Author: Merissa Gerson / Source: Atlas Obscura
The history and even current reality of Martha’s Vineyard, a popular vacation spot off the coast of Massachusetts, is often overlooked or mischaracterized. Celebrities including David Letterman, Meg Ryan, and Jake Gyllenhaal flock to the 20-mile long island, with its idyllic beauty, serene beaches, and honor policy pay-as-you-go farm stands.
Many also associate Martha’s Vineyard with the strong, fraught presence of the Kennedy family who helped it earn its badge as summer isle for white American royalty.It’s not surprising that successful restaurateurs, such as the Jamaican-born, Anguilla-formed, New York-trained Chef Deon Thomas, might set up their eateries on the island. But his current establishment, which is housed inside the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall, contrasts with the mostly white-owned, farm-to-table restaurants across Martha’s Vineyard. Serving New American food with a Caribbean spin, his customers include African-American vacationers and luminaries (who have a history on the island longer than the Kennedy family) and veterans who live in town year-round. In many ways, Deon’s illuminates the true and often hidden stories of the heralded island.
Before opening Deon’s, Thomas, who is also an ordained minister, trained in elite New York kitchens, including a year as chef at 40/40, Jay-Z’s restaurant in New York City and Atlantic City. For a decade he worked as a summer chef in the Hamptons while owning and running multiple restaurants in Anguilla during the winter. He eventually bought and ran a high-end New American restaurant called The Cornerway in Chilmark, a wooded region of Martha’s Vineyard that fills with politicians, celebrities, writers, and lawyers each summer.
After The Cornerway, Thomas opened two other restaurants on Martha’s Vineyard: Deon’s in West Tisbury, which burned down, and Deon’s on Circuit Avenue, the main hub of the large town of Oak Bluffs. When that closed, he opened the current-day Deon’s at the VFW, where he rented the space for its enormous commercial kitchen, transitioning from full-time restaurateur (you can still eat there, on paper plates with plastic forks) to one of the island’s top summer caterers.
“I do big parties,” Thomas says. “I am a premier chef for the African diaspora on the island … White, too, but more the black community, the bourgeoisie of America.” So in addition to the Clintons (“Hillary and Bill”), he says he’s cooked for the Obamas (“Barack and Michelle”) and many black intellectuals such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. (“Skip Gates and all the professors”).
To many outsiders, President Barack and Michelle Obama’s arrival on Martha’s Vineyard, in 2009, might have seemed to signal a change on island, as if they were entering a largely wealthy white space, much as they had when they entered the White House. But the island has long been a popular vacation destination and year-round haven for African-Americans. “They have been here since the 1930s or longer,” says Thomas. “Since the black church brought them here. The underground railroad trail is here.”
Deon’s is located in Oak Bluffs, one of six island towns that was first inhabited by Native Americans from the Wampanoag tribe. When Europeans arrived from England and Portugal (specifically the Azores), enslaved West African laborers came…
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