A family business.
Not a food company.
“I didn’t grow up eating patties as a novelty. They were just food. Tuesday food. The kind your mother made without thinking about it.”
Mr. Spicees opened on Avenue Victoria in Côte-des-Neiges in 1974, making Jamaican patties and rock cakes for a neighbourhood that wanted them. Marlon Cambridge came from a Trinidadian household where that food wasn’t a treat — it was just what was in the kitchen. He took over the business years later, already knowing what the product was supposed to taste like before he ever ran the ovens himself.
What hasn’t changed is the building, the recipes, and the two things people still walk in for: patties and rock cakes, alongside a few other Caribbean dishes made in the same kitchen. What has changed is the reach. Orders that used to come from down the street now come from stores and schools across Québec, and lately from Ontario too — and there’s no plan to stop there.
Mr. Spicees has been feeding Montréal schools since before today’s school board system existed — supplying schools continuously since 1998, without interruption.
Fifty years later, it’s still on the same street it started on.