Who is Beni?
A ten liter bottle of hot pepper sauce, three coffee jars filled with tamarind sauce wrapped in towels in one suitcase, and a carry-on packed with dried West Indian bay leaves. How was he going to explain this to airport security?
It was the same story every time. Whenever Beni headed back to Germany after spending a month or two in Trinidad and Tobago, his family would load him up with homemade condiments and ingredients to ‘carry up’. Sometimes he had to leave clothes behind. Aunt Cynthia didn’t mind. She needed new pair of rain boots anyway!
Exhausted from having to lug all that niceness from the Caribbean to Europe, Beni began studying his Aunt Cynthia whenever she made her legendary tamarind sauce. “Ah does average.” She’d say. Meaning she never measured.
In 2013, already in his mid-twenties, Beni landed in Trinidad and Tobago for the first time. Waiting for him at the airport was his father, Kirk, who he’d meet too, not having known about him or his Trini heritage before then. Beni wrote a book, Good Lime, about his experiences with his Trini family and the food they offered him. He collected many impressions over the years in the form of photos, stories and recipes. Recipes from his elders, his cousins, friends and roadside vendors. Cooking up for lost time and archiving ancestral memory for future generations.
Every trip to Trinidad begins and ends with Doubles. Piarco airport doubles. Beni doesn’t remember where he was when he ate his first doubles. He only remembers that he was in a daze and that he actually had a triples because he made a mess. But he was hooked.
When his friends back in Germany asked him about life in the Caribbean, Beni made them doubles. “Doubles?” they said. “Never heard of that.” Beni shrugged. ”I had a father I never heard of,” he responded. They tried the doubles. Then, they asked for triples! For Trinis, doubles bring people together and give them a piece of home away from home. Beni wanted to deliver exactly that. So, from a tent on a little street corner in Cologne, 10 years after tasting his heritage for the first time, Beni Doubles was born.
