Haitian chef spent life savings on restaurant. Now her landlord wants $2.5 million for her to keep it

BROOKLYN — When Eva Volmar signed the lease on a raw space in March 2024 that she would eventually transform into her popular restaurant, La Cachette du Coin, she thought at the time that her dream had come true. Volmar planned to blend Haitian cuisine from her homeland with high-end French culinary techniques to create a fine-dining establishment. 

Volmar had owned a hair salon and a water company in her native Haiti, then worked as a nurse in the United States. To launch her culinary venture, the 38-year-old single mother of two poured her life savings, over $580,000, into building out and furnishing the future restaurant. It was her first experience working with contractors and retail brokers in a city mired in complex zoning and permit requirements.

But within months, her dream began to unravel. Volmar says her broker, landlord, contractor and lawyer neglected their professional duties, left her with debt, and embroiled her in a legal battle, threatening to upend her business and family’s future.

On June 16, Volmar appeared in Brooklyn’s commercial tenant housing court to argue her case, with Judge Javier Ortiz ordering all parties to return on Aug. 25.

At the heart of the legal battle is what Volmar characterizes as a bad-faith campaign to displace her, orchestrated by her landlord, Nigel Boyden. Volmar alleges that Boyden is attempting to seize the space occupied by La Cachette now that she has fully renovated it, intending to re-lease it to a new tenant at a higher market rate.

Volmar said that battling her landlord while starting a business as a single mother of two has taken a toll. The fight left her little time and money to market her restaurant, which left it empty on most days until an influencer’s secret visit made La Cachette du Coin a viral sensation in May — giving her a much-needed boost.

At this point, Volmar told The Haitian Times special projects editor, who is related to her, about the court case she felt was even more worrisome. The information prompted an investigation.

“I’m telling you, I’ve been [through] hell for this restaurant,” Volmar said. “It’s gone [on] more than a year and a half. I cannot even sleep.”

Boyden and his lawyer did not respond to messages seeking comment about the ongoing case.

Saran Nurse, an assistant professor in Business and Public Management at Kean University, who has studied the displacement of minority business owners in Brooklyn, said landlords can require tenants to pay for all the renovations to an otherwise empty space. 

For startups, this can be financially stressful, especially for a restaurant where profit margins are narrow. This leads to vulnerability, Nurse said, that appears to be a factor in Volmar’s case.

From raw space to welcome dining experience

When Morris Mishan, a real estate broker, brought Volmar to the ground-floor property at 625 Rogers Avenue in Prospect Lefferts Gardens (PLG) in the newly built 6-story condominium in early 2024, Volmar did not want a raw commercial space with concrete floors, exposed pipes and bare cement walls. 

“I said ‘No, I need a space to start working right away,’” Volmar said. “He told me, ‘No, no, no, this space is ready.’”

At the time, the building did not have a Certificate of Occupancy, which the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) requires before anyone can legally occupy a building. The process of getting a certificate from the DOB can take a year. Without the certificate, work could not be started in the building. 

In a statement to The Haitian Times, Mishan said he knew the building was in the process of getting a certificate at the time and that Volmar’s rent-free period was tied to that and he was clear that the space was not move-in ready. 

Part of a broker’s responsibility is negotiating favorable lease terms, such as securing the lowest possible rent or security deposit, for their clients. These negotiations are formalized in a proposal, commonly called a “term sheet” or a letter of intent, that the broker submits to the landlord before a lease is drawn up. 

In Volmar’s list of terms, she requested four months’ security and one month’s rent; however, she received a lease detailing five months’ security. 

Volmar paid the asking price — a $10,000-a-month rent, five months’ security and one month’s rent upfront totaling $60,000. 

Mishan said he could not confirm why the security deposit increased between the letter and the lease, but noted that landlords sometimes request additional security from first-time operators. 

The buildout begins

In March 2024, Volmar and her business partner signed the lease with developer Boyden, who runs Kingsdel Real Estate and Croxdale Real Estate Management — two firms behind multi-million-dollar condominium projects in Brooklyn. 

In the lease, Boyden agreed to lay hardwood tiling over the cement floors, install the drop ceiling and wall off the bathrooms before handing the space to Volmar. 

For the buildout, Volmar turned to a contractor recommended by Mishan, her real estate broker with Tri State Commercial, who showed her commercial properties in Flatbush, including the current space where La Cachette du Coin is located.

Mishan ended up recommending his cousin, Ed Mishan, a contractor from Wharton Smith Construction Group, for repairs once it became clear the space needed more work than initially planned.

Ed Mishan quoted more than Volmar had budgeted; however, he offered to come down if she paid the bulk of it upfront and covered the rest in installments. Volmar said she signed the contract and paid $250,000 of the $386,000 total.

Volmar agreed, paid the deposit, and broke ground in December 2024. She trusted Ed Mishan. 

“He always acted like a father to me,” Volmar said. “He always gave me good advice.”

Volmar planned to install a kitchen, dining and bar area. 

Part of Volmar’s work with Ed Mishan also included setting up the restaurant’s ventilation system. Boyden directed her to install the exhaust fan on a second-floor sub-roof beside the residential units. 

The two scopes of work proved difficult to separate. To install her ventilation system and grease trap, Volmar needed to break through the ceiling and under the floor, both areas Boyden had agreed to finish.

The lease gave Volmar six months rent-free, a common concession landlords give for spaces requiring extensive buildouts, and included a standard commercial provision for the tenant to resolve any mechanic’s lien within 30 days.

With rent abatements, property owners often ask for longer leases lasting at least three to five years. In this case, the lease stated that the clock started only after the landlord’s work was “substantially completed” or on the day the tenant began business operations, whichever occurred first. 

Volmar said Boyden’s share of the work was substantially completed by September 2025, and that her six-month rent abatement should have run from then through March 2026.

Mechanic’s lien escalates dispute

As work on the restaurant wound down in September 2025, Boyden expected Volmar to start paying rent in July 2025. Volmar, however, pushed back. Her grace period, she said, hadn’t begun yet. 

When she took over the part of the buildout work he was supposed to complete, she understood a rent abatement came with it. That work, she said, was supposed to be finished before her keys were in hand. 

They each hired lawyers and began litigation. The summer passed with no resolution. 

Then, on Nov. 5, Ed Mishan put the mechanic’s lien on the building, a move Volmar believes was orchestrated by Boyden. She said Ed Mishan told her he’s been pressured to sue her. 

Contractors typically use liens to pressure clients who’ve defaulted on their payments. But Volmar had paid Ed Mishan his deposit, and they’d verbally agreed to work out the rest in installments. Therefore, in her eyes, she had time to pay him the $100,000 owed. 

Ed Mishan’s lien application is claiming $200,000, however, with the additional $100,000 reflecting change orders. Volmar disputes the amount and says he had not provided documentation of the change orders.

In any case, after the lien was filed, Ed Mishan stopped work on the restaurant.

Less than a week later, on Nov. 10, Boyden’s lawyer Gregory Skiff, sent Volmar a letter giving her 30 days to resolve the case with Ed Mishan by paying the lien in full or face eviction.

It remains unclear whether he filed the lien to collect what he was owed by Volmar, or whether it was at Boyden’s behest to give him grounds for an eviction order.

Neither Ed Mishan nor Skiff responded to requests for comment via email. Skiff also declined to comment in person at the courthouse.

Despite the setback, Volmar kept building, paying out of pocket to finish the work that Ed Mishan had not completed and opened La Cachette on Dec. 19.

Earlier this year, Volmar’s attorney at the time, Robert Rosman, filed two lawsuits: one seeking to discharge the lien and another arguing that Volmar was not in breach of her lease and asking the court to prevent Boyden from terminating it.

Court records show Rosman missed his first court appearance. Without the lien being discharged, the second case unraveled. On March 2, a judge denied Volmar’s Yellowstone injunction, a legal mechanism that can temporarily preserve a commercial lease while a dispute is resolved.

Two weeks later, Boyden filed a holdover proceeding, seeking to have the lease declared terminated.

Volmar later hired the Spodek Law Group to represent her.

Rosman did not respond to a request for comment sent by email.

Challenges facing minority business owners

In 2016, New York passed the Commercial Tenant Harassment Law in an effort to level the playing field between small business owners and powerful corporate real estate owners, who would often use harassment to displace tenants, especially minority and immigrant tenants in gentrifying neighborhoods. 

Four years later, legislators added new protections through the Small Business Tenants Law, mandating free legal support through the city’s Small Business Services.

In a phone interview, Nurse, who researches the displacement of minority business owners in Brooklyn, said commercial leases are generally more complicated, last longer and involve more money. Property owners can require tenants to perform more work than residential leases require, such as renovations or repairs – details that may be missed or negotiated unfavorably for a tenant when a lawyer representing the interests of the tenant is not involved. 

In Volmar’s case, she and her business partner, who asked not to be named for privacy reasons, read their commercial lease themselves, without a lawyer. 

“Black entrepreneurs have to rely more on their internal capacities, which can be very exhausting,” Nurse said. Minorities lack supportive networks where new business owners like Volmar could learn from those more experienced in their field, she added.

Systemic racism in access to funding and fair real estate terms also compounds the issue for minority-owned small businesses. Volmar said banks denied her loan applications, telling her she was too new and the business was too risky.

While Volmar admits she made rookie mistakes as a novice business owner, she believes the real estate professionals took advantage of her. 

“I just finished the space,” Volmar said, after recounting how a broker came in early May to show her space to a client looking for a restaurant. “He wants to take it from me to rent it to another person for more money and he wants the general contractor to sue me on top of that.”

“These people, they don’t have heart,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m a woman and also I’m a black woman and also I’m an immigrant. They just think they can just rob me, take my life, my kids’ life and make it theirs, [as though] they’re entitled to everything.”

Activist Imani Henry, founder of Equality for Flatbush, sees Volmar’s situation as a part of a larger pattern of racialized displacement. 

“It’s not happenstance,” Henry said. “It is a concerted effort to push out and displace largely black and brown tenants, homeowners, small businesses from New York City.”

A lease, a lien — and business as usual 

Ahead of their June 16 hearing at Brooklyn Housing Court, a proposal surfaced.

According to Volmar, the offer came through Eddie Mamiye, a listing agent with MOD Commercial Real Estate. Mamiye said Boyden was willing to sell the restaurant for $2.5 million and help her secure a Small Business Administration loan to finance the purchase.

City property records show Boyden’s building increased in value from $500,000 in 2018, when he purchased the lot, to $2 million in 2025, after Volmar completed the buildout. However, the estimate does not appear to include residential units, which range from about $500,000 to $1.45 million, are sold out.

On MOD’s site, the same space is listed for $2 million and advertised as a fully built-out restaurant.

“I don’t want to buy the restaurant,” Volmar said, referring to the ground-floor space. “I just want to continue my lease.”

During the June hearing, Judge Ortiz called their case around 10 a.m..

At first, Gregory Skiff, Boyden’s attorney, and Ralph Franco Jr., Volmar’s attorney, told the judge that an offer to sell the restaurant to Volmar had been made. Skiff said his client doubted Volmar had the funds to complete the purchase and raised the outstanding lien as an obstacle.

The attorneys then moved to a conference room to continue negotiations. They later returned and asked the judge to set a new trial date to allow more time to work toward an agreement.

Ortiz agreed, and the clerk scheduled a trial for Aug. 25.

After the hearing, contractor Ed Mishan called Volmar’s cellphone, asking her to meet to resolve the lien. 

Volmar later told The Haitian Times the meeting did not produce a breakthrough. She said she offered a payment plan totaling $200,000 — $20,000 upfront and $5,000 per month for 36 months — which she said was $70,000 more than she believed she owed. She said Mishan declined her office after speaking with his son, a business partner and Boyden, the landlord.

“He said he’s not going to remove the lien for that little money,” Volmar said.

Since Mishan would not negotiate, Volmar said, her attorney plans to challenge the lien in court.

Despite both the lease and lien hanging over her head, Volmar plans on continuing business as usual.

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