks we had was good and the place has a nice vibe.

In short: stay clear of the vegan ”so called” pancakes and you should be good! 😉

(And ’yes’, we did mention the pancakes to the waiter. The answer was simply: ”We all have different taste”. 🙈😄 I do agree but a pancake still needs to be at least something that resembles...