Business and culture don’t often mix. And it’s rare when an idea promises to both make someone a lot of money, and help preserve and promote a vital part of our heritage. But such seems to be the case with de Windies Grill, the cricket themed restaurant which opened in Mandeville recently.

I have no financial interest in de Windies Grill, whose partners include test batsman Shiv Chanderpaul. But as a lifelong devotee of the game of glorious uncertainty, I naturally support anything which promotes the sport. So I sincerely hope this is the first of many branches. Certainly it seems like ‘a natural’. Cricket after all is virtually the only unifying force the English speaking Caribbean has. So you have to figure that a cricket themed restaurant will do well anywhere you find a lot of West Indians. Which includes not only Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, Guyana and Antigua but Britain and maybe even places like New York and Toronto.

Of course no matter what its theme, a restaurant must serve good food to survive. And de Windies Grill has certainly started off well in this respect. The meals all have cricketing names – late cut grilled chicken sandwich, googly curried goat, cover drive jerk chicken, top spinner chick peas and roti, hook shot steam fish. All the ones I’ve tried have been very good and people I’ve talked to feel the same way. If they can keep the quality up, my strong feeling is that Shiv and his partners are onto a big winner.

But as managing director Mohan Jagnarine says, de Windies Grill is not just about good food, it’s also about a sport he loves passionately.

“The idea came to me when I was living in New York. One cold winter I was thinking about going back home and wondering what I would do there. I’ve always worked in the food industry and was thinking of some kind of themed restaurant, because you have a lot of those in the US. Now in New York I used to see Jamaican restaurants and Trinidadian restaurants and Guyanese restaurants and Barbadian restaurants and so forth. And I kept asking myself why there couldn’t be something that would appeal to all of these West Indian communities. Then it occurred to me that the thing that makes the English speaking Caribbean come together is cricket. So why not a cricket theme restaurant?

Then the ideas just started pouring into my brain about the cricket field, cricket named combos, posters of great players. Most of the time in business you struggle to come up with new ideas. I was struggling to narrow the ideas down because I couldn’t possibly do everything that came to me.

Anyway I talked to some friends who were cricket addicts like myself and they loved the idea and said let’s do it. We decided it would be nice to get a West Indian cricketer involved. Shiv Chanderpaul is a close friend who always has dinner at my house when he comes to Jamaica. So I asked him if he wanted to get involved and he said yes. Ironically the idea really came to fruition the Saturday night before England bowled us out for 47 at Sabina Park!

You know one of my dreams is that cricketers from all the territories would have an opportunity to invest in this concept and have a financially secure life after cricket. Because a lot of our greats have a tough time of it after retiring. In fact if de Windies Grill becomes as successful as I hope, we will be plowing a great deal back into cricket especially at the school level in terms of scholarships and whichever way we can help the sport grow among the young.

I’m married to a Jamaican and have lived in Jamaica for 25 years –I have been to every test match that has been played at Sabina since 1979! So Jamaica was the place I wanted to start. I did some market research and decided to open the first branch in Mandeville. So far the response has been wonderful and I’m very grateful for the support we’ve gotten.

We don’t have everything in place yet – we hope to have the grand opening later this month. But the plan is to have the entrance resembling a cricket pitch, and on the wall directly ahead will be the scorecards of the two World Cups we have won – hopefully in three years time it will be three! Our packaging has stories about West Indian greats like Brian Lara, Gary Sobers, Lance Gibbs, and Courtney Walsh, all written by Tony Becca. We will also have posters of our greats and videos of great cricket matches running continuously on a big flat screen television. Of course we will show all big matches live.

One thing that spurred on de Windies Grill idea was the potential tourist bonanza of the 2007 World Cup. And I would personally like to thank Pat Rousseau for having that vision and the confidence in the Caribbean people to bid for the World Cup when many people said it was pie in the sky. And I strongly believe we will have the best WorldCcup ever. Nobody enjoys their cricket as much as us West Indians. That’s why people from England and Australia save for 10 years to here for a test match. For sheer fun and exuberance the atmosphere at a West Indies cricket ground cannot be matched anywhere else on earth.

People talk about cricket dying in the Caribbean but that is certainly not true. At the restaurant here I‘ve seen high school girls come in talking enthusiastically about the game and asking when Shiv and the other players are coming so they can get their autographs. I believe the interest in cricket is as high as ever. All we need to do is start winning again and marketing the game properly. And I hope de Windies Grill can be part of that rebirth.” changkob@hotmail.com