THE NEW CARIBBEAN FOOD MOVEMENT
The flavourful but humble tropical fare is nothing new in New York, but the success of a new wave of restaurants has shown that the island cuisine may be the next scene to catch the city’s culinary interest
When Rawlston Williams opened Food Sermon in Brooklyn this year, the chef intended to use the kitchen for his catering business, offering only a limited take-out menu.
But once people tasted his riffs on the food of his childhood in St Vincent and the Grenadines — where he recalls the smoke of callaloo soup cooking over hot stones, and the scent of burned sugar that forms the base of a proper stew chicken — “Suddenly,” Williams said, “I had a restaurant.”
For decades, New Yorkers have dug into the rice and beans of Dominican diners and the yellow-orange Jamaican beef patties sold at pizzerias.
But the diverse queue of customers at Food Sermon, in a gentrifying neighbourhood that has long been home to a vibrant West Indian community, is the latest sign that the next place to spark New York City’s culinary interest may just be the Caribbean, a catchall term for the islands of the West Indies and the Caribbean Sea, as well as coastal countries like Belize and Guyana. More than 1.5 million New Yorkers can trace their roots to the region, where the cooking is often spectacularly bright, complex and flavourful.
Consider Grandchamps, a new all-day café in Brooklyn, where the chef Shawn Brockman dips into his wife’s Haitian family cookbook to make sandwiches layered with griot — pork that is slow-cooked, then fried — plantains and pikliz, which is a mess of shredded cabbage, carrots and fragrant Scotch bonnet chillies.
At the two-year-old restaurant Glady’s in Brooklyn, chef Michael Jacober prepares traditional Jamaican jerk chicken, fish and pork over a high-end wood-fired grill in a modern open kitchen. That grill is fed in part by imported pimento wood, for an authentically smoke-charred, deeply spiced dish with just the right balance of sweet and heat. Jacober plans to open a 400m² outpost, also in Brooklyn, next year.
And then there is the success of the two Miss Lily’s restaurants in lower Manhattan, the second of which opened last year. Co-founded by the nightclub guru Serge Becker, the diner-style restaurant has its own line of sauces and a late-night menu featuring US$5 (180 baht) rice and peas, sweet plantains and the cornmeal fritters Jamaicans call festival.
That the food of the Caribbean is increasingly being embraced by chefs and diners alike comes as no surprise to Alexander Smalls, an owner of Minton’s and the Cecil in upper Manhattan.
“It’s bold and full-flavoured and aromatic and textured food,” Smalls said. The Cecil in particular draws liberally from Guyana and Trinidad, in dishes like a roti pizza topped with soft shreds of oxtail, while the shrimp in chilli-tomato sauce over yam flapjacks borrows from the executive chef JJ Johnson’s Barbadian relatives.
Smalls grew up eating the Gullah cuisine found in his native South Carolina, which has deep ties to the Caribbean islands via the colonial slave trade. He has spent a lifetime pondering the culinary legacy of the African diaspora and the effects of “hundreds and hundreds of years of migration”, he said, on countries like Barbados and Guyana.
Although the results vary from nation to nation, Smalls said, Caribbean food is a fusion of influences that may include plantains, okra and rice from African slaves; stirfries and soy sauce from Chinese migrant workers; pork in all forms from Spanish colonists; puff pastry from the French; and myriad curries and flatbreads delivered with indentured servants from India.
The upscale restaurant menu is a new context for the ingredients and dishes of these islands, where typically only tourists eat out at formal restaurants, said Mitchell Davis, the executive vice-president of the James Beard Foundation, who grew up eating Caribbean food in Toronto. These foods were the provenance of home cooks and food stalls, not the professional kitchen.
“My mother had several very close West Indian friends, mostly from Trinidad and Tobago,” Davis said, “and they were among the best home cooks I’ve ever known: pumpkin curries, handmade roti, coconut bread, stewed oxtail.”
A handful of street vendors are carrying on that tradition, younger Caribbean-American cooks raised on New York City’s dining scene, with its mash-ups, food trucks and blogging chowhounds.
They have thrown themselves into experimenting with the ingredients they grew up with, or honing the finest details of their technique. Many of them sell at Smorgasburg, the food markets held around the city, which have added five new Caribbean vendors within the last two years.
One is Island Tingz, where Trinidadian-American chef Dwayne Bovell (who spends his days in the executive kitchen at JPMorgan’s Manhattan headquarters) sells out of his versions of Trini street snacks like the fried fish sandwich known as bake and shark topped with mango chutney slaw, and doubles, two soft fried flatbreads wrapped around curried chickpeas and laced with sweet-sour tamarind sauce.
Samuel Branch, a Barbadian-American private chef, started the Greenmarket-sourced, handmade Jamaican patty business Mr. Cutters, creating the pastries in flavours like jerk mushroom in a callaloo crust. Branch, who sold patties this summer at Smorgasburg, Brooklyn’s Whole Foods Market and in the archway under the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn, hopes to eventually open a restaurant with Bajan food.
Branch said he was inspired by reading about Brooklyn’s artisan food movement, and decided to apply it to his own culinary heritage.
“I’m amazed no one is doing this on another level — why don’t I do it?” he said. “I want to be part of the new Caribbean food movement.”
At his slickly designed Smorgasburg stand MofonGO, Manolo Lopez makes a traditional rendition of that dish, topped with pork and Puerto Rican mayo-ketchup, say, or shrimp in butter-garlic sauce.
This year Lopez finally quit his day job as a product designer to devote himself to crushing thousands of pounds of plantains to order at Smorgasburg. Each weekend, he said, many diners with Puerto Rican heritage stop by to tell him his stall gives them “a lot of hope and a lot of inspiration”. They also like his mofongo. “A lot of people say, ‘This is better than my grandmother’s’,” he said. “That’s when I know I am doing a good job.”