Three years ago, a stop for coffee sparked an idea which has contributed to a post-COVID revival at Valpark.
Nicholas Sinanansingh and his girlfriend Ashana Gibran were in search of good food when the nearby shopping mall opened their eyes to opportunity.
“It started just off of COVID. We were actually going out of Valsayn to get breakfast and we stopped in Valpark to get a coffee for the drive south. When we saw the spot, we felt it seemed like a location we could look into because the cafe was always an idea (one day) we were going to open. So just at the end of 2021, early 2022, Flamingle Cafe was born,” said Gibran who is co-owner and a chef at the establishment.
“Flamingle was supposed to be a gourmet coffee shop within the area that you can go and get your coffee, your breakfast, your brunch with all those semi fancy foods that you will get in Port-of-Spain that we just wanted to close be by, within the community. Because most times what would happen is that we have to leave Valsayn to go to Port-of-Spain or south when we’re looking for that type of food. So Flamingle cafe was just a fun thing that we wanted to do,” she said, “We wanted good food close by.”
Gibran, also a part of the Zoological Society, incorporated her passion for animals in creating the name.
“It’s a play on mingle with flamingos, bringing in the animal aspect from my background. So we came up with Flamingle cafe, and it’s just worked. (Now)we get Mingle Bar and Trinis they like to mingle so it all ties back together,” said Gibran.
Word of the new cafe spread and it quickly rose in popularity. Too popular for the space it occupied.
“We have really outgrown the spot we had downstairs as we would be getting calls on a regular basis for 20 persons, 25 persons and our spot downstairs was too small to accommodate the number of calls we were getting,” said Gibran, who told the Business Guardian that as a result the Cafe had actively begun looking at moving to a new location.
“We were looking at going to a different mall or adding on a secondary location until Valpark came to us with the expansion and proposed the spot upstairs. We looked at it and said okay, we’ll give it a try because it’s stayed within what we wanted. A cafe where you could get good food in the area. So we came upstairs,” said Gibran.
Valpark confirmed to Guardian Media that they were impressed with the success of the cafe.
“Valpark was approached by the owner of Flamingle, Gibran in 2021 to open a small cafe. She pitched this great idea of a very small cafe-type restaurant that was not something we had at the plaza at that time. We were very intrigued with this new concept, and now, three years later, we are extremely happy about the success of this business,” said Candice Bejai, property manager for Valpark.
Earlier this year, Bejai and Capitol Holdings Ltd executive chairman, Travis Ali told the Business Guardian that the success of hangouts like Flamingle, Mini Bar and Bonavida had prompted increased traffic to the mall, which had recorded million-dollar losses as recently as 2021.
Bejai confirmed that Valpark approached Flamingle as the shopping plaza embarked on a $60 million renovation project to build on that momentum.
“When we started renovations at Valpark in 2022 and saw the success that Flamingle was already having, we approached Gibran about the possibility of expanding her cafe. It has been a pleasure seeing this cafe grow from its original small cafe into a thriving business model that has become one of the more popular cafes in Trinidad,” Bejai said.
The expansion has also allowed Flamingle to expand its bar and hours of operation, allowing the cafe to appeal to a wider demographic, while still accommodating its base audience. Flamingle co-owner Sinanansingh said the cafe would often see their patrons leave to go to other bars on the compound due to their limits.
“What we would notice is because we would only do cocktails and wines, people would eat and have a few drinks and they go across to another location after. So we decided to add on our own bar and do a proper cocktail bar, wine bar so they could come here and eat then they go to the bar and relax,” said Sinanansingh, discussing the decision to create a designated bar area called Mingle Bar. The bar now includes a selection of local beers and hard liquor in addition to the traditional cocktails and wine selection Flamingle had been known for previously.
The owners said they were suprised by immediate interest in the new location.
“The opening was actually very big, we didn’t expect it to be that big. The entire weekend was big. We had opened for the first brunch on Father’s Day. We had a big turnout so people liked the idea now that we are bigger and they could just stay here instead of having to move around to different locations because now we can do after-work limes which we wanted to do before but we were too small. We are adding on different types of events now,” said Sinanansingh who added that companies had even booked the new location for meetings since the reopening.
Gibran, however, admitted the road to this point was not always smooth as she admitted many lessons were learnt during the period of COVID-19 restrictions and subsequent supply chain challenges.
“What we have done is stick to our local markets. So we’ve drafted our menu to local products as much as possible,” said Gibran, adding, “So we tried to pull flavours so that we don’t depend too heavily on international items. We’ve learned that coming out of COVID when we started it was very hard to get items. So we had to redraft and fix the menu to suit what we could get readily available in Trinidad.”
The couple has seen several new establishments open in the shopping Plaza recently but they are not fazed them. Instead, they are enthusiastic that these spots will continue to bring traffic to Valpark.
“You get more people coming into the mall now, so it’s very nice to see Valpark Shopping Plaza get that new boost that it needed. It’s good to see traffic outside on the roads again like I would remember from ten years ago. It used to be a hub, it used to be busy. And I would like to see that happen again,” said Gibran.
‘The other places open bring more people into the mall and everybody has their niche. Nobody doing the same thing as everybody has a different style, different style of food, times they open, different types of drinks. So I wouldn’t really say it is competition. People could come to different spots, depending on what they feel at that point in time,” said Sinanansingh.
The duo confirmed to Business Guardian, however, that there are still plans to expand Flamingle to a second location in due time. However, at this time Gibran is monitoring the progress of the new space for now.