Hillside Avenue

Ken Bernard, 43, came to New York City from Guyana when he was five. A father of three girls, he runs Sybil’s Bakery and Restaurant in Jamaica, established by his late mother in 1978. Sybil’s is the most well-known Guyanese restaurant in New York with additional locations in Forest Hills and Prospect Park South.

How do you hold up working seven days a week?

It’s dedication. You’re not going to make it if you’re not dedicated in this kind of business. I watch a lot of the chef shows now. It’s a learning experience just watching them because they’re looking for perfection in food. Food is an 18-hour job.

How did Sybil’s come to be?

My mom, she was nine of us with her alone. She got laid off — she was a mold cutter of jewelry. My older brother, he knew some Guyanese people and they had a big family and we started delivering to them from our house, in Far Rockaway. And then maybe a year after she rented a place, and took off from there. I guess it’s a blessing.

How many other Guyanese restaurants are there in New York City?

Now? Oh, dime a dozen. We remain No. 1. Everyone knows Sybil’s. You go to England and ask Guyanese, “You know Sybil’s?” they’ll say, “Yeah!”

How important is food to the Guyanese culture?

My mother, she’s East Indian. Her father was from India. Even in India, the poorest homes you go to, the first thing you go in, they offer you something to eat. And that has traveled here. When I go to people’s homes they’re like, “Come on, eat, eat!”

Are most of your customers Guyanese?

Most. But we have all nations coming here at this point. We cater to everyone. It’s rapidly changing though, this community is. First it was Greek, and Puerto Ricans. Then the Guyanese took over. Now it’s more changing to the Muslims from the Middle East and the Hispanics, Mexicans, Guatemala. I see the Guyanese community going more toward Richmond Hill.

What do you think the Guyanese population is shifting to Richmond Hill?

To me it’s like nightclubbing — if that the hot spot at the time, everyone’s going to go with it.

What else has been going on with the Guyanese community?

A lot of Guyanese from here have been getting deported, for a lot of different reasons. When you get arrested here now a few times and you serve some time if you’re not a citizen, you get deported. That’s the law now. Could be anything. Your time is up.

Why do you think Guyanese have done as well as they have in New York?

Always comes back from the roots – from not having. I just want to make sure that my girls get their education. Because I didn’t get a chance to do mine. From not having, you’re climbing a mountain – slow. Might not be this generation, but the next one will be a little stronger.

Cathy Douglas recently moved to Pennsylvania – but on her shopping trips back to New York she makes sure to stop by Sybil’s Bakery and Restaurant, a popular Guyanese eatery in Jamaica.

Colorful awnings and signs proclaiming Sybil’s house specialties jut onto a treeless stretch of bustling Hillside Avenue. Inside, customers point to dishes behind a glass counter and eat at the booths that line the wall filled with paintings of Guyana – or take their orders to go. The line is often long.

Douglas immigrated to Queens when she was 16 and missed the food she grew up on in Guyana. She soon discovered Sybil’s.

“When I first came I went totally crazy,” Douglas, now 35, recalled while picking up a meal with her son. “I went for something that’s called black pudding.”

Food to ‘Believe’ in

A variation on British blood sausage, which Guyana, a former English colony, adopted and adapted, black pudding is made by mixing rice seasoned with traditional Caribbean herbs like thyme and basil with cow’s blood, stuffing it into animal intestine and boiling it until firm.

Fred Richards, another customer on a recent Saturday, used to come for the black pudding too, which he laughingly calls a “poor man’s delicacy.” Now 66, he said he’s lost his craving for the dish and is more likely to order oxtail.

Richards emigrated from Guyana in 1969 to study in New York, and started eating at Sybil’s when it opened in 1978. After retirement he moved to Maryland but often visits his mother in a nursing home in Brooklyn. “I come here to eat because I believe in the food,” he said.

As Richards sat and ate his oxtail, Douglas continued perusing the dozen or so hot dishes in the steam table behind the counter. She recommended cook-up, pointing to a dish of rice flecked with a green vegetable, cooked with coconut milk.

“And the curry!” she said. “You have to try the curry.”

Manager Ken Bernard, a ruggedly handsome man with an easy smile, whose mother Sybil Bernard-Kerrut started the business, explained how he makes the rich and velvety curry sauce, which is served with chicken or beef.

With no formal culinary training, he learned the trade from his mother and has worked for her business since he was 10. His mother died in 2000 but her restaurants continue to prosper. Bernard’s brother manages the Richmond Hill branch and his sisters run a Brooklyn branch.

To make the curry, he starts by seasoning the meat with fresh garlic and peppers. “We let it sit as long as possible,” he said. “That helps with the taste.”

Next, he fries a homemade curry powder in oil, which he says mellows the taste. “Because if you was just to throw it on the chicken it would be raw,” he said, “it’d probably be a burned stomach and stuff like that.” He said other cooks boil the curry, which he believes gives it an unappealing grainy texture, rather than fry it.

“If it’s burning at the bottom you could add water and let it dry back down,” he said. “Then you throw the chicken in it and you fry that down good—you let it really get into the meat. Then you add your water at the end and let it boil with your potatoes. When your potatoes is done, your chicken curry’s done. So go home and try it!”

Sybil’s Story

His mother immigrated to New York in 1969. Bernard and his eight siblings followed two years later. When she lost her job as a jewelry mold-cutter, his mother asked relatives who were running a bakery out of their house in Canada for recipes. She baked pastries in her home in Far Rockaway and sold them to neighbors, enlisting her children’s help.

Word of Sybil’s knack for baking spread quickly, and she soon had more orders than her kitchen and basement could handle. In 1978, she opened her first restaurant, the branch Bernard manages today.

His mother started out by making what Bernard says are Guyana’s three best-loved pastries, which he continues to bake and sell.

The first is a round pastry with a red circle of food coloring the size of a nickel. “Guyana’s made up of a lot of different cultures,” he said. “That’s called Chinese cake. The Chinese put black bean inside. You boil the black bean, then you grind it, then you boil it with sugar and you fry it with oil and flour and you put it in that crust. That’s a double-crust pastry.”

Next to the Chinese cakes is a row of spicy cheese rolls. “That’s the sharp white cheddar cheese we would get in Guyana,” he said, “and we mix that with pepper and a little bit of seasoning, a little bit of butter.”

The third pastry is a pineapple tart. “Guyana, we’re not famous for it but we have the sweetest pineapple,” Bernard said.

Sybil’s also makes their own bottled juices, including peanut punch, which tastes like a peanut-butter milkshake, and sea-moss juice, which is sweet and creamy.

Bernard said Guyanese food reflects the melding of different ethnic backgrounds. His maternal grandfather was an Indian immigrant. “He died because he was an older man,” Bernard said. “Then my grandmother remarried, a man from China, that immigrated from China to Guyana. So that’s how come we have Chinese, Indian.”

Recipe for Success

In his speaking voice one, can hear the tug of different cultures. He speaks prim and proper English at home in Brookhaven, Long Island, with his wife, who is also Guyanese, and slips into a guttural patois at work. “I’ve been with these people all day and I come home speaking like them, she’s like, what?” he said of his wife.

Guyana is South America’s only English-speaking country, but in rural areas people speak a Creole patois. “I can be American when I want to be and I can be raw,” he said. “My wife can’t stand when I’m raw, because she tries to teach my kids to speak proper.”

Bernard works long hours, seven days a week. “If a customer had came the first time and they had something,” he said, “and when you go back you’re going for that same thrill and if you don’t get it one, two, three times, they’re not going to come back. It takes everyday dedication to get in these products like this.

“Food is a great thing. People enjoy food more than . . . some other things,” Bernard said with a mischievous grin. “You know what I mean? It’s very important.”

(Click here to read an interview with Ken Bernard.)