New Café Geared Towards Deaf Patrons Opens in Bogotá, Colombia

At Sin Palabras Café Sordo, a trendy new watering hole in Bogotá, Colombia, patrons can dance, play games, enjoy exhibitions and performances, and grab a drink. But while ordering from the menu, they use their hands to communicate. Sin Palabras Café Sordo—which translates to No Words Deaf Café in English—is the South American nation’s first-ever bar designed to accommodate workers and customers with hearing impairments, according to The Nation.

Located in Bogotá's Chapinero neighborhood, Sin Palabras Café Sordo has both deaf servers and menus written in sign language. Customers sit at small tables and flick on a tiny lamp to signal a bartender over to order a drink. When patrons hit the dance floor, they’re greeted by large screens playing music videos with lyrics in sign language, and a pulsing floor that allows partiers to keep in time with the beat.

A trio of Bogotá entrepreneurs—Maria Fernanda Vanegas, Cristian Melo, and Jessica Mojica—teamed up to launch Sin Palabras Café Sordo in June 2017. None of these co-owners is deaf, but Vanegas told The Nation that their goal is “for us, people who can hear, to adapt to the deaf, and not the other way round, which is always the case.” Keeping with this theme, the bar has small cards to teach non-hearing-impaired customers some basic phrases in sign language. (Visitors who don’t know enough sign language to order off the menu can point to items they want, or write them down.)

Business has been so good for Sin Palabras Café Sordo that Vanegas and her co-owners might establish even more café locations around Colombia, according to Lonely Planet. That said, they aren’t the first ones to launch a business that caters to customers with hearing impairments: Granada, Nicaragua recently became home to Café de las Sonrisas (“Smiles Cafe”), a restaurant that employs only deaf cooks and servers, and similar establishments have opened in Canada and India. And in the U.S., there are restaurants like San Francisco’s deaf-owned and -operated pizzeria, Mozzeria.