Lavern reaping tomatoes from her backyard’

Patrons enjoying the food at La Sha Ry’s

At the end of a busy week as a Machinist, her Dad, Wilfred Suckoo, would come home to his family of nine – four boys, four girls and homemaker wife, Marie Mae – and immediately don other “hats” he loved to wear for the weekend.

Lavern Suckoo, speaking about her Dad, and her home in Clarendon, Jamaica, explained, “There were always people waiting in the yard to get pants made, to get their hair cut, or waiting for Dad to visit them to fix some item of plumbing.

He was always helping Mom to cook on a weekend or planting something in the backyard.” Mr Suckoo was jack-of-all-trades and, ever since she was a little girl, Lavern Suckoo realised that she would be following in her father’s footsteps in this way.

Now that Ms Suckoo has made Cayman her home since 1991, she has brought with her, and actively kept alive, all her rich family legacies – and, literally and figuratively, added beauty to Cayman in small ways.

The pumpkins, sweet potatoes, breadfruit, pak choy, bananas, scotch bonnet peppers and a plethora of other items growing in her own backyard off Fairbanks Road, are an amazing testament to what this one woman with a green thumb can do, with the help of her two young boys – Shaquille, twelve years old, and Ryan, seven.

The beauty around her here in Cayman is, in no way, confined to her backyard. Looking at the pleased faces of the patrons in her restaurant – La Sha Ry’s – along with the Restaurant’s décor, offers up a scene that one could also describe as beautiful.

And if one is to describe beauty associated with Ms Suckoo, her life as a professional hair stylist and hair care expert for almost twenty years comes to the forefront as well. Giving more details about her life Ms Suckoo said, “I also learned some important lessons from my mother. “I used to do the housework and each week every piece of furniture had to be moved when sweeping or mopping.

“Even in the backyard, she would sharpen a piece of stick to a point for us to use to pick up leaves, when the raking was already done and there were just one or two leaves around. “My father was not a talker, he was a doer. And I think that is the path I have followed.

For most of my life, people have asked me “is there anything you cannot do?” Preparing savoury dishes, baking, cake decorating, hairstyling, dressmaking, interior decorating and gardening are just a few of her favourite things.

“I had worked as a beautician here for approximately thirteen years before going into the restaurant business full-time. “But, whichever environment I was in, I was never able to hide my love for cooking and other things. “Throughout the years at the salon here, I would bring something I cooked at home for customers and co-workers.

They would ask me how I got my food to taste that way. “In fact some of my Indian dishes even tasted different from those cooked by Indians coming directly from the Asian continent because Jamaican Indians have their own way of cooking. For example, my Dal Roti is different because our spices are different. People would ask for my Rotis all the time.”

Ms Suckoo explained that one of her great grand grandparents from her mother’s side, and one from her father’s side, relocated to Jamaica, directly from India. “Therefore some parts of my life had Indian influences. My mother was Hindu and therefore did not eat beef, only because it was a family tradition.

“I also remember that some of my cousins had traditional Indian-style weddings. The older ones in the family could speak their traditional dialects but we learned very little of it because we thought it was mostly very funny.” Continuing to explain her primary interests Ms Suckoo said, “I simply love to cook. I like everything about it, right down to garnishing and presenting dishes.

But also, I really like doing anything that has to do with making things beautiful. “My mother was a dressmaker, so I suppose my love for nice clothes came from her. I was always decorating places too. “After school in Jamaica I worked there for six months in an office doing accounting. But I could not see myself sitting all day, even though I loved Math and was always good at it.”

Not being able to contain her innate entrepreneurial spirit for very long, Ms Suckoo revealed, “I started in the hairdressing field in Jamaica when I was eighteen years old. By the time I was twenty I had my own salon, which I operated there for a little over five years until I came to Cayman.”

As with so many other people in the Cayman Islands, Hurricane Ivan was at the root of a big change in Ms Suckoo’s life. She explained, “I moved into my new home in May 2004, only four months before Ivan. One of the things I made sure about was that while everyone else settled for only an electric stove, I wanted to have a gas stove.

“My children never became accustomed to fast food because I always ensured they had home-cooked meals. “So, right after the hurricane hit I was the only one in my community who was able to offer hot tea to neighbours, or cook anything. However, without the water, the children and I went to the United States to stay with my brother for a while.

“Up to the time of Hurricane Ivan, I was still working at the Beauty Salon. But in early October a friend called me to ask if I would return and cook to feed his workers until the salon reopened. “I then called my helper who had gone back to Jamaica. So, we started cooking from the house and more people than we bargained on began showing up for food.

We would buy meat everyday until the electricity came back. “When things began to get back to normal around the Island, I returned to the salon but I just never felt the same after spending so much of my time cooking and enjoying that so much. “So that was when I began looking for a location because I was doing all the cooking from home and, by that time, friends and people who knew about me had even asked me to cater for events.

“The name of the restaurant, La Sha Ry’s, is the abbreviation of my name along with the boys’ names. It’s just the three of us and we have been through thick and thin together.”