Top: Dr. Karla Tejada Arias, Malby Rojas, and their one-month-old son, Leo. Bottom: Katya Vetrov, who owns Inkberry Art Shop with her husband Chris Killheffer.
Malby Rojas made her way behind a bakery counter, floating toward two ovens that had been hard at work just hours before. Beside her, loaves of sourdough sat atop each other, golden brown on top with a soft, springy give beneath the crust. The air was warm and fragrant, with a low-hanging tang left over from that morning’s work.
In the background, her wife watched their one-month-old, Leo, as he stirred in his sleep. For a moment, he scrunched up his tiny mouth, then relaxed. A single, tiny sheaf of wheat rose on his onesie. Rojas looked at him, then back at the kitchen. “I don’t know how I did it,” she said with a half smile—but she had.
Rojas, whose bread tells a story of flour-dusted community, is the new co-owner of Malby’s Pastries, a brick-and-mortar bakery where her wildest sugared and sourdough dreams can take flight. Tuesday, she cut a ribbon on the space with her wife, Dr. Karla Tejada Arias, their son Leo, several city officials, and fellow Westville business owner Katya Vetrov. Vetrov, who is herself a printmaker, owns Inkberry Art Shop with her husband Chris Killheffer.
The businesses, which sit right next door to each other at 910 and 912 Whalley Ave., take the place of Westville General Store and Alisa’s House of Salsa (AHOS). Both of those artists are still very much in New Haven: Westville General owner Alex Dakoulas runs Strange Ways downtown, and AHOS owner Alisa Bowens now teaches in a second-floor studio at 506 Blake St.
“We don’t want to lose sight of how exciting it is that folks like Malby and Karla and Katya and her partner are taking the risk here, and starting new businesses in the village,” said Carlos Eyzaguirre, deputy economic development administrator for the City of New Haven. Not only did the neighborhood need more food, but “arts is our sort of our bread and butter.”
Top: Carlos Eyzaguirre, deputy economic development administrator for the City of New Haven. Growing up in the city's Beaver Hills neighborhood, "a lot of this was unimaginable 25 years ago," he said. Bottom: Westville mover and shaker Thea Buxbaum, who was a founding member of Westville Artwalk, WVRA and ArLoW almost three decades ago. “Our vision isn’t a white-gloved, dainty thing,” she said. “Our vision is businesses that are owned by everyone who lives in our neighborhood. We have Black-owned. Asian-owned. Latino-owned. Women-owned businesses. We have collectives. That’s who we are, and we need to help them thrive.”
For both couples, the path to small business ownership has not been linear. Rojas, who immigrated from Venezuela to Miami in 2017, worked for years as a baker, pastry chef and line cook in various restaurants, from Miami to Chicago to Cambridge to New Haven (read more about that here). After making the move to the Elm City in 2021, she did stints in the Blake Hotel and at Gioia, where she still provides fresh bread twice a week.
Then last year, Rojas decided to start baking full-time, and see if she could make it work as a business model (she is quick to say that she could not do it without Arias). Through a series of neighborhood pop-ups, farmers markets, and weekend bread dropoffs, she realized that she was on to something. Her search for a space, which went on for months, finally led her to Westville—and to the realization that she would have to build out a bakery herself.
After months of hard labor, it’s like her second home. As she walked through the bakery Tuesday, she pointed out twin bread ovens (“It’s still hot,” she warned of one when this reporter got close), multiple pristine sinks, neat shelves of flour, spices and ingredients, two large refrigerators and a freezer with digital timers fixed to the doors. Over a dozen loaves of sourdough, fragrant and golden, sat atop a stainless steel rack, ready to be handed out at a press conference outside.
“Malby did 80 percent of this herself,” Arias said as Rojas smiled, playing down the sheer amount of work that has made the space both functional and gotten it fully up to code. She later remembered spending hours in the now-bakery, transforming the space with new plumbing fixtures, delicate wall moulding and infrastructure for deck ovens, then going home to get their Westville home ready for a new baby.
Baby Leo, of course, may have (rightly) remained Tuesday’s most-beloved freshly baked good, from his casual stroller nap inside the bakery to a cozy space in Rojas’ arms, snugly wrapped in a green muslin blanket for the brisk, breezy weather outside. When Rojas spoke, handing him gently to Arias, she thanked him for opening her eyes to a new world of possibility. In response, he mewled away in the background, finding his voice as Arias held him against her chest.
“You have changed the way I see the world,” Rojas said, addressing Leo as both she and attendees got teary. “You inspire me every single day to be a better person. And everything I do now carries a little more meaning because of you.”
That doesn’t mean it’s straightforward, she added. In fact, managing the bakery is a little like having two newborns at the same time. Since Leo’s arrival last month, she’s taken the first half of the night shift with him, waking up at 3 a.m. to get ready for work (if she is not already awake, because that’s life with a newborn) and heading to the bakery by 4. Once she’s there, she begins on her bread, a mix of water, flour and salt that relies on natural fermentation.
Bottom: Betty Carranza, who is helping Rojas out in the shop.
Currently, she fields two large weekly orders—20 loaves for 80 Proof downtown, and 20 for Gioia in Wooster Square, spread over two different days—as well as weekly requests from customers that come through her website. While she has a standard menu, she’s constantly thinking of adding to it, from new twists on her bread and focaccia to golfeados, Venezuelan sticky buns made with panela, nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves and topped with cheese.
She gets help from her sister, Betty Carranza.
“This bakery isn’t just ours,” she said during her comments, as listeners beamed. Just minutes later, they would be taking turns tucking into a loaf, dipping bits in olive oil and sprinkling it with salt to get the full effect. “It’s yours. Thank you for believing in what we’re building.”
Next door at 910 Whalley Ave., Vetrov welcomed customers into the space, which sells the work of over 20 New Haven area and Connecticut artists. There is, for instance, hammered and sculpted metal from jeweller Kate Stephen, who works just across the street at West River Arts; mobiles by David Sepulveda that have gained Westville celebrity status; small and large quilted designs from Whole Circle Studio (artist Sheri Cifaldi-Morrill) and felted bouquets Oakwind Hollow.
Stationary from Katharine Watson, Sandra Malan and Ariana Hernandez Bergstrom peeks out from the wall; leaves sprout from ceramic planters by Tandem Ceramics and Beacon Craft Studio. Bars of Tierra Soap wink at mixed-media earrings by artist Wendy Lewis.
It’s more than twee: it is a full-out celebration of Connecticut makers, at a time when supporting local business may be more vital than ever.
“I really wanted to create a space where I could bring people together in a brick-and-mortar location, so that if someone wants a handmade gift, or remembers an artist that they saw at Artwalk or Erector Square, that they could come to Inkberry Art Shop and find them there,” Vetrov said.
To be in Westville, she added, is a long-held dream come true. While she may not call the neighborhood home—her family lives in the Spring Glen section of Hamden—she’s had her eye on the property for some time. After growing up in Fairfield and attending college in Russia, she moved to New Haven to work for Long Wharf Theatre, where she became a fixture in their costume shop for two years.
Years later, she still has ties to New Haven, where she teaches art history at Gateway Community College and vends at festivals like Artwalk and Night Market. When she’s making her own art, she works out of her home, in a studio space with a secondhand Vandercook Press.
“I love all the events that they have here [in Westville] and I felt like there was this art community,” she said.
Now, both she and Rojas fit into Westville’s bright, artsy landscape, from yarn-wrapped trees to a studio that becomes a movie theater once every few weeks. Across the street from the shops Tuesday, customers rotated in and out of Pistachio Cafe, carrying rosewater-scented lattes, hot cups of coffee and Lebanese and Syrian sweets like namoura and basbousa.
Just next door, artists tinkered and buzzed in their studios at West River Arts. Passers-by peeked in at Gabriel Da Silva’s frame shop and stopped by the windows at Kehler Liddell Gallery and a duet of thrift stores nearby. By the late afternoon, Manjares' lunch rush would give way to the first bites of dinner at Camacho Garage.
Top: Mayor Justin Elicker. Bottom: WVRA Executive Director Elizabeth (Lizzy) Donius. "This is super exciting. it just feels like the city is back, fully back, after the pandemic," Donius said. "There seems to be thousands of people out, it's wonderful, so to be able to have this today is really wonderful. I think the whole city lifts up entrepreneurs like this."
That creative small-business vision, ArtLoftsWest (ArLoW) landlord Thea Buxbaum said, is exactly what led neighbors to start the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance (WVRA) 28 years ago. When she became a founding member of ArLoW soon after, it was with the belief that a neighborhood's businesses should reflect the people who live there: working artists and librarians and teachers and parents and young kids, all from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.
“Our vision isn’t a white-gloved, dainty thing,” she said. “Our vision is businesses that are owned by everyone who lives in our neighborhood. We have Black-owned. Asian-owned. Latino-owned. Women-owned businesses. We have collectives. That’s who we are, and we need to help them thrive.”
That's especially true as neighbors keep a frustrated eye on Vape R Us, a new smoke shop in what was once a Black-owned artisanal chocolate shop.
“Malby and Karla learned quickly that if they feed you, you want them nearby … it [her bread] is mind-blowingly delicious,” Buxbaum said to laughs, explaining that she turned down a number of smoke and vape shops that may have been more lucrative, but would not have fit the neighborhood’s vibe (ArLoW currently owns 910 and 912 Whalley Ave., as well as the buildings that house Rawa, Manjares, and Kehler Liddell Gallery).
“And Katya said something when I met her that was so moving. She said. ‘I’ve been watching that storefront. I regretted not taking it. And then it opened up, and I had to find you.’ She’s been watching Westville. She wanted to be here. This is the place to be.”
During the press conference, Mayor Justin Elicker also lauded Rojas, Arias, Vetrov and Killheffer, pointing to the way small, locally-owned businesses support the city that they call home. Out of every dollar spent at a small business, 67 cents goes back into the community.
That number is likely even higher in the arts: Americans for the Arts reported in 2023 that arts and culture made up a nearly $1 billion industry in Connecticut, bringing $161,420,087 into the Greater New Haven Region alone.
Those are "exactly the kind of businesses that we want in our city,” Elicker said. “They're family-owned, neighborhood-based, they offer creative and unique items and bring something special and different to customers and the community."