From a full Trinbagonian meal to English, Asian and other types in between, meals can be made from scratch at Serendipitea coffee shop and tea house in St Augustine.
Owner Caryn Nunes-Jameson told WE Life & Culture that in an effort to ensure that customers get great-tasting, nutritious meals, “All the recipes that we have here start as a base. We tweak and develop based on what we need to do for our customers. And all our stuff is halal, except for the pork sausages…But we set up the kitchen in a way that everything is cooked separately to avoid cross-contamination.”
Customers at the tea house are treated to a variety of freshly-made breads, which include multi-grain, white, garlic, English muffins, bagels, and coconut bake.
“And at Christmas time we keep with tradition and serve ham and hops, but we make our original hops bread. At Easter we make our own hot-crossed buns that we fill with cream cheese and blueberries, you know, to make it a bit different.”
Even the sauces and dips, she said, are made in-house – from the Italian pesto to the French hollandaise, the South American chimichurri to the Greek-adopted tzatziki.
“We also do barbecue sauces, honey mustard; we do our own pickles in here. We do escabeche too. And, of course, we don’t put peanuts in any of our sauces because some people may have peanut allergies.”
Desserts too, she beamed, are gluten-free and come in a wide variety and includes sweet and savoury tarts, cakes, and pies, all made from scratch.
But Nunes-Jameson insists that great-looking and tasting food must be complemented by the aesthetics of the environment. The cute doilies on the well-laid-out tables, the colourful teapots that line the shelves on the walls, soft background music, scented candles, a hospitable staff, and the option of having breakfast all day, she said, attract new and returning customers to the quaint tea house, nestled in a sanctuary surrounded by trees—a space that once served as someone’s home.
