Levi Roots on how Notting Hill Carnival has changed: ‘We’ve forgotten what it’s all about – expressing our voice’

Levi Roots and Notting Hill Carnival go way, way back.

The Jamaican-British entrepreneur and chef first attended London’s annual Caribbean carnival around 1976 or 1977.

“I was maybe 17 at the time, and my aunt had a stall there – she lived in Harlesden,” Roots remembers fondly.

“She always had a stall at carnival and invited me for the first time to help scale the fish. For me, it was such an inspirational thing to see the crowd, and to see everyone totally immersed in one thing – which is enjoying themselves and enjoying the food, the food that my aunt was cooking.

“I was so blown away by being involved in that, and feeling that I was one of the [reasons] why people were coming. I knew then that food played a massive part in carnival, so I felt like I was doing a job that was helping the whole festival.”

Roots’ aunt served traditional Caribbean food: “Jerk chicken, rice and peas, rotis, curried goat, that kind of stuff,” he explains.

“Roast fish, steamed fish, lots of fishes she used to do. But everybody when you think of carnival, you think of jerk chicken, rice and peas – that was the staple thing back then, and still is now.”

Roots, now 66, got the carnival bug and has been going back ever since. For years, he went to carnival as a musician – performing with the legendary reggae sound-system Sir Coxsone. When the collective lost sponsorship, he wanted to come back to the event in a different guise – and settled on merging food and music together, setting up his Rasta’raunt in 1991.

“I changed it up from me being a sound-system man to actually having an apron on and being around a fire – some people used to come to me and say, ‘Levi, we don’t know you for doing that kind of stuff, we know you for sound-system!'”

He adds: “The stall was something about me, that I could express my music – I’d be getting my guitar out and I’d be singing food songs, and old Jamaican songs. People love to see a Rasta man with his kids, because I always had my children there with me – it was a family affair.”

It was at this stall that Roots started selling what we now know as Reggae Reggae Sauce – a jerk BBQ sauce that got him on Dragons’ Den in 2007, winning him investments and making his name. He’s since hosted his own BBC food show, appeared on various TV cooking shows and appeared on the most-recent series of Celebrity Big Brother.

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Roots credits the success of Reggae Reggae Sauce – now sold in Sainsbury’s, Tesco and more – to him adapting his grandmother’s recipe to cater to a wider group of people. “My grandmother’s sauce was typical Caribbean in the way she made it – which was hot, it gave you a face ache when you had it,” he explains.

“When she created it, we were so poor that we couldn’t afford meat, like steaks, chicken, hams, that kind of stuff – her sauce was being able to put it on the food and it would take your mind away and put it somewhere else.”

He says that he “changed up her recipe a bit, just to please everyone. It was a way for me to tap into the diversity that was coming to the stall and not just keep it Jamaican” – and it was at odds with a lot of the other sauces at carnival at the time, which Roots says was typically “mashed up Scotch bonnet chilli with a bit of tomato ketchup”.

Roots said he wanted to take the sauce out of carnival, after realising he had an audience for it all year round – and the rest is history.

Notting Hill Carnival still has a place in Roots’ heart – even though it has changed “massively” since he first went in the 1970s.

“These days, we forget what it was about – it wasn’t just about the party, where we wanted to have a good time and drink and smoke. It was trying to bring that realisation that we had a voice as well, and we wanted to express that voice – but not in a violent way.”

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The first outdoor festival in the streets of Notting Hill took place in 1966, organised by community activist Rhaune Laslett. The event came off the back of the racial tensions of the 1950s, and was a way of celebrating the local Caribbean community. Today, Notting Hill Carnival is the second biggest street festival in the world, after Brazil’s Rio Carnival. It takes place on the August bank holiday every year – this year 25 August will see the families and children’s day, and 26 August is adults day.

While Roots says “people do still remember what it was for”, he adds: “The food, the outlook, everything – the music, it’s not the same.”

Carnival’s initial focus was the calypso music of Trinidad and Tobago, which was later usurped by Jamaican sound-systems. Now, it’s even more international, with Roots saying: “You go to carnival and you hear Mexican music, you’re hearing the sound of samba.”

So what’s he particularly looking forward to this year?

Alongside the many stalls selling classic Caribbean food, such as Sunvalley Jerk and Curtis Caribbean, Roots says: “I’m excited about African food joining the throng now.

“I think with the emergence of Afrobeats over the past couple of years, it’s been absolutely fantastic. I used to always think that Caribbean food was the champion and no other cuisine can come close to it – African food was way behind, that was my thought.”

He’s recently been eating more African food – particularly the West African spicy tomato rice dish, jollof – and his perceptions are changing.

“I’m looking forward to this year at carnival where I think Afrobeats will be the main music – and not reggae or hip hop or anything. African food, also with the jollof rice, your curried meats and all that, is going to be one of the cuisines that this year, creates a bit of a surprise to the offering from the Caribbean.”