The Last Taste of Summer

The Last Taste of Summer — Harlem, New York

This dinner is a homecoming.

My mother was raised on 119th & Manhattan Avenue. My Jamaican father was raised in Harlem, too. I was raised in the South, but New York was where I spent my summers — riding the train to Washington Heights and Co-op City, walking 125th past the Apollo, eating turkey and cheese on a roll from the bodega, cherry coco icees in hand while fire hydrants turned the block into a playground.

There is an energy to summer in New York that is almost impossible to describe. The city shifts. The people shift. The whole demeanor changes. Everybody is outside. The streets have a soundtrack. Music spills from cars, bodegas and apartment windows. The heat sits between the buildings. The sidewalks become gathering places. Somehow, the city feels both chaotic and completely in rhythm.

It is a feeling I have spent my whole life trying to put into words.

So instead, I'm putting it on a plate.

Years later, after graduating from FAMU, I moved to the Bronx and rode the train downtown every Monday to perform poetry at the Nuyorican. Before I told stories through food, I told them on a stage.

The Last Taste of Summer is where those stories meet.

Through five courses of pure storytelling, I'll take you from my mother's childhood in Harlem, through the New York summers that made me, to the Caribbean and Southern flavors that eventually shaped the woman — and the chef — I became.

Each course is a chapter. Each plate, a memory.

An intimate, elevated dinner inspired by the beautiful collision of Harlem, the Caribbean, the American South and the cultures that make New York unlike anywhere else in the world.

This is my love letter to the city that raised my mother, shaped my family and gave me some of my sweetest memories.

And this time, I get to bring my mother home and set the table.

Harlem, New York
September 20, 2026

Come hungry. We're going to taste our way through a New York summer.