Savor Scout › Food guides › Trinidadian food
How to find good Trinidadian food
Trinidadian food combines Indian, African, Chinese and Creole cooking, and its most famous dish — doubles, curried chickpeas between two pieces of fried bread — is the best two-dollar breakfast in any city that sells it.
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What separates a good one from a bad one
- Doubles made fresh — Soft, fried bara with curried channa, cucumber, tamarind and pepper sauce. Wrapped in paper, eaten standing up, still warm.
- Roti with a soft, layered skin — Buss-up-shut (shredded paratha) or dhalpuri (with ground split peas). Both should be tender and flaky.
- Curry with green seasoning — Trini curries start with a green seasoning of culantro, thyme and peppers. The flavour is distinct from Indian or Jamaican curry.
- Pepper sauce with a warning — Scotch bonnet-based and very hot. Always ask for slight, medium or hot.
- A line on weekend mornings — Doubles and roti shops get busy early. A queue at 10am on Saturday is the review you want.
What to order
- Doubles — With slight pepper, at first.
- Curry goat roti — Buss-up-shut or dhalpuri.
- Bake and shark — Fried bread with fried shark and condiments, if available.
- Pelau — Rice cooked with chicken, pigeon peas and caramelised sugar.
- Sorrel or mauby — To drink.
Where to find Trinidadian food
Open listings put 24 Trinidadian restaurants across the US. These are the cities and campuses with the most of them.
Cities with the most
A few to start with
- Trini Girl — New York, NY
628 Nostrand Ave, New York
Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.
How Savor Scout looks for it
The search reads for doubles, roti, buss-up-shut, pelau and Trini, separating Trinidadian kitchens from the broader Caribbean category where they are often filed.
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Looking in a particular city?
Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.
- New York, NY
- Los Angeles, CA
- Chicago, IL
- Houston, TX
- Philadelphia, PA
- Phoenix, AZ
- San Antonio, TX
- San Diego, CA
- Dallas, TX
- San Jose, CA
- Austin, TX
- Indianapolis, IN
- Jacksonville, FL
- San Francisco, CA
- Columbus, OH
- Charlotte, NC
- Fort Worth, TX
- Detroit, MI
- El Paso, TX
- Memphis, TN
- Seattle, WA
- Denver, CO
- Washington, DC
- Boston, MA
- Nashville, TN
- Baltimore, MD
- Oklahoma City, OK
- Louisville, KY
- Portland, OR
- Las Vegas, NV
- Milwaukee, WI
- Albuquerque, NM
- Tucson, AZ
- Fresno, CA
- Sacramento, CA
- Long Beach, CA
- Kansas City, MO
- Mesa, AZ
- Virginia Beach, VA
- Atlanta, GA
- Colorado Springs, CO
- Omaha, NE
- Raleigh, NC
- Miami, FL
- Oakland, CA
- Minneapolis, MN
- Tulsa, OK
- Cleveland, OH
- Wichita, KS
- Arlington, TX
- New Orleans, LA
- Bakersfield, CA
- Tampa, FL
- Honolulu, HI
- Aurora, CO
- Anaheim, CA
- Santa Ana, CA
- St. Louis, MO
- Riverside, CA
- Corpus Christi, TX