A Taste of Home

RAP’S Restaurant: Where music inspired food

Horace ‘Rap’ Rose was born in St. Ann’s Parish in Jamaica. He moved to Toronto in the late 1960s as a skilled worker and soon became an active member of Toronto’s Jamaican community and music scene. He was a record producer and reportedly worked alongside famous Jamaican music producer Joe Gibbs in the 1980s. Rose produced and toured with his brother Michael Rose of Black Uhuru, as well as Johnny Osbourne and other popular reggae and ska artists working in Toronto.

Often working late night shows in the city and on tour, Rose and the rest of the crew were hungry but there was nowhere open to grab a good meal. Horace decided to fix that by opening a restaurant at his record shop location. He sourced a steel drum barbecue grill, with the cover painted in Rastafarian colours- red, green and yellow. In 1982, RAP’s restaurant opened and drew members of the local Jamaican community as well as musicians from the Caribbean doing shows in the city. RAP’s served jerk chicken grilled on the sidewalk which you can grab along with a side option of rice and peas or mixed vegetables inside the restaurant.

Listen to Carole Rose tell the history of RAP’S Restaurant.

A Taste of Home

Miss Carole Rose

Carole Rose was born in St. Ann’s Parish, Jamaica but moved to Woodstock, Ontario with her family when she was young. Carole went to college for hairdressing and worked in London, Ontario until 1989 when she moved to Toronto. Miss Rose was familiar with Eglinton West because of Monica’s where she bought hair products for her business. Once in Toronto, Carole was working as a bank attendant when Horace Rose came in to open an account.

After some conversation, Carole found out he ran a restaurant. She began working part-time at RAP’s in 1990 and the rest for Carole and Horace is a sweet history of building decades of community around good-quality, authentic and accessible Jamaican food. Today, Carole is the primary manager of the restaurant, serving jerk chicken as well as other delicacies like oxtail, cow foot, and jerk pork. 

Listen to Carole Rose’s account of meeting her husband Horace Rose.

*Sources

Hannah Alberga, 2021. https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/how-a-record-producer-planted-the-seed-of-late-night-eats-in-little-jamaica-1.5644054

A Taste of Home

Community Grocery Stores

In Little Jamaica, people could find grocery stores like Fester’s and Gus’s that imported fruits and food products from Jamaica and Barbados to sell to the West Indian community. The space for commercial development and retail shops gave Caribbeans and other newcomers living in Toronto the opportunity to start their businesses on the strip, and even street market stalls were very common for a while. 

Culturally or ethnically specific grocery stores have existed in Toronto for as long as people of different nationalities have migrated into the city. Although both Fester’s and Gus’s have since closed, there are grocery stores for West Indians, Africans, Koreans, Filipino people and many more across the city and along Eglinton Avenue West. Their ingredients and produce have helped create the wonderfully diverse culinary scene in Toronto today with new restaurants like Carib21 on Eglinton and Miss Likklemores on King Street West continuing to highlight the tastes of the Caribbean.