No stopping for Stop Light

When Yvonne Thomas opened her first restaurant on December 3, 1993, she didn’t give it a name.

Customers referred to her establishment by the name of a bar which had previously occupied the same building at Frenches Gate. The name stuck; Thomas made it official, and more than 23 years later, Stop Light restaurant is still locked on green, with no red lights in sight. In fact, the business has so thrived that even with the opening in 2012 of a second, larger location at Paul’s Avenue, long lunchtime lines continue to be the trend.

While the restaurant may have got its name by accident, the widely varied daily menu of staples, vegetables, meats, roti and more is cooked with careful consideration. Thomas is secretive about some of her ingredients and methods, but she revealed that Stop Light prepares its food “the old time way,” blending fresh herbs and spices, bought daily from the market and allowing several days for meats to marinate in the seasoning. Thomas is a woman of many talents and interests, including baking and cosmetology, but is happy that she decided to get into the restaurant business. “I also was thinking about opening up a salon. I love hair, and I love beauty, so I started a course in Trinidad, but I did not finish it. I have no regret. Stop Light take off, we maintain our standard, we are consistent.”

Roti has been the number one seller for the restaurant since it opened. Thomas, who previously resided in Trinidad, developed her curry making expertise by observing the family she lived with. “I love curry, so I used to want to see how they making roti, how they cooking this curry. We do our rotis different than anybody else. There’s a special something that we add to our curry. It’s a secret. I think I have a special touch when coming to cooking curry and the only person that I trained is my nephew,” Thomas said.

Keeping the secrets in the family, she trained another nephew to cook the pelau, which won the Best of SVG 2017 award. About 35 pounds of rice, along with lentil peas and various cuts of chicken, are combined with herbs and spices and a precise proportion of perfectly caramelized sugar in an impressively large pot to make the award winning dish. However, Thomas says customers still can’t get enough. “People will keep telling us, ‘why you not cooking more pelau?’ I saying to myself, they don’t really know the pot we cook in.” One of the cooks, Laura, who has been working at Stop Light for 14 years, still does not know exactly what goes into the pelau, but agrees “it tastes real good.”

Stop Light has also done well at keeping staff. Several workers on the 25-member team have been with the restaurant for upwards of 10 years. Thomas, whose son and daughter are also involved in running the business, says that their style is friendly, down-to-earth management, which creates a familial atmosphere.

“We interact with our customers. If I have to clean the table, I clean the table. If I have to mop, I mop. Whatever the workers are doing, is just what we will do.”

She expressed gratitude to customers for their loyal patronage, which has kept the restaurant growing. “When I opened Stop Light number two, even my workers were telling me, ‘you know what you going to do? The economy is tough; there is so much restaurants around and you want to open a number two?’ I know what I’m doing. I look at people plate when they eat. If they leave back the food, it ain’t taste good, but when you only see bone in the plate, you know something have to be good about the food.”