Local Hero: CAFÉ / COFFEE SHOP

AN INTERVIEW WITH SOLANGE SERQUIS AND ANDRES PAGLAYAN, OWNERS

Photos by Stephanie Cameron

Since the day they gathered beneath the rusty 1949 Monte Vista Fuel and Feed building in Santa Fe, Cafecito’s owners have transformed the space to manifest their vision. A landscape architect, Solange Serquis crafts spaces that connect communities, foster learning, and facilitate healing, spaces that echo her outdoor-oriented childhood. Her optimism guides her local and international work, driven by her mission to inspire through design. Andres Paglayan, with a background spanning business management, biomedical science, textiles, industrial construction, and software development, helps Serquis’s vision materialize, grounding her creative instincts with his practical experience.

Empanadas and maté, two of Cafecito’s distinctive menu items, reflect basic advice from the owners’ restaurateur family members, who suggested that a menu must have a strong connection with one’s reality. “Do what’s true to you,” they were told. Thus, a menu of Argentine and Armenian cuisine. “Customers appreciate the authenticity that Cafecito embraces,” say Serquis and Paglayan. “No, we cannot match our grandmothers’ [dishes], but we are still working on it!”

Solange Serquis and Andres Paglayan, owners, at Cafecito.

You’re entrepreneurs, designers, real estate developers, builders, café owners, and parents. How do you keep it all going, and how does Cafecito fit into the mix?

We try a holistic, go-with-the-flow lifestyle. All we do in life and business is interconnected. Serquis + Associates, our landscape architecture firm, is a small office with a seasoned team of creatives producing ideas and designs that get built. Our children, who grew up visiting construction sites and actively participating in our ventures, are part of the set of experts we consult before making important decisions. As for Cafecito, we see it as a way to express our vocation for hospitality—“a tribute and care for the other” through food, ambience, and service. The café is an evolving challenge that is finding its way and identity, and attracting team players. Good things take time, effort, commitment, and consistency!

Cafecito opened in 2019, just before the pandemic began. How did that affect the way your menu and offerings developed? What’s different now?

The menu is a restaurant navigation chart. Since we never closed, it had to be changed almost weekly, adjusting to different imposed conditions. Today is more stable, but we are still learning, evolving, and preparing innovations.

Cafecito has always relied on local growers and producers. Who are your partners, and how do you envision those relationships developing as Cafecito evolves?

Our local partners are Reunity Resources Community Farm, ArtfulTea, Sage Bakehouse, Above Sea Level, Chocolate Maven, ZIA Beverage, Sheehan Winery, Gruet Winery, Taos Cow, Toni Fuge (wood for furniture), Chlorophyll Fine Houseplants, local tango dancers, pottery artists, and others. This is still an area with room for improvement for us, and our commitment is to grow and evolve with them.

Your culinary aesthetic is distinct for being simple yet elevated, reflecting the spirit of Serquis’s landscape designs, Cafecito’s greenhouse-style dining room, and the modern rental units you’ve built. Tell us about your influences. What inspires you?

Inspiration and ideas come from our own lives, heritage, experiences, friends, and, mostly, from the work and influences of our parents. Traveling and looking at everything around us contributes to the shaping of ideas. Cafecito’s greenhouse under the trees (forest) is part of the showroom for Serquis + Associates, a green destination to unwind. We planted the trees, in a variety of sizes, before finishing the construction. Today we refer to each one as an experiential learning tool for our visitors, clients, and collaborators. Construction began in 2017, and now six years later the trees are getting the protagonism as planned. A landscape with a building, not a building with a landscape!

You’ve been involved in the planning of the bike path and access between the Baca Railyard and downtown. You offer bikes to those staying on your property and have installed EV chargers in your parking area. In your vision, where does urban planning intersect with food?

Serquis: My vision is urbanism at a human scale, and an environment contributing to people’s health and wellness. I was a landscape architecture intern making renderings at the firm that did the Railyard master plan for Santa Fe. A multimodal dream is what provided the drive to develop the Trailhead Compound. Cafecito is not just the food, it’s a part of a bigger view of the human scale. Ideally, we can create the perfect environment for food to have its place between other needs for human nurturing. Cafecito is a confluence point for drivers, bikers, pedestrians, locals, and visitors coming to or from the trail, wandering for some relaxation, fun, a bite, coffee, maté, or a glass of wine.

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Left: Empanada sampler plate with chimichurri. Right: Housemade pasta with grilled beef strips.

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With all of your projects and interests, how do you find time to enjoy each other? When you do get time off, what do you like to eat?

We are best friends and celebrate each other, taking turns to back each other’s interests and projects. We have breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the most fun snacks (maté con tostadas con dulce de leche) while checking on our family, revising our current schedules, and making deadlines—and we always look to the horizon for the next vision.

While we have our fair share of disagreements and different opinions, we always find a way to compromise and create the perfect balance. From the black and white, we often get to beautiful shades of gray, and we always manage to get things done or learn how to evolve and keep us going. At home at the end of the day, the projects are infinite! Now planting an orchard is part of our daily lives and that part feels like time off.

We like all food when it is made with good ingredients, and we are very curious to try everything when we are traveling. We cook and sit at the table at home every day—a ritual we both got from our families in Argentina.

You’ve both lived in Santa Fe for more than twenty years. What does community mean to you?

Community is the world at a scale where we can contribute to making things better. We make the effort supporting art, education, and children’s development. We frequently host teachers in our Airbnb, and students and young artists in our café, often weaving art and education into these spaces as a manifestation of our gratitude toward our community, and a commitment to the future of our youth.

Any plans for travel (or recent travel stories)? What kinds of destinations inspire you?

Last May our family visited Armenia to celebrate Hermine’s (Andres’s mother) eightieth birthday. We had never been there before and the experience provided a better understanding of ourselves.

We were eating simple food crafted from the best grains and by traditional artisans, enjoying civic spaces, and getting greens and flavors directly from the land.

922 Shoofly, Santa Fe, 505-310-0089, cafecitosantafe.com