It thrived as a food truck. Now Jamaican-style cuisine has home in new Columbia restaurant
A food-truck-based Columbia business is expanding to a brick-and-mortar restaurant
Tati’s Island Cuisine posted to its Facebook page an image of a new restaurant location getting ready to open its doors, with the truck parked out front.
“Brick and mortar coming soon,” the Tuesday post reads.
Serving Jamaican-style cuisine, the restaurant will open later this month on Bush River Road near the former Walmart Neighborhood Market.
Owner Sasha Simpson said she hopes to have a carnival-style opening once the new restaurant is ready to go. She started Tati’s last year during the pandemic while she was on a break from nursing school, and was surprised by how quickly her old Caribbean favorites found a following.
“As a commissery, we did not have enough food for the customers, so I started looking for a brick-and-mortar place,” Simpson said.
The food truck business offers spicy and mild patties alongside oxtail, jerk lamb and fried lobster, with a selection of Jamaican sodas.
Though she started with a purely Jamaican menu, she’s added some American-inspired dishes too like the rasta pasta — a “spicy alfredo” — and egg rolls combined with Caribbean standards like jerk chicken.
“I wanted to include some of the things we eat here, but make them a little more interesting,” Simpson said.
She said the egg rolls have been such a hit she’s in talks to package and market those separately. That combined with the new restaurant has left Simpson feeling a little overwhelmed, though excited, about her pandemic project has panned out.
“It’s a lot,” she said. “I thought, ‘I’m just a little food truck.’”
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