“Oxtail and cheese!!!!” someone online exclaimed after seeing one of the numerous TikTok reviews of Chef Shorne Benjamin’s now-legendary oxtail grilled cheese sandwich:
“C’mon they doing too much.”
Chef Shorne says that’s the usual reaction when people first hear about his new take on traditional Caribbean food dishes. Although he uses customary island ingredients, he’s changed up their common presentations and offers dishes like rotisserie-roasted chicken, a five-cheese mac and cheese, crispy caramelized plantains, sage-maple sweet potatoes, and shrimp curry burgers.
It was Chef Shorne’s take on one of his favorite dishes––oxtail––that became a viral sensation, though, after he added it to a grilled cheese sandwich with a mildly sweet tomato sauce. On TikTok, the sandwich was deemed “A piece of art.” Another customer made it his business to visit the restaurant when he was in town from England: after tasting the sandwich, he titled his video “Is This The Best Oxtail Sandwich In The World?” Another TikToker simply proclaimed: “Oxtail Grilled Cheese For The Win!”
Chef Shorne serves up what he’s deemed a “New Age Caribbean Cuisine” at Fat Fowl, his Downtown Brooklyn restaurant, which has been open for two years now in the DeKalb Market Hall at City Point/Albee Square Mall. The restaurant is his pandemic baby: It’s a place he’d been working toward establishing for at least 12 years.
“The pandemic happened, and instead of giving up this game, I figured that after the pandemic, with restaurants being restricted, a quick-service place would be great,” he said.
The Fat Fowl restaurant has an open kitchen format and features a long bar for seating. You don’t have to sit and eat your food there, though; the set-up is stylish yet fast-food–oriented so customers can either take a nearby seat or grab their food and go. “I try to put that illusion of, you’re getting the kind of quality food that you get from a sit-down restaurant,” said Shorne. “I tell people that if I actually take the food from the container, you’ll see how elegant and upscale this food is.”
Food is how you see a culture
Born on the island nation of Saint Lucia, Shorne flew to New York City when he was 18. He arrived ready to begin a new life in the United States on January 1, 1999. “I flew here on New Year’s Eve of 1998, and I landed here January 1, 1999, which was like a little Twilight Zone situation,” he said with a laugh. “You leave from one year and you get to a new year in a new land—it was kind of symbolic in a sense, because I didn’t know what was going to happen in New York. I was just reuniting with my parents. It was a new beginning, and I was embracing the change, trying to find myself. One thing that I know my parents always told me was, ‘Hey, you come here, you just have to get your education, be straight, don’t get in trouble’…I just saw the sacrifices my parents made, and I just wanted to be a good citizen and make them feel proud.”
Shorne did as he was told: He went to college, and because he comes from a business-oriented family, he figured he’d also go down the path to a finance-related career. He ended up working in a bank, learned about stocks, and could often be found eating at New York City’s fine dining establishments. After a while, he noticed that there were not many Caribbean sit-down fine dining restaurants. That’s when Shorne said he began toying with the idea of opening a restaurant of his own.
Just as the luster was beginning to fade on his banking job, the 2008 financial crisis hit, and he lost his job. At age 30, Shorne was jobless—but he did have a year and a half’s severance payment. He started wondering, what next? How could he reinvent himself? That is when he decided to pursue his culinary dream.
After attending the French Institute Of Culinary Arts (now the International Culinary Center), Shorne’s non-traditional take on Caribbean cuisine won him invitations to national and international catering gigs. During the pandemic, he catered meals for private customers and, just for fun, would film himself experimenting on new dishes and post the results to his Instagram page.
“It’s been a real blessing in terms of how people respond, and that’s what I wanted to do: get the message out of where I am as a chef and how I could make simple food taste good,” Shorne said.
A major part of Shorne’s flavor profile is an evocation of the food his grandmother used to make in Saint Lucia; that’s one reason he wants to keep cooking: He wants to keep her legacy alive.
“I think food is how you see a culture or the way you say you love somebody,” he said. “I just do it differently. I create my cooking from the center, and the center is like raw, pure energy and creativity.”
