Manjares Closes; Farewell Event Scheduled For Wednesday

By Brandon Cortes, New Haven Independent

NEW HAVEN, CT — After anchoring a Westville Village block for the past 17 years, the Latin American restaurant and café Manjares has now closed.

Subscribe

Owner Ana De Los Angeles plans to host a farewell event for customers on Wednesday from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. — before auctioning off the restaurant's furniture and fixtures on Sept. 29.

The closure comes after the Independent first reported in late August on the decision by the restaurant's landlord ArLoW — aka ArtsLoftsWest — to not renew Manjares' lease at 382 West Rock Ave., citing nearly $30,000 in unpaid rent. The landlord initially told the restaurant to vacate the space by Sept. 30.

In an interview with the Independent on Monday, De Los Angeles said that she has decided to leave rather than pursue a legal fight to try and stay. ArtLoftsWest founding member Thea Buxbaum confirmed, once more, that the lease would not be renewed under any circumstances.

"I want to leave here with the same love I came in with," De Los Angeles said on Monday. "I don't want anything to trouble my soul by fighting for something where I no longer feel welcome."

She said she reached out to Buxbaum one more time after the Independent's earlier story on the dispute, asking again whether paying the debt in full might change things. The answer, she said, was as final as before.

Despite the outcome, De Los Angeles said she remains grateful to Buxbaum for years of support.

"She has always guided her life with a lot of love and respect," De Los Angeles said, adding that she doesn't want the value of money to outweigh how she feels about the relationship. "After 17 years of so much work, so much effort, I feel like I need to take some time to reconnect with myself and find new ideas to carry on Manjares' legacy."

Buxbaum told the Independent that she has fielded significant interest in the space over the past few weeks, though nothing is finalized.

"We do not have the next tenant yet, but we will make sure that whoever comes in will be a wonderful addition to Westville," Buxbaum said.

De Los Angeles said she isn't rushing into what comes next. Several people have offered her other spaces, she said, but she wants to take her time.

"I don't want another business of sacrifice, the way Manjares was, in the good sense of the word," she said, describing the years of exposing her whole life to the business. "That's something nobody can take from me — where I got to, the years I dedicated, the brutal work I put into this place."

On Sept. 29, the restaurant's furniture and fixtures will go up for auction. Her husband, painter Miguel Trelles, will take his paintings back to New York.

De Los Angeles praised her staff, including Angelica Echevarría, who has worked at Manjares for about 10 years. She credited her employees with standing by her through the hardest stretches, especially after Covid, and said she has come to think of them less as staff than as family — a family, she said, that will outlast the restaurant itself.

"They were employees who stood by me through the good and the bad, especially after Covid. This family that I built here — between them and me — is a family that will last forever. I hardly ever saw them as employees. I saw them more as part of my family," De Los Angeles said.

Wednesday's farewell event, De Los Angeles said, is her way of saying thank you without saying a full goodbye — not just to current regulars, but to customers going back to her days working at Lulu's, the East Rock coffee shop where she worked before opening Manjares.

"I hope some of them hear about it and at least stop by to say goodbye and get a hug," she said.

De Los Angeles said she has cried with customers who have come in since the news broke.

"I've received that same love from them, coming in and saying, 'Mami, we're so sorry,'" she said. "I've had support, comfort, and others who've told me they don't even want to walk past."

Manjares opened in July 2009, its name arriving to De Los Angeles in a dream about her late father after a marathon stretch of baking. She later added a tapas bar at night, run by a chef from the Dominican Republic, and a small gelato shop next door that eventually became the space's bar. Both additions grew out of her negotiating with Buxbaum for adjacent space in the building over the years — expansions she said came easily in the restaurant's earlier years.

Gabriel Thomas, De Los Angeles' social media manager, said the closure marks the loss of something the community won't easily replace.

"For the most part I think it's a very culturally relevant place, and I feel sad, but also, like Ana, I feel at peace," Thomas said. "I think Ana's community and everybody who has come through will miss this."

Asked what she'd say to sum it all up, De Los Angeles didn't call it an ending.

"This is not goodbye," she said. "It's see you soon."

The New Haven Independent is a not-for-profit public-interest daily news site founded in 2005.