Photograph by Catherine Grace
You can hear the joy in Leo Morgan’s voice when he talks about his Jamaican food truck Island Frydays. More importantly, you can taste it in the care he and his chefs take when making each dish. It extends to his community, showing up in the way he makes sure no one goes hungry. So when he closed his Corryville restaurant last December, you may have noticed a little joy left with him. But lucky for us, Morgan has decided to give Cincinnati another chance.
Thanks to patrons who kept in touch and outreach led by Emmanuel Karikari, CEO of the College Hill Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation (CHCURC), plans are in the works to reopen Island Frydays in brick-and-mortar form in College Hill next year. It’s a homecoming of sorts for someone who spent nearly 16 years feeding the city before his departure last year.
Morgan arrived in the Queen City in 2005 on a football scholarship at the University of Cincinnati. Like a lot of college students, he found himself wondering what to do with the rest of his life after graduation.
In addition to his day job at a bank, he decided to make all Fridays on campus “Island Frydays.” He cooked the Caribbean food of his youth on a sidewalk grill at his apartment and sold it to teammates and neighbors. Hundreds of people stood in line for the makeshift pop-up shop every week for the first three weeks. By the fourth week, Morgan found his original location on Short Vine.
Photograph by Catherine Grace
The brightly painted yellow-and-green brick building saw its fair share of well-known patrons, including rapper Rick Ross, visiting NFL teams, and Guy Fieri, who brought his Food Network show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives on location in 2014. The restaurant went on to appear on three different Triple D episodes, catapulting Island Frydays to even greater popularity, with a line forming out the door starting at 11 a.m. most days.
Ironically, it was this intense demand that triggered the restaurant’s slow demise. The infrastructure couldn’t keep up. “I found myself having to do a lot of structural work to the building [as a renter] and it was tapping into my profits,” Morgan recalls. “It was not made for the type of pressure we were bringing to it.”
While he was struggling to keep Island Frydays open, Morgan was also experimenting with the idea of a food trailer as a way to keep feeding his fans. Based on prior success at Taste of Cincinnati, he figured he could be successful attending all of the larger local functions and festivals. “My idea was to use the building on Short Vine as a mothership of sorts and pull up and load the trailer and go wherever I wanted,” he says.
In late 2019, Morgan took a trip to visit family in Lakeland, Florida, while his trailer was being finished. Once it was completed and his food license approved, he decided to stay in Florida and start a catering company, while leaving his head chef to manage the carry-out window back at Island Frydays. (As luck would have it, he’d changed the restaurant to carry-out-only right before COVID hit, which helped it remain open through the pandemic.)
Photograph by Catherine Grace
Despite the success of the pick-up window, the five years he spent catering in Florida and driving back and forth to Cincinnati to make sure both businesses were running well, plus the upkeep of the rented space, took its toll.
Morgan didn’t want to keep pouring more money into a building that wasn’t his and decided to stay put in Florida, ultimately shuttering the Corryville spot in 2024. However, out of sight didn’t translate to out of mind.
“The phones never stopped ringing, and the e-mails never stopped coming,” he says. “Every day I was in Florida I always knew [Cincinnati] was my foundation.”
It was CHCURC’s Karikari who finally convinced Morgan to come back to town. In January, Karikari reached out on Instagram, and the two started discussing the challenges of running a restaurant, leading to months of conversations. “[I] told him we have something great going on in College Hill and he’d be an asset to the community as he’s loved by many, many people,” he says.
Eventually he convinced Morgan to bring his trailer to town in May for a 10-day pop-up shop that coincided with a College Hill event. “From the day we opened the traffic was non-stop,” Morgan recalls. “People said they’d never seen the plaza packed like that before—constantly crowded for days, two-hour waits in the rain, no complaints. Afterward, I went back to Florida, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I missed the support and my friends and family and people that love me, so I decided to come back, and it’s been beautiful.”
Photograph by Catherine Grace
Now, the Island Frydays food truck is posted up at the College Hill Plaza on Fridays and Saturdays, with other days reserved for its catering business and special events.
During negotiations, Morgan asked Karikari the most important question of all: What do you like about my food?
“My wife worked at UC, and she’d pick up Island Frydays for dinner,” says Karikari. “A lot of the menu items are the same as we have in [my home country] Ghana, so I talked about his food and how I can relate to it. It’s also his sense of community—the way he uses food to build community that also attracted me to him. I’ve seen him give the unhoused a whole plate. You want those people around. It’s more than his food. It’s the impact [he’ll have] on this community for many, many years to come.”
The two are in the process of finalizing Morgan’s new commercial space, which he plans to open in 2026. “I love Cincinnati,” Morgan says. “And I believe Cincinnati loves us, too.”
Island Frydays, 5833 Hamilton Ave., College Hill, (513) 246-4182
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