Photos by Little Outdoor Giants

Full of flavor and a little spice, the food and drink at One Love Ma Maebelle Café in Worcester offers a culinary escape to the Caribbean. At this brightly colored booth inside Worcester Public Market, owner Venice Fouchard shares her favorite Jamaican foods with her city. 

On the menu you’ll find curried goat and jerk chicken plates with rice, beans and salad, plus watermelon juice and a drink called sorrel (made from hibiscus leaves), sweet plantains on a stick and patties filled with meat, chicken and veggies plus a variety of Jamaican-influenced stews.

Fouchard grew up in Jamaica. It wasn’t until 1975, when she was 14 years old, that her family moved from Manchester, Jamaica, to Brooklyn, New York. While her mother worked, she and her siblings took turns doing chores, rotating each week. When it was her turn to do the laundry, Fouchard often traded with her siblings to do the cooking, her favorite chore. As the seventh of nine children and the fourth of six girls, Fouchard learned how to cook by watching.

“Who better than to tell you what’s wrong or right than your siblings?” she asks.

Though she continued to cook, Fouchard studied fashion design and moved from Brooklyn to Worcester to open her own fashion studio in 2001. After deciding that Worcester needed its own artsy Caribbean restaurant, she opened One Love Café at 800 Main Street in 2003, offering catering and doing pop-ups in addition to the café until 2015. When she heard about the plans for Worcester Public Market, Fouchard checked to see if they had space. She renamed her business One Love Ma Maebelle Café, in honor of her grandmother, Maebelle Gibson, who was “a great influence on our lives,” Fouchard says. 

Fouchard’s favorite dish is ackee and codfish. “I love it,” she says about ackee, a fruit which grows on trees in tropical climates (she gets her ackee from Florida). “I call it fruit from heaven. … I can’t describe it, except it’s yummy.”

In Jamaica, goat meat is eaten mostly at weddings, Fouchard tells me. “I love cooking the goat; that’s my specialty.” She gets her goats from Sterling via Lynn Cheney of Maker to Main, or from Connecticut where there is a large Jamaican community.

Fouchard says her “third yummy” is callaloo, a spinach-like plant that grows locally and is used often in Caribbean cooking. She includes the locally farmed callaloo in stews and in her Ginger Green Juice, which she makes with callaloo, ginger, celery, green apple, mint and honey. “It’s good for the immune system,” she says.

Her pastry dough is a labor of love, she says, using it to make beef, chicken and veggie patties (filled with corn, peas, carrots and beans). She gets most of her produce, including beets and carrots, from Stillman’s Farm at Worcester Public Market and her honey from another market neighbor, Hillcrest Apiary.

And there are stews: Ital Stew, made with chickpeas, pumpkin, red beans, bok choy and broccoli stewed in coconut milk; Stewed Ackee and Codfish (available on Sundays); and Oxtail Stew (available on Saturdays). Sorrel Drink is on the menu daily, a tea brewed with Jamaican sorrel (dried hibiscus), ginger, allspice and cloves.

Fouchard’s plan for the new café is to offer Worcesterites a taste of Caribbean street food, including roti, a West Indian round flatbread, filled with chickpeas. “It’s a great street food,” she says. “That’s what I really want to bring to the marketplace.” 

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This story appeared in the Fall/Holiday 2020 issue of Edible Worcester.