Meet Christina Wilson | Chef/Owner, The Pleasure Principle Supperclub & Dining Events

We had the good fortune of connecting with Christina Wilson and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Christina, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
Well, I started this dining events while living abroad in Barcelona. I was there attending grad school and during my time there, I would get homesick and nostalgic for food from back home. I grew up in Chicago, where we always had access to really any kind of food we wanted. My family is Caribbean and Southern so those are the styles of food we grew up with.

I remember having such a potent craving for the jerk chicken from one of our favorites neighborhood places, Jerk chicken WAS NOT something you could find in Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain – in 2012, no less and it wasn’t something that was easily workshopped. But I did workshop it and it was so successful that I wanted to share what I’d made with others.

So I posted a notice on Meet Up: American Grad Student Sharing Caribbean Feast! And I made what has become one of my signature dishes: “The Blue Plate Special”: marinated jerk chicken, coconut rice & peas, roasted sweet plantains & pickled peach-bell pepper salad. People were pretty impressed and what started as a free opportunity to meet new people while living abroad turned into people from all literal walks of life, paying me for the foods I grew up with. I was pretty hooked on that feeling: that people wanted to pay for some of the comfort I was so lucky to have grown up exposed to.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
What began as an act of defiant inquiry into the sheer and opaque mythologies of the triangular slave trade, The Pleasure Principle positions our food practices at the sites where interpretation, invention, and reclamation meet. Retrieving recipes that weren’t given the air and resource to proliferate,

I am in a constant state of remembering and adorning memories of watching my grandmothers, aunties, and mothers make meals of deep nourishment appear out of the same thin air the direct testimony of my forebears disappeared into.

The Pleasure Principle nods, winks, and bows to the cuisines of the West Indies, to be nourished and to remember what is beautiful and brutal about the diasporic cookery borne out of the transatlantic slave trade. The cuisines that came along these shores in the minds and bodies of those arriving here without choice.

The vitality of food pathways traced to and throughout the West Indies and West Africa is reborn in the intertwining of new and hallowed cultural traditions and innovative flavor building that intentions liberation in edible inspiration, elegantly executed. With five years and counting as a chef and service provider in the Bay Area, I am trying to find the palatable nexus where cultural heritage and locavore priority intersect. I am constantly inspired by the abundance of the agricultural accessibility of living and working in and around Oakland, made apparent by the unique epicurean offerings of our seasonally focused menus.

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Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
For inspiration, I’d check the social feeds of locally owned food spots, restaurants and food writers. I’d be most interested in what my colleagues and friends in the business were up to. Pig Roast at Korner Kitchen? Yes, please. Pop up at purity wine bar? Definitely, Is the weather nice? How about a picnic at Lake Merritt or if we’re up for it, Dolores Park? Maybe we’ll sojourn up to Tomales Bay and have oysters at the Marshall Store before or after a charter on Captain Tims boat in Sausalito. Some the most exciting things to eat and drink in the Bay Area happen in some of the most beautiful places in the world. Really, you just need to be curious enough to go and explore.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
My community deserves all of the credit. The people who go out of their way to show up to my events or refer me to a friend or suggest someone check out my website or socials – those are the people who offer me the grace to do what I do. Really. I say all the time that, without my community, I wouldn’t be able to do to the thing I describe as “what I was put on this Earth to do”. Thank you so much to Oakland, The Bay Area and the communities every where I’ve lived or landed who have supported me on my journey.

Website: pleasureprinciplediningevents.com

Instagram: @pleasureprinciplediningevents

Twitter: @AlexisButters

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thepleasureprinciplesupper4359/channels

Image Credits
Dana Plucinski, of Bay Dish and I’m confirming details of the other photographer.