July 4, 2009
Chelsea coffee shop closes doors
Sucelt Coffee Shop in Chelsea closed its doors on Christmas Eve because of skyrocketing rent prices. Jehnny Navarro, the owner, center, waits on a customer. (Marlene Peralta)
"How do you want your beans -- black or red," asked Jehnny Navarro, owner of Sucelt Coffee Shop in Chelsea. "Do you want your rice yellow or white?"
On any other day, those would have been routine questions, but this was no regular day -- Christmas Eve was the last time they would ever be asked at the restaurant. Sucelt, the Latin American eatery her father began in 1976 that could seat only 10, was closing its doors for good.
Rising rents coupled with newly enforced city regulations dealt a lethal blow to the restaurant. Navarro would have been forced to hike her popular low prices, something she was reluctant to do.
"I don't want to serve the rich, I want to serve the poor because they were the ones who kept us here for 31 years," Navarro said.
The coffee shop opened in July 1976, when the blocks around it were heavily Latino, with Cubans, Colombians and even Spaniards. Like those residents, many small Latino businesses in the area have slowly vanished. In September, Lectorum, a Latino bookstore, closed after decades, as well as the bookstore Macondo and the restaurant Havana Chelsea.
Navarro's father Juan Graña, initially sold Cuban food and then slowly transitioning into a more diverse Latin menu with the help of his Colombian wife, Sucelt, whom he named the restaurant after. The menu would become extensive, including 11 kinds of sandwiches and empanadas from five countries.
"My coffee is unique," says Graña, who was visiting the restaurant on its final day. "I boil the milk before mixing it with espresso coffee, Americans make it with cold milk.".
Navarro, 51, took over the business in 2000 with her sister Yvonne, after their father retired. Navarro says, aside from the increasing rent, she could no longer have a kitchen in the basement due to newly enforced fire department regulations banning open-flame cooking in cellars.
Although she could have built a kitchen on the same level as the shop, she decided not renew her lease, which expired in June.
"It is not even worth it because bringing the kitchen to this floor would mean taking half of the space I have now to seat my customer and as you can see it is already too small."
Another option was to rent a space available right across the street, but the rent there is $17,000 a month, more than twice what she was paying at the end, an increase Navarro didn't want to pass on to her loyal customers.
The regulars included Maria Rios, who often stopped by with her daughter Jessica. "I am sorry for my daughter who loves cheese empanadas, this is the last one we'll eat," Rios said.
Raul Aran, 72, has been dining at Sucelt since it opened. "They even gave me credit when I had no money to eat, they were very good to me."
Others couldn't hold back tears. "I am devastated, this is hard, I made friends here" said a customer who wanted to be identified only as a professor at Rutgers University. "I lived here 20 years ago and never stopped coming to have breakfast everyday," he added with teary eyes.
On the last day, Navarro couldn't avoid crying herself every time a customer offered a last goodbye.
She collected everyone's contact information in a small notebook, and said she will take a vacation and possibly start catering from her home in New Jersey.
"If God wanted us to leave it will be for the better," she said with teary eyes.
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