By Mark Woolsey
A touch of the Caribbean has come to downtown Acworth, with the opening of a restaurant and bar devoted to tropical cuisine.
The aptly named Caribbean Vibes opened its doors in early April, taking over a space that formerly housed a craft cocktail bar. An April 9 ribbon cutting drew city officials, the chamber, and the business community.
Owner and Trinidad native Susan Flynn is pleased at the response to date, but says she’s still scrambling to fully flesh out her staff and pin down entertainment options.
The approach is firmly Caribbean, but a number of dishes hail from Trinidad and ultimately derive from past Indian subcontinent migration to the country.
And Flynn knows it all well.
“I grew up in an old-fashioned Indian home,” she says. “I had to start cooking at a very young age. My mom started teaching me cooking at 13 or 14 years old.”
Flynn says she emigrated to New York in 1995 and started several business ventures before selling them in 2019 and following her brother to metro Atlanta. She weighed unretiring, thinking about a healthy drink stand or a sports bar venture, but ultimately settled on a restaurant to capitalize on the culinary skills learned at her mother’s knee.
“The jerk chicken and the oxtail stew is everywhere in the Caribbean and the curries and the roti are mostly Trinidadian,” she explains. The jerk chicken has won fans, and there’s curried chicken, lamb and goat to sample, along with stewed chicken, red snapper, various veggies, roti bread and rice and beans.
In addition, she says every few days they whip up something that’s not on the menu “and we put it out there just to see if people like it.” She says that so far all of their “extras” have found favor. Her signature hot sauce has been a solid hit with customers regularly asking for extra portions to take home.
The spot is fairly modest inside with official records pegging it at around 11 hundred square feet. There are some limited tables inside, along with a bar and a more generously sized deck in the back.
She plans to pack a lot of happenings into that space.
“It’s not going to be a nightclub, “ she says, “because it’s a small restaurant,” but she says they’re looking at live music, a DJ and comedy to engage their customer base.
As she puts it ,“Everybody else is doing bingo and trivia so I don’t want to do the same thing. I want to be different.”
So far, their hours have been fluid so as not to overwork a still-limited staff, but she anticipates settling into a more permanent schedule with a 10:30 a.m. opening and a 10:30/11 p.m. closing, and staying open until midnight Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
She says the community has been supportive and her spot has had multiple repeat customers, some of which have left five-star ratings on Google and praised both the food and the service.