Caribbean Style Vegan - Telling Their Story

A story short with Elisha Hazel & Qulen Wright, owners of Caribbean Style Vegan restaurant in New Haven, CT. Sharing their passion for serving up life-giving Ital food with local ingredients, and learning the business ropes along the way. The full transcript of the interview is below. Listen by podcast or at the link above or check out this synched audio and photo slideshow.

This story is one in a six part series of BIPOC food business owners sponsored by The Yale School of the Environment. We hope these stories inspire you to check out these delicious family run businesses (if you are lucky enough to live near by), and to spend more time getting to know the people in your community who make and sell food. Stories produced by our host Tagan Engel, edited by Jon Oliver Music, photographed by Maza Rey Photography.

Transcript of Elisha Hazel and Qulen Wright of Caribbean Style Vegan

Elisha Hazel:
My name is Elisha Hazel, and our business is Caribbean Style Vegan, also known as Nine Square Market Caribbean Style.

Qulen Wright:
My name is Qulen Wright, I am the chef and part owner.

Elisha Hazel:
And I am, I guess you would say the manager and part owner. I do help in the kitchen as well, but right now I'm out of the kitchen. I'm on maternity leave; we just had a beautiful baby boy a couple months ago. We wanted to start a restaurant because in all honesty, we're vegan. And there's really scarce food out there in New Haven, there's not many places to eat, we always have to travel outside of the state to find food that we like that's vegan/vegetarian, so he's a great cook at home. And he's been vegan for years. So, him always preparing food for family and friends and them saying like, “it tastes great.” We thought like, “Hey, we can do this, we can do something similar to the businesses that we've traveled to.” And we always wanted to own our own business because it's self-satisfying knowing that you work for yourself and you can do what you want, and also benefit your community, give them something that they are not used to. So, with all that put together we just said “okay, let's start a restaurant.”

Qulen Wright:
We tried to bring the taste of the Caribbean into the vegan, I would say the vegan world, because in Jamaica, “ital” - what we call “ital” (the word comes from the word vital which is food that's nourishing food as wholesome plant-based version). So, we try to bring like the taste of the Caribbean; like the curries, the jerks, and transform that into a plant-based version. I always tell people, the curry mix veg is one of my favorites because it kind of stems from a dish that I learned to cook that’s traditionally from Jamaica, be called “rundown,” which is a dish that's prepared with coconut oil and coconut milk as like the base of what the whole dish is. That's like one of my favorite dishes.

Elisha Hazel:
People don't realize your food is based off of the seasoning. So, the food is heavenly seasoned. Lots of herbs and spices, coconut oil. People always asking why his food tastes so good, but I think it's because we loaded up with the flavor, the herbs and seasonings and things like that.

Qulen Wright:
Food is art also. So not only with the tasting, you know, I like the food to have color and to look rich not only taste rich, but you eat with your eyes first. From a young age, I used to ask my mom, “When am I going to learn how to cook?” And she would tell me that it's something that just naturally develops, like no one sat her down and said “okay, now it's time to learn how to cook”. I stopped eating meat early, ‘93/’94. So at that time, it was hard to find things. I used to have to learn how to prepare these foods. And over the years I will say it just develop. Alicia could tell you, probably her first experience with me giving her tofu, it probably wasn't the best. You know, cuz I was just learning.

Elisha Hazel:
No, it wasn’t at all.

Qulen Wright:
*laughs*

Elisha Hazel:
But it’s certainly the best now. And this is over 20 years ago, maybe, I tried his tofu. But he's come a long way.

I decided to study nutrition after seeing the importance of food on our health. I always wanted to be a doctor, but I figured you know, if you could prevent a lot of these issues that you'd be treating as a doctor with nutrition, then that's probably the direction I should go. So as many people know, the plant-based diet can be a really healthy one. It can also be unhealthy. Through our food, we're showing the healthy side of it. We cook non-GMO/organic as much as possible. We just continue to source the best things that we can and make sure it's healthy for everyone.

Qulen Wright:
Fortunately, we have local places like Edge of the Woods natural health market. Alicia's family also has a farm in West Haven. So sometimes during the summertime we get local organic produce from him a lot. So we've been blessed in that way that we haven't been really stressing to find our sources. Yeah.

Elisha Hazel:
The prices can be tough, because for some reason the healthier foods are more expensive. But we just tried to do our best and continue to keep our prices affordable for everyone.

There are so many challenges to running a business, from finances to employees to maintaining through a pandemic now, we both had no business experience coming into this. We actually started this business four years before we opened up, trying to build our recipes or think about where we are renting, trying to accumulate capital to start. We were gracious enough to start without a lot of money, because we didn't get a loan through a bank after trying. I did take a 16-week chorus with New Haven Business School, which taught you somewhat about what you need to get going, we still weren't prepared. Just with the grace of a higher power out there, everything came together. And we were just grateful that everybody loved it because the customers coming back really helped us build up and get started and to remain here today.

Qulen Wright:
Food connects people, and also it revolves around culture. For people to even see and learn, when we came and we put Caribbean style in on the glass, you hear people going like Caribbean vegan, they had no idea that connection, that the Caribbean or even within the culture of Rasta have always upheld vegan food, but we've called it “ital” food. So it was good to see that people have been learning so much and just bringing people together, all different walks of people being united through food. We really didn't realize that these things that would play a bigger part than just us running the business.

Elisha Hazel:
We never really thought of the impact that would have we were just looking for food, I think, at the time, but throughout the whole process. We've seen people from all different races, ages, backgrounds, and we've seen relationships develop in front of our eyes just because everybody's gathering around food, which is great because I think that naturally happens anyway. But it's given the community a place to go, like you said to get cultural awareness and to unite as one.

Caribbean Style Vegan, 89 George St, New Haven, CT