The smell of curry coconut shrimp, jab jab pasta, and sizzling stew pork hits you the moment you step into Savannah Spiced. Brooklyn has plenty of restaurants, but few feel like home the way this one does. It’s a place where music, flavors, and stories converge, and where Trinidad and Tobago is never far from the surface.
Natalie Lamming-Alexander is a restaurateur and cultural ambassador from Trinidad and Tobago whose work brings Caribbean heritage to life in Brooklyn. For her, this is more than food. It’s memory, identity, and a bridge to the place that shaped her. Natalie moved to the United States as a young woman, carrying little more than ambition, a suitcase, and the spirit of her homeland. What started as a job waiting tables, bartending and managing shifts, became a calling, and eventually ownership. Every restaurant she opens, every event she produces, reflects years spent learning, experimenting, and honoring the Caribbean experience.
At Savannah Spiced, named after the Queen’s Park Savannah, that intention is palpable. The menu doesn’t just feed; it recalls Sundays at home, Carnival mornings, and the family kitchens where flavors were first learned. Names, spices, and presentation are deliberate. Food is never just food here. It’s gathering. It’s history. It’s culture carried forward with care.
Her newest venture, Sebastian’s Spices & Slices, inspired by their young son, brings that same philosophy to a different canvas. Caribbean flavors find a new home atop pizza dough, saltfish buljol, fried shark, and oxtail sitting beside melted cheese, a playful, thoughtful twist that keeps heritage alive without losing relevance. It’s younger, experimental, but unmistakably Natalie.
