WHEN chef Norma Shirley got married, she barely knew how to boil water. But when life as the lady of the house became a bore, she wandered into the kitchen. The rest, as they say, is history. Today she’s the owner of four restaurants in Jamaica and Miami – living proof that anything’s possible.
This day the woman Vogue dubbed the ‘Julia Child of the Caribbean’ is whipping up lunch in the kitchen of Bambou restaurant on East 14th Street, where Shirley plans to return later this year as a guest chef.
“Sometimes I call it my Rasta salad,” she says of the exuberant mix of peppers, papaya, avocado and cucumber with a balsamic-mango vinaigrette, “because red, green and gold are Rastafarian colors.” It’s the kind of fresh, healthy fare that attracts famous faces like Angela Bassett, Whoopi Goldberg, Harrison Ford, Paul McCartney and Ralph Lauren (who owns a home nearby) to her Reading, Jamaica, eatery, Norma at the Wharfhouse.
“Food is now fashion. It’s culture, it’s everything,” says the dynamic woman with wide, dark eyes and an accent that hints at her Jamaican roots. Lately she’s keen on Pacific Rim cooking “because they cook with a lot of broths. It’s healthy. It’s also very comforting, and the aromas!” She also finds Asian food “fascinating because it’s so simple and so clean and so distinctive in flavors.”
Witnessing her enthusiasm for food, it’s hard to believe this chef found her calling late in life and totally by accident. Raised in Jamaica, where she stayed until she was 23, Shirley lived in in Scotland, England, Sweden and India and worked as a nurse before migrating to Manhattan with her then-husband in the late ’60s.
When her ex-husband’s career as a doctor required a move to the Berkshires, then-nurse Shirley had no intention of working at the only hospital in town with him. As a result, she found herself home alone. “I was not one of those housewives who [was happy to sit] home and wonder, ‘Should I change my drapes today?’ ” she explains.
To occupy herself, she was determined to learn to cook. “I began reading cookbooks and started finding it interesting. If I was going to make a chicken, I’d look at six different recipes and would take something from this one and something from that one and try to create my own [dish].”
Shirley turned her hobby into a business by making picnic baskets for Tanglewood, the Berkshires’ summer getaway for music lovers, then, shortly afterward, transformed a local building next to the old railroad into her first restaurant, the Station. “I started out my restaurant by doing one dish. There were no choices. Every day there was a different dish. Like today it’s fish, and if you don’t eat fish, that’s tough on you. You have to go elsewhere.”
But patrons loved her food. In fact, six months later she picked up a GQ magazine and read a reviewer’s pick touting “the best find of the summer is Norma Shirley’s little restaurant.”
“Well, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” she remembers.
In 1982, Shirley separated from her husband, moved back to New York and did catering and food styling for glossies like Vogue, Vanity Fair and Gourmet. “But New York got the better of me,” she says. “I found that I was working constantly. It was like I was on a treadmill.”
So she headed home to Jamaica where she now owns and operates Norma at the Wharfhouse and Norma on the Terrace in Kingston. There are also two Miami spots: Norma’s on the Beach and Ortanique on the Mile, where her son, Delius, runs the kitchen. (Shirley dropped the “Norma’s on the” for her Ortanique spot, because celeb chef Norman van Aken’s namesake place is in the neighborhood, so having a “Norma’s nearby was too confusing.)
Shirley visits New York regularly, however, to see her mother, who lives on 106th Street, and her friends. During this stay, she also appeared on the TV Food Network. For her, the city is also a wonderland of food attractions. “Living on an island, you have to get off [it] or else you become insular. You have to know what’s happening out in the big bad world,” she goes on. That includes forays into “these huge conglomerates like Fairway, Citarella and Grace’s [Marketplace].”
“I love Grace’s because they have wonderful fresh foods,” gushes Shirley, although she thinks our produce, while beautiful, can’t hold a candle to Jamaica’s. “Our soil is a very rich soil, and our fruits and vegetables just have a completely different flavor and taste. For instance, papaya that comes in from Jamaica has a very sweet, succulent, sensuous taste to it, you know? And it’s not just being prejudiced [that] I say that. There’s a vast difference.”
New Yorkers will get the chance to taste for themselves when Shirley returns to the city as a guest chef at Bambou sometime before the new year.