Spice up your life! Sheffield's tastiest Caribbean cuisine
Spice up your life! Sheffield's tastiest Caribbean cuisine
The Tribune's guide to the best jerk chicken, saltfish and curried mutton in the city
By Mina Miller
When I recently asked locals to recommend the best Caribbean places in Sheffield, responses were mixed. Loyalty was sharply and perhaps unsurprisingly divided along neighbourhood lines. The general agreement, however, seemed to be that Sheffield’s Caribbean offerings were scant. A good number of places people suggested were either permanently shut, or under new ownership, meaning consistency couldn’t be guaranteed. One person simply told me, “I would recommend going to Leeds.”
But there is great Caribbean food in Sheffield. It’s just not always that easy to find online — a surefire sign of food made by and for communities, in restaurants that are less preoccupied with SEO and more focused on churning out favourite dishes for repeat customers. I’ve previously written about how the press doesn’t always give Sheffield food places their proper due, focusing only on the same dozen or so buzzy places in the city centre and affluent suburbs. There’s little published about the city’s Caribbean food — a trend that’s apparently echoed nationally. In 2020, Vice reported that fewer than five black-owned UK restaurants were reviewed by the national press. The same year, Vittles reported that “Between the Guardian, The Observer, The Telegraph, Financial Times, The Times and The Sunday Times, there have been only two reviews of a restaurant serving African or Caribbean cuisines in the last 10 years”. Just this week, Chicken + Bread zine posted research on Instagram that found only two black-owned restaurants were reviewed by the same outlets in 2024, none of which were Caribbean. Yet the importance of Caribbean communities on the UK’s food culture is undeniable.
In Sheffield, where roughly 1% of the population identifies as Caribbean, the emphasis, for the most part, is on no-frills, home-style food — whether stewed in a pot or smoked in a barrel for hours. The majority of this demographic identifies as Jamaican or of Jamaican heritage, but you can find food with influences from other Caribbean countries, such as Guyana.
The places I visited operated mostly as takeaway counters, dishing up steaming hot food into containers and sliding them over to you in pre-knotted plastic bags. Opening hours could be restrictive, with businesses only trading part of the week — and the times posted online were sometimes inaccurate. The feeling I got was that, if a place was local to you, you surely knew about it. Dishes weren’t cheap, particularly, but they were hearty. And the food wasn’t always that photogenic — the curse of slow cooking. But the focus wasn’t on Instagrammable plating, anyway, but on unpretentious food to fill bellies and light up palates.
I’m not in any way an expert in Caribbean food and wouldn’t claim to be (for more on the topic, check out Riaz Phillips’ beautiful book, “Belly Full: Caribbean Food in the UK”). The following round-up should serve as a starting point rather than an exhaustive list of what our city has to offer. I also didn’t do a full foray into outer Sheffield suburbs like Darnall, which I knew would be peppered with family-run or independent businesses dishing up flavourful food. I’d encourage readers to strike out on their own, in their immediate locality or further afield. Because Caribbean places in Sheffield seem to be, first and foremost, places that serve the surrounding community, the best way to find places like them is simply word of mouth, or walking past their doors.
My round-up, in ascending order of preference:
No. 5: Loviz Flavaz tied with Caribbean Spice
One Sheffield native recommended me Caribbean Spice, located on London Road, describing it as “probably the best and grumpiest (which is important)” place in town. When I visited, though, the staff were undeniably pleasant, gently informing me that most of the menu, including veggie options, was sold out. I ordered the pepper steak, which was the special that day, and some wings, before realising Caribbean Spice only took cash. Some fifteen minutes of wandering around looking for a cash point later, the pepper steak was mine. Fried into a rich brown sauce with garlic, onion, and a healthy dose of black pepper, then served on rice and peas, this was a solid takeaway, but nothing to write home about. I was slightly disgruntled because they'd forgotten my chicken wings — and would have popped back in to get them, but I had driven too far away at that point for them to be worth going back for.
I’m embarrassed to say that what I ate from Loviz Flavas, which is located in Highfield, came as a Deliveroo order (I was on a tight timeline). By the time I placed my order, most of the menu had also sold out, and items were greyed out in the app. The curry mutton (no signs of goat on most of the menus I came across) had a rich and flavourful gravy, but was literally bare-boned: I surmised that the meat had been slow cooked until so tender it had slipped into the stew, at which point it had been scooped into containers for luckier and more timely customers than me. The rice and peas were also dry, and I could picture the kitchen staff, winding down for the day, literally scraping the bottom of pots to rustle up my order. The saving grace of the meal was the callaloo split: a piece of fried dough stuffed with savoury, oily greens. The dish’s simplicity makes it sound boring, but it made for an incredibly satisfying and nourishing vegetarian main.
The ‘takeaway’ (pun intended) for both Caribbean Spice and Loviz Flavaz is that you should order early (before 8pm), or risk disappointment.
Loviz Flavaz, 334 Edmund Road, Highfield, Sheffield S2 4EN; Caribbean Spice, 80 London Road, Highfield, Sheffield S2 4LR
No. 4: Jamaica Food (used to be Reggae Kitchen)
When my friend and I pulled up to Jamaica Food on City Road, it was decidedly closed, despite Google having indicated it was open. I felt defeated: it had not been easy to find a place doing service on a Tuesday. As we peered through the windows, wondering what to do, a man sitting in a car idling directly in front of the shop rolled down his passenger-seat window. “They’ll be open in ten minutes!” he yelled. He was clearly a regular, and bore more than a passing resemblance to Chet Hanks, Tom Hanks’ son and famed enthusiast of Jamaican culture.
Taking ‘Chet’ at his word, we walked to the nearest shop, bought some Rubicon juice boxes and drank them on the street while we waited. A few minutes later, Jamaica Food was indeed open. The woman behind the counter needlessly apologised for the wait. Chet was now sitting at a counter, tucking into a large container of steaming food, gazing out onto City road.
As we considered our options, Chet recommended the brown stew chicken. Not wanting to defy the wisdom of a regular, we ordered a large platter to share, with brown stew chicken, curry mutton, rice and peas, and coleslaw. For good measure we also asked for two patties (jerk chicken and saltfish) on the side. We sat down at a lone small table, where I was boxed in between a large box of catering supplies on one side and Chet on the other. Correctly detecting that I wasn’t from Sheffield, he tried to strike up a conversation and asked me where I was from, visibly brightening up when I said California.
“This is really spicy!” the cook said, right after he deposited fresh hot sauce on the table, but not before I’d put a big spoonful in my mouth. He wasn’t wrong — my eyes started watering almost instantly. Fresh, gingery, and zingy, I would have happily eaten this on its own, but instead drizzled it over the platter. The brown stew was indeed nice. A milder option for those who aren’t fans of chilli, it is often simmered with ketchup, which imparts a touch of sweetness. The cubes of chicken breast were slightly dry, and I didn’t tell Chet I preferred the spicier and fattier mutton. The patties were made with a light and flaky pastry filled with a rich seam of salty filling. All in all, Jamaica Food served us a very satisfying reasonable local takeaway. My only gripe: the easy-cook rice.
Jamaica Food, 200 City Road, Sheffield S2 5HP
No. 3: Bishops Caribbean Bistro
Friend and man-about-town Shaun recommended Bishops, informing me in the same breath that its owner had won Deal or No Deal some years back. This was the sort of interesting detail I couldn’t resist following up on. Some internet sleuthing led me to a dedicated DoND blog account (the internet is a wondrous thing) which claims that Shaun Yarde, the owner of Bishops, who already ran a coffee shop at the time, did indeed win £75k in 2011 due to savvy decision-making on the game show.
Whether that money was invested into Bishops I don’t know, but from social media I gleaned that Yarde was born in Sheffield but spent his early years in Guyana. When I headed to his place to investigate the food, the polished exterior, “Bistro” signage and white tiles I spotted from the street led me to believe this was a sitdown place. I was wrong. It was actually a deceptively modern takeaway spot on a residential road. As I ambled up, a woman with a pint of ice cream in her hand strode in purposefully ahead of me and asked the staff what the wait time was on chips (three minutes.)
Unfortunately, I was not so lucky and faced a minimum half hour wait. (Note to self: call ahead.) The staff, who were wearing matching t-shirts, were unhurried and methodical packing orders: Bishops seemed to be doing a bang-up trade on the apps. Enticed by the more extensive and varied menu than the holes-in-the-wall I’d visited by this point, I ordered plantain, stewed oxtail, okra and jerk-style prawns (let’s put to one side the debate over what constitutes ‘jerk’ for the time being), a lamb patty, and some banana pepper hot sauce. Once I got home, a full hour and a bit after first pulling up, I was ravenous. Something about Bishops’ polished presentation and custom staff t-shirts had put me off, and I expected the food to be mediocre. It was actually fantastic: the oxtail stew in particular was truly sublime, the meat melting off the tails into a collagenous mess, the sauce a sweet, earthy flavour punched up with pepper and allspice.
The jerk prawns were big, juicy, and spicy; the lamb patty tasted almost like a keema (maybe due to cinnamon?); the okra was crisp rather than slimy, and still vibrant green, sauteed with sweet peppers and onions, providing a light counterpart to all the meaty richness. The plantain was near-caramelised, bringing out the starchy fruit’s inherent sweetness, and the fresh hot sauce was scorching hot.
I had to hand it to Bishops — white tiles and all.
Bishops Caribbean Bistro, 5 Lees Hall Avenue, Meersbrook, Sheffield, S8 9JE
No. 2: Myra’s
While his go-to recommendation growing up had been Reggae Kitchen, Shaun told me the best Caribbean food he’d had over the years had “just been someone local whose phone number you get, and just go and get it from their house.” And that’s how I found Myra’s.
Not an official business (but I have their permission to write about them), Myra’s posts a menu on social media every Monday or Tuesday for pre-order, pick-up on Fridays. I placed an order with the owner, C., by DM, asking for the “Belly Buster” (a selection of everything) and some saltfish patties. “The fritters are sold out even though I’ve not started cooking them lol” she responded. The Belly Buster was good to go, though, and after some pleading, I was put on the fritter waiting list.
Not long later, I drove to a cul-de-sac near Sky Edge playing fields. It was nearly dusk. Two intimidating dogs peered over a makeshift fence at the top of the road, and a woman, tightly holding her child’s hand, gave them a wide berth by crossing over to the other side of the street. Some kids were kicking around a football. I parked on the curb and walked up to Myra’s house. The front door, through which I could see a bit of the spacious kitchen, was standing wide open. A TV was playing in the other room. I yelled out hello and said I was here to pick up my food.
A tall man looked at me with confusion and asked me to wait a sec. He called C., who he put on speakerphone. “The girl from Instagram?” I heard her say. “That’s me!” I bleated in response. “Oh no,” she said slowly. “Because you said 6pm I thought you weren’t coming anymore.” I looked at the time. It was nearly 8. My timings were off again. “I said after 6,” I responded helplessly to the man’s palm, where his phone was resting. C. was profusely apologetic, though really, we both knew the miscommunication was my fault. “We’re out of everything,” she said.
I offered to come back the next day, but C. said she was in her car just round the corner. “Just wait,” she said, so I did, awkwardly shuffling from foot to foot while her colleague/relative kept an eye on me and poked around in the kitchen. A few minutes later, a 30-something woman with long blonde curls appeared in the front door. She apologised again, then said she’d see if she could magic anything up. C. explained that she usually posted her menu online on Monday or Tuesday, and that orders sold out right away. Many of her regulars had been customers for six, seven years. “I gotta keep them on lock,” she said, laughing.
In the end, C. managed to assemble a large box for me, though I couldn’t see what it contained. I tried to pay, but she waved me away, telling me we could sort it later. As I turned to the car and started down the steps, she called me back. “Wait!” she said, “there might be some mutton!” She ducked into the kitchen, then re-emerged regretfully. “No, there isn’t,” she said. “But I’ve given you a small pot of callaloo.” It’s worth noting that I hadn’t mentioned writing a piece at this point, so this was simple generosity.
At home, I dubiously unboxed the order, only to find I’d been given a small feast. One box housed a large portion of jerk chicken, fried wings, rice and peas, and an apologetic spoonful of mutton sauce. It was accompanied by a whole other container of mac n’ cheese, the aforementioned pot of callaloo, and a dumpling to round everything off.
The jerk chicken was tender and slow cooked (though probably not over wood), and artfully seasoned with whole black peppercorns and an unmistakable hit of scotch bonnet. The callaloo was salty, light and astringent, and cut neatly through the richness of everything else. The wings were crispy and drenched in syrup (possibly honey), satisfyingly crunchy, sweet and savoury. And the macaroni was positively oozing with cheese, swimming in a creamy sauce with delicious goblets of fat. Not for the faint of heart.
In the end, Myra’s odds and ends provided me with three substantial and satisfying home-cooked meals. The dishes didn’t hit the same subtle notes of a professional kitchen like Bishops, but knocked it out of the park when it came to comfort food. And when it did come to paying, C. asked me for £13, which I sent by bank transfer. Bargain.
Myra’s can be found by searching on Instagram and Facebook
No. 1: Marcia's All Nation Caribbean Takeaway
Two Sheffield friends directed me to Martins Good To Go (32-38 Wicker, Sheffield S3 8JB) as a key place for Caribbean food in Sheffield, even though, as one of them said, “I mainly think Sheffield is pretty whack for Jamaican food.” The way they both carried on about Martins, I assumed that the grocery store would, at the very least, have a patty or two behind the counter — but it was in fact just a grocery store. Now of course a shop like Martins is a community hub with cultural importance and significance. But I had a deadline, and needed cooked food. Now.
I nevertheless browsed the aisles, which were crammed with crates of produce, packets of spice and bottles of hot sauce. I located and dutifully purchased a hard-to-find Bajan hot sauce my friend recommended. When I handed over my card to pay, I asked Martin, who was sitting behind the till, if he could recommend any good places to eat. He thought about it for a sec. “Marcia’s by Northern General”, he said. “Or something on London road. There isn’t much else.”
So to Marcia’s I headed, determined to try another place before going home. It was rush hour on a sweltering day, and I ineptly tried to find parking off Owler Lane for longer than strictly necessary, arriving flustered and sweaty.
Though the business is explicitly “all nation”, when I entered, the thirty-something man sitting behind the counter proudly told me he was Jamaican and this place only served Jamaican food. He’d just come back from Carnival and was in high spirits, carrying on simultaneous conversations with me and his mum (who turned out to be Marcia, and the owner), while she rattled around with pots and pans at the back of the kitchen. When I asked Marcia’s son for recommendations, he almost apologetically told me he was vegetarian, but that the jerk chicken was very popular. I’d had enough jerk chicken at this point, so I opted for ackee and saltfish (the national dish of Jamaica, after all) and pepper lamb ribs.
This Marcia’s is relatively newly opened, having been in its current location for about a year and a half, but the same family used to own a place (also called Marcia’s) down from Martins shop, and know him well. While Marcia’s did actually have tables for dining in, I was keen to head home, once again eating my food off the kitchen counter. The ackee and saltfish was creamy and custardy and extremely moreish, with flecks of saltfish cutting through the mellow fruit sautée. The lamb ribs, which were stewed in a peppery oil that made me cough before I even started chewing, were studded with whole roasted garlic cloves and twigs of thyme, and absolutely phenomenal.
These two dishes were the best of everything I’d tried, and I regretted not buying more items to sample, but the reality was that I was about to go abroad for three weeks and my housemate, who is vegan, was unlikely to enjoy any of my leftovers. It was the night before my trip, and I was desperately googling how to freeze everything, from ackee to callaloo.
“I’ll see you again soon!” Marcia’s son had said brightly when I left the shop. His confidence was fully warranted.
Marcia's All Nation Caribbean Takeaway, 46 Firth Park Road, Sheffield S5 6WN
Really enjoyed reading this; look forward to trying the food!
Great article. Definitely want to try some of these places.