Soup Joumou on Sundays

“There’s definitely something happening.”

Samuel Bernadin is enthusiastic as he counts about a dozen Haitian restaurants now operating across the Ottawa-Gatineau area. Over the past few years, he has watched interest in the cuisine grow well beyond the region’s Haitian community. Food influencers are making the rounds of local restaurants, introducing dishes, and the people who make them, to new audiences.

“It sparks curiosity, and it snowballs,” he says.

When an influencer visited the recently opened Monique’s Caribbean Takeout, owner Monique shared her story, including her battle with cancer.

“People who saw the TikTok video came from Hawkesbury because they didn’t know Haitian cuisine and they wanted to meet Monique,” Samuel says.

Hawkesbury is more than an hour from the restaurant, a sign that the desire to try Haitian food is reaching beyond the neighbourhoods where these restaurants first put down roots.

For Samuel, that growing curiosity presented an opportunity to share more than a meal. In September 2025, he launched BanFest, a celebration of Haitian culinary culture created for both the diaspora and the wider Ottawa-Gatineau community.

“Haitian culture, which is so rich, is expressed in large part through food, through gastronomy,” he says.

Food is one of the most accessible ways into a culture, but it also carries stories that can be easy to miss when you are simply ordering lunch.

Haitian cuisine is aromatic and deeply layered, Samuel explains, but not necessarily spicy.

For him, the food of his ancestors “is really the definition of comfort food. It’s rich, it warms you up. It’s full of surprises, actually.”

One of those surprises might be djon djon rice, its distinctive dark colour coming from the aromatic black mushrooms used to make the broth in which the rice is cooked.

“And it gives it a black colour. It’s very fragrant,” Samuel says. “It really has a distinctive taste, it’s flavourful, it’s mild.”

Then there is pikliz, the ubiquitous condiment made with cabbage, hot peppers and carrots. “It’s served as a side with fried foods.”

Among those fried dishes is griot, pieces of seasoned pork fried until crisp. Samuel is particularly drawn to the story behind its name and its connection to the West African griot, traditionally a keeper of history and stories.

“When a griot arrived in the village, they would serve him this fried pork. Because it was an expensive meat, offering it showed appreciation. Over time, it’s as though we short-circuited the whole thing: we call this fried pork griot.”

Perhaps no Haitian dish carries more history than soup joumou. Made with giraumon squash and typically including vegetables, meat and pasta, it was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021. During the colonial period, enslaved Haitians were forbidden from eating it. Following Haiti’s independence from France on January 1, 1804, Haitians reclaimed the dish as a symbol of freedom, dignity and resilience. More than two centuries later, eating soup joumou on New Year’s Day remains a tradition.