Just a few blocks from the Maryland Governor’s Mansion sits a white house that hums with warmth, laughter, and the unmistakable aroma of island spices.
Rumhouse, as its name suggests, is built on the legacy of rum: the Caribbean’s most storied export and a drink born of sugarcane and survival, of celebration and struggle. At this restaurant, every plate tells a story, and every sip nods to history.
At the helm is Chef Natasha de Bourg, a self-described “loud brown girl from Trinidad and Tobago,” whose unapologetically bold cooking style mirrors her roots. Her menu is a fiery, colorful, deeply seasoned love letter to the Caribbean that’s impossible to forget.
From jerk-marinated meats to coconut milk-based sauces, de Bourg’s kitchen doesn’t just serve food; it serves up storytelling on a plate.
“I want people to see and realize that the story of our food is one of pain and endurance and within that is a powerful story,” de Bourg said. “What was once enslaved is now precisely what people want and demand. Through oneness, people get the experience of our food on a plate and there is no more pain there anymore.”
At a time when not only storms, but power plays, roil the Caribbean Sea, Rumhouse feels like a quiet act of defiance. As the U.S. edges back into the region under the banner of “stability” and renewed interest in Venezuela, de Bourg is reminding diners that the Caribbean’s story has always been written by its own people, in its own flavors.
Her food rejects the notion of the islands as anyone’s playground or proxy. Instead, it celebrates the self-determination that built the region’s bold, complex and unbought culture in the first place.
Whether it’s curried chickpeas, chutney and fried barras, or slow-cooked oxtails taken off the bone and molded into a croquette served with a beef jus and micro greens, de Bourg’s style brings into modern times the flavors and taste from centuries of Caribbean cooking.
“Food is culture and food is how people come together,” de Bourg said. “Caribbean food is born out of endurance and passed down through DNA, and that DNA has travelled with us and is alive and well today.”
The Chef included pelau—one of her favorite dishes and Rumhouse’s most popular menu item—in that DNA sequence.
Pelau, a West Indies rice dish prepared with pigeon peas, coconut milk, sugar, and aromatically caramelized with chicken, pork and beef, has origins tracing back to West Africa’s jollof rice. It’s also historically connected to Jamaica’s cook-up rice, Louisiana’s jambalaya, and South Carolina’s red beans and rice.
For de Bourg, those three rice dishes are examples of how food can travel through centuries and across oceans despite struggle, oppression, and even enslavement.
“Pelau came about from us getting the scraps,” de Bourg said. “And nowadays, you’re able to enjoy something that came out of hardship. We are no longer enslaved; we are free, and you get to taste who we are as a people.”
While de Bourg’s story starts in her grandmother’s kitchen in Trinidad and Tobago and her flavors are causing palettes to dance in Annapolis, her story has a classically trained chef crisscrossing Europe through some of its best restaurants.
As the first Caribbean female student at César Ritz Colleges Switzerland, de Bourg has worked professionally in multiple Michelin-starred restaurants, including Mirazur in Menton, France. She later became known as The Chef while a cast member on Bravo’s reality TV show hit, Below Deck Sailing Yacht.
For de Bourg, the reality TV role mischaracterized her as complicated and hard to deal with, which she describes as a harmful stereotype of Caribbean women focused on success.
“When I saw myself on Below Deck, I felt very sad for myself,” de Bourg said. “We as Caribbean immigrant women have to be very protective of our image, because people will look down on us and underestimate our talent, and that is what happened on that show.”
Those days of being underestimated are over, with reservations at Rumhouse booked out for weeks, and clientele flocking into Annapolis from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even Maine to taste food prepared by de Bourg.
The Rumhouse menu allows one to teleport themselves from along the Severn River of the Annapolis to the calming beaches and turquoise waters of the Caribbean. That’s always the case, whether a patron tries de Bourg’s preparation of smoky prawns or Spanish Romesco stuffed with island salsa.
Maybe, they’ll try the lump crab meat with Venezuelan guacamole sauce. Patrons even get to couple menu selections with some of the Caribbean’s best rum, including: lemongrass rum; Jamaica’s Appleton’s rum and Trinidad’s Angostura Rum-based punch served with a lime rum shot lit on fire.
“We aren’t Burger King or McDonald’s, where you have endless frozen chicken come out of a fryer,” The Chef emphatically states. “What we prepare is genuine, authentic food that is made with love.”
A love that de Bourg describes comes from her grandmother, who would prepare pelau for the family every Saturday. Now, the pelau at Rumhouse is selling out midway through dinner service on Wednesday.
“In one night, we sold over 45 quarts,” de Bourg exclaimed.
Beyond pelau, the restaurants also pay homage to Black foodways by bringing familiar Caribbean flavors to the fore in new and unexpected ways. The jerk lamb dish features dry-rubbed lamb glazed with homemade jerk syrup, finished with glazed radishes. In addition, Rumhouse offers a New Orleans gumbo, along with a crab & dumplings dish that uplifts Maryland’s rich crab tradition.
“Our nations and their cuisine have always been great,” de Bourg said. “You would have enslaved us, taken away our land, and pillaged our natural resources if they weren’t great. The world is just now acknowledging our truth in its full terms.”
While focusing on that greatness, the Rumhouse took on the jumbo lump crab cake, which had the approval of the Marylanders in attendance on Oct. 16 at the restaurant’s International Food Day celebration.
“These Crab Cakes are delicious, not too much ‘full [breadcrumbs]’ and a lot of crab meat as they should be,” stated a Baltimore native who attended the event.
The International Day celebration brought another piece of the Caribbean with a steel band performance at the white house on 6th Street, just a couple of blocks from the state capitol building.
Beyond serving as Rumhouse’s executive chef, de Bourg is also the founder and president of the Trinidad Culinary Association, which currently has more than 500 members throughout the island nation.
As a Trinidadian native, whose immigrant story is now her living out an American Dream, de Bourg believes that Rumhouse is bringing something new to Annapolis.
“I believe that Rumhouse is a she, and think she is sexy at what she is doing, and she is doing her thing,” de Bourg says with a laugh. “She is very bougie and very classy, and she is bringing a new standard of elegance, excellence and integrity to fine dining.”