The first day I woke up in Panama, a SUV whisked me to the airport at dawn to meet chef Mario Castrellón and his partner Benito Bermudez, co-owners of Maito, the first restaurant in the country ever to win prestigious stars and prizes and shoot up on international rankings. We boarded a short flight to Boquete, the town at the heart of what aficionados hail as the Holy Land of coffee, deep in the mountains and 400 quilometers kilometers Southwest of Panama City. Then we rode up the steep, misty valleys at the foot of the Barú volcano to meet Wilford Lamastus at Finca Elida, the most famed of his family’s three estates.

   Harvest was at full throttle. Men and women in straw hats carried sacks loaded with bright red berries down the steep hill to be weighed, sorted and spread on wire to dry. Wilford, told me Benito, is “a figther who left the country in the nineties, when low demand forced them to sell off the harvest at rock bottom prices, then came back and turned the family business around”. A born communicator, he led an unrelenting promotional blitz abroad, alongside a small group of quality producers who owned fincas nearby, and “single-handedly put Panama coffee on the map”.