Sally's Roti Shop

Sally learned how to make roti by watching her mother in Trinidad, and moved to the Kingston area in 1988 with that recipe line already settled. For years she cooked for friends and family, the way a household kitchen does — doubles for somebody who stopped by, a curry going on the stove in the afternoon, dhalpuri rolled out on a counter at home. In 2014 she and her husband Bobby opened Sally's Roti Shop on Wellington Street, a small Trinidadian counter in the Old Sydenham core where the menu is the menu she had already been cooking. The recipe line did not change when the storefront opened — the dough is still the dough, the spice is still hers — but the room around it did, and so did the rhythm.

The opening move is doubles: curried chickpeas tucked between two soft fried patties, eaten by hand in two or three bites and the first thing to order. Phulorie sit beside them on the snack side — soft dough balls sold by the twenty with the chutney of choice — and pull the same dough work into a shareable second order. The curry roti lineup runs through goat, chicken, lamb, beef, shrimp, chickpeas, squash, and eggplant and spinach. Each one is wrapped in homemade dhalpuri with curried potatoes folded into the same parcel, and jerk chicken is the one exception that goes without the potato. The same curries come as plates instead of wraps when the table wants a knife and fork, with rice and peas, potatoes, and coleslaw set beside the curry rather than tucked into it.

The shape of the menu is its own argument for the kind of shop this is. Snack-counter staples — doubles, phulorie — get the same standing as the curry wraps rather than sitting in a separate snack-only category. The dhalpuri is made in-house, kneaded and rolled in the kitchen rather than pulled from a wholesale stack. The curry chickpeas, curry squash, and curry eggplant and spinach sit in the same wrap-or-plate lineup as the goat and the lamb, not as a vegetarian afterthought. Spice runs mild, medium, or hot at the counter. Specialty Trinidadian ingredients come up from Toronto, and everything else is cooked on Wellington Street.

The shop is family-run in a structural sense, not just as a marketing line. Local reporting names Sally and Bobby as the founders and their son Rossi as full-time counter and kitchen staff, with other family rotating in through the week. They opened the doors in September 2014 with the family lineup in place, and have kept the format compact ever since — a single counter, a small dining area, six lunches a week from eleven to seven, closed Sundays. The Trinidad-to-Kingston pathway sits behind all of it: 1988, years of household cooking for friends, then a Wellington Street storefront with the same hands on the dough and Sally's own name on the door.

Wellington Street runs a few blocks off the Kingston harbour, and Sally's keeps to a rhythm built for the lunch and takeout window: foil-wrapped roti that holds together on the walk back to an office or a hotel; a curry plate that survives the reheat for dinner; doubles eaten standing up before the rest of the order is paid for. Sally's is small. The menu is shorter than it looks once the same fillings are counted for the wrap and the plate. What carries the shop is the line behind both — a recipe that travelled from a kitchen in Trinidad to a counter on Wellington Street, and that has read the same way through twelve years of Kingston lunches.