Café owner has made it through, with a little help
Leyla Dam Jenkins and her downtown coffee shop Lorca have experienced tremendous growth in the cafe’s eight years in Stamford.
But the successful run has not been without tribulations.
Dam Jenkins opted to close her shop in February for renovations, as it expanded to take over the old Downtown Golf storefront.
She was pregnant with her second child, a boy, and hoping to take her business to the next level. The new, bigger Lorca opened its doors three days after her son was born.
Then, the pandemic struck.
“We were already set up for to-go orders,” Dam
Jenkins told Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz this week. “So, we weren’t ready, but we were prepared.”
A skim milk latte in hand, Bysiewicz wasn’t there just for pleasure. The lieutenant governor along with state representatives and community leaders were on a tour of businesses to commemorate Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from Sept. 15 until Oct. 15 every year.
Surviving, with help
“We had to close three weeks after we reopened,” Dam Jenkins told her.
Dam Jenkins shuttered both Lorca locations, in Stamford and Cos Cob in Greenwich.
On Bedford St., Lorca bounced back. In Greenwich, the location closed permanently.
Dam Jenkins emphasized to Bysiewicz that her business couldn’t have survived the pandemic without help from the Women’s Business Development Council, a group geared toward providing entrepreneurial resources to women across the state.
The group’s headquarters sits just across the street from Lorca’s Stamford location.
“I had no idea how to apply for PPP or EIDL,” said Dam Jenkins, referring to the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans — two mechanisms that business owners have used to keep themselves afloat during the COVID-19 crisis.
The WBDC guided Dam Jenkins through the application process for both programs, providing her and other small businesses a vital lifeline, she said.
A mentor provided by the council also helped Dam Jenkins deal with banks as she closed her Cos Cob location, which first opened in 2017.
It was one of the hardest choices she had ever made, Dam Jenkins said.
“You can be as passionate as you want about your business, but they only care about the numbers,” she said.
Along with Dam Jenkins, Stamford state Rep. Patricia Billie Miller, D-145, lauded Bysiewicz for supporting the WBDC and the resources it provides throughout the state.
“We work hard to make sure that the WBDC has enough funding to keep itself going,” said Miller.
The council in August launched a fundraising effort to help expand its microgrant program to support women business owners in Connecticut.
Architect to entrepreneur
At its inception, Lorca was just a tiny storefront on Bedford Street slinging lattes and churros to its clientele. Dam Jenkins serves the Spanish pastries to pay homage to café culture in her native Spain, the heritage that brought Bysiewicz to her shop.
Dam Jenkins moved to the United States at eight years old. By age 11, her family settled in Darien.
She graduated during the last economic recession, a situation somewhat like the one in which she now finds herself. She trained to be an architect, and then was launched into an abyss of uncertainty.
“Nobody was hiring architects because nobody was building anything,” she said.
Dam Jenkins found herself in a series of babysitting gigs and barista jobs to try to sustain herself amid the economic turmoil. Despite the seemingly bleak prospects, she found her stints in New York City cafes comforting, like a callback to her childhood in Spain or times cooking with her mother.
“That’s our culture,” said Dam Jenkins. “We were always in the kitchen with my mom chopping things for her.”
After some time working as an architect, she used that experience to launch Lorca and transformed herself into a small business owner.
After almost a decade in Stamford and eight months of a pandemic, Dam Jenkins does not plan on giving up the business she has spent so long building from the ground up.
“To be honest,” she told Bysiewicz. “I think everything is going to feel easy after this.”