Cafe Reyés | 421 Shrewsbury St., Worcester | (508) 762-9900 | cafereyes.org

Walking into Café Reyes, your eyes are met with bright colors and the smell of the roast pork. But this is no ordinary restaurant.

Cafe Reyes opened on Shrewsbury Street in January to serve as an outlet for hands-on job training for those staying at the Hector Reyes House. Café Reyes serves traditional Cuban cuisine and offers full-service catering.

The Hector Reyes House is a 25-bed, culturally focused program and treatment facility for Latino males that opened in 2008, as a response by Hector Reyes (a native of Puerto Rico and a Worcester resident) and others in the Worcester area to the rise in violence and substance abuse problems.

Many people pick up leadership skills at school or at work. But for Reymond Ortiz, these are skills that, due to a series of events in his life, he was never able to obtain. Now, after years of substance abuse problems and trouble, Cafe Reyes and the Hector Reyes House are helping him and other Latino men recovering from substance abuse problems get these valuable work-life skills.

According to the program’s director, Dr. Matilde Castiel, the idea for the unique program stemmed from a discussion around the high risk of relapse due to unemployment and the inability to obtain or keep a job. Castiel said employers often assume employees have job and leadership skills. Castiel and others involved in the creation of Cafe Reyes felt that it was important to bring the participants’ Latin American culture into the restaurant.

For the first few months, participants in the program receive a $100 stipend for their work, then they are officially hired or recommended for a job elsewhere. The program also works with Quinsigamond Community College, where participants take a 100-hour course that covers everything from safe food handling and restaurant machinery to hospitality.

Ortiz said Café Reyes is helping him to learn and better himself. “I was always a follower, never a leader. I always wanted to do everything a little bit better than everyone else. … If they were gangbanging, so was I, and if they were doing drugs, so was I.” Now, Ortiz is learning how to lead and deal with his emotions through his work as a server at Cafe Reyes. Through Café Reyes and the Hector Reyes House, Ortiz said, he is distancing himself from his previous “animalistic lifestyle” and “learning responsibility – waking up in the morning and taking care of myself.”

According to Café Reyes manager and chef instructor, Kenneth Bourbeau, “We work on everything, from keeping a time sheet to showing up on time, to how and when to call out professionally.” Bourbeau said many of the men in the program have either been out of the work environment for a number of years or were never really part of it.

Both Bourbeau and Castiel hope to see Café Reyes expand its hours into the weekend and grow the business for the catering department. Café Reyes was funded by a number of grants, said Castiel, but the goal is for Café Reyes to be a self-sustaining restaurant.

“At work, I always put a smile on people’s faces; that’s the most amazing thing to me. Before, I was always hurting people; I destroyed everything I touched,” Ortiz said.

Café Reyes serves traditional Cuban cuisine from 7 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday and offers full-service catering. For more information, visit cafereyes.org.

By Brianna Duval