Simmone Edwin: The chef who's also a parrandera

Whether she has a knife, microphone or cuatro in hand, Simmone Edwin can make you and your tastebuds dance for the Christmas season and beyond.

She is one of the singers and lead cuatro player for the Voces Jovenes parang band, as well as the food stylist, chef consultant and CEO at her own company, Meraki Catering. And she recently won the second season of the televised Maggi Food Court Caribbean competition in Jamaica.

During one intense week of shooting and eight episodes, Edwin, 35, beat three other chefs from TT, eight from Jamaica, and one each from St Lucia, Guyana, Barbados, and The Bahamas. The win brought her respect from colleagues across the region for her skills, as well as US$10,000.

“I was randomly scrolling through Facebook when I saw an ad for a competition in Jamaica, all expenses paid, with a prize of US$10,000. I figured, ‘What’s the worst that could happen. I could as well try my hand at it.’ A few weeks later I got called, and after an interview they selected me as one of the Trinidad chefs.

“That experience in itself was wild. We shot in June and the competition aired in August. It was great getting to meet those regional chefs. Aside from winning the competition, meeting them was really rewarding.”

The show aired in TT and Jamaica, and can be see on Maggi Caribbean’s YouTube channel.

After getting an associate degree in culinary management at the TT Hospitality and Tourism Institute (TTHTI) in 2008, Edwin moved on to Miami to attend Johnson and Wales University where she achieved a bachelor of science in food service management with a concentration in international hotel operations in 2009.

She told WMN she was able to speed up her degree through a study abroad programme in Belgium, before returning to the US for about a year to get work experience. On her return to TT, she worked at several restaurants and hotels until she landed the job of a baking and pastry arts facilitator at TTHTI.

Impressed by her cooking skills, friends and family had encouraged her to have her own food business for years, but she was not interested. But, after six years at TTHTI, she resigned in 2017 to start her own food business, Meraki Catering, based in Diego Martin.

“The school wasn’t going in the direction I envisioned for myself and my career so I decided to leave in 2017. And I didn’t want to end up in a job where I was at the whim of my employer. I wanted to be in control of my own destiny so I opened my business and slowly built my clientele.”

In 2020, Edwin was head chef at Adams Bagels but, just before the covid19 pandemic hit TT, she left to focus on her business full-time.

“It was the scariest months of my life, thinking what kind of mad timing I had with this, not knowing if would be able to make money. It turned out that year was the most fantastic thing for my business.”

She converted her home kitchen to a workspace space that could handle enough food for small events and started cooking and marketing. People were at home and getting tired of their own cooking so she catered for packaged meals for people with dietary restrictions, micro-weddings, and intimate private dinners at people’s homes.

At the end of 2020, she returned to Adams to head its pastry department while running her business on the side. But, in April 2022, she again left Adams as she wanted to take a leap of faith and transform her catering service into a hospitality and service-oriented business doing consulting for food business and restaurant start ups, as well as culinary and menu transformations.

She said the money from the competition was being used to expand her business and buy equipment.

“The future of Meraki is going to focus on training around culinary arts, baking and pastry arts, and hospitality. I’m very passionate about education and because there is a dire need for training now, I’m dedicating myself to figuring out how to get young persons that are interested in this field to learn the values and skills of the industry. I want to leave a legacy of professionalism, and sharing the knowledge I’ve gained thus far.”

Edwin said she always liked to eat, and her family events always revolved around food. Her fondest memories were when her grandmother would call on a random day of the week to invite family members to eat something she had made.

Even so, she did not know what she wanted to do with her life. It was only when she attended St Francois Girls’ College for sixth form, and her art teacher suggested she accompany another class to an open house to TTHTI, that she found her calling.

“Literally, on that day I fell in love with food and never looked back since. I always say, God rest her soul now, but she was responsible for my career. If she didn’t prompt me to go to TTHTI that day, I don’t know what I would be doing with myself right now.”

And although being a chef could be physically and emotionally challenging with the long hours, being on one’s feet most of the time, dealing with clients and more, she would not trade it for anything.

Edwin’s other love is parang.

In 1997, at age ten, she and bandleader, Russell Corbie started the parang band, Voces Jovenes (Young Voices), when they decided they wanted to do more than sing Christmas carols in the group, Yuletide Carolers.

“We were getting older and didn’t want to be singing carols and that kind of baby stuff. Even though we sang mostly carols, we did a few Spanish parang songs. So we decided learn some more and form a parang band.”

They gathered other young parang lovers together and now, the majority of the members have been with them for over two decades.

She said they started off as a young and enthusiastic band, trying to get into the fraternity and become known. But, as they got older, the members started to work on fine-tuning their craft.

“We take the time to make sure our instruments, even if it’s our voices, into something we could definitely be proud of at the end of the day. Because, I always tell people, I don’t do things for doing it sake. It has to be done with passion, with some kind of love behind it, or else it doesn’t make sense to do it.”

The band also focussed on becoming more business-oriented and professional, especially when they realised many people did not associate parang bands with professionalism.

Since then, they have produced two albums, Coming of Age in 2002 and Viva la Parranda in 2007, and recorded five original compositions including Christo Ha Venido and Maria. They placed first in the Port of Spain East Lion’s Cultural Competition five times and were the 2016 National Senior Parang Champions.

In fact, they are still the reigning champions as there has not been another senior competition since then, and she does not believe there will be since the top bands have yet to receive any prize money from the National Parang Association.

However, they refuse to let that discourage them.

“At the end of the day, parang is bigger than us. We want to preserve our rich traditions. I think it’s our responsibility, as a band of our stature, to preserve it and respect it more than anything else that could happen.”