27-year-old café owner draws from his Dominican roots

The Don Carvajal coffee shop on Main Street is a college project come to life. 

In 2018, Hector Carvajal was a junior majoring in business at the University of Rochester when he dreamed up a coffee venture to fulfill a marketing class assignment. Carvajal, now 27, had spent the first eight years of his life in the Dominican Republic, and when he began research for the project, he discovered a lack of representation for his culture.

“There’s Colombian coffee, Vietnamese, Brazilian, Ethiopian,” said Carvajal, who has lived in the Bronx for almost 20 years. “Every coffee origin has somebody representing it, but for Dominican coffee, there was nobody. And I was born out there in the countryside, so I know we had coffee there. I just didn’t see it represented.”