As I sit across one of my closest friends at a cafe, half-blind by the determination to milk my haggled-for gas station sunglasses for every now-obsolete penny, scrunched over a wobbly side table with precariously full drinks, I ponder. I write and rewrite, and scribble, and write again.
Spring is in the air, with spring break breeching our minds of getaway locations, whether across the globe or tangentially off campus. The streets are buzzing. Don’t shake. Sip your performative coconut matcha and write something, anything, down.
I think back to leaning on a Walgreens cane to nurse a bad fall and avoid an urgent care bill a few weeks ago. I hum the national anthem, “DtMf” by Bad Bunny, as my boyfriend flags down the Uber that I absentmindedly left my phone in while I triple checked my questions.
This was going to be my first interview for Buffalo Plates and Prose, and the third ever that I remember myself doing. Despite a seemingly outgoing personality, I don’t really elect to make conversation with people.
I am always open to getting out of my comfort zone for a great opportunity, and being able to sit down with Executive Chef Chris Sinclair-McCalla to talk about his journey was an amazing one that I couldn’t pass up.
We added buffer time to the buffer time to the interview, and were presently standing awkwardly outside Bratts Hill by Chef Darian. If you’re a Buffalo State student, staff, or alumnus, that name may ring a bell for you, as Chef Darian Bryan is a 2017 graduate from the Hospitality Administration program and is currently competing on Gordon Ramsay’s show, Next Level Chef.
Bratts Hill, named after a neighborhood in Jamaica, sits in Larkin Square, an event venue on Seneca Street. Photos online make the square look enticing to return to when the weather sweetens up again, but standing in the drizzle, frazzled by the phone fiasco, Bratt’s is a beacon of hope on an otherwise dreary day.
I remembered I set this meeting up via email, and wanting to be out of the rain, let Executive Chef Sinclair-McCalla know about our antitardy behavior, and he promptly let us in.
The interior is equally inviting, with light fixtures immediately juxtaposing the cloudy atmosphere outside. It felt like coming in from a long day at school to smell dinner simmering on the stove. I almost instinctively kicked off my boots, forgetting myself.
After welcoming us in, Sinclair-McCalla showed us to a table by the window, where we would have our conversation and be able to try one of his dishes, the Tallyman Boat.
Sinclair-McCalla graciously told us his story, beginning with how he started cooking when he was 12 in Jamaica, with dreams of becoming a doctor. After program issues transpired, preventing him from pursuing this goal, one of his relatives highlighted his passion for cooking and suggested he get a job in a hotel where he could use these skills.
Working in both fine dining and buffet style business, he decided to begin a catering business, and during that process, looked into getting a degree.
“I decided to look up if there was a way to combine doctor with food, and I found degree programs to be a dietician or nutritionist, and from there, I decided, ‘Okay, well, if I’m going to be studying this, I want to do a style of catering that kind of aligns with what I’m studying,’” said Sinclair-McCalla.
“So, I decided to create a style of cooking called Health Fusion Cooking, which is basically creating meals of lower calorie content while increasing the nutrient density of it.”
Through his inventiveness, he carved a pathway for success with little competition, earning himself accolades such as being featured in various media and interviews, and cooking for the government and various celebrities.
Sinclair-McCalla hit a road-bump when he moved to the US. Even with an impressive resume and a degree in Dietetics and Nutrition, the most he was offered in restaurants in New York City was dishwasher.
“A lot of people said, ‘because you don’t have any experience in a first world country, you’d have to start at the bottom, and after five, six years, maybe a line cook position,” said Sinclair-McCalla.
This disappointed him, but didn’t break his stride; he began to create online cooking content during the pandemic, where he now posts to an audience of over 140k followers across various platforms.
Sinclair-McCalla’s story is one of hard work and dedication, coupled with running into the right people at the right time and putting yourself out there. When cooking in his apartment, he connected with a woman who needed a chef for her company’s MLK day celebration.
At the event, he was chatting with someone about his experience, who ended up being the boss of the company, who hired him to cook for about a year, until he got asked to help out at a restaurant at the suggestion of one of his contacts in Jamaica.
After uplifting a few more restaurants, Sinclair-McCalla was ready for a change of scenery, when Chef Darian Bryan called him, changing his trajectory from Florida to Buffalo. I am speaking unjournalistically biased here when I say this, but Buffalo and I are better off due to this serendipitous phone call.
After the interview with Sinclair-McCalla, he invited us into the kitchen to walk us through his Tallyman Boat appetizer, a plantain-hummus spread with a plantain-bell pepper compote and smoked, grilled pita wedges.
When I took a bite of this dish, I couldn’t help myself but to hit my fist on the table in approval. The journey from sweet, to savory, to smoky… it almost brought a tear to my eye. The majority of plantains I’ve had were in the form of making tostones with my mother, but this dish rewired my brain to the limitless possibilities that ingredients can be transformed into.
Sinclair-McCalla kindly took a photo of the moment of us trying the dish.
After asking if this recipe was written anywhere I could try and emulate, Sinclair-McCalla went back into the kitchen and brought back his hardcover copy of Island Fusion: A Culinary Journey, which was published in June of last year. I gleefully perused the recipes, knowing this was another recipe book I needed on my shelf.
Before we knew it, the afternoon spent with Executive Chef Chris Sinclair-McCalla had concluded. He told us that when we came back for dinner service sometime, to let the waitstaff know, so he could say hello at some point in the night.
We said our goodbyes, and set back out into slightly more palatable weather. Though it may have been happenstance that the clouds were a bit more thin, if you had told me it was a sunny summer day when we left Bratts Hill, I would have agreed for the feeling I felt inside alone.
Where to find Chef Sinclair-McCalla:
Instagram
Cookbook
Bratts Hill by Chef Darian
