Haam, a new Trinidadian-Dominican vegan restaurant, opened its doors in Williamsburg earlier this month.
Photo by Ximena Del Cerro
Smorgasburg hit, Haam, is now a brick-and-mortar restaurant at the corner of Union Avenue and Meserole Street. Chef Yesenia Ramdass took the food she grew up eating at her Dominican home in Washington Heights, some advice from her Trinidadian mother-in-law, threw in some New York-inspired twists and, with a growing passion for contributing to a healthy and sustainable way of eating, she opened a new vegan eatery.
The plant-based Caribbean eatery started off as a delivery kitchen in Sunnyside, Queens. Many confused customers would show up looking for a place where they could sit down and have a meal. Every time, Ramdass would come out to deliver the food herself and meet them in-person, making sure they didn’t feel they were leaving without a full experience. Her team also posted a phone number for people to reach them instead of just ordering through an app and that helped them gather some extra data —many patrons would try to make a reservation, sometimes even for parties of six, which signaled to them that a physical space could be viable.
If it hadn’t been for a last-minute gut feeling, the chef and her chief of operations Randy Ramdass, who is also her husband, would have opened their eatery in Times Square. A sudden realization that what they were really after was to continue building personal relationships with their patrons, brought them to Williamsburg, and they opened the restaurant there on Nov. 15.
“At the end of last year, we sat down and asked ourselves, ‘What do we want to stand for this year?” Ramdass recalled. “We said, ‘We are going ham this year,’ and now here we are with a whole restaurant.”
For many Brooklynites, Caribbean food means jerk chicken, oxtail stew or roasted pernil — but at Haam, it means family, heritage, health, colors and flavor. She and her…
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