Elevating Black Food – Eugene Weekly - Eugene Weekly

The stereotype that Black people love fried chicken developed deep in U.S. history, says chef and Yardy Eugene owner Isaiah Martinez. It started after emancipation when Black people continued to face systematic oppression but, over time, created professional success. One of the trades that allowed them to financially support themselves was selling fried chicken, Martinez says, but this prompted white backlash.

As the Black community grew stronger, “propaganda would come out and there would be these weird images and depictions of Black people and fried chicken, kind of defacing the product so that there wouldn’t be larger support, and so you would feel demeaned in the process,” he says. “That’s what we’re still going to this day. We still get to pick and cancel things that we don’t want to be associated with.” 

Serving West Indian food — dishes from the Caribbean — from his new food truck, Yardy Eugene, Martinez works to celebrate Black culture through food and give marginalized people a path into cooking careers. Kitchens are predominantly white and male, he says, and customers put European foods, like Italian and French dishes, on a pedestal, while assigning a lower value to foods from the cultures of Black and Brown people. He wants to change this dynamic. 

Martinez currently sells his food online and out of his newly-built mustard yellow food truck at ColdFire Brewing. One of his primary dishes is a chicken meal: skillet-fried chicken that comes with a salad, a biscuit and pepper sauce. The other is doubles, a vegan dish (with a gluten-free option) consisting of two pieces of fried flatbread called bara, topped with chickpea curry, chutney and fresh herbs.

He hopes these dishes, cooked with ingredients from the Northwest, will help elevate Caribbean food, he says, and that Yardy Eugene will help combat the lack of diversity that Martinez has experienced in kitchens throughout his career. 

Martinez has known he wanted to be a chef since he was 17. He says he avoided high school algebra by taking vocational cooking courses, moved to California and earned a bachelor’s from the International School of Culinary Art. He then worked at several well established restaurants where “the chefs were like celebrities,” he says. 

But Martinez says he quickly noticed a lack of women and people of color in kitchens, as well as the different values customers place on food. As a sous chef at the restaurant A16, a high-class Italian restaurant in Oakland, he made a comfortable living. “Pasta is easy,” he says. “It took three hours to make sausage for 300 people.”

But while working at a Chinese restaurant, it took three days to make a traditional dish that was priced at $8. That restaurant shut down because people thought the food was too expensive, he says. 

Regardless of ingredient costs or the time it takes to cook something, customers often put Western European foods on a pedestal and are willing to pay more for them, Martinez says. Food from the cultures of Black and Brown people, though, are perceived as street food or snack food that should be cheap — even if it takes more money and skill to make. 

Martinez moved to Eugene a few years ago and started working at Marché. After doing a pop up to celebrate Black History month in 2019, he decided to sell West Indian food more regularly. He eventually hopes to own his own brick and mortar restaurant, but in the middle of the pandemic, starting with a food truck seemed like a more practical move, Martinez says, so he started Yardy Eugene. Martinez uses “Yardy” to describe anyone from the West Indies, taking back the sometimes derogatory term and using it in a positive way. 

While he expects some pushback from people who don’t understand his intentions, he says he’s excited to share his food with Eugene. 

“I’m trying to tell a story,” Martinez says. “I think that when you do food and you’re trying to tell a story, it’s kind of hard to fuck it up because you have something to work for.”

Yardy Eugene is at Coldfire Brewery, located at 263 Mill Street, from 5 to 8 pm. Monday through Thursday. Visit YardyEugene.com for more information. 

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