Features
Janelle De Souza
Whether she has a knife, microphone or cuatro in hand, Simmone Edwin can get you and your taste buds dancing for the Christmas season and beyond.
She is one of the lead cuatro singers and actresses for the group Voces Jovenes parang, as well as a food designer, kitchen consultant and CEO at her company, Meraki Catering. And recently she won the second season of Maggi Food Court Caribbean TV competition in Jamaica.
During an intense week of filming and eight episodes, Edwin, 35, beat three other chefs from TT, eight from Jamaica and one each from St Lucia, Guyana, Barbados and the Bahamas. The win earned her respect from colleagues across the region for her skills, as well as US$10,000.
“I was casually scrolling through Facebook when I saw an ad for an all-expenses-paid competition in Jamaica with a prize of US$10,000. I thought, ‘What’s the worst that can happen. I might as well try my hand at it.’ A few weeks later I was called and after an interview I was selected as one of Trinidad’s chefs.
“That experience in itself was wild. We shot in June and the competition aired in August. It was great to meet those regional chefs. Apart from winning the competition, meeting them was really rewarding.”
The show aired in TT and Jamaica and can be seen on the Maggi Caribbean YouTube channel.
After receiving an associate degree in culinary management from the TT Hospitality and Tourism Institute (TTHTI) in 2008, Edwin moved to Miami to attend Johnson and Wales University, where he earned a bachelor of science in food service management with a concentration in international hotel operations. in 2009.
She told WMN that she was able to fast-track her degree through a study abroad program in Belgium, before returning to the U.S. for about a year to get work experience. After her return to TT, she worked in several restaurants and hotels until she got the job of a bread and pastry arts moderator at TTHTI.
Impressed by her cooking skills, friends and family had been encouraging her to have her own food business for years, but she wasn’t interested. But after six years at TTHTI, she resigned in 2017 to start her own catering business, Meraki Catering, based in Diego Martin.
“The school wasn’t going in the direction I envisioned for myself and my career, so I decided to leave in 2017. And I didn’t want to end up in a job where I was at the whim of the employer. I wanted to be in control of my own destiny, so I opened my own business and slowly built my clientele.”
In 2020, Edwin was the head chef at Adams Bagels, but shortly before the Covid19 pandemic hit TT, she left to focus on her business full time.
“It was the scariest months of my life, thinking what kind of crazy time I was in for, not knowing if I was going to be able to make any money. It turned out to be the most fantastic year for my business.”
She converted her home kitchen into a workspace that could handle enough food for small events and started cooking and marketing. People were at home and getting tired of their own cooking, so she catered packed meals for people with dietary restrictions, micro-weddings and intimate private dinners in people’s homes.
In late 2020, she returned to Adams to run her pastry department while running her business on the side. But in April 2022, she left Adams again as she wanted to take a leap of faith and transform her catering business into a hospitality and service business that does food business consulting and restaurant start-ups as well as transformations of the kitchen and menu.
She said the money from the competition was being used to expand her business and buy equipment.
“Meraki’s future will focus on training around culinary arts, baking and pastry arts and hospitality. I am very passionate about education and because there is a great need for training right now, I am devoting myself to finding out how to get young people who are interested in this field to learn the values and skills of the industry. I want to leave a legacy of professionalism and sharing the knowledge I have gained so far.”
Edwin said she always loved to eat and her family events always revolved around food. Her fondest memories were when her grandmother would call her on a random day of the week to invite family members to eat something she had made.
However, she didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. It wasn’t until she attended St Francois Girls’ College for sixth grade and her art teacher suggested she accompany another class to an open house for TTHTI that she found her calling.
“Literally, I fell in love with food that day and I haven’t looked back since. I always say, God bless her now, but she was responsible for my career. If she hadn’t pushed me to go to TTHTI that day, I don’t know what I would do with myself now.”
And while being a chef can be physically and emotionally challenging with long hours, being on your feet most of the time, dealing with customers and more, she wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Edwin’s other love is parang.
In 1997, at the age of ten, she and bandleader Russell Corbie started the parang group Voces Jovenes (Young Voices) when they decided they wanted to do more than sing Christmas carols in the band, Yuletide Carolers.
“We were growing up and we didn’t want to sing children’s songs and stuff like that. Although we mostly sang carols, we did some Spanish parang songs. So we decided to learn more and form a parang group.”
They brought together other young parang lovers and now, most of the members have been with them for more than two decades.
She said they started out as a young and enthusiastic group, trying to fit into the fraternity and make themselves known. But as they grew older, the members began working on fine-tuning their craft.
“We take the time to make sure that our instruments, even if it’s our voices, into something that we can definitely be proud of at the end of the day. Because, I always tell people, I don’t do things for the sake of it . It has to be done with passion, with some kind of love behind it, or else there’s no point in doing it.”
The group also focused on becoming more business-oriented and professional, especially when they realized that many people do not associate parang gangs with professionalism.
Since then, they have produced two albums, Coming of Age in 2002 and Viva la Parranda in 2007, and have recorded five original compositions including Christo Ha Venido and Maria. They placed first in the East Lyon Port of Spain Cultural Competition five times and were the 2016 Senior Parang National Champions.
In fact, they are still the reigning champions as there hasn’t been another senior competition since then and she doesn’t believe there will be as the top groups have yet to receive any awards from the Parang National Association.
However, they refuse to let that discourage them.
“At the end of the day, the parang is bigger than us. We want to preserve our rich traditions. I think it’s our responsibility, as a group of our stature, to preserve and respect that more than anything else that might happen.”
