Dub N Grub Serves Some of Miami's Favorite Vegan Caribbean Food

Dec 11, 2023

By Dinkinish O'Connor

I’ve followed Kriss Kofi on Instagram for years, drooling over images of grilled okra skewers and breadfruit roasting over an open fire. Broadcasting to his 20,000-plus followers, Kofi shares videos of stewed blueberries, and gently stirs orange blossom–candied yams while Rasta hymns play. Kofi’s restaurant, Dub N Grub, is set on Miami’s dub side of town, “dub” referring to a subgenre of reggae music that began in the 1960s.

Miami-Dade County is home to more than 860,000 Caribbean immigrants, the highest population of any US county. With backyards and bodegas overflowing with the spices, fruits, and root vegetables many Caribbean immigrants grew up eating in their native homelands, Miami has always been wildly plant-based—a city where maduros, sos pwa nwa (black bean sauce), guarapo (sugarcane juice), and coconut wata have sustained generations.

Now. though, Miami’s food scene is changing. The governor’s lenient COVID-19 policies have welcomed an influx of new, wealthy residents from California, Texas, and New York, among other states, and with this major demographic shift have come new restaurants. In all these shifts, Miami has become something of a haven for a new wave of plant-based restaurants. But for Miami to truly flourish as a destination for vegan eating, we should be celebrating Miami’s unsung pioneers in the Caribbean plant-based food movement—the farmers and chefs, like Kofi, who have been fueling this city with their knowledge and cooking since long before it was trendy or particularly profitable to do so.

Kofi’s food tastes like home to me—like him, I am the child of Jamaican immigrants. I was born in July during Miami’s mango season in Little River or “Lickle Rivah” as my mother, Sistah Sonia, used to call it. Sistah Sonia was from Craig Head, a bucolic village nestled in Jamaica’s misty Manchester mountains. I grew up watching her move intuitively with nature, planting ackee, thyme, Scotch bonnet chiles, guava, green bananas, Otaheite apples, and mangoes (her favorite) in the plush gardens that wrapped around our home.

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On the weekends, long before farmers markets became a regular part of Miami’s food scene, Sistah Sonia and I joined other Caribbean families at the bustling Opa-Locka Hialeah Flea Market, a short drive from where Dub N Grub is now based. Here accents swirled with the scent of bacalao (or dried codfish) and dried chorizo, vendors selling beans, scallions, garlic, boniato (white-fleshed sweet potatoes), yams, and so much more. Sistah Sonia’s Saturday menu always included piping-hot sweet pumpkin soup (even if it was over 90 degrees outside), and on any given day, we ate my father’s specialty: a medley of steamed callaloo, white cabbage and basmati rice, boiled pumpkin, and Irish potatoes. On Sundays, he made fresh carrot juice kissed with condensed milk and Guinness.

While I grew up east of I-95 in North Miami—a kind of Port-au-Prince since the late 1990s—Kofi grew up on the west side in Carol City, a neighborhood whose DNA is shaped by the food traditions of Southern Black Americans and Caribbean communities, largely from Jamaica and Haiti. Kofi and his wife, Chef Macka, opened Dub N Grub at Treelion in December 2022.

I love Kofi’s stir-fried callaloo with okra and bok choy. His stew peas would have made my mother kiss her teeth—with no beef or pig’s tail, the dish is still delicious. Mushrooms like lion’s mane, oyster, and portobello are listed as proteins on Dub N Grub’s menu. Kofi transforms the mushrooms’ texture and brings out their flavor, referring to himself as “the Mushroom Don.” His crispy ik’n (“chicken”) and jerk options are rich with familiar spices and textural appeal. In the world of vegan macaroni and cheese, some recipes boast a distracting nut flavor that is noticeably (and refreshingly) missing from Macka’s version. Unlike the typical cashew-base, she uses almond milk, since her children are allergic to cashews. The result is a creamy dish with hints of sweet spice.

Dub N Grub is part of what I call Lickle Jamaica, a strip mall in Miami Gardens known for its Jamaican food offerings. There’s Taste Rite Jamaican Bakery popular for its warm, flaky patties and FA&M West Indian market (more commonly known among locals by the owner’s name: Miss Mack). At Miss Mack, you’ll find a mélange of ingredients to make classic Jamaican recipes, like strongback herb for tea and dasheen (or taro) for pudding. On some weekends and during the holiday season, there’s reggae music blaring from a truck’s sound system out front.

Chef Kofi has ties to the strip mall. His father worked just a few doors down from what’s now Dub N Grub, at the Original Junie’s Restaurant, a local favorite featured in a shooting scene in the 2002 Jamaican cult classic Shottas. “My grandmother was Junie’s best friend,” says Kofi. “My dad was working there in the ’90s and early 2000s before he opened up his own restaurant, and that’s how I started out in the food business because when I was 12 or 13, I started working at my dad’s restaurant—as a server, cashier, stuff like that.” In 2010 at age 19, Kofi went into the army. In 2017, he graduated from New York’s Natural Gourmet Institute, which offered a plant-based culinary curriculum.

“In 2014, I crossed over to the plant-based side,” says Kofi, who was a food service specialist in the army. “I was going overseas a lot, and I realized we were risking our lives in Afghanistan, but the food quality wasn’t top-tier.” While coping with the mental and physical stress of being in the military, he was also inspired by the “reggae revival” and musicians like Chronixx, Proteje, and Kabaka Pyramid. It was then that Kofi decided to “Ras up and look within myself,” as he remembers. Historically, Rastafarians have been pioneers in plant-based, sustainable living, and created the term “ital” (or vital) to describe an unprocessed, meatless diet that goes hand in hand with living consciously and in tune with nature.

When Kofi opened Dub N Grub, he joined a lineage of plant-based visionaries in Miami. Among them is Hakin Hill, the Antigua-raised chef-owner of Vegetarian Restaurant by Hakin, who served black sapote smoothies, soursop juice, spinach and lentil patties, and ginger-seitan meals for 16 years at his beloved vegan restaurant in North Miami Beach. In August, the restaurant closed because of increased rent, but Hakin still offers catering. For the past 12 years, farmer and Urban Greenworks president Roger Horne, who is originally from St. Vincent, has been working with volunteers to sustain Cerasee Urban Community Farm in Liberty City—a low-income, black neighborhood. They grow everything from papaya, passion fruit, and bilimbi to moringa, Guinea Hen weed, and elderflower.

Many locals have a deep connection with the plants, fruits, and herbs that Horne and his volunteers grow. Cerasee, for example, is a sacred, healing herb known in many Caribbean communities for its anti-inflammatory properties. It flourishes in unexpected places, like near the 79th Street Causeway along Miami’s beautiful Biscayne Bay. Mysteriously, the sweet, creamy fruit from my mother’s ackee tree in North Miami bloomed almost all year. We called it the Holy Ghost Ackee Tree.

“Eating healthy, they push it to be a wealthy thing,” says Horne, who believes Miami’s food scene attempts to mimic New York’s and California’s, when the city’s weather and thriving Caribbean culinary culture allow it to have its own, distinct plant-based identity—something that Kofi exemplifies. At Dub N Grub, you’ll find my favorite vegetable: callaloo. Traditionally steamed, callaloo tastes like a combination of spinach and collard greens, and its broth is an ambrosial base for vegetable soups. Kofi’s vision for plant-based eating is simple: “In a plant-based fridge, the majority of the things on the shelves will be package-free,” Kofi says. “I use a lot of mushrooms, fruits, vegetables, whole grains.”

“I’m cooking for the people,” he adds. “There’s a deity in the Santería religion called Eleguá that meets you at the crossroads.” Kofi says that he takes on this role or “form” in his community. “I’m meeting people at the crossroads that want to cross over into the plant-based life.”