Sabrina Prendergast’s Plates by Sab

IT was never Sabrina Prendergast’s intention to become a chef. She had no training in food preparation, no experience cooking for large groups of people, and no particular desire to be an entrepreneur. All she had was some left over baked macaroni and cheese from Mother’s Day last year and a hungry group of friends.

“I decided to go out on a limb and sell the remainder of my macaroni,” she told All Woman. “So I sliced it into squares, I posted that I was selling one slice for $150 the next day, so people should DM me if they were ordering. I sold 12 mini boxes the next day, which finished my leftovers, but then persons messaged me like, ‘what’s on the menu tomorrow?’”

And that is how Plates by Sab was born. Prendergast, who at the time was 21 years old and taking a gap year from school, had the full support of her mother and her boyfriend, and they helped her to set up her business. She started buying ingredients in bulk and cooking out of her mother’s kitchen to fill orders from her social media pages, until she needed a bigger space.

“I moved here in March of this year,” she said, waving an arm around her restaurant on the roof of the business complex at 124 Old Hope Road in St Andrew. “And ever since being here, as you can see, it’s been running like a cook shop, where you come up to the window, place the order, or you can call or DM me with your order. I post the menu every day on my @platesbysab page on Instagram.”

Prendergast has kept her customers coming back for more by offering them a delightful menu of Jamaican favourites such as fried chicken, bar-b-fried chicken, stew pork, curried goat, stew peas, oxtail and pasta, as well as seafood and vegetarian meals done to order. She admits, however, that running a business has been a challenge, especially because she did not set out to run a cook shop.

“When I was starting to think about Plates by Sab it was initially supposed to be a catering business, so that things would be a lot more intimate, as opposed to a cook shop operation,” she said. “But it kind of became more of a cook shop because I moved from just doing things like lasagne and pastas to doing things like curried goat — things that people can relate to more, and that became very promising.”

Plates by Sab has not only provided an outlet for Prendergast’s culinary skills, but also those of her boyfriend, Craig Marsh, who is more popularly known as dancehall artiste Serani.

“He is the seafood guru of the business,” she laughed. “So for things like steamed fish, roast fish, coconut fish, garlic scotch bonnet salmon and basa, those are his recipes. I do everything else.”

Her mother, Trish McFarlane, whose effervescent energy helped to keep the momentum going from day one, also decided to show off her culinary prowess by launching her line of natural juices — All Things Juicey — as the perfect complement to Plates by Sab.

While Prendergast has come to terms with the fact that medical school would not have been a good fit for her, as it was the anxiety of starting that prompted her to take a gap year, she has not given up on running Plates by Sab as a catering business.

“I want Plates by Sab to appeal to everybody,” she said. “I want to graduate to the level where we can cater to large events, feeding thousands of people, but I also like the intimate setting, and I’m getting used to the cook shop operation. I want us to expand to reach everybody — as a personal cook, a private caterer and a regular cookshop.”