Derrica Williamson-Lyons grew up in the Bahamas and moved to New York in 2013 while pursuing a career in fashion design. When she visited New Orleans in 2021, she thought it felt like home, and she moved here. She and Joi Warner started Junkanoo Cafe in St. Roch Market. It serves popular Bahamian dishes and Bahamian flavors in tacos. Junkanoo also will serve food at a burlesque and spoken word event organized by Warner this week. “Quartier Rouge Noir” explores the history of Black Storyville with shows at 3:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday, July 6, at Cafe Istanbul. For information about Junkanoo, visit strochmarket.com or @junkanoocafe on Instagram. Tickets to “Quartier Rouge Noir” are available on eventbrite.com.
Gambit: How did you learn to cook?
Derrica Williamson-Lyons: I learned to cook at home. From when I was 7, I was a part of my grandmother’s weekly ritual of cooking on Sundays. I grew up in the kitchen, having to grate the cheese for the baked macaroni, cutting up the herbs or the cabbage for the coleslaw. Every Saturday night I was in the kitchen helping my grammy and my mom. We’d wake up at 6 a.m. on Sunday to cook Sunday dinner. By 8:30 a.m., before we go to church, the food is ready. I grew up making food for my whole family because everybody would come over to the house and get a plate.
It was some of the things I now make at the restaurant, like a traditional Sunday dinner with peas and rice, and macaroni. You might have barbecued ribs or barbecued chicken or steamed crawfish, which is our version of lobster. We have spiny tail lobster — we call it crawfish. A real Sunday dinner would have two meats, peas and rice, baked macaroni, potato salad and plantains. We have big plates of food.
I do that at Junkanoo Cafe. I have baked macaroni, peas and rice, jerk vegetables and potato salad. I do sweet fried plantains. That is very common in the Bahamas.
Gambit: How do you describe Bahamian food?
Williamson-Lyons: When people come to my restaurant, they notice the jerk first. I let them know that I am Bahamian. What makes it Bahamian is that I specialize in conch. You can’t find conch anywhere in New Orleans the way I do it. I put it in stews, fresh conch salad, conch fritters and cracked conch, which is battered and lightly fried. I am trying to put conch on the forefront, but I have to educate people who don’t know what conch is.
Bahamian culture eats more seafood than anything. If you look at my menu, I have conch, lobster, salmon and shrimp, and sometimes I have red snapper.
Most American culture is more familiar with Jamaican cuisine. It’s easy for people to see something that’s widely made in the Caribbean and think it’s Jamaican. Jerk is done all over the Caribbean in different ways.
I tell people all the time there’s a difference between rice and peas and peas and rice.
Peas and rice versus rice and peas is like jambalaya versus dirty rice. It’s a vast difference. Jamaicans make their rice and peas with kidney beans and white rice with coconut milk and not much herbs. Peas and rice is made with tomato and browning the base. It has bell peppers and onions. Growing up, we used a lot of black-eyed peas, but now people are using pigeon peas. Our peas and rice has more of a jambalaya consistency, because you have tomatoes, bell peppers, onion and thyme.
I love Jamaican food. I support a Jamaican restaurant up the street, and they support me and come to me for conch.
Conch is funny. When it is raw, it’s like a scallop. With conch, you have to undercook it or overcook it. That’s the way it stays tender. If you cut it up in a salad, it’s tender. If you cook it like cracked conch, you cook it for like 30 seconds. If you fry it for two minutes, it’s going to get tough. When you cook it in a soup and boil it, then it gets tender again. Anything between undercooked and overcooked will be tough.
We eat a lot of it raw. We take it out of the shell and wash it off with some salt, water and lime. If you get a conch salad, you’ll see me take a whole conch and cut it in front of you.
Gambit: Why did you add tacos?
Williamson-Lyons: My partner has a burlesque troupe. She has burlesque events. I would sell tacos at them. I wasn’t doing Bahamian food for that.
Tacos is not a big thing in the Bahamas. So I grew up as a child counting the days until we’d go to Florida so I could go to Taco Bell. I was obsessed with it in my childhood. Tacos to us are an Americanized thing.
(At St. Roch) we started with a strictly Bahamian menu. I had wanted to incorporate some Caribbean tacos on Taco Tuesdays. I was collaborating with other vendors for Taco Tuesdays, including Taceaux Loceaux. I didn’t want to do something intrusive, so I spoke to them, and they were OK with it.
People started coming in on other days and asking for tacos and I would have to turn them down. I’d say you have to come back on Tuesdays.
Then I put my Caribbean tacos on the menu. I use strictly Caribbean flavors. Ever since then, tacos have been the main thing people are coming for. I think a lot of people are trying things they wouldn’t have tried before. I offer conch tacos. And people may not have had oxtail before, but I offer oxtail in a taco. You have the jerk with the heat, the oxtail stew, the cracked conch and the lobster.
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