Harry Singh on the Perfect Roti, Trinidad, and Life in the Kitchen

While you were Instagramming your mermaid toast, Caribbean food legend Harry Singh was rolling another perfect roti.

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I looked all around Harry Singh’s restaurant kitchen, because I was hearing something that sounded like a little steel drum, a musical pop-bump-a-pop-bump. It was different from the vintage calypso and soca soundtrack that Singh keeps going every minute he’s in the shop. Was there a steel band somewhere down the block from the Nicollet Avenue storefront? 

I asked Singh. 

“It does that if there’s water,” he said, gesturing to the pot of oil he’d set to boil on the stove. The pot was black, iron, and round-bottomed, and sheets of orange flame from the stove were wrapping around the outside. Calypso—the classic West Indian folk music—first emerged as a kind of protest speech in Trinidad, after the British authorities banned drums in hopes of preventing enslaved Africans from communicating with one another. Cooking pots, oil drums, and such were recruited instead. Was this phantom music something that would be familiar to anyone cooking in a traditional Trinidadian way? 

We were cooking doubles, the Trinidad fry bread that is simplicity itself and, like a perfect biscuit, the work of a lifetime. Here’s how Singh makes them. 

First you set an appointment to prepare them together, then he’s an hour late. Then, while you’re pacing outside, you realize the dough—which looks like a pile of bubbles—has somehow already been made. And you stand beside him while he uses his wiry hands to pinch off bunches of what looks like gobs of lemon pudding and pop them onto an oiled cookie sheet. Then he counts them, his fingers jumping down the aisles of dough blobs. And each time he counts one, he presses a gentle divot into its center, and after a while he has enough pairs formed to satisfy him. 

Then he seizes a blob and says, “And Dara, this is how you do”—and he claps his hands together as swiftly as a magic trick, slipping the just-flattened double into the oil. He sees something invisible to the untrained eye, flips the bread, sees something else invisible to the untrained eye, and removes a bread-colored cloud that is the loveliest, freshest, most perfect thing you could ever hope to taste. 

Typically, Singh serves two to an order (they’re doubled, hence the name) and gives them to you with curried chickpeas. An order runs $4. 

They are not popular. Most days, Harry Singh’s restaurant is sleepy, if not downright empty. A few people come to visit and eat, but not many. Sometimes he closes for no obvious reason and opens up again the same way. He’ll be closed during the State Fair, because that’s when he mans his little booth in the Food Building. When he’s there, his days are long. He leaves his house in Coon Rapids at 4 am and typically doesn’t get home again till near midnight. After the fair, he’ll take two weeks off to recover. He’s 74 years old. 

I would like to make the case that Harry Singh’s is the best old food at the State Fair—and, moreover, that old food is the best food. 

As I write this, the new State Fair foods have been released. The odds-on favorite to become a hit involves Fruity Pebbles and gummy bears on soft serve, in a nest of cotton candy. It will look great on Instagram. Everything that’s been a hit lately—glitter tea, mermaid toast—makes you do a shocked double-take and stop scrolling on Instagram (for a solid 10 seconds). 

Harry Singh’s food is the opposite of that. It’s the color of rice and bread and curried chickpeas. But I would like to make the case that Singh’s is the best old food at the State Fair—and, moreover, that old food is the best food. There’s nothing better than the dishes learned at your mother’s side and then artfully perfected over 40 years of dinner services.

This story—of Singh and his Minnesota doubles—begins in 1945, when Kissoondath “Joe Flat” and Carmen Singh welcomed their first son, baby Harry, into a small home in a village outside Princes Town, on the island of Trinidad. They were third-generation Indo-Trinidadian, whose parents had arrived as indentured laborers of the British. 

The village wasn’t electrified, and the family cooked in an outdoor kitchen. Imagine a small clay volcano, squat and wide. That was the outdoor cooking fire. The round-bottomed pot that Singh still uses would have sat on that clay volcano. Eventually, the Singh family would have seven children, and in 1953, when Harry was seven, Carmen taught him all the tricks of the kitchen. 

“Guess the first thing she made me cook: roti and pumpkin,” Singh tells me. You have to start kids early at roti, he explains, because the layered bread is incredibly difficult to make. First you mix up a dough, then you grind a split-pea filling, and then, somehow, you end up with a big old pancake. It’s thin—a few millimeters of stretchy bread dough on the outside, a few millimeters of spiced lentils in the middle, and another few millimeters of bread dough on the other side. It takes most people years to make a good one, Singh says. 

He rolls them out and cooks them on a cast-iron tawa, a slightly bowed griddle of sorts. And to see him do it sort of defies the sense of your eyes. Take a ball of dough, a scoop of filling, rolling pin, rolling pin, giant perfect roti!

“Dara! You can’t do it any other how,”  Singh says, shaking his head playfully when he sees how confused I am by the process. “If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll burn every damn thing. The trick is, you have to know the consistency of the flour and let it rest. A shortcut thing—I don’t do that.” 

In that outdoor kitchen where he grew up, Singh says, he had everything. Green mangoes in the trees for a green mango chutney, different fresh chilies, avocados growing everywhere, chickens for eggs, and a tied-up goat for meat. Everyone in the village knew each other: Singh walked the village kids to school, where he met a little girl called Anne Marie. 

Joe Flat drove a taxi, a big black ’48 Ford, and everyone in the village could hear when he drove toward home, often with a fish he’d picked up in Princes Town. Carmen and Joe Flat would listen to Indian music on the battery-powered Blaupunkt radio. And for some reason, when the battery ran low, Singh could get more power out of it by pressing the connector. As his dad ate curried kingfish, his mother would call out, “Press it, Har!” 

Then, suddenly, in 1962, independence came to Trinidad. Singh was 17 and feeling like everyone in the world had money and freedom, except people in small villages in Trinidad. “We had to wash our clothes on a scrubbing board in a tub outside. You try that one day,” says Singh. 

He attended college for generals in Trinidad. But when he saw an ad in the newspaper for, of all things, Minneapolis Business College, he applied. When he got in, he kept the acceptance letter a secret from Carmen for eight months, hiding it in the visor of the taxi. 

When he arrived in Minneapolis in 1970, the school sent someone to meet him who stashed him in a church overnight, to sleep on a pew. But the school’s minder showed up to collect him the next day, helped him find a Loring Park apartment for $75 a month, and stocked it with Goodwill furniture. Young Singh set out the door and started walking down Hennepin Avenue, door-knocking for something to make money at night. He found a job 15 blocks along, after crossing the Mississippi, at Nye’s Polonaise Room.

Here he met Minneapolis restaurant legend Al Nye. 

“Al became my father figure,” Singh recalls. “He helped me get my first checking account. He showed me how to make pierogi, how to do the big, big steak.” 

Through Minneapolis Business College, Singh also met Hubert Humphrey, who helped him secure a green card. “He wanted my birth paper, my work paper.” Singh shrugs at the memory. “And then he bought me a car! A ’60 Chevy. He said, I only paid $50 for this car. Open the trunk. Mr. Humphrey put two boxes of groceries, a battery, and a spare tire in the car! He called me Sonny Boy. He was really a great man.” 

Singh worked at Nye’s washing dishes for four years, then landed a job in a Northeast foundry, forging wheels for freight trains. On a visit back to Trinidad, the family of his childhood friend, Anne Marie, pulled him aside. “‘She won’t marry anyone else,’” Singh recalls hearing. “I said: ‘Oh cheezers.’” 

The couple married in the village and took an apartment in Northeast, where Anne Marie and Harry soon welcomed two baby boys, David and Robyn. When Singh finally graduated from school, he took a job as a parole officer. But his heart broke to see men separated from their families. “After one week I told Anne Marie, ‘We have got to open a Caribbean restaurant. There is no Caribbean restaurant in all of Minnesota!’”

The Singhs opened their first place in 1983, on Central Avenue in Northeast. It was called, simply, Harry Singh’s Caribbean Restaurant. 

The critic for the Star Tribune, Jeremy Iggers, came and focused, oddly, on the hot sauce: “The ‘average’ hot sauce made with mango and papaya is excruciatingly hot. The hottest of the hot sauce defies description, but if owner Harry Singh carries through on his plan to sell the stuff by the bottle, the FDA and the EPA should both be alerted.” 

This review would dictate the coverage of the restaurant, essentially till this day. 

“We never encouraged people to eat this thing hot, but. . . ” Singh shrugs. Camera crews came with gallon jugs of water to set around on-camera tasters, should fires need to be dampened. It turned into something of a sensation. The restaurant relocated to Lyn-Lake, and they strung chili-pepper lights through the dining room. Those were the good years. Prince was dating Apollonia 6 star Susan Moonsie, whose parents came from Trinidad, and they would send a white limousine for roti and curried kingfish head, a delicacy. 

Singh bought his mother and father a stove, a refrigerator, a bed. “Everything we had in America.” When he went home, he was puzzled to find his mother still cooking eggplant on the outdoor stove, but she told him it was sweeter that way. In time, Harry and Anne Marie made a spot in their home for his youngest sibling, Marla—later of Marla’s Caribbean Cuisine. 

Until this point, Singh’s biography sounds a lot like an archetypal American success story: Man comes to America, Hubert Humphrey buys him a car, etc. But at this point, things got rough. Anne Marie struggled with alcoholism. The family’s savings evaporated, time and again, as the family paid for her to enter rehab. Singh, in turn, would shut down the restaurant to care for the boys. 

In 1997, Singh’s wife died in his arms. “The dream shattered!” he says. Her picture hangs in the dining room. A lot of the customers who come in still remember her, and they stand near her picture and talk about how much they miss her. Ultimately, Singh will conclude, “I always forgave her anything. But a sickness is a sickness.” 

This is not where you go for Instagram glitter tea.

When I was visiting with Singh, a customer popped in. He had biked 12 miles to get here, and when Singh told him it wasn’t a good time, he said he’d come back tomorrow. 

“When I went to Trinidad, the food isn’t as good as Harry’s,” the patron declared.

Part of the reason I wanted to write this story now is that I feel like we all, as a restaurant scene, don’t appreciate Harry Singh enough. Maybe we think because he’s been here since 1983, he’ll be here forever. All of south Minneapolis was shocked and appalled when a massive rent increase caused Marla’s Caribbean Cuisine to shutter its doors. Possibly to relocate, possibly not. 

There’s a sense of loss we diners feel when something we’ve counted on—something we took for granted, even—vanishes. But I am here to tell you that Harry Singh has five years left on his lease, and his landlord has been frank with him about the ever-increasing offers she’s getting for his building. A six-story high-rise, which will hold 80 brand new units beneath a rooftop patio, is going up across the street. 

“I get offers, I get offers,” Singh tells me, shaking his head. “But the general idea is to keep busy. What am I going to do, watch TV?” 

We sit down in a booth, and I drink some of Singh’s homemade ginger beer, and he gestures to a mural on the wall that a friend painted for him. “You see that donkey carrying the coconuts?” I glance up. “Even in the rain, he’s slipping, slipping, but he don’t give up! In our time, those poor donkeys, they had to carry everything. But that gets in your blood, and you work, work, work.” 

And you fry doubles and roll roti, whether or not the world is wise enough to pay attention.