Tag: caribbean

In 1996, a legendary Carnival designer brought Caribbean flair to the Atlanta Olympics—and accidentally transformed car dealerships forever.

There’s life before you add green seasoning to your cooking repertoire, and life after it. You’ll likely never see this concoction in an official recipe for a soup, stew, slow roast, or curry, but green seasoning—known as sofrito and recaito in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and epis in Haiti—is undoubtedly the backbone of Caribbean cooking.

Cookbooks, essays, history, and more.

Over the past two decades, the celebration has departed from Peachtree Street and split into two competing operations: the Atlanta Caribbean Carnival, which has taken place at Turner Field, Morris Brown College, Auburn Avenue, Old Fourth Ward Park, and, more recently, Central Park; and the Atlanta-DeKalb Carnival, which started in Conyers then moved to Decatur and, now, Stonecrest. At first glance, the split might seem to mirror the sprawl of the Caribbean community throughout the metro Atlanta area. But Atlanta’s tale of two Carnivals also reflects the age-old tensions that can occur when people with disparate but similar backgrounds have limited options for celebrating their identities and are forced to find community together—alternately being blamed or credited for each others’ actions.

Winston Munroe has been playing mas for 65 years and he says each year is even more exhilarating than the last. According to the Trinidad native, who is also president of Sesame Atlanta band, Carnival preparations for the next year begin a day after Carnival ends.

But perhaps the clearest example of the Caribbean’s influence on Atlanta hip-hop is OutKast’s classic song on its third studio album, Aquemini: “SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” described by Andre 3000 in the second verse as a "fine, bow-legged girl . . . fine as all outdoors."

Everybody loves sauce. It’s an easy way to enhance, and sometimes outright save, the quality of an otherwise lacking recipe. But no matter how thick a sauce company might try to pour it on, there’s no culturally acceptable version of Jamaica’s famous and famously imitated jerk you can make simply by opening and tilting a bottle of sauce.

When I finally arrived to check out APT 4B, I met Clive Ruddock, a Jamaican immigrant who is part-owner of this and several other Caribbean-themed Atlanta restaurants—collectively, though unofficially, known as Every1Eats Hospitality Group. He, and later his partners, shared with me the unconventional but remarkable story of their rapidly growing enterprise.

Cooking stew peas or any iteration of beans and rice was never meant to be dogma. Rather, it is a humble offering connected to nourishment and nostalgia wrapped in the comfort of eating what we are used to eating and will continue to eat.

Christopher Swain Christopher Swain has traveled the globe seeking to understand his ancestral lineage through the arts. The native Atlantan, author, and public arts coordinator for the City of East Point is an avid collector...