Sunday Dinner Served For Weekday Lunch

Fifty-two years after arriving in New York City at the age of 16, Rudolph Ford has helped his wife, Dorma Bryan, achieve the ​“American dream” — with a Jamaican twist, as one of the newer culinary outposts of a fast-growing local immigrant community.

Spanning the corner of Olive Street and Grand Avenue, family-owned Sunday Dinner Everyday has been serving up Jamaican cuisine in Wooster Square since March 2023.

The restaurant, named for Ford and Bryan’s fond memories of their own Sunday dinners with family in Jamaica, aims to recreate the same experience for its customers, every day. 

Sunday Dinner Everyday is just one of New Haven’s many new restaurants proudly waving black, yellow, and green Jamaican flags and serving up oxtail and plantains and saltfish amidst the growth of the region’s Caribbean population. There are at least a dozen beloved spots in New Haven, including Jammin Jamaican Cuisine, Island Spice Restaurant, and Koolbreeze.

According to the 2023 Greater New Haven Community Wellbeing Index, the New Haven region is home to over 6,000 Jamaican immigrants — a 94 percent increase since 2000. The nearly 2,000 Jamaican residents living in the city proper comprise 1.5 percent of New Haven’s population. Connecticut as a whole has over 45,000 residents who were born in Jamaica, ​“making Jamaicans the largest immigrant group in the state,” said DataHaven Executive Director Mark Abraham.

Ford, now ​“400 — I’m kidding, 68,” moved to New Haven in September 2022 to support his wife in fulfilling her dream of opening her own restaurant.

The married co-owners met while living in Brooklyn, where Ford picked up jobs in construction and driving while Bryan worked in fast food and waited tables around the city.

Ford, who was cooking during the Tuesday lunch hour while Bryan ran errands, doesn’t like to take credit for the restaurant’s successes. ​“I just do the cooking — [my wife] is the one who seasons everything.” 

When Ford first introduced himself, he hesitated before calling himself the co-owner: ​“I like to stay in the back and let my wife take the lead.” (Click on the video below to watch a recent interview with Ford’s wife and restaurant co-owner Dorma Bryan on WNHH Radio’s ​“Behind The Brand with Prestige and EZ BlueZ.”)

The ​“back” (the kitchen) was sweltering on Tuesday in high-80-degree weather, evidenced by Ford’s sweat-drenched shirt and a wet rag on his head.

The dining area, however, was a cool refuge from the heat outside of the restaurant’s neon green walls, tastefully decorated with faux flowers and bright yellow steel tables. The wall behind the cash register features a collage of dollar bills, signed by Sunday Dinner Everyday’s earliest customers as a token of encouragement.

The restaurant’s main attraction, its hot food bar, overflowed with the restaurant’s specialities, including jerk chicken, oxtail, and rice and peas — ​“the classics,” according to Ford.

Ford’s personal favorite is Jamaica’s national dish: ackee and saltfish, a savory tropical fruit sauteed with salted white fish traditionally served as a breakfast food, but now a fan favorite at any time of day. At Sunday Dinner Everyday, however, those days are only Saturday and Sunday.

At Ford’s recommendation, the only other employee working the shift on Tuesday served up a hot aluminum to-go container of ​“mash-up”: rice, peas, cabbage, jerk chicken, fried plantains, and oxtail.

The jerk chicken barely needed a head jerk to tear off a bite; tender and just a tad spicy, it nicely complemented the tangy oxtail, a stout bauble of beef that slid right off the bone. The fried plantains wrapped up the trio of flavor with a soft sweetness, browned not a moment too long.

The restaurant cooks its orders using recipes that ​“everyone just knows,” according to Ford — not recipes that have been passed down through generations, but that have ingrained themselves so deeply into Jamaican culture and cuisine that they can rely solely on taste for preservation.

From noon to 1 p.m., the restaurant welcomed three customers — a Doordasher, a Grubhubber, and an UberEats driver, each there to pick up a delivery ordered through the services’ respective apps.

“Business is not the best,” Ford said. ​“We are always looking for more customers.”

Outside, the restaurant’s neon OPEN sign flickered on and off in the window, but was overshadowed by the chains of Jamaican flags bordering the restaurant’s sidewalk awning.

When asked what fuels the restaurant — and the explosion of Jamaican cuisine in New Haven — Ford didn’t need to think hard: ​“Because Jamaican food is the best!”