Start the table series: An interview with ChefJasmine Michel

In our Start the Table Series, the Indo-Caribbean Beauty Magazine highlights Caribbeans who have created their own table of opportunities, representation, and cultural enrichment for the diaspora. We had the wonderful pleasure of connecting with Jasmine Michel, Chef and Owner of Dreamboat Cafe, a multidisciplinary platform of pop-up food events and independent publications based in North Carolina. From cooking with maternal figures in her childhood to challenging Eurocentric standards as a rising chef, Jasmine's honoring of her Indo and Afro-Caribbean heritage is unmistakable. Her dedication to community building, cultural preservation, and social activism shines in the kitchen and beyond. After all, she's a writer AND researcher too!

In the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Helene in September 2024, Jasmine Michel and Dreamboat Cafe are still persisting. She is currently working on opening their first Appalachian-Caribbean store in Western North Carolina. Despite unethical housing practices in Asheville, especially post-hurricane, Jasmine remains a fierce advocate for her community and people. Read on to learn more about Jasmine Michel's community-centered work and follow @Dreamboat Cafe to continue amplifying their culinary and social impact.

Q: What inspired you to enter the culinary world?

Like a lot of Guyanese-Haitian kids, I was raised with food and with cooking. Not even for survival but as a way of life. Cooking was how we connected to each other, how we put value in our life.

I was born and raised in South Florida so the homes that we lived in with our family, they were trying to replicate what they once had in Guyana and Haiti and other places in the Caribbean. We didn't have a lot so I think food was always a way to re-establish and reiterate our worth, our values, the beauty of our culture, and sustaining our traditions. With me being the youngest of the first set of grandkids, cooking was the one thing I could help with and that I saw was very helpful.

I liked the way I felt in the kitchen. I like how empowered I felt. All the aunties and the women that had taught me food, they were some of the most powerful women I learned about and saw. I saw that cooking and serving people was a tool and something really important that comes with hospitality. It isn't just service; it isn't just cooking. It's caring for people. It's serving people but with dignity, intention, and compassion.

Chef Jasmine Michel poses with one of her original menus featuring some Caribbean favorites.

Q: What was your journey towards creating the concept of Dreamboat Café?

When I went to culinary school 11-12 years ago, I was forced to unlearn a lot of these [Caribbean] standards of food that I knew. And it didn't feel right then; it didn't feel right when I was doing it in kitchens. I think I did it because I really wanted to be seen as a chef and I wanted to be heralded as such. But that meant giving up what we know in the Caribbean and Guyanese households as service and the standard of food.

After many years in and out of the kitchen and usually being the only woman, let alone woman of color in the kitchen, I was like, "It would be so nice to just show people that there can be a really beautiful fine dining standard with Caribbean, West Indian, and Haitian food.”

And then Dreamboat kind of started, in that I started doing small pop-ups. That turned into what is now a dinner series and we started doing small batch products and it's been going on for seven years now. It's been very, very hard because when I started Dreamboat, it wasn't right at the cusp of that collective consciousness that took over in the civil rights movements and LGBTQIA movements and all the movements that were happening. But it has been so fulfilling and rewarding.

Q: Do you have a specific memory that grounds you that you like to recall before preparing food?

I have such deep, deep, deep memories of being with the women in my family, having a whole day where you're hitting up all the places that have all our [Caribbean] food and just seeing how excited my grandma and my aunts would get and then coming home and prepping it.

A huge part of me cooking, especially centering a lot of what I do with queer and trans folks who come from a background like us as well, is trying to recapture that moment of feeling festive, surrounded and excited about food.

A part of me thinks that I am not allowed that process. A part of it is me trying to re-establish in my brain that you are allowed to carry on those traditions. You are allowed these memories and you're allowed to build your whole home, life, or career around those memories.

A staple at every Dreamboat Cafe pop up dinner, Curry Leaf Bread with Goat Cheese and Honey. Created by Chef Jasmine Michel.

Q: What were some challenges and highlights of your culinary journey?

I willingly, for a while, immersed myself in the Eurocentric standards that food, fine dining, and restaurants tend to live in. I think it is because it's beautiful, and it's known, and it's a standard for a reason. But I felt sort of crazy in the kitchen--feeling like that was the only standard to exist in food.

I wanted to challenge it, but I didn't have my voice yet. Working in kitchens with a lot of white men made it difficult for me because I would get easily intimidated and I didn't necessarily know how to navigate the kitchen, command attention, or give direction. I had to learn that in the kitchen, where I didn't see myself to be self-realized enough to use my words, power, and energy. The other difficulty was stigma about women of color, especially Caribbean women of color--that we have this innate sense of service, servitude, and labor. But people don't know that that's one small, minute aspect to being a Guyanese woman or a Caribbean woman.

When you work in kitchens in New York, you work in very heavily Eurocentric kitchens. They stigmatize darker women to be loud and funny and whatever else. I felt like for many years, it was difficult for me to exist. When I wanted to be serious or assertive, it was not taken seriously or it offered something other than what they thought I could offer.

On the opposite side, the moments where I was able to outgrow that and find environments that appreciated the intersections that many women of color live in within the food industry--that's been very restorative. It's been restorative to see the standard of food now include West Indian food, the origins of Guyana and Caribbean countries, the true trade routes, and the accurate history that created where we are.

We still have a long way to go. But I think now, it's very nice to know that majority of the time when somebody knows that you're a Caribbean woman or Guyanese woman, they'll know not only can you cook but you can swing a cutlass, you can bear and carry children, and do a million things that go beyond the construct we were raised in or assimilated to.

Fruit and Olive Graze Platter prepared by Chef Jasmine Michel.

Q: How do themes of race and gender surface when you think about the intersectionality of food?

I identify as both Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean. For a while, my siblings and I were the only half-Black, half-Guyanese kids in our family and community in South Florida. I have never not existed at an intersection. It is actually more difficult for me to just live in one tone and one way.

Race is such a huge factor in so many things within the Caribbean. It's something that’s affected Caribbean cultures and Caribbean people in the diaspora for decades. So, I don't think that it's something that could easily be healed. But it's something that runs so many premises of our culture between colorism and flat-out racism.

I don't blame our community and our people for being racist. I really do look to Western assimilation and colonization as encouraging racist behavior within our community. It honestly gives other people permission to dismiss us or cease our existence.

Coolie people are also at the cusp of this proximity to whiteness still. I think with a lot of West Indian people who even get a glimmer of acceptance through that whiteness or benefits through that, it really makes darker people live a more isolated, difficult, and stigmatized life.

What I’d really like Dreamboat Cafe to do is show the intersections but in a soft way that's approachable and kind of undeniable. I try to intersect the reality of our history and the reality of our lives. I really use food as a way to try and intercept that [racism].

A photo of Chef Jasmine Michel.

Q: What advice would you give to future generations, those that might be breaking barriers or doing untraditional things in the arts?

Something that I wish I was told or reminded of was that we're not wrong.

Anybody in the arts or anybody trying to do something through a medium that might not be well-received or understood in a general sense--that is the reason why those mediums and those opportunities exist. We are supposed to agitate people's minds. We are supposed to be reflective of the lives that we’ve had to live and the lives our ancestors had to live.

Art can be a tool that we use to show the times and show history. There's so many things that people get to denounce these days. But when an artist approaches their piece or their work with intention to rattle somebody into thinking so differently, even for a minute, just for a moment to think outside of their own perspective--that's really powerful.

That's why we need it and we use it. That's the only thing that really supports us and validates our experiences. I would want our future generation to be stronger, tougher, more resilient than us, more self-realized. I think any self-realization that we get, our future generation will get it too.

You can't tell these kids anything, in a good way! We're getting a revival of the wild, untamed human finding their purpose in life, and art really helps with that.

Salad made with local Roquette, Herbs, Asparagus, Hazelnuts, and a Tahini dressing. Created by Chef Jasmine Michel.

Q: What do you want the world to know about the cafe and what are you looking forward to as you continue growing?

The vision that I want people to receive when joining a Dreamboat Cafe event is really being willing to be moved. I always say at the beginning of our dinners that I hope people leave with a sense of being turned on again. Not in an erotic or sexual way but if something was once stagnant in you, I would hope that it's turned on again.

I want people to be open to the medicine of food. Not just [seeing] food as something transactional but seeing the gift that food is--that's my dream. I hope for Dreamboat that it can be a part of the collective group of people that are trying to heal our diaspora, offer something to our lineage, and heal our pain. Not being scared to exacerbate our pain but celebrating it and eating because of it and being in gatherings with each other because of it.

If people get to see that through Dreamboat, through Guyanese and Haitian food, and the foods that I was raised on in a Muslim upbringing, then that's really beyond the dream.

Chef Jasmine Michel sets the table in preparation for a Dreamboat Cafe community event.

Q: What is your favorite self-care or wellness practice?

Remembering that I can stop and slow down--that's probably my first top tool of self-care!

Also my mom raised me on hot showers, baths, and dousing myself in hot avocado or coconut oil. That has always been something that brought me back to innocence. That's been my go-to because sometimes all I can muster up is the energy for a shower or putting an oil treatment in my hair.

Coming from a farming background with food, that's always been the thing that revitalizes me too. Usually, I work in seasons where I'm in the kitchen one season and then I'll take an off-season and I'll be working with the land and working in the field. Nothing feels better than washing away those little, weird grass cuts with hot water and just putting oil all over your body. I feel brand-new and I also feel close to my mom and close to my heritage.