At the intersection of Grand and Chase avenues, the heart of the Shelter Island Heights Historic District, sits a little old house with huge front windows and creaky wooden floors called Stars Café. There are no fewer than three other establishments for a good, hot cuppa nearby, but the ever-busy and buzzy Stars, with its sunny sidewalk tables, is the clear favorite.
One bright afternoon at the café, regular Jonathan Russo, a Heights resident, wanders in for his afternoon coffee. “I am such a loyal customer,” he quips, “that I keep my own glass here.”
While other businesses shutter for the cold months, Lydia Martinez Majdišová and her husband, Pepe Martinez, have kept their doors open year round for almost two decades, steaming milk for lingered-over lattes, making soups in the winter, sandwiches in the summer, and fresh muffins, cakes and cookies that Lydia bakes daily all year. The latter fill the glass display case by the register, plump, fragrant, buttery, sugar-dusted and tempting all who gaze upon them, coffees in hand.
Lydia and Pepe were immigrants from opposite ends of the world who found their way to Shelter Island, bonded over chicken wings, and overcame adversity to make a family and a business. Along the way, they anchored and reinvented the little café, which will soon celebrate not only its 20th year under their management, but the quality cooking that makes it an Island institution.
Stars is not merely the best place for a cup of coffee on the Island, it’s a year-round hub of Island life. Wondering who won at Wednesday night bingo? Stop by Stars on Thursday morning. Need a coffee in the middle of a long dog walk? You and your pooch can hold court at the sidewalk tables. For decades, Stars has been the place where people gather to graze, to gossip, to make new friends and catch up with old ones. It was that hometown vibe that attracted Lydia and Pepe to Shelter Island initially, and the thing that’s fostered in each of them a love of the petite café with a big heart on the tiny island, such a long way from where they each began.
A Slovak and a Mexican walk into a bar…
Lydia was born and raised in Dolný Kubín, in what is now Slovakia, and spent the first 10 years of her life under communism. After the 1989 Velvet Revolution, travel and educational opportunities opened in Slovakia and, with a student visa in hand, she went to work and study in the United States in 2001. She was looking for a job in Water Mill when Pepe Martinez, a skilled coffee bean roaster who came to the U.S. in 1994 from Tampico, Mexico, was running the very first incarnation of Hampton Coffee Company with a partner. “When Pepe saw my application with my picture he said, ‘OK, this girl is hired,’” laughs Lydia.
Her first visit to Shelter Island was in a Hampton Coffee Company delivery van with Pepe at the wheel, when they were just friends. “Pepe asked if I had ever tried chicken wings, and I said, ‘That sounds weird,’” she says of the popular American bar food. Pepe brought his new Slovakian friend to the Dory, an island watering hole and grill perched on Chase Creek, for her first encounter with the staple snack. “It was such a success,” Lydia says, “I asked if I could go to the Dory for chicken wings every time we had a Shelter Island delivery.”
After her work visa was up, Lydia went back to Slovakia to finish her undergraduate schooling, earn a master’s degree and work a stint as a teacher. She traveled a bit and saw some more of the world, but her mind drifted back to eastern Long Island and her friend with the dark brown eyes and kind countenance. By February 2003, she was back in Water Mill and living with Pepe—together, for good. Their first child, Emma, was born in 2004.
Pepe’s dream was to have his own coffee shop, and in 2005, when he learned that a café on Shelter Island needed new ownership, he took it. The little café already had a place in the community’s heart. It had been owned for 10 years by its original local proprietor, Cheryl Hannabury. When she passed away after battling lymphoma, her parents—Charlotte, an Islander from birth, and Pete Hannabury, the town justice for over 20 years—ran it. Pepe asked permission to continue to use the name Stars and Charlotte Hannabury gave him her blessing.
Dark coffee times
In 2010, Pepe, Lydia, and their children, Emma and Sebastian, took a family vacation to Slovakia and Pepe, who had a green card at the time, was detained on his return and instructed to see a judge about a problem with his credentials. When he went to the appointment, he was arrested and held at an immigration facility in New Jersey for six weeks while a lawyer handled his case and Lydia assembled the necessary documents to prove his status.
“So many people in the community wrote letters of support for Pepe,” Lydia recalls.
Even with that support, those were dark days for the Martinez family. Unsure when Pepe would be released, Lydia ran Stars alone, took care of their children, and watched their daughter, Emma, start kindergarten.
The 2010 crisis marked the first time Lydia took an active role at Stars. Before, she had focused on their children and left the café to Pepe. “In the end, it was a blessing. I didn’t know that I had that strength,” she says. “I accepted that role and I was OK with it. I had no intention of having a career or being involved with the business. But there was no other way.”
As she spent more time at Stars, Lydia began to notice things she wanted to change. “We started to find our own roles that are very complementary,” she says. Pepe receives all the deliveries and is the coffee master; Lydia does marketing and bookkeeping and eventually took on the role of baker. “I had never baked in my life; it just came to be from what I remembered helping my mom,” she recalls. “Little by little I learned, until now people trust me with their wedding cakes.”
The birth of a baker
Come holiday time, Lydia is a one-woman pastry machine, with gingerbread houses, yule logs, intricately decorated cookies and mince pies displayed like jewels in the café’s glass display case. If you can’t find her chatting with regulars in the store, she’s home in front of her huge day planner, making lists and prepping for custom orders. On a typical day, Pepe is in the kitchen or behind the counter, supervising the coffee.
Lydia may not have felt secure in her confectionary skills in the beginning, but baked into her DNA was a talent waiting to reveal itself. “Every woman in Slovakia is a baker. If you needed a birthday cake, you would never buy one,” she says.
Lydia and her siblings were often called upon by their mother to participate in making sweets, especially at the holidays, when preparing 12 or 13 different kinds of pastries was the least you could do for a proper celebration.“ She didn’t have a KitchenAid mixer; she had four kids,” Lydia says.
When Lydia and Pepe initially took over the cafe, Lydia was not going to play a daily, front-facing role, but extenuating circumstances brought her into the fold. Today, she and Pepe work side by side, and she’s become a renowned baker on the island. “Every woman in Slovakia is a baker,” she says. “If you needed a birthday cake, you would never buy one.” (Photo credit: Madison Fender)
She and her sister, Kristina Majdišová, who also lives on Shelter Island with her husband and young son, remember their mother lining them up in front of the TV with a whisk and a bowl of cold butter and sugar, telling them to beat “until it’s foamy. My sister and I still joke when I turn on my KitchenAid and she says, ‘What? Do you mean to say you are not going to whisk it from hard butter until it’s foamy?!’”
Lydia’s parents and her two other siblings still live in Slovakia. When her mom and dad realized that Lydia would be raising hers and Pepe’s children in the U.S., they exacted a promise from her: “Make sure our grandchildren are fluent in Slovak.” It’s a promise she and Pepe have made good on: Emma and Sebastian speak not just Slovak and English, but Spanish, too.
Wishing on Stars
When they look to the future, Lydia and Pepe admit they would love for one of their kids to show an interest in taking over the family business someday. But right now, of course, they agree it’s too early to tell. Emma will start a graduate program at the Sorbonne in Paris next year, and Sebastian is a rising sophomore at Shelter Island School.
Both Emma and Sebastian have worked at Stars over the summer, but so far Sebastian’s reaction has been typical of a young man looking past his hometown. He even said, as Pepe tells it: “It’s your dream; why should I live your dream?”
“I said, ‘We all have a dream, and I want you to live your own dream. Go wherever you want to go, but it’s one step that begins everything, and I’m your step,’” Pepe says. “If you start here, you can go anywhere.”
