Pupusas have a new home on Temple Street. La Cocina de Sandra, a restaurant serving dishes from across Latin America, has opened at 25 Temple St. in downtown New Haven, taking over the storefront once occupied by Havenly Cafe. The thick, griddle-cooked corn tortillas, stuffed with fillings and ready in about two minutes, have already become the kitchen's best-selling item, with roughly ten flavor options on offer.
Founder Sandra Trigueros built the business from the ground up, starting it as a ghost kitchen before bringing it into a brick-and-mortar space, according to the New Haven Independent. She joined Havenly's second cohort of trainees and used Havenly's own kitchen as a ghost kitchen while building her menu, the outlet reported. Trigueros also ran a food truck as her business grew, according to a GoFundMe campaign describing how she started out four years ago selling traditional Guatemalan dishes from home as demand for her cooking grew.
The menu at the new storefront spans the region: Salvadoran pupusas, Guatemalan pepián, tamales, empanadas, Mexican mole and pozole all appear on the lineup, per the same report. Business has been brisk out of the gate — the kitchen filled a catering order of 200 pupusas for Yale the Saturday before the Independent's report. For now, La Cocina de Sandra is open seven days a week from noon to 8 p.m., though the restaurant's hours may shift after its first two months in the space.
Havenly's Cafe Closed, But Its Mission Continues
The space itself carries its own history. Havenly, the nonprofit that previously ran a cafe at 25 Temple St. training immigrant and refugee women for the workforce, closed that cafe on July 17. The organization said at the time that it had become unsustainable to run both a cafe and a nonprofit job-training program simultaneously, according to the New Haven Register.
Havenly's other programs didn't disappear along with the cafe. The fellowship program, a childcare incubator, an apprenticeship program, a savings cooperative and an alumnae assembly all continued operating, the Register reported. Fellowship participants now complete three-month externships with local employers rather than training in a cafe kitchen, the paper noted. The Temple Street space will still host meetings of the Havenly women's network, a cooperative for immigrant women, according to the Independent.
From Trainee to Tenant
Havenly was founded in 2018 by Neida Abbas, a refugee from Iraq, and Caterina Passoni, according to CT Insider. By March 2024, 90 women had graduated from its program, and seven of those graduates had gone on to start their own businesses, the outlet reported — a pipeline Trigueros' new storefront now extends in visible, edible form.
Trigueros has said she hopes to grow La Cocina de Sandra further and create jobs, particularly for women who share her background, per the Independent's reporting. It's a goal that echoes a broader pattern tracked elsewhere in the state: Connecticut food incubators have reported growing demand from women and BIPOC food entrepreneurs, according to Connecticut Public. Similar nonprofit models exist beyond New Haven, too — Refuge Coffee Co. runs a job-training program that uses coffee shops and catering operations as classrooms, according to the organization's own description of its work.
For now, the kitchen at 25 Temple St. keeps turning out pupusas by the hundreds, a storefront built on training that started just a few steps away.
