Interviewing Award-Winning Writer, Riaz Phillips

Talking about the Caribbean diaspora, UK, history, a bit about Vietnam and a potential new book!

Riaz Phillips, the author of West Winds: Recipes, History and Tales from Jamaica takes your taste buds to the Caribbean. His recipes are a testament to the island’s rich culture of food and history. In this interview, he shares his reason for tracing the taste of Jamaica and it’s diaspora. Riaz tells us about his first book, Belly Full: Caribbean Food in the UK, and two more of his books, West Winds, and East Winds: Recipes, History and Tales from the Hidden Caribbean, and even gives a glimpse of a future project.

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Let’s ease into things, do you wash your chicken and where do you stand on this debate?

Yeah, I always do. I think it’s a cultural thing. There are many different reasons and traditions that people relate to the origins of it. It’s something that my family always did, and I worked in a bunch of Caribbean restaurants and they always washed it. It was only when I started doing shoots with people from different backgrounds, that they would cook the chicken from the box.

You go back and forth between London and New York. Compared to those two cities, how different is the Caribbean diaspora? 

I go to Florida more. I always look at cities like Venn diagrams, so for Florida, you have Jamaicans, Haitians, Guianese, and Trini which you’ll have in England but not as much as in New York or Florida. When I relay that to food, depending on where you go they’ll cater to wider communities, like a Haitian place might do jerk chicken. Florida and New York are so much bigger in terms of space and population whereas in London it’s smaller and more restricted and they feel the need to cater to everyone. 

You’ve published 3 books, Belly Full: Caribbean Food in the UK, West Winds, and East Winds. What was the most challenging part of creating your cookbooks?

The first wasn’t a cookbook, it was more of a coffee table book. The challenge was being super broke and getting around meeting chefs and restaurant owners who have such little amounts of free time. 

You dove into a rich culture and community in your first book, what was the deciding factor in documenting Belly Full: Caribbean Food in the UK?

It wasn’t just one thing, it was a confluence of different things that happened. Like my grandma, she was from Jamaica, and she passed away. I never really spoke much about where she was from, and why she was so insistent on always cooking food from back home. She lived in Hackney, in East London, one of the original Caribbean communities. She would always go shopping at Ridley Road Market. I never asked her why it was so important, it’s always interesting to know why there is nostalgia behind people’s dishes and the things they try to recreate when they come to Britain.

As she passed away, I realized if you want to learn about food there is this whole gamut of restaurants in the UK. People of the same generation as my grandma, or their children that spoke to their elders who have those stories or memories. That is what I wanted, to talk to her through those people and get an understanding of the early days of the Caribbean community in England.

At this time there were loads of books popping up about Hackney food, East London food, these listicle articles about the best food in London and they all consistently left out Caribbean, West, and East African food. Growing up I ate at these places and I thought if these books or articles gave one small corner to Caribbean food it wouldn’t be enough. At first, I documented on the internet and using Tumblr to upload photos and captions. Then I heard about Instagram, so I looked into it and it happened all together. 

My friends are TV writers and before they started their careers they wanted to shoot a pilot for a TV show so they raised their money through Kickstarter, put a link on Facebook and I started looking into that. On the ‘books page,’ there were Kickstarter books about dogs and ice cream so I thought, based on my small following, I had worked in sales before so I was good at cold calling and getting into contact with people, media, and editors. Between my community and reaching out to media publications, I thought I could publish this idea. 

Where else have you been where you’ve witnessed a similar community or connection through food?

Vietnam is pretty cool. I went there many years ago, in a way, it felt like I was in the Caribbean. They had the same relationship between food, informal restaurants, and street foods. Things like sugar cane juice is a big thing in the Caribbean and in Vietnam, it was the first thing I saw and I couldn’t believe it. They had market stalls and fruit vendors everywhere with similar fruits. It was cool. 

You just landed in Jamaica, what is the first thing you would grab to eat and drink?

The time determines what you’ll eat, in the morning or lunchtime that's where all the vegan Rastafari places are still open. They wake up early, shut around 3 or 4, and even sell out by then. If you arrive late in the night it might be KFC, it’s a running joke, but KFC in the Caribbean is really good, like Island Grill, which is the Jamaican version of KFC and fast food. Or the street vendors that start coming out with carts and a grill doing jerk chicken, it’s incredible. 

In West Winds you mention “There are no recipes in the Caribbean in the traditional Western format sense — rather there are folk tales, short stories, songs, and anecdotes.” How did it make you feel following the long lineage of history and culture?

It was cool, cuisines are all pretty transitory in a way, but especially Caribbean food, because no one who lives in the Caribbean except for the Amerindian community, which is only big in Guyana are native to the island. So pretty much all the food brought there, in a way, that depending where you’re from you’ll have some relation to Caribbean food. That is one of the main messages I wanted to get out. It’s not this kind of scary food you need to be put off by because it’s super foreign.

If you’re from England and you baked before then you can make a patty because that’s based on Cornish pasties, or if you’re of Asian descent, things like chow mein are huge in Jamaica because of the Chinese Jamaican population and so on, and that was one of the more important cool things that came out of it. 

Your bibliography proves you traced your roots in both West Winds and East Winds, have you found yourself changed after that research and history?

I wouldn’t say I’ve changed but after studying the origins of these foods you realize it was all innovation, in a way. It all changed over time and what happens now is this imaginary moment in time where we stopped and said this is the food and it’s never allowed to change again.

So, the diaspora and the people who are in England can’t get a plant like chadon beni which is like a coriander so instead they’ll use regular coriander. They’ll post the recipe on Instagram, including myself and people will say this is not the real thing because you didn’t use that one ingredient, so its fake.

When you look at the origins of these foods, people from West Africa or India couldn’t use what they had from their origins, so they had to do it with something else. So I came out of it wanting more to adapt and change things because that is more true to history than how it was made in 1912 so it has to be that way forever now. 

Whose hands do you wish your cookbooks to land in?

Always a mix, I get messages from people who were born or grew up there and haven’t been back in ages. It helped spark a memory and made them want to learn more about it. Or also people who have never been or know anything about it and want a stepping stone into learning more about it.

It’s equally cool for all those different types of people to get their hands on it. I think the only people I’d say not, are people who want these guidebooks, step-by-step recipe books. You can get your weekly newspaper, a blog for that. 

Might there be a hint of another book? Or would you like to share what you’re working on next?

I just finished a pitch, but I can’t talk about it too much because it’s in the agency’s hands. As a stepping stone, when I was a kid someone told me specifically what the African diaspora was, he said we’re all the same we just got off from different boats. So that’s the emphasis of the next book. It would seem like it’s not connected to Caribbean food when geographically it’s obviously close, I already mentioned it early on in the interview. 

What are a handful of ingredients you can’t live without?

All-purpose seasoning, green seasoning which I always make, and paprika. And I guess you always need a bag of flour because so much can come from a simple bag of flour it’s incredible. 

What would you recommend to new food writers, or what word of advice would you give?

Just follow your convergence of passion and niches because no one else can be you. I’d love to read stuff by a Turkish person who grew up in Germany, I’d love to know what they think about stuff that could never be replicated.

I love that kind of convergence, and I also think for writing we get caught up in the presentation of that being text. There’s so much space for writing in places that aren’t text anymore. Most of the text-based platforms are dying anyway, you got Substack and things like that but, people don’t look at places like TikTok and YouTube as venues for their writing.

So I think if you combine writing with video editing or illustration or something like that just as a bonus to tag onto your writing. That’s another layer of convergence that can’t be replicated by another person as easily. And I think that’s where you begin to stand out. 

Thank you, Riaz!

Hurricane Relief Fund: While recording this interview, Hurricane Beryl struck the Caribbean islands. Since Riaz worked hard to bring us these amazing books and historically grounded recipes, let’s give back where we can. Here you can donate to World Central Kitchen:

HURRICANE RELIEF FUND DONATION

Pepper shrimp-ly yours,

The Greasy Pen