“I have always liked the saying: 'If you don't have a dream, you will work for someone who does',” says Raimonda Vainutytė-Čevykina. After settling in Los Angeles 19 years ago, she has created a successful Uppers Cafe & Bakeshop, selling desserts and Lithuanian delicacies to locals, including celebrities.
Raimonda's path to the United States began in Spain’s Andalusia region.
“Within a year of settling down in Spain, I got a job [...] to clean resort apartments and pack tomatoes. I used to look at the 25–28 year old women who worked there and said they had been working for 12 years. I thought, no, I'm not going to work in a warehouse. I always wanted to do better,” she says.
Soon enough, she decided to swap Spain for California in the United States, where her parents had lived for some time.
“If there's something wrong, where will you go? Obviously, you go to your parents. [...] I packed two suitcases, took my two children and left. I arrived in Santa Monica. I thought I had enough money, but it evaporated in about three months, so I started looking for a job,” she recalls.
At first, she began working in the kitchen of a Lithuanian school, and later at a warehouse for another Lithuanian company.
After six years of working there, she came up with the idea of baking cakes because she didn't like the ones she could find in American stores.
“I wanted to bake cakes that were not only tasty but also looked beautiful. During my first months in the US, I realised that they didn't have that here. [...] After tasting the cakes, people started asking if they could order them. I used to work eight hours in the warehouse, come home and bake cakes,” says Raimonda.
Eventually, she left the warehouse to work for a real estate company, but continued making cakes.
“There were [large] orders where I would come home and tell them to empty the fridge because I had to put the cakes together,” says Raimonda.
Meanwhile, many people who come to Santa Monica dream of opening a small café on the seafront.
“My husband and I also started thinking that it would be a good idea to open a little café,” she says. “We must have been dreaming for four years, and every evening after work we would walk around Santa Monica looking for the best place and we found it.”
However, their dream had to be put on hold, due to the onset of the Covid pandemic and quarantine. This allowed her to rethink her business strategy.
Santa Monica has dozens of similar brunch cafés, but most of them get poor reviews and do not attract customers. However, the one run by Renata and her husband is now booming.
Although Raimonda says she doesn't have any traditional Lithuanian dishes in her waterfront café, she does offer dumplings for the Lithuanian visitors.
“I decided to call them ‘koldūnai’, but I had to figure out how to write it so that people could read it. Then I wrote 'col-doo-nai'. We explain to our customers that these are European-style ravioli with meat, served with sour cream, with pork crackling. They like it that way,” she says.
Although business is booming, Raimonda says it’s not time to relax.
“If you think you're going to open a café and go on holiday, it's not worth starting a business,” she says.
The café is now becoming famous among Los Angeles’ rich and famous for its Lithuanian desserts. “They really like Medutis [honey cake] and Tinginys [brownie],” she says.
Her recent clients also include sports celebrities and Hollywood stars. “The judges of Canada's Got Talent also ordered a cake,” she says.
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