There’s a new restaurant in West Newton offering a kind of food that can be harder to find in the area: Lavender Café, which serves Venezuelan food along with more traditional café items like croissants.

The café, located at 15 Spencer St., has options like arepas, rice bowls, tequeños (fried dough with cheese) and cachitos (sweet bread with savory fillings), and lots of baked goods – all made in-house.

That’s because the café is owned by two pastry chefs, Naisbel Azarak and Haylee Kulig. They’d spent several years running a catering company before deciding to start the café.

It was Kulig’s idea to serve Venezuelan food after trying food made by Azarak’s mother, who is from Venezuela.

“There’s nothing like this around here,” said Kulig.

They’ve been pleasantly surprised by the positive reception.

“The amount of Venezuelan people who have been coming is incredible,” said Azarak. She’s been in the US for 22 years, but hadn’t realized how many other Venezuelans there are in the Boston area.

Part of why the duo decided to open Lavender Café was because so many people had asked them about the space, which had previously been a cafe for over a decade.

“People were saying we really wish we had another café here,” said Azarak. “The community has been really welcoming and supportive,” she added.

The cachitos have been especially popular, with people coming in and ordering eight or ten at a time.

“Every weekend we’ve been increasing the amount we make,” Azarak said.

Azarak’s mother has been helping teach the staff how to cook Venezuelan dishes.

“She’s a traditional Latin mom, so it’s just a little bit of this, a little bit of that…but it always comes out well,” said Azarak.

Her mother is also a vegetarian, so the cafe has a variety of vegetarian dishes available. Azarak is happy that she can honor her mother’s passion for cooking through her restaurant.

Azarak and Kulig bring with them a significant amount of experience. Azarak attended Le Cordon Bleu, and has been a pastry chef at a variety of Boston-area establishments, including TD Garden, Boston Harbor Hotel, and the Museum of Science.

The Museum of Science is where she met Kulig. Kulig had attended the Culinary Institute of America and then moved to California, where she worked at high-end restaurants in Monterrey.

But she’s from Connecticut and was homesick for the East Coast, and she applied for the Museum of Science pastry job in 2017.

She likes to tease Azarak that hiring her was the best choice she ever made. The two of them then moved to work at the Facebook office in Cambridge, but they then decided to set out on their own.

“We wanted to leave corporate,” said Azarak. “We can really do awesome things together,” she added.

They started their catering business NaisLee Catering in 2023. But catering is tough.

“It’s always ups and downs,” Kulig said. “The operational part is extreme,” said Azarak. “I really love doing that, but it’s hard to find staff.”

They’ve decided to stop taking new catering clients until their café is more stable, although they hope to return to taking new clients eventually.

They began discussing Lavender Café last fall, and the new business opened in early May.

Lavender Café is open Thursday and Friday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

They’ll also be at the Cold Spring Park farmers market from June 17 to Oct. 28 from 1:30 to  6 p.m. (except June 24) and the Newton North High School farmers market from June 28 to Oct. 25 from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. (except July 19 and 26).