Yonette Alleyne Is the Hardest-Working Grandmother in Los Angeles
By Dakota Kim
Yonette Alleyne had to move quickly to survive California’s pandemic lockdown; within a few days, she had pivoted her Los Angeles catering business Caribbean Gourmet toward home delivery. Less than one week after Governor Gavin Newsom declared stay-at-home orders on March 19, 2019, she had converted her business specializing in oxtail stew, vegan curry, beef patties, and pineapple tarts from purveying mainly at farmers markets to slinging deliveries.
“The first two months were really hard, because it was an area we’d never done,” Yonette says. “Cooking the food and taking it to all these different locations was a challenge.”
After Yonette’s daughter guided her toward a delivery app called Circuit, things got a little easier. The orders were flooding in, so Yonette called back a furloughed employee who was thrilled to start delivering again. Yonette’s demographic had changed—now she had a lot of new fans who had never had Caribbean food. Yonette was determined to bring the new customers into her familial fold. “It feels good that people notice that we actually put a lot into our customers,” Yonette says.
It makes Yonette happy to personally greet new customers at her Sunday stall at the Atwater Village Farmers Market. “A couple walked up to our booth and I greeted them as I greet every single person. They stopped in their tracks and says, ‘Wow, this is the first time I’ve ever felt so welcome.’ They were excited and they bought stuff, and came back a half hour later and bought more stuff.” Yonette puts her customers above all, even the food, she says. “Even though the food is important, the experience must be good and you must be happy to really taste the food.”
Yonette talks about how multifaceted Guyanese food is, including elements from India, Africa, Portugal, China, Europe, and aboriginal native cultures. Yonette grew up eating and making Indian curries and roti, as well as root vegetables and cookup rice descended from African cultures. She also cooks Chinese dishes like bao, Chinese egg custard tarts, bean cake, and fried rice. The national dishes of Guyana, she says, come from native peoples, like an all-meat dish called pepperpot. “Everyone intermingles cultures in Guyana,” she says.
And then of course, there are classics like oxtail stew and chicken curry. But Yonette doesn’t eat those, because she’s been vegan for two years and vegetarian since 2008.
As a result, her menus always feature extensive vegan options, not just one item. Her customers look forward all week to her vegan curry resplendent with zucchini, cauliflower, red bell pepper, potatoes, carrots, green peas, garlic and onion, served with roti and a side of channa masala. Yonette also loves her metemgee, a dish of plantains, taro root, coconut milk, garlic, onion and green onions, long-simmered and tender.
There’s a comforting warmth to Yonette’s food that can bring you back from the brink of depression, whether it’s the jerk chicken, the cassava pone, or the rice and peas. The chef chalks it up to her complex Caribbean spices, which bring warmth to your palate. “My spices are all freshly roasted—each time I roast cumin, everything is a whole spice and then I put in the mortar, wake up all the oils and the spices.”
The busy mother of five and grandmother of three says that she works so hard, the years have gone by rapidly. Yonette married young and adopted her oldest child while she was pregnant with her third child. She became a grandmother at 42, and now has three grandsons, the youngest of whom turned two years old last month.
When I relate to her how challenging my life has become since giving birth, she offers me perspective from one mother to another. “I remember when I was your age having my kids—it doesn't take long and the years go by so quickly,” she reminds me. I’ve been told before that childhood is “the longest shortest time,” but hearing it in her tender-hearted voice, I pause and reflect on being truly conscious at this moment.
Luckily, Yonette works with her family now. Her husband, despite a full-time job, wakes up early on weekends to help set up and clean up at the farmers markets, and also makes the drinks for her menu. Her daughter Arianne, who has a business degree, manages Caribbean Gourmet’s Instagram account and teaches her mother financial and computer skills. Her daughter Maya, meanwhile, works the Sunday Atwater Village Farmer’s Market, having started managing credit card and cash transactions starting at age 15. The incoming University of California Irvine student is picking up on the pastry side of the business fast, Yonette says. “She has these small dainty hands that can fold pastry so cute—we don't want to eat them because they're so perfect.”
Yonette grew up in Guyana, a Caribbean country at the north end of South America. As a kid, she came to the United States on vacations. In her thirties, she, her husband and her three kids moved to Los Angeles. “It was a struggle because we had to start over in a new country with children, but I came from Guyana already having done my own business for 12 years.”
Yonette knew she could hustle— in Guyana, she had run her own business, and she knew she had the skills to survive. Her skills had come from her own mother and grandmother, as Yonette had assisted her grandmother in the kitchen making peppermint candies, jams, jellies, cakes and pastries. “She let me stir stuff, and she answered every question,” Yonette says.
At age 11, Yonette asked her mother for a chef’s coat and hat, but her mother was not pleased as she wanted her to have “a fancy job.” In the end, Yonette’s mother did get her a cookbook, and she was so happy, she made cupcakes right away—but forgot to add the baking powder. “My siblings teased me so much because all my cupcakes were hard and flat, and I says to them, ‘You know what? I'm going to eat them myself.’ Every day I would eat two, and I ate them all.”
The chef didn't realize how much she’d learned from her mother and grandmother until she was 16 and her neighbor begged her to come over and help with a party cake. “I did the cake and they were so excited and happy, jumping around, I couldn't believe it.” Yonette started her business catering small parties and providing hors d’oeuvres and cakes for restaurants when they threw events. Soon, she was not only cooking for but planning weddings and events in town. Her artistry wasn’t just for cakes—Yonette started an apparel design business that produced bridal headdresses, shirts and hats, and opened a small flower shop providing fresh flowers and wedding bouquets. “It's just natural in me to be creative,” she says. “Headdresses and flowers are similar to cake decorating.”
Coming to Los Angeles was a new challenge after being a business owner in control of her own fate. After nine months of searching for and applying for jobs, Yonette got a job as a cake decorator at a Los Angeles supermarket. She says she impressed her interviewer during her interview by decorating a cake with skill. Within nine months of working, she became a manager and began training others, staying for nine years and then becoming a bakery manager at another location for five years.
From 2012 to 2015, she became a full-time caregiver to her children. “My children were not getting enough time with me, and I was tired, so tired,” she says, after having worked long hours six days a week for 14 years. But motherhood is a lot of work, and Yonette wasn’t watching soap operas at home every day. With five children, she was making daily park and beach trips, helping them with homework and preparing their meals.
After three years of full-time caregiving, Yonette decided she wanted to work again outside the home, but for herself. When she couldn’t get any funding to start her own business, she took “the little money I had” and started investing in product for a farmers market booth. To her surprise, five of the managers of Los Angeles farmers markets wanted her at their markets. She picked three, but was working around the clock. Now, Yonette works at two markets. She’s up by 5 a.m. on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, cooking for deliveries all day long Friday. Saturdays are spent at the Crenshaw Farmers Market, and Sundays are her day serving at the Atwater Village Farmers Market.
In 2019, a couple opening a food hall approached Yonette. They’d had her food via a friend and loved it. Though the pandemic has delayed the intended opening date of August 2020, at some point post-pandemic, Caribbean Gourmet will be one of 14 restaurant spaces at Blossom Market Hall in San Gabriel, with a tentative opening date of February 2021.
“This is a tense kind of time that we're choosing, but we're going to have our own space,” the entrepreneur says. “I have everything ready to open up, and we’re shooting for spring, so hopefully things will be okay by then.”
This period of waiting has brought her closer together with other entrepreneurs, many of whom have reached out to her on social media. “The pandemic has made people kinder and gentler,” she says. “Also, the protests have made people realize a lot, that there's a lot of racism, a lot of classism.”
Yonette opened up to me about the racism she’s faced in America—“a great deal” since arriving in 1998. Often, she’s experienced aggressions “that were uncalled for—like I'm just being regular and someone will just say something mean to me for no reason at all.”
But one incident in particular still feels fresh in Yonette’s mind. She and her daughter had parked their van in the driveway of a wealthy woman whose 60-person party they were catering. As they opened the back of the van to begin unloading, they noticed a police car turn around and come back toward them, stopping to sit there as the police officers stared at them. Yonette knew it was because they were Black in a very white neighborhood—despite their chef’s jackets.
“I said to Ariane, ‘Don’t make eye contact with them,’” Yonette says.
The police did a U-turn and came back again to stare at them. And then again, for the third time, they came back to survey Yonette and Ariane from their SUV.
“You could feel the stare,” Yonette says.
But then the owner of the house came out onto the driveway, and “as soon as the police saw that, you just heard the tires screech and they pulled off. They saw this white woman call me by name and say, ‘Come on in.’ Two Black women with a van in this neighborhood—they were thinking that we’re thieves. They were trying to get us to respond.”
Yonette fears for her son, who’s 6’3”. “Though you’re a real nerdy, preppy young man who goes to college and you’re so mild-mannered, if the police stop you, do not answer back or respond in any way except politely because it's your life. You're a tall Black man—they're already going to look at that as a threat.”
The thing that’s incredible about Yonette is she of course wants to care for and feed her immediate family, seeing them flourish—but she sees her customers as an extended family, truly. It’s not just something she says.
“I want to teach my children and grandchildren that cooking is love, that food and love bring people together,” Yonette says. “Our customers talk about the way our food makes them feel. We make them feel like they're part of our family—the way we talk to them, the way we reach out.”
This essay is a part of Comestible Issue 9, a special online edition devoted to the wisdom, knowledge, and inspiration from the women who came before us.
Papercut illustration by Anna Brones
Yonette's Caribbean Gourmet Channa
A great use of canned chickpeas and an easy weeknight meal.
Makes: 4 to 6 servings
4 16-ounce garbanzo beans (drained)
1 large onion, chopped
6 large garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon crushed pepper flakes
2 teaspoons dried thyme
2 teaspoons paprika
1 teaspoon ground cumin
Pinch of salt
3 tablespoons of vegetable oil
1 cup water
2 stalks green onions sliced thinly (optional)
In a medium-sized heavy saucepan or skillet, on medium heat, caramelize onion and garlic for about 3 minutes.
Add the drained garbanzo beans and stir fry for about 2 minutes. Add all the other ingredients except the green onions and stir for about 2 minutes.
Add the water, reduce the heat to low, cover the pan, and let simmer for about 15 to 20 minutes until the water has been absorbed.
Garnish with green onions and enjoy. Can be served hot or at room temperature.
Refrigerate leftovers immediately.
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