Welcome to our “Redefining Luxury” interview series. Our main aim here is to contemplate the essence of luxury and explore its many forms and definitions. Through open conversations with creators, entrepreneurs, and passionate individuals we talk about the process behind designing luxurious, pleasurable, yet thoughtful creations and their importance in the modern world. In search of joy, marvel, and inspiration.
Up next: food stylist, chef, and culinary activist: Lelani Lewis.

South London born and raised, with Grenadian and Irish heritage, Lelani was immersed into a whole plethora of cuisines growing up, which has shaped her passion for paying homage to Carribbean food and culture. Her deep connection to culinary history translates into unique projects, such as Code Noir and Whisk Food Studio, which she puts a lot of love into, alongside doing educational workshops, engaging talks and raising her son. I truly admire the purpose behind Lelani’s cooking and the book she is working on, and since we connected in person, we discovered a shared passion for change in the food system and healthy soils. It’s been a pleasure to sit down and talk to Lelani about her roots, inspiration, her journey and future aspirations.

Back in London, Lelani was working as a Project Manager for different charities for many years. Working with homeless, disabled young people, and people who were excluded from the mainstream systems. She originally studied food technology in school and seemed to have a real talent for it according to her mentors. Her father, having some experience in restaurants himself, wasn’t too fond of the idea of her getting into this field, but later on in life, in search of a deeper purpose within herself, Lelani got inspired and began to slowly dip her toes back in the food industry. Sparked by the undercurrent of pop-up restaurants happening all over London, she started a pop-up called “Carriacou Kitchen” with her cousin.

“My dad is from an island called Grenada, and there’s this tiny island off it called Carriacou, which has got the greenest crystal-clear waters with fish swimming in them and clear white sand. The aim of our Carriacou Kitchen pop-up was to elevate Caribbean food. We did a dinner for about forty people. When I look back, I think of the state of the kitchen… it looked like everything had exploded. None of us had any experience, we didn’t know how to organize ourselves, we had all of our friends helping, waiting, plating, all of that. But the adrenaline rush afterward, knowing that people were happy and satisfied with the food was the best feeling ever. And something sparked in me that made me think maybe this is it. Once I make a decision to do something, it doesn’t matter how hard or how long it’s gonna take, I’m gonna get there. I’m like a dog with a bone.”

Apparently, there was this knowledge gap that needed to be filled. Lelani got approached to organize an African and Caribbean diasporic-themed event and in the conceptual process, she came up with the idea of doing a massive long table for an immersive dinner which would take the guests into the details of how Caribbean food came to be what it is now, to attempt to truly weave in the narrative of the cuisine into all details of the evening. As a venue, she proposed Troopenmuseum, her favorite museum in Amsterdam and even though that particular client couldn’t afford this concept at the time, she was determined to continue pursuing her idea regardless.

Lelani connected with a partner who was also studying history and they both started really diving deep into research for about a year or so, reading many books about Caribbean cuisine and culture.

“It was just mind-blowing to find all of these connections between ingredients and people that have traveled or traversed the world. And it started to make me see the connections between how we look at culture and traditional national dishes and cuisines. And the fallacy of them. “

“Dutch stamppot is made with Peruvian potatoes. Curry is the national dish of Great Britain. So we’ve all been begging, borrowing, and stealing each other's ingredients around the world since forever. Basically, the whole idea of having these stiff ideas around our culture and nationalism kind of pales into insignificance when you realize that we’re all a mixture and a melting pot of one another. “

“That made me feel great because, being mixed race, half Grenadian and half Irish, this helps me reconcile my own identity as well. I think Caribbean food is a triumph. It’s a delicious melting pot of all of these cuisines and all of these influences coming together. These people have gone through the biggest adversity to bring you the tastiest food and most people know that if you cook with love, you can make really tasty food. That’s the special ingredient. So no matter the suffering they went through, they still had love in their hearts to produce these delicious foods. To me that’s a triumph and that’s to be celebrated. And that’s the irony of the Code Noir name. Because it comes from tragedy, but I want to focus on the celebration. Code Noir is actually a decree, written by King Louis XIV, and it was a decree with instructions on how to keep your slaves within the French colonies. From “how many grams should each person be given for food each day”, to “if an enslaved African woman would give birth to a child, who would that child belong to”. So dehumanizing. So dark…”

In 2020, Lelani was talking to loads of different venues about adapting the dining concept, until Mediamatic came along. They thought this was a brilliant idea, and instantly allocated a budget and resources for it, offering a helping hand in developing the whole project. Since there was already about a year of preparation and thought processes put into the entire experience, it was a labor of love all the way down to details like the wax seal stamps on each one of the menus that were applied manually by Lelani’s younger brother.

“In its essence, the dinner was split up into four different courses. They were like the four different epochs of the real significance of the changing Caribbean cuisine. First there was the indigenous period, when we did live cassava bread cooking on an open fire. Then we had the European course, with this long table covered in broken Delft blue plates and candelabras and barock music. A spoken word artist appeared like a ghost at the end of the course, and literally the first time I saw it, I had goosebumps all over my body. And then we had an African course, looking at the ingredients and the techniques that they’ve brought into the Caribbean and then finally we tried to do a kind of street food scene where we had people eating Indian baras with trini doubles. It’s like a bara with chickpea curry and tamarind sauce, coconut yogurt, and pickled cucumbers. The reason it’s called doubles apparently is because people were like “they’re so good, I want two”, so give me double. Doubles. We wanted to bring people through this journey, like quite literally a journey. From each course, they’d go to a different spot within the venue, so then you really saw this lineage and red thread going through.. and people really enjoyed it, because it was an entertaining and interesting experience that was also thought-provoking. The spoken word artist helped bring about some of the subjects that we felt were super-important for people to understand. Some people came purely for entertainment and for other people, I think it really set seeds in their minds with questions like: How did the foods that we have on our plate today come to be here?

During this process, Lelani had a ten months old baby, sleeping about 3-4 hours a night, all of this in pandemic times, which has obviously been quite intense for the food industry in general. Lelani also had her share of pivoting and reinventing herself during this time. She kept herself busy with spreading the word, doing a TEDx talk, and guiding online corporate workshops and workshops at universities, which is now coming back in real life.

Another project Lelani has co-founded while she was pregnant is Whisk Food Studio, which focuses on creating mouthwatering photo’s & content for sustainable food & drink brands.

Together with her partner, they became determined to create an opportunity for themselves, since food styling is not an easy field to get into, especially with little experience. Lelani’s had some experience with food styling for agencies, and shadowed a few people here and there. Her partner decided to self-train herself in photography. Being big advocates of learning through doing, they kept on going from there, building their portfolio, doing business acquisition, being approached by different small-scale businesses, until in August last year they were approached by Lipton.

“I really enjoy creating, and having another faucet within the food industry. But how do we go about it? As a bi-product of food styling, we waste a lot of food. So we only work with brands that want to make a positive impact. We donate excess foods that we have, either to ourselves or using some of the apps like OLIO for example. In all of the work I do around food, I want there to be some kind of enlightening on some of the pervasive issues within the food industry. I want to do a shoot bringing up the overuse of plastic within food packaging.
Like when you go to Albert Heijn and you see plastic wrapped around an individual f*cking aubergine, or… I think I saw a single banana wrapped in plastic somewhere.

Currently, aside from working on the next edition of large-scale immersive dinner experiences like this one, Lelani is in the process of writing a cookbook, looking even deeper at the heritage of some of these ingredients, and recipes around the Caribbean cuisine.

“Because of the cookbook, I’ve been doing a lot more Caribbean cooking. Most of the time, I wouldn’t cook it on a daily basis, because it’s like a treat for me, and it’s something you have to pour a lot of time into. A lot of the dishes require overnight marinating, et cetera. But because I’ve been cooking it more lately, I’m realizing there’s so much fried stuff here and so much really heavy starches. I want to give it to people the way it is, and also add interpretations of dishes that I’ve invented, but maybe later down the line, I can look into how we can make it a little bit more healthy.”

There are also talks about turning it into a TV program, lots of different possibilities and opportunities on where to take this concept further and expand it to new heights. Inspired by the Whetstone magazine that looks into origins of food from all around the world and Stephen Satterfield, who’s behind High on the Hog on Netflix, the ultimate dream might be to turn Code Noir into a media platform. Bringing in other creators and pulling in different experiences on top of cooking, like food styling, and photography to create this all-encompassing platform that could be a magazine, a website with videos, a podcast, or even all of the above, to be able to actually tell all of the stories, claim back power and have a wider audience to educate.

“I want Code Noir to become something bigger than just focused on Caribbean food. It’s Caribbean food because that’s what I resonate with. I am half-Caribbean, but at the same time, I think there are important stories to tell of other diasporic people or marginalized voices within the food industry who aren’t given the platform or the respect, because they’re not European. Yet, they create the most delicious fare. And so, my focus, actually, after establishing myself, is to give a platform to those people and the stories I think the world needs to hear.”

Aside from all her projects, Lelani is determined to bring more balance into her private life as well and invest into her relationships as well. As a passionate entrepreneur, and activist, it’s easy to become carried away with work, but in the end, time with friends and family gives her a lot of joy and fills her with the inspiration to do the work that she actually wants to do.