Tasha’s Caribbean and Soul Food Cuisine

All the World on Dodd Street

At first glance, the neatly chalked menu at Tasha’s Caribbean and Soul Food Cuisine in East Orange appears to be, literally, all over the map. A quick conversation with chef-owner Natasha Williams renders that menu even more overwhelming as she explains the many ways she can customize her dishes, which hail from the Caribbean, India, England, and the American South.

Digging deeper, the curious diner will find the thread that draws the seemingly disparate dishes together. The menu showcases how Williams uses food to tell the intertwining histories of her life and that of her husband, James. And it demonstrates how, together, they are using their tiny café to connect customers with a range of culinary traditions while reconnecting the community with fresh food.

Williams’s Caribbean roots are reflected in menu items such as Goat Curry, Fire Pit Jerk Chicken, and Veggie Roti. Born and raised in Trinidad, Williams began cooking traditional Trinidadian dishes at the age of 9. The southernmost island in the West Indies, Trinidad’s history of immigration—including its colonial plantation-based economy that relied on enslaved and indentured laborers—resulted in a varied and vibrant cuisine that combines ingredients and dishes originating in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Trinidad is where Williams’s love of food exploration began. “It’s like a melting pot. You find French Creole restaurants,” explains Williams, whose ancestors include great-great-great-grandparents who came to the island from India. “And then you would find a classic Trinidadian restaurant or classic BBQ place with the ground pit. Trinidad also had a big migration of Chinese. There’s a lot of Chinese food in Trinidad.” After earning a culinary degree in Trinidad, Williams worked around the island in fine-dining establishments where she expanded her culinary range, including a deep dive into Cajun cuisine under a Danish head chef who, says Williams, “was so intrigued by it, we had no choice.”

A family medical emergency brought Williams to New Jersey, where she met and married James Williams—a Newark native with strong southern roots and a deep love of meals prepared by his maternal grandmother, May Thomas. “James is a big foodie,” Williams says. “He’s a very particular foodie. You just can’t give him regular mac and cheese or regular black-eyed peas. It has to be a certain type of way, like his grandmother did.”

At the restaurant, Williams represents James’s family story through menu items such as BBQ Beef Ribs, Fried Chicken, and Grandma’s Mac & Cheese. “My first introduction into soul food was May Thomas’s food,” says Williams, who set out to re-create the flavors of her husband’s childhood, in part so that he could continue to enjoy them after Thomas left Newark to move back to the South. The restaurant’s opening hours are another nod to James’s family. “On Sunday, they cook. That’s why we’re closed on Sunday,” Williams says. “To James, that’s the day his family sits and eats and be together.”

Before opening Tasha’s, Williams worked for many years as a corporate catering chef. Laid off due to COVID-related cutbacks, she went to work at Ironbound Farm in Asbury, where her husband and her son, Kelon Bishop, worked as farmers.

At the farm, Williams cooked directly from the fields and over open fire, returning to her Caribbean culinary roots. “In the Caribbean, you cook with live fire,” she says. “Like going outside, getting the chickens from the farm, getting the [wood], putting it on the fire and creating jerk chicken on the pit.” She also processed farm produce to create the farm’s signature Mother Fire Hot Sauce, as well as pestos and other items.

“It was beautiful,” James says. “When I saw all the people coming, I saw the excitement in [Natasha’s] cooking and her having all that land that had fresh vegetables.”

Driving home from the farm one fall evening in 2020, James stopped into the Paraíso Chapin Restaurant in East Orange. A conversation with the woman behind the counter revealed that the restaurant was closing in two weeks. “When she said that, I said ‘I think this was meant to be,’” James says. “So I talked to the owner, got everything lined up, paid for, and then I blessed [Natasha] with something I knew she wanted.”

What “she wanted” was to bring her passion and skills for feeding people to their community. “I like to see people happy through food,” Williams says. “Bringing different types of food to the community—fresh food, better food— that’s basically my mission.” Tasha’s opened on December 21, 2020, and sales really took off a few months later when the city’s fire chief became a regular customer and spread the word among the firefighters, as well as to the community and the mayor.

Wary at first, the community has embraced her eclectic menu, which sometimes ventures beyond Caribbean and soul food to include traditional British dishes such as shepherd’s pie, reflecting the teenage years Williams spent living with relatives in Leicester, England. She also prepares a range of vegan dishes, including collard greens, in which she builds complexity of flavor using a preparation method she learned making callaloo, a popular dish in Trinidad.

One way that Williams has expanded her customers’ preferences is by readily offering them a taste of a dish before they make a purchase. Samples also get customers past the assumption that her food is hot; excessive spiciness, she says, ruins food because it masks flavor. At the customer’s request, dishes can be spiced up with a few drops of Tasha’s Hell Pepper Sauce, which she makes with the scorching Trinidad Scorpion Pepper.

When preparing a dish, Williams focuses on layering flavors through techniques such as smoking and by searing meats in browned sugar. She also focuses on balance, such as pairing spicy elements with cooling tropical fruits and combining heavy dishes with bright sauces, as she does in her Hennessy Wingz and Green Goddess Dressing— a playful autobiographical dish in which she uses the intensity of the Hennessy BBQ Sauce to describe her husband, and the accompanying Green Goddess Dressing to describe herself. “You have a very tough guy,” she says with a laugh. “And you have the Goddess to balance him off.”

What Williams does not do on her menu is fuse different culinary traditions. “Everything is in its own region,” she says. “What’s in the Caribbean stays in the Caribbean. What’s soul food stays classic soul food. They’re very different. It’s like night and day.”

WHEN PREPARING A DISH, WILLIAMS FOCUSES ON LAYERING FLAVORS THROUGH TECHNIQUES SUCH AS SMOKING AND BY SEARING MEATS IN BROWNED SUGAR.

Left: Chef and farmer— Natasha and James Williams

Williams takes pride in the way her food transports some of her customers back home. “A lot of people in this community that have grandparents in the South say I cook with love because it reminds them of their grandma,” Williams says. “Embracing of me—being Caribbean—being able to fulfill your grandmother’s soul food, it’s unique for me and that’s my ‘wow’ moment. My mission was just to make sure my husband got good food when his grandma moved back to the South. For me to do that for someone else, that makes me feel good.”

Everything at Tasha’s is made from scratch. Trying to keep her purchasing as local as possible, Williams buys meats from local butchers—searching out specific qualities such as halal processing, extra-meaty oxtails, and large ribs for her Texas-style ribs.

Farm-to-table is her ultimate goal, but they are still working out the logistical kinks. In the meantime, James uses his farming skills to bring fresh produce to their community—starting with a large backyard home garden that he and his sons created during the first summer of COVID. “James took the two boys, he rented a tiller, he tilled the land, and the whole neighborhood had vegetables during COVID,” Williams says. “And then everyone else wanted him to come and do their backyard. It was a whole COVID neighbor society.”

Along with providing food, James wanted to show his farming skills to his community. “That was very important to me,” he says. “That people knew that I was a farmer and I really knew what I was doing. And I showed them by giving them the products I was growing.”

James also planted more than a dozen apple trees from Ironbound Farm in the neighborhood around the café, including several Harrisons and Campfields—two historic 18th century Newark apples. “The neighbor next door has apples,” Williams says. “The man across the street has apples. And this one across the street has apples. Everyone has apples.” Last fall, one young tree produced enough apples that she could offer Campfield Apple Cake as a dessert special.

Williams has witnessed the transformative power of farming through James’s work at Ironbound— where he went from eating only canned vegetables to eating root vegetables right out of the ground. “It’s part of him, that place,” Williams says. “It changed him a lot.” Now, they are eager to use those farming skills and the restaurant to offer that same transformative experience in East Orange.

To do that, they hope to be granted access to a city lot across the street where James and his sons intend to plant a large garden this spring. The produce will be used in the restaurant—especially by local youth, who will be invited to pick their own vegetables and bring them across the street to be prepared.

“I want to show them my experience of how restaurants can have farm-to-table and eliminate a lot of vegetables going to waste,” James says. “I think people in the inner city will appreciate knowing where their food comes from and understanding exactly what they’re eating.”

He hopes the garden will also further his desire to be a role model for kids in the community. “He tells the kids ‘I’m a farmer,’” Williams says. “And they’re, like, ‘No you’re not. There’s no Black farmers.’ They will taunt him and he’ll pull down that picture. ‘See! That’s me!’” The picture she refers to is a photograph of James and the original Ironbound Farm crew that is displayed on a shelf in the café.

Tasha’s is a classic family-run restaurant. James helps out in the kitchen, where Williams says he makes her fried catfish recipe so well that customers specify that they want him to cook their order. Twelve-year-old James Jr. often works the register and manages all of the online and in-store technology. “The farmer and chef—we invested in ourselves,” Williams says. “We took our savings and we are building our restaurant.”

Inspired by Ironbound Farm owner Charles Rosen’s inclusion of his children in the work and future of the farm, James sees the restaurant as an opportunity to build financial security for his sons. “I’m looking at building wealth or financial gain for them now—the same as Charles was building for his kids,” he says. “So everything moving forward, it’s for the kids. It’s no longer for us. It’s really for them—to keep them motivated and understand the financial business and the responsibilities.”

For now, Tasha’s is takeout only, much of it purchased by families who pick up multiple dinners on the way home from work. When COVID recedes, Williams plans to add a few indoor tables and a cozy décor. They also plan to add an outdoor garden dining space when the weather warms.

Williams has dreams of someday returning to fine dining. “I would love to open up a restaurant in Montclair,” she says. “Fine dining. I come from that background and I love it. I love it!”

Meanwhile, James’s goals remain centered around farming and family. “I know I’m going to continue doing farm-to-table and keeping it fresh,” he says. “As long as she’s happy—that’s the whole key. Preserve her energy, and don’t burn her out. Just let her grow and wherever God take her, that’s where it take her. And I’m there for her.”

Tasha’s Caribbean and Soul Food Cuisine
405 Dodd St., East Orange
862.224.1682
tashascaribbeansoul.com