- Carlington Wilmot/Freelance Photographer
Sonia Gibbons, matriarch of Jamaican style meals is owner of the Sonia's Home Style Cooking, located in Lane Plaza, South Avenue.
Avia Ustanny, Outlook Writer
SONIA GIBBONS runs the home style restaurant in upscale Lane Plaza where music softly plays and waiters dress in traditional Jamaican outfits move softly among guests who dine in air-conditioned comfort.
On the menu are an astonishing range of traditional dishes, served in authentic Jamaican style, including sweet potato pudding, curried chicken, oxtail, chicken foot soup, mannish water, corned pork and ackee, salt fish fritters, gully beans and salt fish, to name a few.
In her office, Sonia sits on an office chair which might look the worse for wear, but which she says she will not dump because of the memories which are attached.
The accomplished caterer will be the first to tell you, without prompting, that she started her cooking career on a sky juice cart parked near a gas station on Camperdown Road in Kingston and that her first clients were taxi and bus men drivers .
The revelation is astonishing and grows more so when we are taken on a tour of her kitchen and see the gleaming equipment which certainly must cost millions of dollars and we notice the smooth operation of the staff of 18 whom she says she has trained herself.
Peter Downie, loan officer at City of Kingston Credit Union, who facilitated the refurbishing of the Lane Plaza property says of this woman, "She is an entrepreneur extraordinaire. She understands the Jamaican palate and how to treat it.
"She is a humble person really, (but) in terms of innovativeness, how she exposes a lot of old time foods (there is no one like her). She brings back the turned cornmeal and old time goat soup and all the traditional foods including chocolate tea. She has a sense of what is heritage."
No one would have guessed
Twenty-five years ago, no one would have guessed that the mother of six would have done so well. The life of Sonia Gibbons is a mystical revelation and a tale that we should advise you to sit for the hearing.
Life has delivered more than a fair share of challenges to the five foot two inches tall Sonia. At the age of seven she was the victim of abuse which was to continue for several years. Her mother, with 10 children to care for, could not send them to school all at once. Sonia attended school on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
By her mid-20s, she was the mother of five children by different fathers, most of whom did not do much to support them. But, Sonia has never known the meaning of giving up. In the late 1970s when she lost her job at a tobacco factory on Ashenheim Road, she decided to do something for herself.
"First, things were very hard," she recalls, living on Berger Avenue in Kingston 2, her children included Junior aged 14, Patrick aged 12, Steve aged 13, Georgia who was 11 and baby Tamra who was three years old.
She would walk from company to company and ask to be allowed to cook for them, but she was always turned down. Sonia loved to cook. Winston Gibbons, gas station worker and her partner at the time and who was to become her husband warned her that she loved cooking too much, and that she might very well 'die poor' because of it.
Self employment
But, he was the one who opened the door to self employment for them, by using oil tins to make a sky juice cart. This he would take downtown, but it did not do very well. Sonia therefore, decided to take over the cart herself and parked the cart near a gas station on Camperdown Road, selling juice, milk and pudding.
The turning point came, one day she said, when she took some 'Sunday dinner' with her and shared it with three men who had come to buy juice. They loved it and asked her' why don't you cook and sell? Sonia immediately decided to do it. In the first week, she saved five dollars from each days sky juice sales and by the end of the week, with savings of $35, she bought 2 lbs of stew beef, four lbs of rice, some Irish potato and carrots. The supplies made 10 servings, which disappeared in minutes when she came on the road. The next day her clients were back asking for more. Sonia cooked on a coal pot and baked pudding too.
Winston and Sonia were married in 1980 and continued to cook for mini-bus men and taxi drivers from far and near. She would also do breakfast of fried dumplings and milk for the Camperdown students. The first major challenge to her booming business came when she was asked to leave her location.
"I started getting a fight," Mrs. Gibbons recalls.
She was glad, she said when a man offered to sell her a small bus which could be a mobile cook shop. A woman who lived next door to the gas station also offered her a spot on which she could park the van. However the Gibbons were eventually forced to leave even this location, as gunmen held them up twice, taking away their earnings which by then included proceeds from a very big lunch time crowd which included staff from Bellevue Hospital.
"It was all day cooking," she recalls." Her coal pot was never allowed to cool because of her growing clientele.
She was leased a restaurant on Mountain View Avenue, which also did well until the owner threw sand into the front yard and entrance which prevented clients from entering. The Gibbons then moved to Windward Road, first to a home and then to property at 145 Windward Road which they purchased "with the help of a good friend".
Sonia Gibbons recalls that with all their moving, they were followed by the faithful few. At 145 Windward Road "people now knew that I had a restaurant and they came" Mrs. Gibbons said. Without one word of advertisement, the business again became a very demanding one that caught the attention of everyone, including gunmen in the area who would send and demand their breakfast and other meals.
But Sonia persevered and began catering for companies and events as far away as Lake Charles Louisiana in the United States. "They would send for me abroad to cater for their functions," she explains.
On Windward Road, she also started a feeding programme for small children who were going to school without adequate meals.
In the 1990s Sonia had many opportunities to throw in the towel, including the day when she found a gun in her cooking butter, and others when the restaurant was broken into. But, as she tells Outlook, "I was not born a loser. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I felt bad when these things happened, but I encouraged myself."
According to the caterer, she had developed a special relationship with God. She would fall asleep wanting to do a particular dish and "I see two big hands come and prepare the oxtail (for example) step by step, down to the presentation." So, Sonia who has never attended a catering school, astonished even her own mother.
Coming to Lane Plaza was a miracle, she says which happened this way: One day her brother who was on farm work abroad called her to say there was a man who wanted to send her a kitchen. She never believed it until she got the documents in her hands which said that they were on the wharf to be picked up.
The equipment that came through customs eventually without her paying one cent out of her pocket (she did pay the truck driver who moved them) included all that she would need for an upscale, fully commercial operation.
Taking out a loan
Although she trembled at the thought of borrowing money she realised it was the only way to move ahead and went to City of Kingston Cooperative Credit Union.
Collecting the keys to 9 Lane Plaza in August of last year, she proceeded to transform it into Sonia's Home Style.
Son Junior Blackwood, a police constable who also helps his mother with lunchtime deliveries was amazed at the result. Recalling that the place was "like a dump" he comments, "anything she puts her hand to, trust me, it comes out tremendously."
All the children of Sonia Gibbons have high praises for her, both as boss and mother (four of them are employed to the restaurant). Daughter Winsome Williams told Outlook that "she reminds me of Shirley Cesar. She is motivating." She enjoys working for her mother and states that she can hardly wait for the day when her mother's wish to own a few residential apartment buildings also becomes a reality.
But Sonia Gibbons is taking life one day at a time. A few months after Home Style was opened, she leased additional premises next door exclusively for pastries and take out. Both ventures in Lane Plaza are now "above water". She smiles when she says that she never listened when several individuals said that "a restaurant in that corner would fail."
Her enthusiastic supporters are faithful clients and her children.
Thirty three-year-old Steve states that he could not cook until his mother forced him into the kitchen at age 13. Now an accomplished chef, he says that he enjoys working for his mother who is very nice when things are going her way. "No day passes when she is not in the kitchen, he adds. She is businesslike and she is always trying."
The most telling testimony of all comes from client Sharon Moss, secretary at E & E Campbell Engineering in Kingston who has been eating her daily lunch at Sonia's for the last 15 years. Sharon Moss told Outlook, "I have been eating with her for 15 years since she started a little van on Camperdown Road.
"I followed her everywhere. I eat there (take out) five days a week. On weekends I eat uptown at Lane Plaza. My favourite meal is curried chicken. Today I had it with cooked carrots and pumpkin, yam and shredded vegetables."
She says Mrs. Gibbons is most efficient. "Anytime I go to pick up the lunch it's all always ready and the food tastes good."
After 15 years of inspired loyalty, there's more than a mouthful of sincerity in those words.
