Haitian chef finds home for native fare on South Side
He felt the floor shake and thought at first it was simply the transmission in the rickety Toyota compact he was crowded into. But that didn’t make sense. It didn’t feel right.
Then he saw a giant rock hurtling down a hillside, smashing into concrete, followed by thick dust enveloping everything. Finally the walking wounded emerged like ghosts.
It was about 10 minutes to 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010. Carl Pierre-Louis was a 16-yearold high school student in Port-auPrince, Haiti, carpooling home with friends after soccer practice when a 7.0-magnitude earthquake ravaged the impoverished island nation.
Mr. Pierre, now 25 and the head chef at Carmella’s Plates and Pints on the South Side, recounts those moments.
“The car started shaking from side to side, with me in it — I’m 300 pounds. Something’s not right. Fifteen feet away from us the rock smashed.
“We got out of the car. You could barely see in front of you. But there were people with their heads bleeding. Their arms were broken. As we walked farther, there were dead bodies along the road.
“There was a building, like five stories, and the fifth story collapsed onto the fourth, and there was a man, half sticking out, crying for help. No one could reach him. It was total chaos. There was no way to help.”
He saw more real dead bodies than he’d seen combined in all the movies he’d watched. He made it home. His mother, Carole, was OK, but his father, Carlo, the chief security officer for a bank, was missing. Communication on the island was crippled. An estimated 160,000 were killed.
An agonizing week passed. The family eventually received the grim news. Mr. Pierre-Louis’s father had perished trying to get people out of the bank, which collapsed. His body was never recovered.
That kind of trauma could easily (and understandably) destroy a person. Carl Pierre-Louis saw it as a binary decision: “I have two choices. I can sit and pout about it. Or, I can do something that will make him proud,” he said. “Life don’t owe you anything. And someone always has it worse.”
With his high school destroyed in the earthquake, he went to live with his 30-year-old brother, Harold, in Kendall, Fla. (a community southwest of Miami), and to attend school with eyes on being the first person in his family to attend college.
Mr. Pierre-Louis enrolled at Felix Varela High School and was one of 51 new students there who had fled from the earthquake. His big frame immediately caught the eye of head football coach Matthew Dixon, who asked him if he played football.
“I said, ‘What’s that?’ “
“He knew nothing about football,” Mr. Dixon said.
But, the 6-foot-3, 290-pound high school junior soon found a natural home on the offensive line.
In November 2010, Harold went back to Haiti to visit family. Violent crime had skyrocketed in the months following the disaster. While he was there, he was shot and killed in what the Miami Herald described as “an outbreak of
“Life don’t owe you anything. And someone always has it worse.” Carl Pierre-Louis
violence in the streets.”
Now Mr. Pierre-Louis was alone in America, mourning and with a major choice: stay, or go back home?
“It happened in the blink of an eye,” Mr. Dixon said in a phone interview. “I called my wife and said, ‘Do you trust me?’ And then I told her I’m bringing home one of my football players to stay with us for a while.”
He moved in with the Dixons and stayed with them through his graduation.
“He’s part of our family,” Mr. Dixon said. “My young kids call him their brother. Every person he comes in contact with loves him. The one word that comes to me is genuine. He cares. He’s the type of young man you look up to.”
In 2012, he was honored with the Leo Suarez/Walter Krietsch Courage Award at The Miami Herald’s annual awards breakfast. According to the paper, “the award is given annually to a member of the local high school sports community who shows extraordinary courage in the face of adversity.”
Mr. Pierre-Louis graduated and accepted a football scholarship to Fairmont State University in West Virginia. Mr. Pierre-Louis earned a business degree there and also studied culinary arts at neighboring Pierpont Community & Technical College.
“The passion was already there,” he said. “I grew up cooking,”
But in Haiti, he said, that’s still considered to be a woman’s vocation. “I’m supposed to be outside working, but I would sneak around to see what my mom was doing in the kitchen. I was fascinated. She thought I just wanted food, but I was like no, this is fascinating how you’re marinating this and turning it into something beautiful.
“The more she chased me out, the more I wanted to be in the kitchen.”
He has since been in some exclusive ones, to say the least. While in school he completed an internship at the legendary Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. After graduation, he went to work under chef Kristin Butterworth in the kitchen at Lautrec, the AAA Five-Diamond restaurant at Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in Farmington.
After marrying his fiancee Taelor, a West Virginia native, last summer, he accepted the job at Carmella’s. He has since revamped the menu, his roasted asparagus soup took top honors at the annual South Side Soup Contest last month, and he has taught and cooked with students at Community Kitchen Pittsburgh in Hazelwood.
He has also introduced something not seen often — if ever — on Pittsburgh menus: Haitian food. Once a month, he does a multicourse, fixed-price dinner of Haitian cuisine. The next one, for $35, is Tuesday.
“Haitian food is more about spices,” he explains. “Not spicy — but spices and seasoning. Everything has a twist to it. If we’re butchering an animal, we’re using as much as we can.”
“In the Caribbean, many of the countries have similar food. But we came down from the French. So we have that French influence as well.”
One dish diners can expect is “griot,” a traditional fried pork dish. Mr. PierreLouis will marinate a pork shoulder in a complex blend of parsley, garlic, habanero, green onions, sweet peppers, lemon juice and Dijon mustard, and emulsify it with olive oil for two days.
“Then we braise it, and to finish it off, we fry it. So it’s crispy and tender, and it just melts away.”
The Haitian population in the United States is relatively small — estimated to be about 676,000 in 2015, according to the U.S. Census Bureau — with 70 percent concentrated in either Florida or greater New York City.
Mr. Pierre-Louis is both excited and humbled to give Haitian food and culture a new audience here in Pittsburgh, with him as the ambassador.
“My dream is to turn Haitian cuisine into something people could see as a finedining cuisine as well. To take something simple and turn it into a ‘wow’ and create something for my country that you don’t see too often, in places you wouldn’t think of.”