New York’s new-wave Caribbean cuisine

At Maison Passerelle, the new art deco brasserie at the Manhattan branch of French department store Printemps, the shrimp cocktail presentation is impressive, the ocean trout elegantly plated with cracker-crisp skin, the coconut chiboust light and airy to close out the meal. But the best thing on the menu might be the homeliest, a simple bowl of rice and beans, the recipe inspired by chef Gregory Gourdet’s mother’s home cooking.

“It’s the first thing my mom taught me to make when I was learning the family recipes,” he says of his velvety braised kidney beans. “Mine’s a little bit spicier than hers.”

Gourdet, a first-generation Haitian-American raised in Queens, oversees five food and drink outlets in the shopping complex near Wall Street, including a café, champagne bar and raw bar. At his flagship, Maison Passerelle, the menu mixes influences from francophone Africa, south-east Asia, the Caribbean and North America, but it’s his Haitian heritage in particular that makes the food sing.

Gourdet’s shrimp cocktail starter, three gargantuan specimens served on crushed ice, is kissed with an incendiary creole cocktail sauce; his ocean trout is marinated in a Haitian spice blend and served with a fiery red plantain purée and house-made ti malice, a traditional onion and scotch bonnet pickle. He rubs the steak in Haitian coffee and serves Haitian chocolate in the petits fours.

“I always want to push culture,” he says. “I think that’s very important whenever there’s an opportunity and a stage to talk about some of the flavours and methods that probably don’t get as much attention as the traditional French, Italian or Japanese flavours.”

Historically New York’s best Caribbean restaurants have been confined to the outer boroughs, inexpensive local destinations for Trinidad doubles (flat bread with curried chickpea), Jamaican jerk chicken and Puerto Rican lechón (suckling pig) spread across the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. Now a few chefs with haute-cuisine backgrounds – Gourdet began his career working for Jean Georges Vongerichten – are bringing the island flavours they grew up on into Manhattan’s high-end restaurant scene, putting their personal stories on the plate along with their fine-dining technique.

Tatiana, another pioneer in the category, opened in Lincoln Center three years ago. Its chef Kwame Onwuachi, a veteran of three-Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park, knocked the cultural complex off its feet with his spicy, funky, generous food, referencing the Caribbean and African diaspora (and his family’s roots in Trinidad, Jamaica, Louisiana and Nigeria). The chef’s signature dishes – his curried goat patties, jerk cod with buttermilk soubise, and sweet sticky oxtails, among others – have helped make Tatiana one of the most popular, and consistently fully booked, restaurants in New York.

Onwuachi wasn’t the first chef in the city to highlight bold Caribbean flavours, but he was the first to truly break out. Paul Carmichael, a native of Barbados, took a stab at it years before. After stints cooking under Marcus Samuelsson at Aquavit and Wylie Dufresne at WD-50, in 2011 he became executive chef at Má Pêche in midtown, an outpost of David Chang’s Momofuku restaurant empire. Into the mix of Asian, American and Mediterranean flavours he added a bit of Caribbean spice. It was the beginning of something.

His island cooking came much more into focus at Momofuku Seiobo, his next post in Sydney, where the pan-Caribbean tasting menu racked up rave reviews, with its dozen-plus courses offering an edible journey through the region’s colonial history. “There’s always these threads that link us all in that region,” he says. “While there are distinct cultural differences, we all share the same trauma, and that weaves through the food. Showing that without having to talk about it all the time, that was interesting.”

My goal was to have the table be full, to feel like mom’s Sunday lunch

Now Carmichael is back in New York, telling a more relaxed version of the same story. Down a discreet alleyway in the East Village, he’s transformed the former home of Momofuku Ko, the hushed temple of cerebral tasting menus that closed two years ago, into Kabawa, a new showcase for his boisterous pan-Caribbean cooking. The once sober space, with counter seating around a showcase kitchen, is now a riot of colour, with a lighthouse mosaic and a playlist including original compositions by Carmichael’s cousin in Barbados. “I just wanted it to feel really warm and inviting,” says Carmichael.

An ideal evening begins at Bar Kabawa next door, where the house Daiquiris are poured over ice shaved from a hand-cranked Japanese kakigori machine, and the Jamaican-Haitian beef patties come filled with braised short rib infused with bone marrow and conch. A passage behind the bar connects to the adjoining chef’s counter, where Carmichael serves a generous three-course prix fixe with plenty of extra sides and snacks. “My goal was to have the table be full, to feel like mom’s Sunday lunch,” he says.

The food ranges wildly across the Caribbean. From Trinidad there’s roti with curried chickpeas, from Jamaica a raw shrimp starter, electric with hibiscus powder and scotch bonnet, inspired by a popular roadside snack of peel ’n’ eat pepper shrimp. From Martinique comes sauce chien, a herbaceous condiment served here with a sort of octopus crostini. Jerk flavours infuse a plump sausage stuffed with a potent mix of chicken liver and duck leg. Finally for dessert there’s a nod to Barbados, a warm coconut turnover, rich as brioche, topped tableside with a coconut cream cheese frosting. More than anything on the menu, it reminds Carmichael of home. “It’s a Barbados turnover mixed with Cinnabon,” he says of the dish and its partial chain-food inspiration. “Because I love Cinnabon. Or at least, when I was in my 20s, I did.” 

New York’s new Caribbean wave, just getting started at Kabawa, Tatiana and Maison Passerelle, might not be fully fledged, but it’s gaining momentum. Onwuachi recently opened a patty shop for sports fans at Citi Field in Queens and is planning another in a Manhattan food hall. He’s also working on a new full-service restaurant in Las Vegas, and a project in Miami as chef-partner. Carmichael, meanwhile, has his sights set on the entire Momofuku restaurant group: he expects ideas hatched at Kabawa eventually to make their way across the US. “I’m here to take the business in a new direction,” he says.