11-Year-Old Opens Caribbean Pizzeria In Brooklyn

Sebastian Wilson opens Sebastian’s Spices and Slices in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.

An 11-year-old budding entrepreneur has recently opened a hybrid pizzeria in Brooklyn that combines the tradition of Italian fare with a Caribbean spin.

According to PIX 11, a new pizza shop was opened in the Crown Heights neighborhood by teen Sebastian Wilson named appropriately Sebastian’s Spices and Slices. You will find the customary pizza with cheese and tomato sauce, but the toppings are where it differs from what you are used to. The toppings hail from a menu that incorporates the Caribbean fare one would find in Trinidad and Grenada. That’s where his mother and stepfather are from.

Sebastian’s pizzas are topped with oxtail, jerk chicken, codfish, shrimp, and saltfish, not the ingredients you’d expect from your local pizzeria.

Wilson credits his mother for incorporating the mixture of the cultures.

“My mom taught me how to do the recipes,” Wilson said. “I used to eat those sometimes, and they were good; yeah, my mom used to cook them all the time.”

He was also inspired to start his own business to follow in his parents’ footsteps, who are both entrepreneurs, so the influence comes from within the family.

“My mom works a lot, and I want to work a lot so I could, like, get my own money,” Wilson states. “My parents are hard workers, and I just want to be a hard worker like them.”

Child labor laws prevent Sebastian from working long hours, but he is vital in the pizzeria’s decision-making. Sebastian’s mother says her parents influenced her entrepreneurial ways, and now she wants to pass them on to Sebastian.

“I kind of want to be there with him, and obviously, there’s a time I’ll have to let go, but I’m trying to provide the things that maybe my parents provided for me and more,” said Natalie Lamming.