THE grounds are immaculate and meticulously tended flowers do duel with the trees that sway along the banks of Montego Bay’s Barnett River. A green tent provides shade from the sun’s rays and nearby, there is a stone table and matching benches.

This is where 28 year-old Donat Williams earns his living, and it is called Food Suh Nice.

From 7:00 am every morning, he serves up meals to his growing clientele. He closes up shop and goes home to his six year-old daughter, usually about 7:00 pm, when all the meals have been sold. On a good day, he sells 25 meals; on a bad day he sells about 10.

According to a slick, laminated business card, Food Suh Nice offers “the unique vegetable and meat experience”.

“We offer meals such as vegetable chunks with pineapple dye for the vegetarians, we do vegetable stew, and sometimes vegetable steak,” Williams said from his modest business place. “On a Saturday we have things like peanut porridge. And during the week we serve basic meals like rice and peas and chicken, sliced trout and steam or raw vegetables.”

And while the shrewd young businessman readily admits that he is basically a squatter on the Urban Development Corporation’s land, he is hoping for the best.

“I have tried to get through all the proper channels but I have failed. But still that didn’t deter me from really continuing with my goals,” he said.

“I am just a young man who really doesn’t want to pick up a gun, who is trying to make a life for himself and his daughter. My daughter is going to infant school so I have to keep funds turning and this is just another way out.”

He is now trying to get the UDC to regularise his status on the river’s bank or relocate him elsewhere.

Food Suh Nice is in a valley and is just barely visible from the roadway, and Williams wants to erect a sign so that prospective customers who are travelling along the busy roadway can know that his business is there. But he needs permission from the UDC, he says.

So far, he has been able to get a telephone and electricity installed. He trucks in water to his cook shop, as the National Water Commission needs proof that he has a right to be on the land.

Williams’ business grew from his initial idea to supply meals to the nearby Westgreen community’s football players. Now he has customers from the Westgate Mall, a tyre shop located across the road, and workers from the Montego Bay Freezone.

The only boy in his immediate family, he learned to cook at his mother’s knees. Later, he developed an interest in building construction, which he studied at Herbert Morrison Technical High School. But his love for cooking had not died.

“After leaving school, I went back into the cooking field and worked for six months at a Chinese restaurant,” Williams explained. “After that restaurant closed I did other kinds of work and up until 1997, I worked as a merchandiser. But my dream was plaguing me, to do something for myself and that is what catapulted me into this.”

He is obviously intelligent and speaks well, and he has a thirst for knowledge. But he recognises that his fledgling business might not be enough to finance his further education. So he is determined to do his best for his daughter.

“To be honest, I don’t know what the future entails but I know that there is more education to be gained and if I can’t get it I’ll work as hard as I can for my daughter to get it,” Williams said.

His business card and his cook shop are adorned with the Star of David, and the word “Israel” is written in whitewashed stones along his flowerbed. According to him, these are just signs of his consciousness of his role as a black man in the world.

“I am an Israelite, proud to say, and the Star just symbolises 180 degrees of positivity and 180 degrees of negativity. The Star to me, just like the Christian cross, is the sign I would like to associate myself with,” he explained. “I wouldn’t say I am a religious person because religion comes from the Latin word religio, meaning to divide. And I wouldn’t be in anything that divides me from my people. I would say I am conscious in the sense that I am a black man and we were first.”

He speaks with utter conviction, and it is this same conviction and determination that has helped him claw his way up to the status of a small businessman.

And he enjoys his job.

He is his own boss, he walks to work and spends all day in a cool, shady spot, doing what he loves — cooking.