Meet the Young Caribbean Couple who Run a Farm in Curaçao
Travelettes
When I visited Curacao last week, I bumped into Josh and Femi Peiliker, a young couple who decided to move back to their home country after having lived and studied in Amsterdam for five years. When you’re from a tiny Caribbean island and in your mid twenties, that in itself is quite unusual. But not just that: They also decided to start a farm and a farm-to-table restaurant: Hofi Cas Cora.
Wait, what? So today, surrounded by banana trees, donkeys, and surprisingly green fields, Josh and Femi invent dishes around the harvest and inspire the local community to grow their own stuff. Needless to say, I was wildly inspired and grabbed Femi straight after ordering my brunch for a Q&A in the shade.
Femi, tell me a bit about yourself!
I was born and raised in Curacao, and so was my husband Joshua. We met here, but Joshua moved to the US for his recording arts studies, and then we both moved to Holland. I never thought I would come back. I was 18 and I thought, I’m leaving this tiny rock and I can’t wait to get out of here to see what else the world has to offer.
But it all turned out a little different it seems! What happened in between studying marketing in Amsterdam and running this place here?
So I started my degree in marketing and specialised in branding. I took a little longer with my studies because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I always used to go to the farmers’ market to get fresh produce and my mum always cooked at home (so for me, it’s weird to go out for dinner or lunch all the time). And a few years into living in Holland, I asked Josh: could you imagine having a little coffee shop? I was thinking with baked goods and stuff like that.
Read the full article, originally published on November 9, 2016, on Travelettes.