Stephen Curry’s wife Ayesha Curry extends business empire coming back to her Jamaican heritage: “We’ve worked so hard on with the people we love”

Ayesha Curry is opening a restaurant in the city that raised her, and this one comes with real stakes attached. Sweet July Cafe, her new concept inside the Ritz-Carlton in Charlotte, North Carolina, launches this year as the first of three dining spaces she's building there with chef Michael Mina, and it leans hard into the Jamaican flavors she grew up on.Curry spent her teenage years in Charlotte before her career took her everywhere from cookbooks to the Food Network, so this isn't a celebrity slapping a name on a menu. It's personal, and she's not shy about saying so.Ayesha Curry opens Sweet July Cafe in her hometownThe cafe opened at the Ritz-Carlton, with two more concepts, The Eighth Rule and Bourbon Steak, following later this year from the same Curry-Mina partnership. Both Ayesha and her husband, NBA star Stephen Curry, still have family ties in Charlotte, which is part of why this project holds more emotional value than a typical restaurant rollout. She called it a full-circle moment, telling Style Blue Print, "It feels really special to be able to share something we've worked so hard on with the people we love."The menu builds on the same fresh, casual approach she's known for through her Sweet July lifestyle brand, just filtered through a Southern lens this time.How Ayesha Curry weaves Jamaican heritage into Sweet July CafeCurry didn't want to just drop traditional Jamaican dishes onto a casual menu, since those recipes tend to lean slow-cooked and heavy. Instead, her team pulled the flavor profiles out and rebuilt them lighter. That shows up in small but deliberate touches, like the Island Love syrup made with coconut and ginger, and the Caribbean Chicken Pita-Foldie, which stacks beans and plantains with a green dipping sauce.“Sweet July Cafe is all about fresh, casual meals, so it’s actually been a really fun challenge to find ways to incorporate the same flavor profiles from the slow-cooked, traditional Jamaican dishes I love into something a little lighter,” she told the outlet.Even the desserts carry that same instinct to blend traditions. The cafe's Lava Cookies started as an idea to merge a cookie with a molten lava cake, crispy outside and gooey in the middle, and now come in pistachio, chocolate, and strawberry.Ayesha Curry and Chef Michael Mina keep pushing their partnership furtherThis isn't the first time Curry and Michael Mina have worked together. Their history goes back to International Smoke in San Francisco, and years later, the trust between them has only deepened, giving both of them room to try things that don't follow a standard restaurant playbook.Ayesha sees Southern hospitality as making people feel genuinely welcome, and she puts as much thought into the staff, the lighting, and the playlist as she does the menu itself.Get the latest Sports News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.