Chef on the Rise
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Chef Colleen Royes considers being a chef a late-in-life calling. After completing a degree in Management and Economics at the University of the West Indies and working at the national airline for nine years, she longed for a change. She loved to cook and it seemed a no-brainer the moment she decided to enter the culinary world. Fast-forward nine years from that moment. With a culinary degree under her belt and valuable experience gained at Half Moon Hotel, Goddard Catering and Round Hill Hotel and Villas, Royes is now the executive chef and co-owner of Decadent Catering and Events and Grillerz Restaurant. Her passion, drive and ambition come from a perceived notion that she always has to be playing catch-up, to make up for the time spent in the airline industry.
My passion for food started as a child. I grew up with my grandparents and we always had meals together as a family. Meals, especially breakfast and dinner, were an important time for us to talk about the upcoming day or the day that was ending. My grand-uncle was the head cook, and breakfast was always the typical Jamaican fare: ackee and salt fish, or liver with bananas, or callaloo and salt fish with roasted breadfruit or boiled green bananas. I used to watch him cook when I could and by the age of eight or nine I could fry an egg and make a sandwich. My grandmother also had a big encyclopaedic cookbook from the Culinary Institute of America that I would pore through for hours and even attempted making muffins and popovers which seemed to be the easiest things to try. It gave me immense pleasure to hear how much they enjoyed it, if I prepared something that my family liked. And that is the main motivation, to this day, that people eating food I have prepared enjoy the experience.
