More than halfway through a busy Restaurant Month and Alisa Ali, pastry chef at Hotel Indigo Grand Cayman, is celebrating a successful Signature Brunch at Catalina, where her desserts came in for particular praise. There is no time to relax though.
While being a pastry chef for a luxury hotel restaurant is an exacting task in itself, when there are actually nine different outlets for your creations at the hotel, there can be a lot of juggling involved. Thankfully, Ali is more than up to the task.
“You have to be extremely organised in this job,” she says, taking a few moments out from her day to chat over coffee and gourmet cakes in Hotel Indigo’s Catalina restaurant.
Festival planning
“There are meetings throughout the day with all the different departments to make sure that everyone is on the same page,” she says. “You have to also be aware of upcoming events as well as the regular restaurant cycle, such as Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Cayman Art Week, festivals and so on and there’s the food production itself.”
While Ali’s culinary creations are made throughout the day, she tries to plan the week ahead, although there are certain things that you can only make on the day.
“It’s all about connecting the dots to make sure that all our orders are in place,” she says.
Indigo’s food outlets include the rooftop bar and restaurant Pom Pom, fine dining at Rasa, Catalina itself, where California meets the Mediterranean, as well as Milkberry, Cafe Alula and Bata Bar and the room service menu.
Ali is responsible for desserts, cakes, pastries and confectionery at all of them, with new menus introduced every few months and absolutely no overlapping.
“People want to feel that they’re in a totally new place each time,” says Ali, who also creates the very first culinary delight offered to guests, the intricate chocolate pastry puzzle with a unique Cayman Islands theme that is part of the welcome package.
Journey into food
Originally from Barbados, Ali says that her food journey started over 20 years ago when, not knowing what she wanted to do with her life, she completed a college degree in hotel management.
“I thought that sounded funky and spunky,” she laughs, saying that she didn’t find the course particularly fulfilling but it allowed her to dabble in all parts of the hotel industry. Through a family friend, Ali got a position in a patisserie offering cakes, bread and confectionery and, after a year realised, ‘I love this!’
“I really found my passion there,” she recalls. “I was always questioning the how and the why and it felt like something I could really see myself doing.”
Ali earned a bachelor’s degree in baking and pastry art from Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island and then landed, as she describes it, “the dream internship” at the five-star Four Seasons hotel chain, working around the world in Miami, London and Azerbaijan.
Stints in Bermuda and BVI followed and then a recruiter reached out to her and asked if she might be interested in a job in the Cayman Islands.
“I was definitely interested,” says Ali, who was even more so after meeting with Indigo’s head chef Massimo De Francesca. “I loved his vision and his idea of what this property is, what it brings, the many outlets, the experiences, and I was fully on board.”
Ali also loved the creative and logistical challenge that came with working for a brand-new hotel.
Making her mark
“It’s very interesting because you play an important role in creating menus and linking themes and concepts to your experience and your vision,” she says “and also the vision of the company and, of course, the executive chef himself. There’s a lot of people involved! But at the same time, you want to also put your own mark on it.”
Like with many chefs, the visual aspect is just as important as the taste. “When you look at something, you’re eating already, you’re eating with your eyes,” she says. “Our goal at the end of the day is for it to be as tasty as it is appealing visually and aesthetically. I think inspiration comes from so many things, such as from a conversation, an experience, from travel, nature, art and architecture.”
Cayman Art Week
The recent Cayman Art Week talk with artist Cera-Tan Kennaird and trail-blazing Cayman Airways First Officer Giselah Ebanks hosted by Hotel Indigo was a particular favourite event of Ali’s.
“We got to link with this amazing artist, Cera-Tan, and talk about her vision and what she was looking for and how we could link that to pastry in general.”
This meant a lot of discussions about art as well as flavour profiles, resulting in some epic creations for the event with passion fruit, curry leaf chantilly and tamarind and white chocolate, with a backdrop of tropical flowers, fruits and leaves to reflect the colours and vibrancy of both Cera-Tan’s work and the flora of the Cayman Islands.
With just a few weeks of Restaurant Month left, Ali hopes that people will be take the opportunity to experience Catalina’s three-course lunch ($30) and dinner ($50) menus which includes a range of her culinary creations including Malibu coconut macaroon, coconut lime cheesecake, opéra gâteau, Florentine, prosecco pavlova and Bailey’s coffee slice.
“I hope that people are able to come and enjoy Catalina and to really see what our chefs can offer,” she said. “And yeah, I think it’s a steal of a deal!”
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