With the Windrush scandal still a firm fixture of the country’s news agenda, Britain has been celebrating—perhaps belatedly—the contributions of the Caribbean community to the food industry. But to do this properly, we must begin by looking back to earlier generations.
Often fuelled by an unquenchable entrepreneurial spirit, many West Indians and people of Caribbean heritage who came to the UK in the 1950s built businesses, both big and small, inspired by the food from their home countries. Janet McGowan is one of them.
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“Oh, an enormous impact I would say,” she says of the influence of Caribbean migrants on British eating habits. “I don’t know if it had that much of an impact during the time when my mother arrived here from Jamaica in 1950, but in the last 20 years, I think it’s made a tremendous difference. What’s happened is that people in England began to get a taste for Caribbean food through the little takeaways and from there, I think it grew.”
Now aged 67, British-born McGowan, who created the menu and occasionally cooks at her son’s Deptford bar and restaurant, Buster Mantis, eventually moved to Jamaica as an adult, where she refined her cooking methods.
“I learned to cook when I was about 11 from my mother and I expanded my skills when I went to Jamaica,” she says. “My husband and I came back in the late 90s and at that time there weren’t many nice Caribbean restaurants around, so we opened a little place called Irie Jamaican Cafe in New Cross where we cooked fresh 100-percent Jamaican food.”
It was McGowan’s experience running her own restaurant that prompted her son to ask for her input when he was opening his own eatery.
Children taking the cookery skills and long-held recipes passed down from their parents and introducing them to other cultures is nothing new within the British Caribbean community. Take brothers Craig and Shaun McAnuff, who created their Caradise Original Flava food and lifestyle platform after years of watching their mother and Jamaican grandmother cooking.
“Our mum and grandma taught us the process of how to make the food, prepare it, marinate it overnight, and how to blend different spices and flavours together to compliment each dish,” explains Craig.
Original Flava is the result of these teachings and along with a well-established social media identity and YouTube channel, the two released their first cookbook which comprises more than 70 recipes, last year.
“When we’d bring food to work, a lot of our colleagues used to love the smell of it, but they never knew how to make it themselves. We know it’s easy and it’s really simple, so we basically just tried to make an easy step-by-step guide so that people can make the food themselves,” says Craig.
A testament to the popularity of Caribbean food; their instructional videos instantly caught traction and Craig and Shaun quickly amassed a thriving following.
“Overnight it just went kind of crazy. Our first video came out on Facebook and it got a million views in a week,” Craig says. “We got about 70,000 Facebook followers in about a month and here we are today.”
The brothers’ popularity isn’t too surprising when you think about just how influential Caribbean cuisine has become in Britain. Levi Roots, who moved to England at age 11 in 1969, is arguably the most prominent example of a Caribbean immigrant who used the teachings from his home country to shake up the food industry on a massive scale. After successfully pitching for investors for his now famous “Reggae Reggae” sauce on BBC business show Dragons’ Den in 2007, Roots’ jerk marinade landed on the shelves of every major supermarket in the country. The Reggae Reggae imprint has since expanded to seasonings, frozen meals, soft drinks, crisps, and Jamaican patties. He’s also opened the Caribbean Smokehouse, his first restaurant located in London’s Westfield shopping centre.
One of the biggest indicators of just how successful Caribbean food has become in the UK is the expansion from small local takeaways, which laid the foundation for the availability and awareness of West Indian food in Britain, to sit-down eateries that typically attract a much broader clientele.
“I find it very interesting that for years Caribbean food was just takeaways. It’s only relatively recently that it’s become a sit-down scenario,” says April Jackson, owner of Three Little Birds kitchen and rum bar. The former Miss Jamaica winner opened her first location in Brixton after appearing on The Apprentice in 2015. She opened her second bar and restaurant in Battersea earlier this year. “I think people are appreciating the brand that is Jamaica. We influence pop culture more than any other country in the world if you think per capita. We are tiny. We’re only 2.7 million people but everybody knows us.”
Unsurprisingly, as with all things that gain popularity amongst minority audiences, Caribbean food has captured the attention of the mainstream and large chains owned by people with no ties to the culture or its food have begun to profit from it. But despite the understandable disdain expressed by many in response to this, Jackson sees the benefits of new restaurants that can draw in larger pools of customers.
“The more Caribbean restaurants you have, the better it is for everyone. There was once a study that said Caribbean food, whilst it was one of the most desirable cuisines, was considered one of the most inaccessible,” she explains. “There’s no advantage to having inaccessible cuisine. Even if you and I were to say a particular restaurant wasn’t to our liking, the fact is that it’s introducing something to the masses so that should they ever come to Three Little Birds, it all of a sudden becomes something that’s more familiar and therefore more desirable.”
I look forward to witnessing the rise of the next wave of Caribbean restaurants, takeaways, and food products inspired by the tiny West Indian islands—and, of course, the tenacious men and women of the Windrush generation.
