Veronica Alimole and husband Jazz Alimole have brought a new dining experience to the North Shore for Sault and Algoma District residents to enjoy.
Veronica hails from Ghana, Jazz from Nigeria.
Their grocery store and restaurant named Ije's Place: Cafe & Bakery, situated in Desbarats, serves African and Caribbean food for customers to savour.
Their enterprise is named in honour of Ije (pronounced Eeja), the couple’s daughter.
Veronica and Jazz have lived in Canada for many years. They have lived in Sudbury as well as Eastmain, a Cree community in Northern Quebec on the east coast of James Bay before resettling in this region.
In Eastmain, Veronica worked in economic development, Jazz as a contractor. It was Jazz who built Ije's Place.
“It was a labour of love for him, and we love our community. It’s a beautiful area,” Veronica told SooToday.
The couple moved to the Algoma District as daughter Ije planned to begin her postsecondary education at Sudbury’s Laurentian University.
“We ended up in Desbarats by chance. It looked pretty to us and that was it,” Veronica said with a chuckle.
“The food we serve is of course something you don’t usually find in this area. I have a mixture of Caribbean, African and Canadian food. We have a good range of food. I have African desserts like doughnuts from West Africa, African bread and Canadian food like poutine. I do poutine Quebec-style because I lived in Quebec.”
Veronica and Jazz opened their grocery store in Desbarats in 2021, followed by the cafe in February 2023.
Veronica offers a wide range of dishes for both meat lovers and vegetarians. For meat eaters there's Jamaican jerk chicken with rice and beans or coleslaw, oxtail stew, Jamaican chicken curry, goat curry, African meat pies and African-styled butter chicken.
“We do a lot of Caribbean food because a lot of people in this area have gone to the Caribbean at some point on vacation so Caribbean food was the easier one to introduce to people and I enjoy cooking it very much. I have Jamaican food, I have Trinidadian food. I have a big range,” Veronica said.
She said the cafe’s three most popular dishes are jerk chicken, butter chicken and oxtail stew.
She is certainly not a short order cook.
“I do a lot of things from scratch. I do my chicken dishes from scratch. My jerk chicken has a lot of earthy seasoning. Usually it takes me from 24 to 28 hours to season it and then cook it. It takes me about three days to prepare the meal from scratch. The same with the oxtail stew,” Veronica said.
“Jamaican and West African food is very similar because of the historical link between those two parts of the world. They both have a lot of rice and beans. That’s very Jamaican and in Ghana we have the same thing but it has a different name.”
Ije's Place has proven to be a hit with more than a few Sault and Algoma residents.
“We do very well in the summer and we have a really good customer base in the Sault. We didn’t do this as much this year, but last year, every other month, we would do a food delivery to the Sault. On average we would get 40 to 60 customers we would deliver to, keeping the food in warmers. It’s been nice to meet people. It’s been a joy to introduce people to the food we enjoy,” Veronica said.
Veronica and Jazz are proud of their daughter Ije.
“She’s very focused. She’s a good girl. She’s always wanted to be a doctor. Because we raised her up north she speaks Cree so she’s hoping when she becomes a doctor after university she can go back up north and help. We’re really proud of that.”
“Her name Ije means ‘a beautiful journey’ and it’s been a beautiful journey for us. It’s been wonderful to see people be so receptive to something different. We’re very happy to live here in such a beautiful place,” Veronica said.
