Christopher Golding, Chef de Cuisine, Sugar Mill Restaurant at Half Moon

“I was born doing food,” declares Christopher Golding, Half Moon’s new chef de cuisine for the 41-year-old Sugar Mill Restaurant. It’s nearly true for the Kingston native who remembers early years spent in his parents’ kitchen. “I was the second eldest of five kids and I was always in the kitchen. I loved hearing my family say, ‘Boy, what a little boy can cook!'” Golding recalls with a smile. This innate passion and early praise drove young Christopher to study home economics in high school before heading for the kitchens of Kingston’s top hotels. After being apprenticed at the Wyndham Hotel, Golding moved to Sans Souci Resort on the island’s north coast. There he demonstrated great potential, impressing his supervisors and managers to invest in further training at Hocking Technical College in Ohio, United States, the Caribbean Training Institute and the HEART Academy in Runaway Bay, Jamaica.

A desire for adventure and exploration soon had Christopher sailing aboard the Premier Cruise Lines where he spent five years as a chef de partie and later sous-chef. For Golding, the real adventure was meeting and getting to know his shipmates from around the world. “I truly believe in the saying ‘the way to a man’s heart is through food.’ By asking the other crew members about their national foods, I experienced different cultures and learnt about the foods,” he said. It was here that Chris learned the art of marrying cultures through food; putting a Jamaican twist to a Spanish dish he learnt from a shipmate.

It is this well honed craft that Christopher promises to bring to the historic Sugar Mill kitchen. According to the veteran chef, the new menu for Sugar Mill honours the restaurant’s contemporary interpretation of traditional Caribbean cuisine and uses local ingredients and spices to awaken the taste buds and senses of diners. “Guests come here to taste our food,” he said. “My mission is to use our local ingredients in a different way to give them a whole new experience.”

In addition to working with the Premier Cruise Lines as a chef de partie and sous-chef, Golding also worked at The Ritz-Carlton Rose Hall Resort & Spa in Rose Hall for eight years as chef de partie, assistant sous-chef and sous-chef. He joined Half Moon in 2008 as sous-chef for the resort’s seaside restaurant, Seagrape Terrace.

Cornelius Spencer, Executive Chef, Jamaica Observer (Staff) Canteen

Thursday Food didn’t have to journey too far to find executive chef Cornelius Spencer. In fact, we merely had to walk across the office parking lot and into our staff canteen, where Spencer was finalising lunchtime meals. A Level Two graduate of HEART Academy in Runaway Bay, the 31-year-old Cornelius took a momentary break from behind the range to talk food. Pulling up a seat at one of the mod, gleaming steel dining tables alongside us, the personable chef credits former boss Phillip Bernard of the now-defunct SugarDaddies for steering him on a path to pursue formal culinary training. “I was a kitchen assistant and I would help out the chef, so Bernard would always see me around the stove trying to keep the area clean and he encouraged me to go study food,” he remembers. Cornelius heeded Bernard’s advice. He was spurred even further to do so, as he had cultivated an affinity for the food industry, landing his very first job at a cook-shop along Half-Way-Tree Road upon leaving Papine High School. “That didn’t last long though,” he shares, as it proved difficult to gel with the work conditions and irksome customers. “I only stayed a week,” Cornelius adds. Thankfully there were lengthier tenures elsewhere like at the former Hilton Hotel (now the Wyndham Kingston) and Altamont Court Hotel. Asked how challenging it is to oversee food preparation while trying to please the palates of hundreds of persons on a daily basis, he concurs that it is a testing experience. However, having been at it for the past two years, he says: “you have to know measurements, know how to strike a balance between ingredients and quantity, and make the food tasty enough to tantalise the varied taste buds.” Cornelius is currently pursuing course studies locally at the Culinary Institute of America. When he’s not studying or cooking, our chef on the rise enjoys cycling and reading passages from his Bible each day.

Brenton Coley, Range Chef, Secret Garden Restaurant (MayFair Hotel)

Brenton Coley’s journey into the classroom to pursue culinary studies at HEART is one that was dotted with so many obstacles that one is forced to marvel at his ability to create meals with such passion. The St Elizabeth resident, who works as range chef at the six-month-old Secret Garden Restaurant, located at the MayFair hotel, divulges that he was unable to attain secondary education as his mother could not afford to send all six of her children to high school. So, 12-year-old Brenton relocated from his rural Balaclava to the capital city to help his elder sister with her sky-juice business in Jones Town. At 17, he moved out to live on his own in Trench Town and ventured into the fish vending trade. His entrepreneurial side revealed itself and Brenton opened a cookshop on West Street in downtown, Kingston which he operated for five years. Sadly, the political violence that plagued the area forced him to close the business. Stints in farming back home in St Bess and as a security guard followed, until he was prompted by a friend to enrol at the Boys’ Town HEART Vocational Training Centre to be properly accredited and acquire the necessary knowledge for professional advancement. The Level Two (Food Preparation) grad, who never got the chance to experience high school, speaks with a sense of accomplishment when noting he was awarded Trainee of the Year by the institution and also served as Student Council President for his class. The now 43-year-old Brenton says he sometimes finds it challenging to learn among primarily younger students but he refuses to allow the disparity in age to faze him. “I’ve always had a passion for cooking,” Brenton beams, pointing to his mother’s pot roast beef, and potato and cornmeal puddings as foods that stoked his inner culinary desires to eventually get formal training. Today, the father of three says his teenaged son Khaleel wants to follow in his footsteps and is taking Food Preparation in the Career Advancement Programme at his school, Marcus Garvey High. “He jokes and says, ‘Daddy I want to be a better chef than you’ and he’s challenged me to a cook-off”, Brenton shares.