After the bara bubbles inside LC's Roti Shop, restaurant owner Elsie Gopaul-Chin tops off the fried flatbreads with a scoop of a spiced chickpea curry called channa to finish the famed Trinidadian doubles.
“Every corner in Trinidad probably sells doubles,” Gopaul-Chin said. “So people will grab two doubles, grab a drink and they're on their way to work.”
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Only, she's not selling this dish–one of the best examples of the cultural tie between India and the Caribbean–in her native Trinidad and Tobago.
She's serving it up in Miami Gardens.
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On June 1, the nation closes out Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month and marks the start of Caribbean American Heritage Month, which has been recognized by presidential proclamation annually since 2006. But these cultures overlap in more ways than one, and two South Florida restaurants are examples of that connection.
At her restaurant, Gopaul-Chin proudly plates an authentic taste of Trinidad and Tobago with a side of history.
“My great-grandparents came from India, my grandparents came from India,” Gopaul-Chin said. “So the culture comes with them.”
Her family story is not uncommon. According to the CIA, more than 40 percent of Trinidadians and Tobagonians are of East Indian descent or mixed African and East Indian descent, and cuisine from the dual-island nation tells that story.
“This type of food that I make here originated from India,” Gopaul-Chin said. “But when it comes to Trinidad, most of the things they had [in India], the ingredients, we didn’t have it in Trinidad. So we switched it up a little bit.”
Switching it up resulted in culinary creations like the Trinidadian doubles, a popular street food made of bara, channa, tamarind sauce and scotch bonnet peppers–a tropical hot pepper native to Latin America and the Caribbean.
Historical records show the earliest movement from India to places in the Caribbean like Trinidad, Guyana and Jamaica came in the 1800s, before any of those countries became independent.
“I feel 100 percent Trinidadian,” Gopaul-Chin said. “We have a very mixed, very diverse type of people there, so we are blended.”
In Miami-Dade's Sunset West shopping center, you’ll find Jamaica Kitchen. Inside, the aroma of fresh-baked patties and egg rolls for the popular suey mein fill the air.
“That soup is specific to the Hakka people. That's suey mein,” said restaurant manager Cheryl Chin as she pointed to its picture on the menu above her. “People come from far to get that.”
For decades, Chin’s family has been serving up a melting pot of flavors that tell the stories of generations.
“Jamaican-Chinese dishes are slightly different. You wouldn’t get that in a traditional Chinese restaurant,” she said. "There's a little more seasoning in there, a little more flavor."
Similar to the migration pattern from India, people of Chinese descent began to arrive on the shores of Caribbean islands in the 19th century, after the end of the transatlantic slave trade.
“Asians, you know, Indians and Chinese, were brought to the Caribbean to replace the slaves on the sugar plantations as indentured labor pretty much,” Chin said. “Eventually, they started bringing their families.”
That is how Chin’s ancestors initially arrived in the Caribbean, but she and her parents were born and raised in Jamaica. Chin’s grandmother was a mixed-race Jamaican woman of African and Chinese descent.
Although Chin describes herself as Jamaican first and foremost, she said she gets many questions from non-Caribbean people based on how she looks.
“We get it both ways,” Chin said. “Prejudice. We look Chinese, but don’t speak Chinese and we don’t look like Black Jamaicans.”
The island of Jamaica has a national motto, printed on its coat of arms that reads, “Out of many, one people.” The motto is based on the country’s multiracial population, and like the motto describes, the influences and mixing of cultures are an integral part of what it means to be Caribbean.
“It feels good that you have a culture that you can pass on,” Gopaul-Chin said.
