Singh’s Roti Shop

It’s not every day I get to try a whole new regional cuisine, but my first visit to Singh’s Roti Shop (https://www.facebook.com/SinghsRotiShop/) on Old Winter Garden Road, just east of Kirkman Road in West Orlando, was my first experience eating Trinidadian and Guyanese food.  Trinidad and Tobago is a small dual-island country in the southern Caribbean Sea, just off the northern coast of South America, while Guyana is a slightly larger country in the north of the South American mainland, directly east of Venezuela.  The two countries are relatively close, geographically, and both have similar demographics, with large Indo-Caribbean populations who influenced their culinary cultures.

I was so excited to make the schlep out to Singh’s for the first time, and I loved all the West Indian delicacies I brought home.  The closest I’ve come to this cuisine is Jamaican food, which is one of my favorites.  Many of the dishes at Singh’s were familiar to me from Jamaican menus, but the flavors here were somewhat different, and often spicier.  But Singh’s food also had a strong Indian influence, and then they even had an entire Chinese menu with West Indian takes on familiar Chinese dishes.

The menu is not available online, so I scanned their paper menu.  Right-click these menu images to open larger images in new tabs.  When you enter Singh’s, you will see illuminated menu signs above the counter.  I took pictures of those too, but I think it will be easier to read this printed menu.

This was the stew oxtail meal ($15.50).  I can’t go to a restaurant with oxtail on the menu and not try it!  It is one of my favorite meats, and one of my favorite dishes, period.  Each culture prepares oxtail a little differently, but usually stewed or braised to break down all that wonderful collagen for some of the most tender, unctious meat.  This oxtail was spicier than the Jamaican-style oxtail I’m used to, which is savory but also a little sweet, in a darker sauce.  I loved this hotter, redder regional variation!

And this was the curry duck meal ($13.50).  It was a very generous portion of bite-size pieces of duck stewed with potatoes and some chick peas in a thick, rich, very spicy curry sauce.  I love duck almost as much as I love oxtail, so when I saw it on the menu, any thoughts of other meats went out the window.  The duck was so tender, it was very easy to pull the bones right out.  I wonder if it was cooked in a pressure cooker.  This was probably a mild curry, but it was noticeably, pleasantly spicy by my standards. 

Note on the above menu that main entree meals come with either roti or rice, and they way I see it, the place is called Singh’s Roti Shop, not Singh’s Rice Shop.  I’m sure the rice is good, but you can also get rice almost anywhere, and roti is something you would probably love if you haven’t tried it before.

This is the dhal puri, one of two kinds of roti that you can choose with the main entree meals, or you can order it separately for $2.50.  It is a huge, round, chewy, golden blanket of dough stuffed with seasoned ground chickpeas.  If you unfold the whole thing or tear off a piece, be really careful to avoid causing a messy shower of fine chickpea crumbs.  I made that mistake the first time I ever ordered a roti at the Jamaican restaurant Golden Krust, so I moved a little more gingerly as I tore into this one. 

But because I am a bit of a rube, I didn’t even realize there was a whole other kind of roti, listed on the menu as the paratha buss up (also $2.50 if you get one a la carte, or included with a meal).  The name comes from “buss up shut,” West Indian slang for a tattered, torn, “busted up” shirt.  I think I accidentally ordered the dhal puri with the oxtail meal and the paratha buss up with the curry duck meal, which was a lucky break.  If I had known what I was doing, I’d place the exact same order.  The paratha buss up was even softer, fluffier, and chewier than the dhal puri, but equally gigantic when unfurled.  But this was a little more buttery and less “earthy”-tasting than the dhal puri — more like a cross between really soft and fresh Indian naan and a puffy, fluffy Mexican flour tortilla.  Here it is after my wife and I had torn it up a little — a buss up shot of a buss up shut.

The top item on the plate below is a fry bake ($2), a breakfast offering that is warm, soft, fluffy fried dough, much like Native American fry bread, and very similar to the batura I enjoyed so much at Rasa, an Indian restaurant I reviewed months before it closed last year.  I would have also ordered some smoke herring to go with this, but breakfast hours were over, and they were all out!  The fry bake would have also been delicious drizzled with honey and cinnamon for a dessert, like a giant sopapilla, but that would be a bastardization of this wonderful, simple treat.  But to be fair, it’s so good and such a perfect blank canvas that it would go well with anything, savory, spicy, or sweet.  The pastry below it is an aloo pie ($1.50), a soft fritter that is stuffed with spiced mashed potatoes.  Both of these were a little greasy, but very tasty, with great textures — the lightest outer crispiness but so perfectly fluffy, soft, and warm on the inside.  These were my wife’s two favorite things I brought home.

Here is a separate aloo pie split down the long way and stuffed with tender and spicy curry beef ($4.50).  I chose the beef after getting oxtail and curry duck in the main meals, but the nice folks at Singh’s let you choose whichever meat you want!  This could be a terrific option for visitors wanting to maximize the things they can sample on a single visit — a few aloo pies with different meats. 

This is a doubles ($1.50), a popular Trinidadian street food dish of curried chickpeas called channa, served as a sandwich between two soft fried flatbreads called baras.  Baras are direct descendants of South Indian vadas, another fried bread I tried for the first time at the Hindu Society of Central Florida’s cafeteria in Casselberry.  The classic doubles costs only $1.50, and most people in front of me in line were ordering several of them.  Indian food aficionados might have noticed this is similar to the South Indian dish chole poori, another lesson in how immigration and diaspora inspire regional recipes. As much as I love foods made out of chickpeas, particularly falafel and hummus, I’ve never been too keen on plain old chickpeas, because my mom used to buy cans of them, and I hated that texture and the slippery, goopy liquid they were packed in.  These curried chickpeas in the doubles were so flavorful, and had a good soft texture too, like well-cooked beans.

I brought home a doubles with meat ($4.50) as well, choosing chicken as the meat option, so we could sample yet another meat too.  That photo didn’t come out looking very appetizing, so I spared you, but I assure you the chicken was tasty!

Finally, this is a piece of macaroni pie ($3.50), very much like a baked macaroni and cheese casserole that uses long bucatini-like noodles.  I wish it was a little cheesier and gooier, as I always do with baked mac and cheese dishes that crisp up the cheese too much on top and aren’t cheesy enough all the way through, but I’m glad I tried it too.

Singh’s Roti Shop doesn’t have a working website at the moment, but the address is 524 Old Winter Garden Road, Orlando, FL 32811.  The phone number is 407.253.2900.  You have to go!  I just wish I had gone sooner, but hopefully I have demystified the basic menu options for first-timers.  Once again, I recommend a new visitor try the doubles and the aloo pie because you can’t go wrong for $1.50 each.  They would be perfect vegetarian snacks, and then you can order more with different meats for $4.50 each.  And you absolutely can’t miss the two kinds of roti — the dhal puri and the paratha buss up — for $2.50 each.

Plenty of people around Orlando have probably been fans of Singh’s for years and years, but it is one of my favorite recent discoveries.  I’m always a late bloomer, but better late than never!