Category: Trinidadian

Summer Breeze Roti Shop

Summer Breeze Roti Shop (https://summerbreezerotishop.com/) is a brand-new Trinidadian restaurant that opened in April 2026 in Longwood, at 215 W. State Road 434, Unit 203 (right next door to the second location of Dough Boyz Pizza).  I have been there twice now because I love Trinidadian and other West Indian food, and it is much closer to me than other Trinidadian restaurants in and around Orlando.

The menu is on the website, but I snapped this photo of a menu at the front counter to show you prices and selections for June 2026, in case it changes.  

This is a doubles, a popular Trinidadian street food that consists of curried chickpeas called channa served on two flatbreads called bara, which are soft, chewy, and fluffy, but a little greasy on the outside from being fried — kind of like the old Chalupas from Taco Bell, but softer.  Depending on how it’s folded, a doubles could be structured similarly to a sandwich or a taco, but I find them far messier to eat than either of them.  It is absolutely delicious, though.  Vegetarians would love it, but I think most people would love it. 

Here’s a look inside the open doubles.  Kaye Mohammed, the owner-operator of Summer Breeze Roti Shop, adorns them with cucumbers sliced paper-thin and house-made sweet sauce and tangy pepper sauce, kind of like chutneys. 

On my first visit, they didn’t have my first choice of meat.  I wasn’t planning to order stew beef, but it looked really good, so I went for it.  The beef was flavorful and tender, and it was easy to remove the bone fragments.  It came with a heaping portion of channa, the curried chickpeas.  All the meats at Summer Breeze Roti Shop are halal, by the way!

When you order a meat dish, you get a choice of roti skin to go with it.  Roti skins are huge, soft, fluffy flatbreads, and you tear off pieces of them to pinch and scoop up the meat and sop up the savory sauces, like Indian naan or Ethiopian injera.  Summer Breeze offers two varieties, which I have always enjoyed in the past, so I had to try them both.  One came with the meat, and I paid $5 for the other, a la carte.  On the top is the paratha, sometimes called a “buss-up shut” (Trinidadian dialect for a “busted-up shirt,” like ripped to rags).  It is served steaming hot and wrapped in a paper bag, but when I unfolded it back at home, it was wider than this entire green plate.  The buss-up shot is thicker than a flour tortilla or the Malaysian-style roti they serve at restaurants like Hawkers, but not quite as thick as Indian naan.  It is about as chewy as naan.
The roti skin at the bottom is folded too, so it is much larger than it looks.  This is the dhalpourie (sometimes called dhal puri), another Indian-inspired Caribbean flatbread, and it has a golden hue from turmeric and is stuffed with ground yellow split peas for an interesting texture and flavor.  Just be careful ripping it apart, or the split pea fragments will go flying everywhere and make a mess.

I called Summer Breeze Roti Shop before heading over for a second visit, around 11 AM this past Saturday, to ensure they had oxtail, one of my favorite meats.  I was excited to try Kaye’s version, and it did not disappoint.  It was so savory, unctuous, and tender, and the rich, flavorful meat separated so easily from the bone fragments.  I usually love oxtail with rice and peas at Jamaican restaurants, topped with plenty of extra oxtail gravy.  But Summer Breeze only had plain white rice, so I opted for another buss-up shot roti skin instead.

On this second visit, I also tried an aloo pie, a soft and savory potato fritter.  You usually get these cut open and can add whatever you want inside — meat, vegetables, channa, you name it. 

Ashley, a really nice young lady working for Kaye, added the traditional doubles ingredients to my aloo pie: more channa, the thin-sliced cucumbers, and Kaye’s pepper sauce and sweet sauce.  It was so good, I think I liked it even more than the doubles on my first visit, and I really enjoyed the doubles!

I was all ready to check out, but then I noticed they also had bake and saltfish buljol, so of course I had to order one of those too!  This is a common breakfast food in Trinidad and Tobago, with shredded salted cod (some know it as bacalao) mixed with vegetables and served inside a “bake,” a different kind of soft, deep-fried dough.  It was kind of like a deep-fried pita bread!

Here’s a shot of the lovely saltfish buljol inside, with plenty of crunchy, colorful hot peppers, onions, and tomatoes.  There is some lime juice in there too, which really brightens it up.  It was so delicious, and it is a nice option at any time of day, especially if you don’t want heavy, saucy meats.  I am always a fan of smoked, cured, and pickled fish in any forms.  Growing up eating nova salmon and pickled herring with bagels, I am always delighted to discover other cultures’ culinary traditions of curing fish and serving them in different ways.  In Trinidad and Tobago, “bake and shark” is another common street food, and yes, they use actual shark meat.  But I was perfectly happy with the bake and saltfish.

There are a few tables inside Summer Breeze Roti Shop for dining in, and a family was enjoying the heck out of their food when I arrived on my second visit this past Saturday.  Kaye Mohammed runs a tight ship, but I’ve only seen her with one additional worker each time I’ve come in, so they may not have every dish listed on the menu.  You may want to call before showing up if you’re looking for something specific (I haven’t caught their macaroni pie or potato salad yet), but you can’t go wrong with anything there.

I may not be “Trini 2 De Bone,” but I am a huge fan of Summer Breeze Roti Shop, and I know I’ll be back.  Please give them a chance, even if you’re not previously familiar with Trinidadian food.  Especially if you’re not familiar with it!  If you know and love Jamaican food, you’ll feel very much at home with it, and if you like Indian food, it will be interesting to try some Caribbean variations.  There is a lot for vegetarians to be able to enjoy, and practicing Muslims will also appreciate that all the meats are halal.  Enjoy, and tell me what you like there and what I should try next time!

Sherry’s Trini Flavors

Sherry’s Trini Flavors (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090751170325) is a wonderful Trinidadian restaurant set up inside a gas station convenience store at 1200 West State Road 436, Altamonte Springs, FL 32714, shortly before Altamonte Springs blends into Apopka to the west.  It is closed Sundays and Mondays, but open every other day from 11 AM until 7 PM.  As you can guess, Sherry’s Trini Flavors is primarily a takeout operation.  The menu is simple, you order at the counter, and they prepare your food to enjoy somewhere else — somewhere you can sit down to fully appreciate its savory flavors.

I appreciate that Sherry’s is a lot closer to home for me than the venerable Singh’s Roti Shop and Caribbean Shack (formerly known as Vindi’s), all the way out in Pine Hills in West Orlando.  I have been there twice now, and I think the food is just as good as those two popular restaurants, and probably even better, despite the smaller menu at Sherry’s.  Singh’s has all those Trinidadian Chinese specialties, and both Singh’s and Caribbean Shack serve oxtails, which I am sad to say Sherry’s does not.  I thought I might have missed oxtails on my first visit last year, but they are not on the menu, and I confirmed on my latest visit this past weekend that they don’t serve them at all.  But as much as I love those tender, unctuous cuts, Sherry’s Trini Flavors offers plenty of other delicacies, including other rich, savory, bone-in stewed meats.

On my first visit, I ordered the stew chicken dinner that came with fried rice (not rice and peas) and delicious, savory, occasionally stewed chickpeas called channa (a name that reminds me of a really cute girl I had a crush on until she went to Birthright and came home obsessed with the IDF soldier she hooked up with over there).  The stew chicken isn’t as sweet and tangy as Jamaican-style “brown stew” chicken, which usually seems to involve ketchup.  Still, the mostly dark meat is seasoned and stewed to perfection, literally falling off the bones.  If you like chicken but have never tried Trinidadian stew chicken, your life won’t be complete until you do, and this would be a perfect place to start.

On my more recent visit, I couldn’t help ordering stew chicken again!  This time I got the roti option that comes with potatoes, channa, and one of two types of roti, which I will talk about soon, rather than the “dinner” that comes with rice.  The chicken was even better than I remembered.  No regrets here.

On my first visit, this was curry duck, which was much spicier than the stew chicken, but not as spicy as you might be worried about.  Apologies for not scooping out a few chunks of tender, rich, bone-in duck meat, but the containers all leaked a bit, and it was a mess at the time.  The meat was easily falling off the bones.

And this was my favorite meat I’ve tried at Sherry’s so far, which I got on my most recent visit: curry lamb.  Goat is much more popular in Caribbean cooking, but my wife really, really adores baby goats, so the least I could do is not bring that meat home to eat in front of her.  Since we have both frolicked with super-cute baby goats in the pasture at Orlando’s Wildflower Farm, I don’t eat goat meat anymore.  But I’ve never met a lamb, so I have no such compunction about eating those guys, possibly my favorite protein of all.  This was tender, braised meat, very easy to separate from the bones, and seasoned to perfection.  It was served with more potatoes and channa. This savory stewed curry lamb was so incredible, I didn’t even miss oxtails.

When you order these proteins as roti, they come with stewed potatoes instead of rice, channa, and your choice of two warm flatbreads that are served folded up like a hot towel, but can be unfolded to be about the size of a large, round towel.  These are the roti, and if you love tortillas, pita bread, Turkish lavas bread, Indian naan, or Malaysian parathas, you absolutely have to try the roti here.  They are very different from other roti I’ve had, which are flakier like parathas (the love child of a flour tortilla and a buttery croissant).  These are big, billowy blankets meant to tear off pieces and dip or scoop them in the rich sauces or create little wraps with the meats and channa.

The yellow-tinted roti is called the dhal puri or daal puri, which is stuffed with tiny granules of ground yellow split peas.  If you’re anything like me, you might create a dust storm of split pea bits all over the table when you tear off a hunk of the dhal puri, even if you’ve had it before.  It is really good, but believe it or not, there’s another roti I like even more.

This roti edges out the dhal puri for me, and it is the only one my wife likes.  Sorry, loves.  And she doesn’t even share my obsession with Trinidadian food!  It has the delightful name of the “bussup” or or sometimes “buss up shut,” Caribbean slang for a tattered, torn, or “busted up” shirt.  It is thicker than a flour tortilla and chewier than most pita bread.  Greasier, too.  But it is soooo good whether you choose to dip, scoop, or wrap with it.   

This was one of the doubles I got on my first visit, served on a plate so I could enjoy it fresh on the premises.  Doubles are a beloved street food from the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, and one of the most delicious vegetarian foods I can think of.  It is made of two small, chewy, fried flatbreads with channa in between them.  The green stuff you see is a spicy condiment that I just loved, giving these doubles the edge over the ones I’ve tried from Singh’s and Caribbean Shack.  I ordered even more doubles to bring home on both of my visits.  They are somewhat messy to eat (both drippy and greasy), but awesome. 
On my most recent visit, I brought home four doubles and wolfed down two of them while they were still warm.  The others heated up just fine in the mick-row-wah-vey.  You can add any of the proteins to your doubles as an upcharge, but I kinda like them as their own thing.

On my first visit, I also tried the macaroni pie, which is essentially a baked macaroni and cheese casserole with long ziti-like noodles, served in slices.   I’ve had somewhat dry, slightly overcooked macaroni pie elsewhere, but this one had the meltiest, cheesiest texture, and I loved it. 

So after trying this kind of food at three different local restaurants, I absolutely love it and recommend it to all.  Even if it is completely unfamiliar to you, the closest comparison I can make is Jamaican food, followed by Indian food, but Trinidadian is very much its own thing.  I am so glad Sherry’s Trini Flavors exists, and it is a heck of a lot closer to me than the other restaurants in Pine Hills.  I will be returning much more often to treat myself and slowly work my way through the menu.  While Sherry’s menu does not offer as many different dishes as Singh’s or Caribbean Shack, the standards I’ve tried are all top-notch, clearly made with love and care in a tiny operation, hidden away from most, that deserves to be discovered and loved.