Ivy Roig didn’t set out to open a coffee business. She’d spent years thinking about her family’s coffee farms in Guayanilla, Puerto Rico, dating back to 1876. 

One day, her partner, Dino, said, “Let’s do it.” So they did. 

The couple recently celebrated the completion of Cafe Roig’s first year at CentroVilla25 in the Near West Side’s Clark-Fulton neighborhood. 

The first year was, by many vendors’ accounts, survival mode.

“I expected people to be crazy about it,” Ivy Roig said. “It’s been a slow process.”

Clark-Fultons ‘center of the village’ market was years in the making

CentroVilla was designed by the Hispanic Center for Economic Development as a launchpad for Latino entrepreneurs. The name means “center of the village,” a nod to its location in Clark-Fulton, which has the highest density of Latino residents in Ohio.

Like many vendors, Cafe Roig is navigating both the challenges of a new business and a project still finding its footing.

The project is estimated to have cost about $14 million. Funding was secured through new market tax credits, city and county programs, a corporate fundraising campaign and a grassroots effort within the local Latino community.

In 2023, Cleveland City Council approved $1.5 million to support the project. 

After hearing about the program’s promises to Latino entrepreneurs, Ivy and Dino Roig enrolled in Barrio Progreso. The training program met on Saturdays and covered the fundamentals — marketing, budgeting, cost projections, mission statements and target audiences.

Participants pitched their concepts, and a selection committee chose who would earn a spot inside CentroVilla25. Cafe Roig made the cut, and the couple signed a three-year lease on a kiosk inside the food hall.

Vendors went through IMPACTO, a second round of business training that functioned as a kind of fortification of what they’d already learned. 

JumpStart, an organization that supports business owners in Ohio, provides hands-on daily support designed to help bi-lingual entrepreneurs start and scale their business ventures. They’ve helped CentroVilla25 vendors access interest-free loans. 

The coffee at Cafe Roig comes from Ivy’s relatives still farming in Puerto Rico. It is not commercial coffee. You get it here, or you go to the source. When customers say their product reminds them of home, Ivy knows the concept is working. 

For new CentroVilla25 vendors, year one brought many lessons

Now, a year in, reality has a way of adding texture to their vision. 

Menus started ambitious and had to be trimmed. Recipes had to be perfected to bring people  back. Saturdays got busy. Weekdays stayed quiet. 

CentroVilla is still getting its bearings. The building is new, and leadership is learning as they go. The shared kitchen, the incubator classes, the weekly check-ins with management: all well-meaning, and all imperfect. 

For a while, it felt as though vendors and management alike were figuring out the same things at the same time.

What has helped? MetroHealth employees walking over for lunch. Corporations booking vendors for catering events. A small, loyal neighborhood base is starting to form.

Elizabeth Valdez moved from Orlando, Florida, to Cleveland last year to open La Esquina Dominicana with her cousin. Growing up, family gatherings hosted by their grandmother showed them the wonderful tradition of food, hospitality and community in Dominican culture.

Valdez said she is grateful that CentroVilla has helped turn their passion for cooking into a working reality. 

Vendors spoke optimistically about several CentroVilla amenities they’re counting on to drive foot traffic — a full bar, a renovated event center, an outdoor market, and a long-anticipated grocery — describing some of them as weeks away from opening. 

But when asked for specifics, CentroVilla spokesperson Roselyn Muñiz offered a more measured picture. 

“That’s news to me,” she said of the timelines the vendors had described, adding that firm opening dates for the supermarket, bar, event space and outdoor market are not available. 

The broader target, they said, is sometime this summer or fall. 

The disconnect is clear: Vendors are planning around timelines that management isn’t ready to confirm. 

It’s a project built on genuine community ambition, still working out the distance between vision and execution.

Vendors are candid that more funding from the start would have made things a lot smoother. But the money wasn’t there, and so everyone has been laying the foundation beneath a building already under construction.

There have been additional challenges this year outside of CentroVilla’s control. Valdez said that federal ICE crackdowns have decreased engagement as community members fear that community spaces like CentroVilla will be targeted. An especially cold winter also reduced foot traffic. 

La Placita an outdoor pop-up market celebrating Hispanic culture, community andsmall businesses will be at CentroVilla25 starting in June on weekends from noon to 6 p.m. (Except for July 4th.) The market is located at 3140 W 25th St in Cleveland.

CentroVilla25 vendors hope to build as market grows

Year two, vendors say, is about building on what they’ve learned. 

New hires are working on securing grants and improving marketing. Outside seating is finally being considered. There is talk of scheduling live music on Saturdays.

“Year one was survival,” Dino Roig said. “Year two is: OK, we know what we’re doing a little more. Year three is what we’re really building toward.”

CentroVilla operates under a revenue-sharing rent model rather than a fixed monthly lease — meaning the more a shop earns, the more it pays toward occupancy.

Ivy and Dino Roig describe the arrangement as workable for now, though they’re candid that it’s too early to know whether it will feel equitable at scale. “If we’re making half a million in sales and paying a percentage of rent on that,” Dino said,  “maybe I won’t feel the same way.” 

For a business still in its growth phase, the structure offers some breathing room — but the real verdict, they said, is a year three question.

The couple is honest that they wish they had known more going in — that they wish the funding had been there earlier, that some things on both sides could have been done differently. 

“Every challenge is an opportunity to grow,” said Valdez. 

She appreciates that CentroVilla allows vendors to get creative about driving foot traffic. In February, she helped organize an event to celebrate Dominican Independence Day. 

Valdez looks forward to taking advantage of all the support CentroVilla offers to one day move to their own location. “I can’t wait until I clear out my kiosk for the next generation of entrepreneurs,” she added. 

For the grand opening last May, Ivy Roig’s sister and brother-in-law flew in from Puerto Rico. Standing in the middle of the kiosk she had built from nothing, surrounded by family, it finally felt real — not a dream she’d been carrying around, but an actual place people could walk into and order coffee.

“Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it,” she said, “that we have a coffee shop.”

But then someone takes a sip and says they haven’t tasted anything like this since they left the island. And Ivy Roig thinks about her father — the one who used to make coffee every morning until the smell woke everyone up, the one whose family line stretches back to those farms in Guayanilla, the one who isn’t here to see any of this.

She thinks he would be proud.