For this, our inaugural Member Spotlight piece, deciding on a title was a real chore, as I found myself constantly wavering between my favorite, Ryan Lalchan Returns Home - Sort Of, as opposed to a few others that didn’t nearly tickle my fancy as much.

And I wavered because I felt the story of how Ryan ended up back in Tobago, was too much like a case of destiny to not acknowledge right up front. And so it should come as no surprise that we start his story right here… in Tobago.

In 1993, a 20-year-old Ryan Lalchan, the current owner of Il Portico, the pizzeria, made his debut in the tourism world as the receivables clerk in the accounting department of what was then called, Rex Turtle Beach, one of Tobago’s largest players in the hotel arena.

During the stint with “Rex”, which lasted three years, he fell in love with what was, at the time, a quiet and relatively easy-going island lifestyle.

In 1996, he’d accepted a job as Residence Manager with Ambassador Hotel in St James, and had again moved on by 1999 to become front office manager for Crowne Plaza; a move he attributed to his desire to experience working for an international brand.

From 2000 to 2015, he worked for Royal Caribbean, starting off as a front desk agent, till he was eventually promoted to guest services manager in 2004. It was not long after attaining his new position that he started envisioning himself as a hotel director.

However, in order to become one, you had to have had experiences in housekeeping, food & beverage, maintenance etc. And it is in his choice of where he chose to be trained in food and beverage that the seed was planted for the position he now finds himself in. . . the proud owner of his own pizzeria.

On every Royal Caribbean ship, there were restaurants. And on some ships, there were specialty restaurants. On the ship Ryan worked on, there was a specialty Italian restaurant called, Porto Fino.

And it was this restaurant he chose to work with closely to gain his food and beverage experience. And he did so because at the time, he’d already had a love for pizzas, pastas and the Italian dessert, tiramisu.

As fate would have it, he was eventually offered a position as a traveling guest services manager, which he felt more suited what he really wanted to do, which was to see the world.

It was a job that involved going to different ports and checking on the services provided to ensure they were in keeping with Royal Caribbean’s standards. It just so happened that many of the ports visited were Italian, and, of course, when Ryan got hungry during the day, he would feast on as many types and as many kinds of Italian cuisine as he could.

He eventually left RC in 2015, worked for two other foreign entities and landed back in Tobago at Le Grande Courland from 2018 to 2019 as the Operations Manager. He left for another international outfit in 2019 till it all came crashing down in 2020 as the cruise ship industry came to an almost grinding halt due to COVID.

Ryan was let go and decided to make his way back home to Trinidad to give himself time to reset and review his life, before taking up the next adventure. It wasn’t long after, that food beckoned him once again. Though this time it came in the form of a food truck that sold fast food at the Eddie Hart grounds at nights in Tacarigua.

Things were not all hunky dory in the beginning though, as travel was still slow. But 2022 was pretty good to him, particularly during the July/August period of that year.

For Ryan, this was validation enough to stay the course, especially after being told by the previous owner that he had never seen that kind of lift in that same period.

For Ryan, this was validation enough to stay the course, especially after being told by the previous owner that he had never seen that kind of lift in that same period.

Earlier in that same year, not even six months into his ownership, Ryan had felt the urge to become a more complete restaurant, and so he brought someone in to do pastas around March of 2022.

The response was pretty good then and has sustained itself even till today, where pastas have become the primary draw for many of those who go to IL Portico. Of course, if you ask Ryan, he’s still say his restaurant is a pizzeria, though he admits to being happy with the variety.

But Lalchan isn’t contented with being the purveyor of pizza and pasta, as is clear by the recently concluded Tobago Flavours, held from September 23rd to 29th.

It was an event he created to showcase the different restaurants and their culinary skills as they create food from only Tobago-based products, as much as is humanly possible. It was well received, and from all accounts, it’s well on its way to becoming a staple of the culinary event landscape on the island.

For this writer, it is clear that Ryan Lalchan's interests in tourism lie much further beyond the doors of his restaurant. So it will be interesting to see what he comes up with in the future, as someone who has returned to put his stamp on the local industry he literally got his start in.