IF you have ever been to Lethem and asked advice on a nice place to get some food then one person or another is probably going to advise you to check out Ravi’s Chinese Restaurant at the corner of Rupununi Road and Kanuku Drive.
And while there’s nothing special about a Chinese restaurant in the middle of a Guyanese town, what makes this particular eatery stand out is that the kitchen does not have your average Chinese chef. Behind the stove is 34-year-old Rabindra Boodhoo best known in Lethem by the name “Ravi”.
The restaurant is a product of Guyana’s brimming multiculturalism. Despite being Indo-Guyanese Ravi has spent most of his working life as a cook serving up Chinese food. He has worked at various Chinese restaurants across the country, including the well-known Kamboat Restaurant. As unusual as his being an Indo-Guyanese proprietor of a Chinese restaurant, he’s never really felt out of place. And for most of his customers in Lethem at least the food is so good, and he has been there so long that Ravi is just another common place fixture of their town.
“I think it’s the best Chinese food in Guyana that I’ve ever tasted,” commented Aaliyah Anthony, one of the restaurant’s regulars. “I really didn’t dig nothing that it’s an Indian person cooking it, all I thought was that he must’ve been working at a Chinese restaurant before.”
It was some eight years ago that Ravi first established himself in the Rupununi town. After racking up years of experience cooking he was asked by a friend to work at a restaurant that was being opened in Lethem, and he jumped at the opportunity to enter a new environment. The first people he told what he was in Lethem for thought he was being funny. Ravi thought nothing of it. “When I left to come to Lethem I come up with a bus, and I tell them boys in the bus I going and open a restaurant, I going and cook ‘chiney’ food and everybody just laugh,” Ravi said, himself laughing at the memory, “but now all of them does only come and eat by me.”
It’s been over 10 years since he first took up the craft of cooking Chinese food, Ravi said, as he explains how he came by this stand out skill. “I used to work in Parika at one time, I learn in Parika. I had a cousin she marry a ‘chiney’ man and I gone and stay with them and then I learn. I work with he like two years and something, then I go and start work for Kamboat for couple of years and then I went to Enmore and spend a couple of years and then I come to Lethem,” he related.
And it’s not just the food that makes his restaurant so popular. Ravi’s warm, friendly personality just seems to add to the atmosphere of the eatery. His ever smiling wife works at the counter taking orders and performing the role of waitress and cashier. Ravi and his wife, Shelly Boodhoo, have pretty much settled into life in Lethem, they already built their home and have one daughter together, and are living out their version of their perfect life. “I don’t have no complaint everything is alright. I get everything right here, built my house up here and left right here. I enjoy everything up here, no problems with anybody, with the job [or] with the Chinese food and thing. I get to work with myself,” Ravi noted.
The restaurant’s current location is being rented, so Ravi says his next goal is to get a place of his own for his restaurant. He also currently passing on what he’s learnt to others. “I renting here for now, I ain’t get my own place yet. I’m working on it, and I have two guys and I does teach them,” he commented.
