New Orleans has long called itself the northernmost Caribbean city, and Queen Trini Lisa on D’Hemecourt Street in Mid-City is the most honest proof of that claim you’ll find at a lunch counter.
Chef Lisa Nelson grew up in Hardbargain, a small village in Trinidad, she simply calls “the bush,” learning to cook in her mother’s kitchen before moving to New York, then New Jersey, then eventually to New Orleans after her family’s contracting business brought them south following Hurricane Katrina.
She started selling jerk chicken and curried chicken out of a Bywater corner store in 2016, cooking Trinidadian food in the back for her kids while running a standard po’boy operation up front. The smells reached the customers. People started knocking on the back door.
The rest followed from there, through pop-ups, festivals, and a year and a half of teaching herself to make doubles from scratch because she couldn’t get anyone to share the real recipe. She kept working at it until it tasted right.
The doubles are the reason most people show up the first time. They’re a Trinidadian street food, two pieces of soft turmeric flatbread folded around curried chickpeas seasoned with coriander and tamarind, bright and warming and nothing like anything else in the city.
Nelson adds Creole seasoning to hers because she believes in making home where you are, and the result is something that belongs specifically to New Orleans while being deeply rooted in Trinidad. Order them with all the sauces.
The coco bread fish sandwich is the other anchor of the menu, a Louisiana-fried fillet tucked into pillowy Caribbean bread with cool crunch underneath. Jerk chicken, curry chicken, oxtail soup, rice and peas, and a traditional sorrel drink made from hibiscus round out a menu that Nelson points out has direct parallels to the New Orleans table: pelau is close to jambalaya, rice and peas tracks with red beans and rice. The cuisines grew from the same roots.
Gambit Magazine covered the restaurant’s brick-and-mortar opening, and Nelson’s name now appears alongside chefs like Nina Compton and Serigne Mbaye in conversations about where New Orleans food actually comes from and who shaped it. The dining room seats about 20, decorated with island murals and Trinidad and Tobago flags, with red benches outside.
Nelson or one of her kids is almost always in the kitchen or on the floor, and the warmth of the place is not an accident. Queen Trini Lisa is at 4200 D’Hemecourt Street in Mid-City. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 8 p.m. Call (504) 345-2058. Check Instagram at @the_queen_trini for daily specials before you go.
