With Creole, Caribbean and cocktails, Afrodisiac brings vibrant new restaurant to Gentilly (2025)

The barbecue shrimp at Afrodisiac are big, beautiful and buttery. They’re also spicy, though not in the usual black pepper way of the New Orleans staple.

Here, the heat comes from a Jamaican jerk seasoning, pulsing with Scotch bonnet pepper, a strong dose of allspice and thyme. The first bite pops on the palate and then keeps coming, not overwhelming, but robust and riveting.

The dish also serves as a fitting first taste of Afrodisiac, a restaurant that blends Jamaican and New Orleans Creole flavors.

What started as a food truck has grown into a full-service restaurant in Gentilly.

Chef Caron “Kay” Garel and her husband, Shaka Garel, opened the doors in March, adding a multifaceted new restaurant to a neighborhood always eager for more of them.

Afrodisiac serves lunch and dinner. It also serves as a bar with its own small lounge and a carefully composed cocktail program focusing on island-style drinks.

And in back, this cottage-sized restaurant opens to a large, terraced patio, lushly fringed by ginger and palmetto.

Rebounding from disaster

The idea of fusion comes naturally to this couple. Shaka Garel is a first-generation Jamaican-American who grew up in a home surrounded by island culture. Kay Garel grew up in Lafayette and came to New Orleans to attend Dillard University.

Their whole life together plays out as a blend of Jamaican Creole heritage, and that inspired the approach to food.

Kay Garel learned to cook at home; food was central to family life. She and her husband made the first moves to build a business around it about eight years ago. They bought a one-time bread delivery van and painstakingly turned it into a food truck themselves, adding a service window and kitchen equipment.

This mobile version of Afrodisiac was a regal purple rig that debuted along the Endymion parade route in 2017. Soon, it was making appearances at festivals and community celebrations and regular stops outside hospitals, breweries and other venues.

When the pandemic hit, the Garels’ pivot was to redeploy the truck as a portable kitchen for the city’s feeding effort for homeless people.

Then Hurricane Zeta hit later that year. The storm felled a tree that landed right on the truck, essentially crumpling it. It seemed like they were wiped out, but not for long.

The calamity inspired an outpouring of community support, with an online fundraiser and events hosted at other restaurants and cafes. It put wind in the couple’s sails to propel the business forward.

Fusion in life, on the plate

Now with a full restaurant, they are finding new ways to express their fusion ideas. The menu is much larger now and continues to evolve.

A shrimp stew mixes Louisiana flavor and island vibrancy beautifully, with plump shrimp mixing it up with smoked sausage and potatoes in the curry sauce, and a clutch of cornmeal-crusted catfish finishing it all off.

For the fried Jamaican fish, they’ve been using local drum, which flakes apart under a crisp, dark shell, with the tangy-bright tangle of onions and peppers in an escovitch sauce.

Kay Garel’s approach to jerk is foundational to this kitchen. Like the barbecue shrimp, the jerk chicken pulses with steady, building heat from those Scotch bonnet peppers. The chicken is also smoked over pimento wood the traditional way, before being finished on the griddle.

Jerk chicken nachos — heaped with cheese and pico de gallo — deploy these flavors in a different way, and make an ideal snapshot of Jamaican Creole fusion bar food.

Good thing, because Afrodisiac is bringing something unique to Gentilly with its bar.

Island dreaming at the bar

To develop this part of the business, the couple worked with Toure Folkes, the local bar consultant and founder of Turning Tables, a nonprofit that’s addressing racial inequity in restaurants and bars with mentorship and training.

Several of Afrodisiac’s staff members are graduates of the program.

The opening drinks list brings some unique twists to classics, like a margarita made with guava and pineapple syrup (the Guava Rita). The Red Gyal Ring, named for a part of Jamaica, blends dark and white rums with strawberry shrub and fruit juices for a long sipper that will have you looking for a hammock.

Afrodisiac has an island vibe all over. Bright, colorful and open, it emulates spots the Garels are drawn to in their own travels around the Caribbean.

“When we saw this place, we knew it was right, it looks like us,” said Shaka Garel.

A mural of African beauty and Louisiana food bounty by Lionel Milton adorns one wall. A pattern of iridescent irises covers another. Little touches of personality and color appear across the small dining rooms leading out to the patio.

The space was previously home to Stuph’D Beignets and Burgers, which relocated to St. Claude Avenue in 2020. Earlier, it was known as the JuJu Bag Café, which had a popular following, especially for music nights, poetry readings and other such events.

That’s something that Garels plan to introduce as the restaurant develops.

Afrodisiac

5363 Franklin Ave., (504) 302-2090

Wed. and Thu. 11 a.m.-8 p.m., Fri. and Sat. 11 a.m.-9 p.m.