He is not a restaurant.
That is the point.
Nigel Simmons grew up eating this food in Trinidad, and he cooks it in Utah the way it was cooked for him. No line, no second kitchen, nobody else’s hands on your order.
Where it comes from
Trinidad food, cooked in Utah.
Trinidadian cooking is its own thing, and people often expect it to be something else. It isn’t Jamaican food. It isn’t Indian food. It is what happens when African, Indian, Chinese and Creole cooking share one small island for two hundred years, and it produces dishes that exist nowhere else: doubles, buss-up-shut, pelau, callaloo, cow heel soup.
That is what Nigel cooks. Not a version of it adjusted for people who might not know better, and not “island cuisine” with the specifics sanded off. The food he sends out is the food he grew up on.
In Utah, that makes him unusual. Most people here have never eaten a doubles, and Nigel would rather introduce them to the real one than a softened one.
Why only a few events
He has a job. He cooks anyway.
Nigel works full time. Catering is not how he pays the mortgage, and that turns out to matter more than it sounds.
It means he takes a small number of events, because he is the one cooking all of them. It means he can say no to a date rather than stretch himself across two in a weekend. And it means nothing goes out at a standard he wouldn’t serve his own family, because there is no volume target forcing his hand.
He cooks because he wants to. Book early, particularly around the holidays and graduation season, and if he can’t take your date he will tell you straight away.
How he cooks
Nothing arrives ready-made.
Most of what makes this food taste right happens a day before anyone sits down.
Dough, proofed overnight
Every roti and bara is rolled and cooked on the day of your event. There is no version of this that can be done in advance and still be soft.
Peppers off his own plant
Blended fresh into green seasoning rather than poured out of a jar.
Fish limed, never filleted
Bought whole, broken down by hand, soaked in lime and seasoned the same day it is cooked.
Every plate that leaves here, I cooked. That’s the whole promise.
Nigel Simmons
Tell him the date.
15 to 60 guests is the usual range, more by arrangement, and about two weeks’ notice. He replies within 48 hours, usually in the evening after work.
Check your date