CitySeed | Culture & Community | Fair Haven | Arts & Culture
Top: Chutahaphorn Sricharoenta, who often goes by Kai. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Chutahaphorn Sricharoenta worked from memory, her hands gliding through the air as she worked a mortar and pestle. First was the mixture of garlic and red chili, with just a dash of palm sugar, lime juice, tamarind and fish sauce. Then the long beans, shredded green papaya, carrots and tomatoes. The last added a pop of color, vibrant beneath the blue New Haven sky.
As she mixed, she could feel her mom and grandmother beside her, suggesting a pinch of this, a spoonful of that. Within minutes, she had plated her fresh papaya salad, a sprinkle of chopped peanuts on the top.
Sricharoenta, who goes simply by “Kai” around most of her friends, is the chef behind Mea Kai Thai, one of the newest small food businesses growing out of New Haven’s diverse and polyphonic culinary community. Friday night, she joined vendors at CitySeed’s inaugural “Friday Food Fest,” an outdoor street fair and showcase at the organization’s 162 James St. hub.
Set beneath twinkling white lights and a pink-streaked sky, the event became a celebration of food and family, with multiple generations of chefs turning story into sustenance.
“I think we really need events like this,” said Cara Santino, director of food business development at CitySeed. For months, she and CitySeed Director Sarah Miller talked about how to activate the space, located off a residential section of James Street that sits close to the Mill River Trail and John C. Martinez School. The festival fit the bill. “We need joy.”
Around her, the block came alive, with everything from Thai iced tea and fresh, spicy papaya salad to Nepalese momos, Caribbean-inspired spice rubs, loose leaf tea, and confetti-patterned, buttery poundcake. As members of Movimiento Cultural Afro-Continental set up down the street, Sricharoenta greeted her first customers, showing off pans of grilled chicken, Pad Thai and vegetable-studded fried rice.
The business is extremely young, she said: she launched it just earlier this year, after encouragement from her colleague and friend, Kismet Douglass. Friday, in fact, marked her first public event in New Haven. Douglass, who runs Momma Kiss Kitchen Cuisine, was just one tent over, nearly within arm’s reach if Sricharoenta had questions.
As Sricharoenta buzzed between the dishes, she turned the clock back to her childhood in Chang Mai, Thailand, where the women in her family taught her to cook as a matter of necessity. Raised in the mountains, Sricharoenta would wake up regularly at 5 a.m., helping her mom on the family’s farm before tending to rice over a fire.
Now, she tries to bring that feeling to every dish she makes, passing the recipes on to her two children, Salvatore and Pelagia. Friday, they hurried behind her, spooning out portions of salty-sweet Pad Thai noodles and chicken browned at the edges as she took an interview.
“It’s gotta be hot and spicy or it’s not Thai food!” she exclaimed as she mixed a single serving of papaya salad, transferring it gently into a to-go container. Tossed in its light, limey dressing with hot chili, it looked for a moment like a nest of fresh vegetables, glittering in the pre-twilight.
Just a few tents away, Margo Jones of Assiah Tea and Wellness also returned to the idea of family, leaning on the Southern matriarch who helped make her who she was. During her childhood, it was her grandmother—her Big Mama, as she only ever called her—who turned her on to tea. Born in Alabama, Big Mama moved to Ohio during the Second Great Migration, for the opportunities that beckoned in the Rustbelt.
There, she helped raise Jones, reminding her that “you don’t have to move so fast to get everything done,” Jones remembered.
Part of that was her connection to the world around her, and the belief in its bounty. Big Mama was a naturalist, with a strong preference for home remedies and a notion that tea could cure most problems. Most of the time, Jones said with a smile, she was right.
“If you had a bad day, she’d make you a cup of tea,” Jones said. “If you had a good day, she’d make you a cup of tea.”
Her advice felt life-giving years later as Jones, who was working a corporate job, began to deal with professional stress. As she was getting ready one morning, she heeded her grandmother’s advice, and made herself a cup of tea. For a moment, her nerves stilled. She realized she wanted to share that stillness.
Assiah, which is a Hebrew word for “A World In Action,” grew out of that moment. This year, she launched the small business in the hopes of spreading more moments of calm to those around her. Friday, she smiled as she told the story of its birth over and over again, her hands flitting over loose leaf tea studded with lemon verbena, hibiscus and rose hips. 
Top: Members of Movimiento Cultural. Bottom: Jamille Rancourt with her 15-month-old, Zeca, tries out the drums.
That sense of family wove through the crowd, as attendees tucked into plates of Thai food, nibbled on dumplings, sipped tea and sized up slices of pound cake for later in the evening. Kids, some just starting to walk, sat on laps and ran up and down the closed-off street, some lingering at a tent for Save The Sound and an orange-and-white barricade nearby.
To the ringing, rolling drums from down the street, a small group gathered, ready to learn Puerto Rican Bomba from members of MCAC.
Watching it all unfold, West Havener Cherryll LaFond paid homage to her great-grandmother Madell with her small business, Caribbean Home Style Products. Like Jones’ grandmother, Madell—who raised her family in Dominica, whence LaFond also hails—was a naturalist. From early on, she instilled in LaFond the importance of connecting with the natural world around her.
“Everything I do in my life, I do it in her honor,” LaFond said.
“Everything I do in my life, I do it in her honor,” LaFond said. When she came to Connecticut as a teenager, she held fast to the lessons she’d learned in Dominica, and ultimately founded her business in 2002. Her products, from nutmeg-kissed seasoning and chili-based hot sauce to soaps, have since expanded to small, family-owned retailers like Edge of the Woods.
“I don’t do it for the money,” she said. Instead, she wants to give her customers access to the same plant-based, all-natural products she had as a child. As passers-by headed toward her tent, she praised CitySeed for creating the space to showcase small businesses like hers.
Nearby, Christine Searson supervised a table for Chauncey’s Butter Pound Cake, named in honor of a brother that she lost as a child. While the business belongs to her mother, Clementine Johnson, Searson found herself helping out Friday after her mother had to step away. As people looked over the cake selections, each touched by Johnson’s fearlessness to use butter and sugar, Searson remembered her brother, the baby of the family.
“He was into the arts and dance, and he was a fun guy,” she said. “Really artistic. This keeps him alive.”
Back at the intersection of James and Exchange Streets, Movimiento Cultural was picking up steam. To a steady beat, dancer Miriam Magalis Cruz bowed to the drummers, and began to move, the step of her feet and swish of her skirt driving the drums forward. Within minutes, she was teaching a sort of impromptu masterclass, guiding attendees through the fundamentals of the form.
Behind her, volunteers from Sanctuary Kitchen poured cups of chilled tamarind juice and gave out information about the organization, a professional pathway for refugee chefs that was founded almost 10 years ago and now operates under CitySeed’s umbrella. This summer, their food is available at CitySeed’s weekly farmers’ markets at the Dixwell Community Q House, Wooster Square, Edgewood Park.
Aminah Alsaleh, a Syrian chef who is the program’s culinary manager, praised the food fest as one of the things that makes CitySeed into a tight-knit community, bound by food but also a sense of responsibility to the people who lovingly make it. Nine years ago, she came to New Haven from Syria on the night of the 2016 election. Since that time, she has built a small catering business, grown her family, and helped welcome other refugee chefs the way people once welcomed her.
“It’s just amazing,” she said. “It’s not like a business. It’s like a family.”