Shorne Benjamin was working on Wall Street as a stockbroker after his degree from Mercy College in New York. He chose a career that aligns with his family’s background in finance and accounting.
Then the 2008 financial crisis happened, and he lost his job. He pivoted from banking to the culinary industry and opened a Brooklyn-based restaurant called Fat Fowl.
“It’s life, and it’s just like this whole pandemic going on right now. Back then, it was the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, and I was out of a job,” he told Travel Noire in 2021. “I was 30 at the time, and I was at a crossroads in my life. I didn’t know what direction to go. I’m looking at the financial world, and that’s not going to recover any time soon. I needed to keep moving and keep positive.”
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To pursue his career in culinary arts, he attended the French Culinary Institute down in Soho, where his skills in cooking were honed. Before that, he had no clue how to do a menu, much less open a restaurant.
“So I decided to go into cooking because I had a dream to open my own restaurant … I enrolled in culinary school to just get the basic foundation. I attended the French Culinary Institute down in Soho. It was a great option for me to go there. It was a great foundation. It’s one of the best, the alumni, and the whole support of the school after you graduate is amazing,” he said.
After graduating, he worked in a few restaurants to polish his cooking skills, but he also picked up some useful cooking skills through a “combination of traveling, eating out, and seeing different things where you get inspired, and you just put your own spin on it.”
Some of the dishes of his restaurant, which he opened during the pandemic, are oxtail grilled cheese, black fried rice, sweet plantains and signature specials such as jerky chicken and a shrimp curry burger with mango curry mayo.
He infuses a lot of St. Lucian heritage into his dishes in order to offer something different. He told Travel Noire about his cooking style, “For me, it’s going back to begin my formal training as a chef in culinary school. You’re in a classroom where everybody’s eager to learn French cooking, Thai cooking, and here I am thinking, okay, I’m just here to get the basics of what cooking is really about and use that language in a Caribbean format, with Caribbean inspiration.”
Although Benjamin pursued a career on Wall Street, cooking has always been part of him. Growing up, he spent time with his Caribbean grandmother, preparing meals.
“She made me realize that cooking is another way of showing love and appreciation,” he told Travel Noire about how his grandmother inspired him to take to cooking. “You can show love in different ways. And for me, that just made me happy. So I’m just tying that to how I cook right now and putting love into food.”
Recalling the first dish he made, Benjamin said he made green banana or green figs and stewed chicken, which incidentally happened to be the first dish his grandmother taught him to do.
Today, he is a popular chef in Brooklyn who has been honored several times including becoming a semi-finalist in the International Iron Chef Competition based in Toronto, Canada. He has also participated in many major events such as the Taste of Montréal festival, the 11th Annual Iron Chef Competition in Toronto, and the Haitian Food & Spirits Festival and has appeared on the Food Network’s Beat Bobby Flay and Chopped.
