Neighborhood residents took photos of their guava cheesecakes and greeted old friends inside Café Tropical in Silver Lake on Thursday. It was a sweet reunion for cafe patrons who have missed the Cuban institution since it closed suddenly in November.
At Thursday's reopening event, new owners Danny Khorunzhiy, Ed Cornell and Rene Navarrette welcomed customers to the nearly 50-year-old establishment and served a limited menu that included breakfast sandwiches and coffee.
“The community outpouring has been really great,” Khorunzhiy said.
Café Tropical will officially reopen to the public on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Regular business hours going forward will be Tuesday through Sunday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., the owners said.
Tropical has been a fixture on Sunset Boulevard since 1975, when the street connecting Silver Lake to Echo Park was home to many Cuban-American businesses. A family legal dispute contributed to the unexpected closure of the cafe, as well as its sister businesses, El Cochinito restaurant and Bolita bar.
The cafe was not only a treasured coffee shop, but also an unofficial beacon for people in addiction recovery. Meetings were held day and night in a back room.
“I have frequented the community room here for the past 15 years,” Khorunzhiy said. “This place has really had an impact on my life.”
When Khorunzhiy heard that Tropical was closing, he asked Navarrette to help him gather a group of people from the community to save it. Navarrette connected the group with his brother, Eddie Navarrette, executive director of the Independent Hospitality Coalition.
“Recently, they've been trying to save older restaurants that are being phased out here in Los Angeles,” René Navarrette said. “This was already on our minds.”
Cornell was working at the nearby Quarter Sheets when Khorunzhiy approached him to enter the Cafe Tropical kitchen.
“We reset the menu, but kept some things that we thought were the most popular and loved,” Cornell said. “We reduced it so we could reopen and not destroy ourselves or ruin anything.”
For about the last four weeks, the group has been working to prepare the restaurant to reopen and even brought back some former staff, many of whom were left without pay after the unexpected closure.
Some guests at Café Tropical's soft reopening on March 14 were eager to get back to their favorite tables.
(Sarah Mosqueda / Los Angeles Times)
More items will be added to the menu once Café Tropical is back to full staff, with a better idea of how busy it will be, the new team said. Cornell assured guests that they can count on lattes and at least three tropical dishes.
“The guava cheese, the guava cakes and the Cuban sandwich; Those are three things we said: 'We know we can't open without them,'” Cornell said.
Local writer trained in a cafe
Poet, author and Silver Lake native Yesika Salgado days ago sparked initial rumors of a reopening when she posted on her Instagram account that she was nearly moved to tears when she bit into a guava cheesecake on a pre-opening visit.
“I've been going to Café Tropical my whole life. I have lived in Silver Lake since I was born and I don't have a single memory of Café Tropical not being on the corner of Sunset and Parkman,” Salgado said.
Salgado started going to the cafe as a child with her mother and continued doing so as a teenager, when she had friends who worked there. As an adult, she said, Café Tropical became her preferred workspace early in her writing career.
“When I started writing more seriously and needed somewhere to go outside of my house, the closest café within walking distance was welcoming,” he said.
Café Tropical was where Salgado wrote his first poetry collection, “Los Poemas de Luna,” and where he had his first meeting with his editor.
“There I worked on the manuscripts; “That was my office,” Salgado said. “I think I became just another piece of furniture in the cafe.”
Like Salgado, some guests at the opening were eager to return to their favorite table and settle in with their laptops. Others were looking forward to the return of sobriety meetings, which will begin again next week, Khorunzhiy said.
“That's how I found out about this place, through the meeting room. That is an important and vital part of why we are doing this,” Khorunzhiy said.
Cornell, Khorunzhiy and Navarrette recognize that Café Tropical has become the third place for many in the community, and the partners are working hard to make sure the sun doesn't set on Café Tropical.
“It feels good to be a part of something that wasn't lost,” Navarrette said.
