Cultural Crock Pot: Café Trinidad offers homestyle island fare

From Chicago Weekly:

Serial dieters and otherwise picky eaters beware: Café Trinidad serves up generous portions of Trinbagonian food just like your fantasy grandmother used to make. The food is as filling as it is flavorful. You may want to save the calorie counting for when you’re back on campus because each bite transports the palate.

Tucked away on the corner of 75th Street and St. Lawrence Avenue in Grand Crossing, Café Trinidad’s one-room restaurant is fittingly proportionate to the tiny country that the Hicks family calls home. For five years, the Hicks have followed a disciplined routine that would make even Benjamin Franklin blush. Each day of the week, the family comes into the restaurant at 7am to start preparing the dumplings, curries, and jerk chicken that will feed the hungry lunch and dinner crowds later on. Despite the impetuousness of heat and spice, it’s a process that can’t be rushed.

The national cuisine of Trinidad and Tobago is as storied as the forced migrations that mark the islands’ history. A sort of cultural Crock Pot, Trini gastronomy borrows from the varied culinary traditions of India, West Africa, Spain, and the Americas to create dishes that are even more delicious than the sum of their parts. Take curry, for example. Café Trinidad prepares their curry with your choice of meat—goat, chicken, crab or shrimp. (Vegetarian options are limited to channa curry.) Unlike Indian or Southeast Asian curries, Trini curry is a mild brown sauce that gives full play to the tender, slow-cooked protein. Spooned atop a bed of fluffy brown rice and black-eyed peas (a nod to Creole dirty rice and Cuban black beans and rice), nothing could be better. Don’t expect to chow down mindlessly, though. Meat at Café Trinidad is prepared as it should be—bones intact. Think of it as a natural reminder to slow down and savor the next bite on Island Time.

Taste of the World in our ward.