In the Kitchen with Rockaway’s Queen Crab
Editor's Note: This article was written before the COVID-19 crisis for what would have been our print Women's Issue. Decadent Domi's Caribbean Seafood Experience is not running this summer. Follow @chefdecadence for updates.
On Instagram, an eye-catching graphic advertises Decadent Domi’s Caribbean Seafood Experience with undulating ocean waves and a magenta-purple crab. Swipe to see the crab multiply into rows of facsimiles—claws in the air, dancing. Swipe again for a peek at the menu: codfish fritters, jumbo shrimp, snow crab and king crab, all served with corn and potatoes. Other posts showcase the prepared crustaceans in all their outsized glory—claws extending far beyond the plate’s edge.
Then there’s Chef Decadence herself—sometimes pictured in a bathing suit top, cooking up a storm; always charming, always smiling. She says Instagram is her portable flyer—“It’s how I make all my money.” Once people see the photos of her crab boils, they’ll come and they’ll queue as long as it takes.
Chef Decadence is Dominique Small, Domi for short. She did not attend culinary school, but you’d never know that. She wears a crisp apron and toque in the kitchen, and she teaches herself whatever she needs to know, by watching chefs on TV—then she re-creates and adapts with what she has.
Before Small started her pop-up crab dinners in Rockaway a few years ago, she was growing up in East New York, raised on fish fries hosted by her tight-knit Jamaican family. She now uses the Jamaican ingredients she grew up with to make Caribbean-inspired fare that’s a little different, a little lighter.
She learned much of what she knows from her aunt, who needed a wheelchair. Since she couldn’t travel, she got a taste of the world by cooking along with chefs on Food Network; she brought Small along for the ride.
“Growing up, it felt like I was traveling with her and seeing all these different foods and all these different places and we hadn’t gone anywhere. She’s Jamaican, so she’s learning how to cook these different styles of food. All I did was trail behind her, watching her cook,” said Small as she steamed a deep pan of corn and crab in the airy Far Rockaway home she and her boyfriend, Christopher Pliego, own. (He built out the kitchen for Small. She says, “I do so much that I can’t have a kitchen that’s dainty. I needed it open.”)
Small started taking charge of the food at family functions when she was still in high school. Though some of her uncles doubted her ways at first, they respected her process. Presiding over those outdoor parties, with her dad DJing and playing artists like Beres Hammond, Buju Banton and Peter Tosh, was the precursor to Small’s future seafood business.
Shortly after Small and Pliego moved to Rockaway in 2016, Small was asked to do a pop-up fish fry at Rockaway Brewing; her dad DJ’d the event. And that led to another series of pop-ups at Rustwoods, then at Te Quiero last summer, alongside catering private events, hosting her seafood experience at the house and sometimes using a friend’s kitchen and backyard space on the waterfront (that’s the scene of all those dreamy photos on Instagram, at dusk, with the string lights, and all the happy-looking guests).
She’d always had a clear vision of what Decadent Domi’s should be. Small specifically chose seafood because she saw an opportunity to carve out a niche for herself; no one else was doing seafood in Rockaway, at least not fresh, and not like hers. Besides Decadent Domi’s, “There isn’t a real seafood restaurant out here,” she says. At a certain point, she and Pliego decided they needed to take a risk and just do this. It was impossible to fully commit to the business without jumping in full time.
Nowadays, the business mostly operates on deliveries and pickups, because demand has grown so much that Small can’t handle it all in one sitting. Orders come in by phone, and Small gets to work making fresh seafood meals—each one carefully packed in a biodegradable aluminum container that can easily be reheated without drying out the meat. Christian Holmes—who the couple both knew in high school—assists Small with the cooking, serving and seafood and produce hauls. Small credits his help as a large part of why she was able to expand the business. Holmes believes in her vision, and knows that it’s her personality that draws people in. “I keep telling her,” he says, “‘It’s your energy. You bring that positive energy and people are attracted to that.’”
Egypt, Small and Pliego’s 19-month-old daughter, seems to fit seamlessly into their world, babbling watchfully as the trio whisks around the house and kitchen cooking and prepping. Egypt often sits just outside the kitchen in her baby walker watching her mother cook. Some people say they’re awfully young to be parents, but Small pays them no mind. If anything, her daughter has clarified her ambition.
“I know what I want. I’m not gonna be scared,” she says. “I’m not gonna try to do the nice route. I want it done—this is what needs to be done, if we’re gonna make it. And I’m used to not sleeping now because I just had the baby. I wasn’t sleeping and then [after] working a 12-hour shift, going to pick up ingredients in the morning.”One of her signature dishes is the sauce she offers for dipping (she also caramelizes and tosses the shrimp in it); a blend of butter, Scotch Bonnet peppers, tomatoes, scallions, garlic, onion, red peppers and Old Bay seasoning and curry powder that’s sautéed and then hand-blended. People tell Small she should bottle it and sell it. Maybe she will someday.
She sources most of her vegetables from Edgemere Farm and Rockaway Buying Club, is a frequent Costco peruser and makes weekly trips to the New Fulton Fish Market at Hunt’s Point in the Bronx. Buying restaurant-grade seafood wholesale is what allows Small to keep her prices so reasonable (whole snow crab for $38, king crab for $45). “You’ll come back and tell your friends. It sells itself,” Small says. She doesn’t do anything deep-fried. People have queued for over an hour, waiting for Small to cook to order for them, one person at a time, so the food is as fresh as can be; she usually sells out of one haul of seafood in one day.
Small’s dinners bring the whole community together. She says people who have lived down the street from each other for years have met around her table. Her regulars will come twice a week, some every day, and they bring their parents back, and their dates.
What Small really wants, though, is a place of her own—a brick-and-mortar, so she can expand her menu and not have to worry about finding new spaces to cook in. She applied to Industry City, but that didn’t work out. When the Rockaway Village development comes to downtown Far Rockaway, she’s vying for a spot there. Either that or a space near Edgemere Farm. “We don’t want to stop,” she says. “We’ve been doing this for years; we built it from the ground up.”
Every Sunday, both Small and Pliegos’ families come over for dinner—Pliego’s father, who works at Cipriani in Manhattan, often brings ingredients from the restaurant to show Small how he makes certain dishes; then Small re-creates them with her own twist. Recently he brought over lump crab and showed Small how to make crab cakes. She then re-created the recipe using lobster and king crab. These Sunday suppers are not so different from the dinners Small hosts as Chef Decadence—intimate, lively and full of flavor.
“I'm just happy to be able to get the chance to cook,” says Chef Domi as she serves up a platter of king crab, blue crab and corn on the cob. “I love to create, and I just want people to experience my food.”
Decadent Domi’s Caribbean Seafood Experience
Edgemere Farm | @edgemerefarm
