The coffee shop owner | Liz Feindel-Decheva
After only a couple of rings, Liz answers the phone and says: “Hello darling.” These two words have almost become her catchphrase, something her customers recognize her for and can expect to hear before getting their morning coffee.
Her full name is Liz Feindel-Decheva, but a lot of people know her as one-half of the PolCa ladies, since she and her partner Elwira have been running their family-owned café in Blagoevgrad for almost seven years.
The story of how the pair met is an interesting one, “I’m going to write a book about it someday,” she jokes. Liz, who is originally from Canada, went on a gap year to England to work as a nanny, but she found herself in need of a second job. She found one as a waitress at a pub and that’s where she met Elwira, who was managing the place at the time. This pub is also where they both met the men who they ended up marrying, a pair of childhood best friends from Blagoevgrad.
All four of them decided to come to Bulgaria together and start PolCa, but as Liz remembers it, it wasn’t an easy process. “[Opening PolCa] took a long time. We wanted to make sure we got everything just right.” And they did it again a couple of years ago when they opened their second place, Roots, a very popular restaurant among the locals.
This attention to detail applies to most things they do in PolCa. Almost everything they sell is homemade, from the sauces to the soups; and they even go as far as handpicking the vegetables that they use for their food. Liz said that Elwira prefers to do this over using suppliers, “I think that is one of the things that makes us unique,” she says.
Liz’s days consist of way more than serving coffee. What the client sees is just a tiny part of all the work that goes into running PolCa. “We are constantly on the move, we have to prepare everything in the morning in order to have it ready by lunch,” she says. They open at 8 am, but the preparation of the meals can take up until 10.30, and it has to be done while simultaneously serving the customers from the breakfast shift.
Working in the service industry requires a lot of sacrifices, and especially when pandemic hit. Even though they had to remain closed for a while when the lockdown was in place, Liz still considers they were very lucky to be able to adapt to the safety measures implemented after it. “Since we are a takeout kind of place, we simply installed a window while the other places had to shut down.”
Even now, when entering stores is allowed again, they decided to stick with the window. As she puts it: “we have a lot of people coming into PolCa every single day, it’s just safer that way (…) you pick up your stuff and you go.” They are both mothers and worry that they might put their families at risk since they have contact with so many people. “We are constantly thinking of the people around us, so we have rules and our clients know them.”
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Valeria Calò is a JMC Major at the American University in Bulgaria. She frequently visits PolCa, where she became acquainted with Liz. The interview was done via telephone, but Valeria had the opportunity to take pictures at their Christmas Market on December 8th.
