
Audubon Arts | Culture & Community | Economic Development | Puerto Rico | Arts & Culture | Culinary Arts
Lucy Gellman Photos.
Lorivie Alicea studied the cool coconut cream for just a moment, admiring her handiwork before it started to melt. Atop the just-shiny, periwinkle sides of the scoop, flecks of homemade matcha turned into tiny land-masses, as if it was a globe. The sides looked satiny, as if it had been polished. Any closer, and she could smell the gentle coconut, the fruity notes of blue pea. She lifted a wafer-thin wedge of her signature “dark matter” cone, and placed it in the center of the confection.
In every step, she was channeling a lifetime of cooking, from her grandmother’s hand-pressed juices in Bayamón to late night recipe tests with coconut milk, a KitchenAid mixer and a creamy, sweet dream of something beyond a shop in San Juan.
Alicea is one of the chefs behind Vía Láctea CT, a new plant-based sweets shop specializing in frozen desserts and vegan baked goods at 2 Whitney Ave. in the Whitney-Audubon Retail District of New Haven. Tuesday afternoon, she gathered with city officials, New Haven boosters, representatives of Yale Properties and co-owner and chef Reinaldo Sánchez to officially inaugurate the shop.
Inside the bright storefront, the two sell an array of frozen treats, from coconut milk based ice cream and sorbet to pecan brownies and cookies studded with gooey, plant-based chocolate chips. While both hail most recently from San Juan, Sánchez now lives in East Haven; Alicea still splits her time between New Haven and Puerto Rico.
Sánchez, who credited New Haven's small business supports for helping him open.
“It’s truly an honor to celebrate the opening of Vía Láctea here at the heart of the Whitney-Audubon district,” Sánchez said Tuesday, eyeing a pair of comically large scissors that would soon be in his hands. “This vibrant and diverse community feels like the perfect place to continue our journey, and we are thrilled to bring our galaxy of flavors to New Haven.”
The story of Vía Láctea, which this year was named a James Beard Foundation Awards Semifinalist, begins in San Juan, where both Sánchez and Alicea grew up. As a kid, “I always wanted to be a chef,” Sánchez said. At home, his grandmother helped raise him while his mom ran an art studio that would ultimately connect him with Alicea. It instilled in him a deep, almost reverent love for food: he asked for a rice cooker before the time he was a teenager, and became a self-taught chef as the cooker grew up with him.
In Bayamón Alicea also grew up under her grandmother’s watchful eye, learning to trust local foodways as the two picked fruit on her small farm, hand-pressed juices and made traditional desserts like majarete (a warming, silky-smooth corn pudding) and candied green papaya. By early adulthood, she was working as the pastry chef at Bodegas Compostela, a farm-to-table Spanish restaurant in San Juan. After long days at work, she would go home and experiment with ice cream recipes using just her KitchAid mixer and a handful of ingredients.
Finding the right plant-based recipe took time—and the right combination of ingredients. Coconut milk, Alicea explained, is a kind of superstar in this regard: it has enough fat content to mimic the creaminess and heft of dairy, with a flavor that is sweet, a little floral and nutty, and still mild enough to take on other flavor profiles. Enter early visions of deep, rich dark chocolate, bright guava and passionfruit, cazuela de calabaza and ginger root— flavors that have since become Vía Láctea mainstays in both Puerto Rico and Connecticut.
“This has been such a beautiful and heartwarming experience to be, in less than a year, opening our second location abroad,” she said of the shop’s growth since those first beta tests years ago. “I’m so, so thankful for everyone that extended their help.”
It was not always the shop it is now, Sánchez added. When the two started a bakery in San Juan in 2017, their menu included dairy. As they got established, they made every item from scratch, using locally sourced ingredients whenever possible. It gave them the same kind of culinary foundation that they have in New Haven, in which every component—from pumpkin puree and squash-kissed coffeecake to their sesame candy—is handmade in their kitchen.
Top: Bottom: New Haven Independent reporter Laura Glesby, who is vegan, waits for her first taste. Sánchez credited Joe Williams, who manages the New Haven Equitable Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (NHE3) and is standing behind Glesby, with helping the team get the shop off the ground.
From the jump, those included seasonal and temporary flavors, like a coquito that ran during the winter months, or wildberry and matcha-passionfruit, or the vanilla-scented, chewy red banana, harvested from small farmers on the island for a totally unique flavor profile. At some point, dairy became obsolete: the longer the shop was open, the more popular plant-based items became.
At some point, Sánchez recalled, they made the decision to stop selling dairy entirely. Not only did it save costs—milk products are both expensive and perishable—it was also healthier and more sustainable, while still allowing the duo to experiment with flavors and baked goods that rotated with the seasons and holidays. The coquito, for instance, grew out of wanting something traditional around Christmas.
But running a frozen dessert shop in San Juan was also difficult for reasons beyond their culinary control (it still is; the storefront in Puerto Rico is still very much open). Waves of political and economic unrest, cycles of hurricane recovery, and old infrastructure subjected them to rolling blackouts, in which desserts could melt, ingredients might spoil, and employees’ shifts would be canceled at the last minute.
It felt unsustainable. While the two installed a solar array that now generates 50 percent of the energy they need, the other 50 percent relies on a power grid that is fundamentally unreliable. “We were desperate to leave the island, because the island is very unstable right now,” Alicea said.
“I call it survival,” Sánchez added with a tight smile after the ribbon cutting.
Meanwhile, the two thought about expanding their business beyond the island. Thirteen months ago, Sánchez enrolled in New Haven’s “DNA of an Entrepreneur" program, a now-remote initiative of the city’s Small Business Resource Center that teaches business development, human resources and marketing, and financial literacy. He connected with the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, learning about resources like the New Haven Equitable Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (NHE3). It gave him a launchpad so that when he arrived in the city, those small business dreams could become a reality.
“I’m really proud of him,” said Cathy Graves, deputy director of economic development for the city and an early fan of the coffee chip. “He was so dedicated, in class every Monday night. It’s been a journey.”
In New Haven, Vía Láctea is growing that plant-based footprint with an eye toward ingredients that are more frequently used in Connecticut and New England, like fresh summer berries and maple syrup (as he bounced through the kitchen, Sánchez said he is already dreaming of a maple pecan). This fall, for instance, the shop sourced fresh pumpkins from the Guilford-based business Bishop’s Orchards, turning them into a bright, coral-colored pumpkin puree for a special pumpkin flavor.
While Sánchez and Alicea are not vegan themselves, they are sensitive to dietary restrictions, including and especially nuts, Sánchez added. To avoid allergens in their desserts, they only cook with nuts on certain days, keeping those ingredients separate as they cook, freeze, and clean the kitchen. Just as in San Juan, every component is hand-made, from a crumbly, sweet and spicy coffeecake to their signature matcha cookies and “dark matter” cones, made with activated charcoal.
They have a strong culinary palette to show for it. The matcha is smooth and surprisingly subtle, without the powdery grit or bitterness that sometimes comes from using green tea powder. Their pastel-toned “Home Planet,” with bits of matcha and butterfly pea powder, strikes a balance between almost fruity and floral, like early spring on the tongue. The coffee chip, meanwhile, is a testament to Alicea’s background as a pastry chef, with slow-blooming, intense layers of coffee flavor, hints of coconut, whisper-thin chocolate crackles and the just-right balance of salt.
“We’re excited to become a part of this community, to collaborate, and to create moments of joy through our desserts,” Sánchez said, adding that he’s excited to get to know New Haven’s Puerto Rican community. “Today, it isn’t just about opening a shop. It’s about opening a new chapter.”
Tuesday, that excitement was palpable both in and outside the shop, as customers crowded the sidewalk and buzzed around a neat, green-and-white interior waiting their turn for a taste. Through two balloon columns, customers gathered behind a case stocked with almond-streaked guava, pistachio and almond, sweet, vanilla bean and caramel, seed-studded black sesame and a chocolate deep enough to get lost in. Every so often, Alicea reached over to a smaller case of baked goods, pulling out brownies the size of index cards.
Outside, the celebration continued. Noting the business’ proximity to City Hall, Mayor Justin Elicker said that he is excited for many returns to the shop. As it opens, he added, it is part of the small business ecosystem that makes the city a more diverse and interesting place to live and work.
"This corridor is just hopping," he said, noting two other small businesses—the Giggling Pig Art & Party Studio and Habesha Ethiopian Restaurant—that also just opened in the area. "This small business community is what makes our city so vibrant."
"In New Haven, we have so many small businesses that help our economy be resilient," he added. "Because if one of the businesses happens to not do well, there's so many more businesses that can keep it going ... when we spend a dollar on a local small business, much more of that dollar is going to stay in New Haven."