Born: 13 August 1938, Jamaica
Died: 1 November 2010
Country most active: Jamaica, United States
Also known as: Norma Elise Smith
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40. For more on her story, check out Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America.
Jamaican chef Norma Shirley built a reputation in the U.S. serving “New England food with Jamaican flair” at her Massachusetts restaurant in the late 1970s. But as she told Essence magazine, “It’s my dream to open another restaurant in Jamaica where Blacks would be the majority clientele.” It was a dream she wouldn’t realize until her late 40s. Born in 1938, her multicultural extended family exposed her to not just standard Jamaican fare, but Chinese, East Indian, Italian, Jewish, and British dishes as well. After marrying in 1965, she moved with her husband first to Europe, then New York City, and finally settling in Massachusetts in 1976. Leaving behind her first career as a nurse, she started a picnic basket takeaway operation out of her home and later opened Station Restaurant.
With the end of her marriage, however, she returned to New York City in the early ‘80s but had trouble finding investors in the crowded culinary scene and instead began working as a caterer and food stylist for Condé Nast, feeding crews and arranging shoots for Gourmet, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. But her years away from Jamaica had left her homesick, and a 1985 visit inspired her to return to Kingston. There, she used $10,000 of her own savings to launch Norma’s on Belmont Road. She wanted to serve locals, unlike so much of the economy that was focused on tourists, but there was some resistance to her variations on familiar dishes. As Shirley would later recall, “they didn’t understand” dishes like curried lobster with a flambé of mango or roast pork loin with prunes and tangerine marmalade. But with a location near Embassy Row, she was able to attract middle and upper class diners who, like Shirley herself, had lived in other countries and returned home and were more open to trying her food. She was so successful, she went on to open a second Kingston restaurant, Norma’s on the Terrace, and expand to other major cities with Norma’s at the Marina in Port Antonio, Norma’s on the Beach in Negril, and Norma at the Wharf House near Montego Bay. In 1995, the prestigious James Beard Foundation asked her to host the organization’s first Jamaican meal.
But she resisted being referred to in terms like the “Jamaican Julia Child” (Vogue, 1992). “I don’t see myself as the Grand Dame of Caribbean cooking,” Shirley later said. She also pushed back against her cuisine as “elevating” Jamaican food above its working-class connotations as a cheap food not to be taken seriously. She believed in the fundamental value of Jamaican food—not that it needed to be changed but that it was versatile enough to be experimented with. “I’m coming into my country now to try and help my people,” she said. “That’s how I looked at it.”