Leaning In: Chef Jenn Ross on Black excellence
The news cycle is fickle: months of coronavirus, a whitehot burst of George Floyd, protests and Black Lives Matter. Now, COVID-19 is front and center again. There have been hurricanes. And coming up, elections. Before virus numbers resurged, I’d spoken with members of Orlando’s food community who, like me, were interested in keeping the nation’s renewed passion for civil rights in the spotlight. History has shown it’s not a sprint, but a marathon. Touchstones help. And food unites us all. “Leaning In” welcomes you to the table for ongoing conversation, questions and comfort. Recipes included.
“When the average person imagines a vegan,” says chef
Jenn Ross, “they’re not seeing anyone who looks anything like me. And I’m fine with that. But what I’d like is that at some point, that vision of what a vegan is expands.”
Ross is a bold, plant-based ambassador in the Orlando food community, but getting to this place has been a journey.
It began when she bought some land out in Crystal River.
“I set out to create the life I
wanted,” she says.
And at the outset, it looked a lot like how things were back in her native Jamaica. There were goats she’d milk in the morning (“Let me clarify that goat’s milk isn’t common in Jamaica, but I wasn’t about to get a cow!” she says). And a bunch of fluffy, little Heritage chicks — some for eggs, some for meat. She freeranged them, played with them, named them.
But then she couldn’t kill Bertha.
“The concept of raising what we eat was not foreign to me. That’s why I did it,” she says. “But because I was no longer detached from what I deemed to be food, these chickens had become my friends.
“Store-bought, neatly ’processed’ chicken — that’s language that’s designed to make us feel better about it. It’s me paying someone to do something I couldn’t do myself. And for me, that involved a fair amount of hypocrisy. And so, chicken left the table.”
In the following weeks, other animal products left, as well.
“But then, 800 million other things came to the table,” she says. “And that’s essentially how my vegan journey started.”
That steady march took her through several business models, including a small setup inside a Rosemont gas station before opening her vegan, Jamaican café DaJen Eats about two years ago in historic Eatonville, the nation’s first Black-incorporated municipality.
The space fell into her lap almost serendipitously, and Ross was delighted. “I wanted to become a part of the fabric of the community,” she says.
“One of the reasons we started in the gas station was to make sure that people of color were included in the vegan conversation,” she says. “We’ve always been there, but just like in so many other things, we are underrepresented.”
She thought she’d find her place in feeding Eatonville, but found the average resident couldn’t afford to come to the café regularly.
“The prices are what they are so I can stay open,” she says. “So, I decided we should make as much money as we could — the ones who can afford us will come — and then we’d take that money and put it back into the community in different ways.”
Ross partners regularly with Eatonville’s Community Redevelopment Agency, hosting everything from free cooking classes to Healthy Eatonville events where residents can be seen by medical professionals.
“This is where we knew we could have an impact,” she says.
Then came COVID-19, with impact all its own. But fate and unintentional foresight afforded Ross and her team a bit of fortune. DaJen Eats has five brands under its umbrella, one of which is Exclusively Irie: frozen, vegan meals bought in bulk and shipped right to customers’ doors.
“A lot of people who weren’t coming out saw this as a very valuable service, so at the beginning [of the coronavirus downturn], we were able to stay afloat based entirely on the frozen meals,” she says.
Then came more kismet. A day that changed everything for Ross and her team: May 31.
“When we introduce a new product,” she explains, “people get excited and we typically see a little bump in sales. But on that day, with the Drumsticks [a vegan take on fried chicken], we did 3.7 times the previous Sunday.”
The success, however, highlighted the café‘s inefficiencies. “We were traumatized,” she says, laughing. Ross thanked her customers in a social post that night for the unfailing support for which she was completely unprepared. “A lot of people left not getting the ‘Irie experience’ on which we pride ourselves.”
“We are very big on service,” she says. “And we got slammed. And it was embarrassing. The wait was like two hours. I went outside and I cried.”
She made it a mission to see what could be finetuned. And with the generous help of Kelly Shockley of Ethos Vegan Kitchen, identified kinks in the system.
“He made suggestions, and in three days, we changed everything from how we received orders to how they went out,” Ross says.
Minimal investments, like a pager system, kept coronavirus congregation at bay, making the cafe a safer place. Customers could now wait in their cars for orders.
“The results were night and day,” she says.
And just in time for Black Lives Matter, which sent a crushing wave of supporters impassioned to patronize Black-owned businesses to DaJen’s door.
“Had we not installed that pager system the very first week of June,” Ross surmises, “we would have lost virtually every new customer we got.”
Growth, she says, is never pretty.
“Small-business ownership is a roller coaster of emotion,” Ross says. “You read the stories about people becoming successful and you think, Oh, the numbers just go up and it’s amazing! But it’s stressful.”
At the heart of it, though, is gratitude.
“There’s a sense of remembering that this is what you asked for,” she says. “This is what all the vision-board stuff was about.”
Part of it, she hopes, is raising visibility, changing perceptions.
“Expectations for a Black-owned business can sometimes be different,” she says, noting the frequency of moments in which delivery drivers or salespeople breeze right past her looking for the owner, often settling on an employee who is male. Or white.
“They will twist themselves into a million knots to make the narrative in their head fit —even if it makes no sense,” she says.
People have reached out to her in the wake of
George Floyd’s death, she says. But so, too, has she to her own staff.
“At the peak, I sent a text message to specific employees,” she recounts, “three young, Black men.”
It spoke of the space in which they live, noting that because of how they look and the color of their skin that there are people who would seek to make them feel as though they shouldn’t be here, wherever “here” happened to be.
“You don’t have to prove your worth,” it read in part. “Your worth is innately yours.”
She implored them, as they made decisions about how to express their support for the movement, to be safe.
“‘Try, as much as you can,’ I told them, ‘to not give someone silly a stupid reason to harm you.’ And it was painful, was exceptionally painful, having to send that message to 19- and 20-year-old Black men,” she says.
Ross says she had many mornings of “not being okay,” but she had a business to run. One with an image that is based on irie, on good vibes.
“The brand is all airy and happy and joyful,” says
Ross, “but there are moments when you’re not joyful. There are moments when you’re angry. And all of these emotions are valid. And you shouldn’t run away from them. You should sit with these emotions and work through them. And how much can you continue with business as usual in the face of all of it? I decided that was by highlighting Black excellence.”
Juneteenth saw a celebration in Eatonville. The café had many guests, among them a family of four sitting in an outdoor booth. Ross greeted them and thanked them for coming. Later, the mother approached to say thank you.
Ross laughed, “I said no, no, no, thank YOU for coming.”
The woman shook her head.
“When you came by earlier,” she told Ross, “I told my daughter you were the owner. And she said, ‘Wow, mommy! She’s Black, like me.’ ”
And so, Black excellence. “There are so many stories of people of color running businesses. They have so many hurdles to overcome. A lot of them just don’t make it,” she says. “And so, you have to be excellent. Just do it. Make it. And be that example for someone else.”