Caribbean restaurateur pushes on after oven explosion

McALLEN — Cable news blared from the TV on the bamboo and wooden-shutter-lined walls of Esther Etienne’s restaurant.

Few customers had ventured in to try her Caribbean cuisine that day — like many others — so Etienne had a quiet lunch with a glass of lemonade.

Her restaurant, Caribbean Taste, 135 W. Nolana, has been open about a month. She was forced to close it over the summer, after the gas oven exploded as she tried to ignite the pilot light. Severe burns covered her face, neck, arms and hands.

“You could hear it from the outside,” she recalled. “The noise was so big.”

With a noticeable Haitian Creole accent, Etienne vividly describes that day and her painful recovery. She flips through photos on her cell phone that show each week of her recovery — from when she looked like a mummy with her gauze-wrapped head to when the bandages came off, revealing blotchy scars that covered her face.

“I thought I would never see my face again,” the 35-year-old said. “I was very depressed. I said to myself, ‘God, are you telling me something?’”

Etienne’s face came back.

A Haitian-born immigrant and devout Seventh-day Adventist, she doesn’t say she was lucky. Etienne attributes her speedy recovery to her faith and her dermatologist’s treatment.

Little evidence of her facial scars remains less than three months after the explosion. Bright, blotchy burn marks on her hands still contrast with her natural skin color. Still, she has pulled herself out of the depression she sank into during the recovery.

“I think God was here that day,” she said.

Etienne’s family immigrated to New York City when she was 9 years old. Her father worked as a security guard at the American Museum of Natural History for 19 years and drove taxicabs at night.

Divorced from her husband, who still lives in New York, Etienne and her 10-year-old son live with her brother — one of a pair who came to the area to practice medicine. Her sister is a nurse in Edinburg and treated her burns each day.

Etienne graduated from Long Island University and was a social worker for more than a decade. She came to the Rio Grande Valley last year to be closer to her brothers and find a similar job after she was laid off in Atlanta.

Her passion for cooking, particularly Caribbean cuisine, helped drive her desire to open her first restaurant. But it was Etienne’s brothers who convinced her to finally take the plunge, finding her space in the former home of a Japanese restaurant located across Nolana from the Cinemark Hollywood USA multiplex.

“This has always been my passion since I was a little girl,” she said.

The bamboo walls and dark wooden bar that adorned the space when Etienne moved in are holdovers from the departed sushi joint, but they seem to fit with Etienne’s specially seasoned oxtail, fried green plantains, chicken and red snapper.

“I cook as if I was cooking at home with my child,” Etienne said.

She has poured about $40,000 — her entire life savings — into the restaurant so far and there have not been as many customers as she would like.

Still, after all she has been through, Etienne said she will push on.

“I don’t want to give up,” she said. “I don’t want to feel like I am a failure.”

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Jared Taylor covers law enforcement and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4439.