Outsourced Roti Becomes Staple for Indo-Caribbean Women

Trini style pepper roti, a mix of flour, masala, and other spices left to the imagination of the customer.

It’s almost 7pm on a weekday at Sandy’s Roti Shop in Richmond Hill and customers are still trickling in from a hard day of work. Steaming stainless steel tubs  are filled with an assortment of Caribbean delicacies: chicken curry, smoke herring, fried cabbage, ‘aloo’ potato curry, pepper shrimp fried rice, and chow-mein.

For added flavor–the buffet selection at ‘Trini Delite’ features a chili pepper in each curry dish.

But most customers are not there for the buffet style wonder. They are there to pick up some fresh, hot roti.

Roti, a common Indian and West Indian bread dish, doubles (a spongy sandwich of spicy chick peas) and dhal puri (a flaky bread embedded with split peas) are the restaurant’s best sellers.

The staff at Sandy’s is friendly, but they  know they are on a mission: to serve up all of the roti, dhal puri, and “buss up shut”— a Trinidadian variation of roti, to a mass of customers.

“You could say every five minutes,” said Mitra Jankie, a member of the shop’s staff, about the constant influx of customers coming in to order roti.

Sandy’s Roti Shop is twenty-five years old, but still a walk-in store with a few tables but lots of orders.

He approximated that one out of every three customers  purchases roti or dhal puri on a daily basis.

Roti shops are popular destinations for Indo-Caribbean residents to purchase their homeland’s ethnic dishes. Time is valuable, and a growing trend, within these small businesses, is selling rotis for $2 a piece, quite a bargain for working mothers who no longer make the dish from home as they used to do in the Caribbean. Now, many outsource the job of making roti and dhal puri to the shops.

A woman dressed in a black sequined blouse and sporting fuschia-colored lipstick came into Sandy’s roti shop in the evening to pick up one dhal-puri for her dinner—including some leftover chicken curry she had cooked the night before. She said being able to purchase one dhal-puri for just $2 was a big help after she comes home from hours of taking care of the elderly as a home aide.

“It’s too stressful,” making the dish from scratch, said  Savitri Singh who emigrated from Guyana six years ago. She added that she works six days a week and that she has learned in this country, you need to work hard in order to have the lifestyle you want.

It’s 3pm on a Sunday and the line at Singh’s continues.

“People say when you come to this country it is paradise,” she said pointing out, “You’ve got to make it your paradise.” For her, purchasing dhal-puri makes her life just a little less stressful.

The cost of making roti? Time. The purchase of flour, a rolling pin, oil, and a griddle seem to be less of a feat. It is the number of steps from kneading the dough, rolling it, oiling it, placing it on a hot ‘towah’ , and ‘clapping’ the roti with bare hands for just the right flaky texture, all of which compare to a quick stop at the roti shop for ready-made batches of the staple.

Singh’s Roti Shop has been a long-time hotspot for Trinidadian and West Indian dishes. It started with just five tables and now among a slew of customers, also features a vibrant nightlife of ‘tassa’ music for customers.

Back at the shop the staff prepare for a new set of customers. The trio wear red aprons and clear gloves behind the counter, occasionally coming out from the kitchen with batches of the flaky, round roti and widening spreads of dhal puri, cutting and packing them in brown paper bags. Instead of using a small griddle or ‘towah’ to make a single roti, a large griddle replaces it to cook several rotis all at once.

The shop uses two cooks and a three foot mill to grind split peas for the signature style of dhal-puri, a variation of the flaky roti bread eaten with an assortment of curries and fried vegetables dishes. Though the restaurant does offer these dishes to go with the store-bought roti, members of the staff mentioned that female customers often come in just for the roti because they have leftovers like chicken curry made at home.

Susan Persaud, a Trinidadian native and Manhattan nanny, picked up a stack of 10 rotis for her family of four and guests. Though she learned to make roti from her mother back home in south Trinidad when she was fifteen years old, she has found outsourcing the work to nearby roti shops most convenient upon moving to this country.

“It’s easy,” she said mentioning that her life could be quite stressful looking after children on a daily basis and coming home having to make a fresh batch of roti. “Back home all you have to do is look after your kids,” she said pointing out, “Here, everybody has to work.”

The owner of Anil’s Roti Shop is related to the venerable Singh’s Roti Shop. “We’re all interconnected,” said Seema Singh.

It’s a similar story with the owner of Ghee’s Roti Shop just a few miles away in South Ozone Park, Queens.

“From the time we open till the time we close, it’s roti all day long,” said Diane Itwaru the co-owner of Ghee’s, a family-owned roti shop she runs each day with her husband.

Just fifteen minutes away from John F. Kennedy airport, Ghee’s stands a good shot at maintaining a regular airport crowd from pilots, flight attendants, and workers. But still the majority of the shop’s customers are Indo-Caribbean.

Itwaru said her new roti shop, which opened in December, sells soft, layered roti which keep her customers coming back. She said sometimes she can sell up to 200 of the hot breads per day.

“When wives come home from work—that’s a hard thing to do,” she said commenting on the difficulty many Indo-Caribbean mothers face at balancing their families, jobs, and the complex steps of making roti when they come home from work.

For many Indo-Caribbean women, ‘sada’ roti can do the trick for some weeknights. Alica Ramkirpal-Senhouse, a food blogger for “Inner-Gourmet: Culinary and Cultural Musings of Guyanese-American Girl,” reflected on the “labor intensive” process her mother went through to make traditional roti at home and she wrote that her mother would often make a quicker version of the ‘paratha roti’ she so enjoyed, called ‘sada’ roti — made without oil, simply flour, salt, and water.

“One particular memory that sticks out in my mind is the overwhelming feeling my mom felt when she had to make paratha, oil roti for dinner on a weeknight,” she wrote later delineating some do-it-yourself steps to achieve the quicker version of roti at home. Though she noted the quicker version was nothing like the traditional roti she loved.

For many, purchasing roti, rather than making it at home, seems like the best option, but there are challenges when outsourcing a dish, that was traditionally made at home. “After two days they said it has a funny scent,” Itwaru said of some of her customers at Ghee’s Roti Shop who complained that at other shops, the roti isn’t always so wonderful and can not be used as left overs.