(BALTIMORE – July 31, 2026) – Ever drive past Island Quizine? You see one in Woodlawn. Then you see one on Liberty Road. Then you find out the owner, Donovan Murphy, is now serving jerk chicken in Montgomery County, too. This is not a game. Island Quizine is about their business.
Count them up: Reisterstown. Pikesville. Woodlawn/Windsor Mill. Milford Mill. Towson. Silver Spring in Montgomery County. Murphy says the count is actually seven stores strong, plus a catering business and a vending business layered on top — and that’s before you even get to the trucks on the road.
Baltimore has produced its share of hustlers who turned a plate of food into an empire, but few have taken it as far — literally — as Donovan Murphy. As the man behind logistics for Island Quizine, the Jamaican restaurant and catering brand with roots on Reisterstown Road, Murphy has spent this summer proving that Baltimore-grown Caribbean flavor can hold its own on some of the biggest stages in the country.
In the span of a few weeks, Island Quizine’s trucks rolled through Essence Festival in New Orleans, the Cincinnati Music Festival, the Detroit African World Festival, Myrtle Beach, Metro Beach, and a catering stop in Pittsburgh — with a world festival appearance in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and a stop in Chicago still ahead. Layer on an annual pre-show run at Essence Festival and a football bowl game every season, and it’s a pace that would break most operations. For Murphy’s team, it’s just the season.
He’s one of the most astute entrepreneurs I’ve ever met. Donovan is the kind of entrepreneur who can make something out of nothing — a visionary, perhaps part of his Sagittarius makeup. He sees the opportunity, does the math, surveys the landscape (sometimes weeks in advance), creates the plan, and then executes with his dynamic, hard-working team until the day is done. Never running out of food. All the way in Kalamazoo. In Milford Mill one day, Detroit the next. Going from brick-and-mortar to catering events has become a significant part of his business, truth be told.
Seven Stores and the Buying Power to Match
Scale is what separates Island Quizine from the average local caterer trying to break into festival work, and Murphy is direct about why it works: buying power. With seven stores plus a substantial catering and vending operation, Island Quizine isn’t a small account for a supplier like Cisco — it’s a priority one.
“It is very important because once you have a partnership — here, Cisco is one of our major suppliers,” Murphy explains. “And with our buying power, having seven stores plus a large catering business and vending, they look at our numbers and treat us accordingly.” He describes the arrangement almost like a contractor agreement, built on relationship as much as revenue. “It has been fruitful,” he says simply.
That relationship is what allows Island Quizine to promise something most road-based caterers can’t: they never run out of food. If a city’s stock runs low, a call to Cisco by a set time in the day gets a truck refilled before service the next morning.
Big Enough for the Big Names
Island Quizine’s road show isn’t just for the crowds. The team has catered for artists including Mary J. Blige, and Murphy says Rick Ross swung by their setup when they were catering in Pittsburgh — with more names, he says, still to come once he tracks down the details. It’s the kind of proof point that separates a neighborhood favorite from a national player — and Murphy is quick to credit the team, not just the brand, for making it happen.
Eighteen-Hour Days and 100-Pound Propane Tanks
Ask what it’s actually like on the ground, and Murphy doesn’t sugarcoat it. Festival days routinely run eighteen hours. The team travels with two to three trucks, including a 16-foot refrigerated box truck, and works within hard limits most people never think about — like the fact that the largest propane tank they’re permitted to travel with is 100 pounds, which shapes exactly how much can be cooked and how often tanks need to be managed throughout a single event.
The operation runs deep: a four-person culinary team, a six-person front-of-house team, a two-person logistics team (Murphy and his assistant), and a dedicated dishwashing crew. Before Island Quizine ever rolls into a new city, Murphy is scouting — sometimes days or weeks ahead — studying opening times, traffic patterns, and the daily flow of the event so the team can plan around it.
“The challenges are your teacher,” Murphy says. Every city brings its own health department rules, its own clientele, and its own tastes — whiting in parts of Virginia, catfish in Florida, salmon in Chicago. Reading a market quickly, and adjusting the menu to match it, is part of the job. So is knowing how much product to bring, and where the backup supply is coming from if a location runs hotter than expected.
“Yesterday Maryland, Tomorrow Another City”
For all the logistics and long hours, Murphy says the payoff is what keeps him doing it. “The best part of traveling is to realize that yesterday you were in Maryland in the brick and mortar, and tomorrow you’re in another city doing the same thing you do in a brick and mortar — and it can be way more profitable and way more challenging, but yet rewarding as well,” he says. “So the reward outweighs any challenge that we come across.”
That mindset — treating every new market as a classroom rather than an obstacle — is a big part of why Island Quizine keeps getting invited back to bigger stages.
New Orleans and the Reggae Pasta Effect
Of all the stops, New Orleans holds a special place for Murphy and the Island Quizine team — anchored by their annual presence at the pre-show for Essence Festival, plus a football bowl game appearance each season. Murphy calls it a great city for culture. It’s also where the brand’s Caribbean identity stands out most. New Orleans is seafood gumbo country — most visitors go there chasing that flavor — and Caribbean food is harder to find the deeper south you travel. That gap is where Island Quizine thrives.
“One of the main reasons why people love our food there is because a lot of people go for the seafood gumbo,” Murphy says. “So when you get a chance to hit them with the Caribbean flavor, that’s actually something you don’t find much there.” Their Reggae pasta, cooked fresh to order rather than pre-made and reheated, draws lines of fifty or more people every single day they’re on-site. Jerk chicken keeps the line moving right behind it, filling a lane that thins out considerably the further south you travel from the Caribbean’s natural footprint on the East Coast.
It’s a reminder that in a region known for its own iconic food culture, there’s still plenty of appetite for something different — done right, and done fresh, order by order.
A Visionary, Jamaican-Born
Donovan Murphy was born in Jamaica, and there’s something in his story that echoes another son of Jamaica who built something out of nothing on American soil: Marcus Garvey, who organized the largest Black organization in world history right here in the United States. Like Garvey, Murphy came to this country speaking English, but fluent English hasn’t always been enough to shield immigrants from the prejudice that can come with an accent. Whatever obstacles Murphy faced along the way, he’s never been the type to dwell on them. He’s a visionary. He puts his mind on something, and he goes and gets it.
Leadership in the Trenches
Ask Murphy what makes Island Quizine’s team run the way it does, and the answer isn’t about recipes or trucks. It’s about leadership. Murphy recalled a moment when one of his team members told him directly: the reason he stays is because Murphy never asks anyone to do something he hasn’t done himself, or wouldn’t do. Whether it’s an eighteen-hour day or the toughest shift of the run, Murphy is in the trenches alongside his team.
“I don’t believe that I’m better than working with anybody else,” Murphy says. “So what I ask them to do, I’ll do the same.”
That ethic, paired with the operational discipline to keep three trucks fed, staffed, and stocked across six or seven cities in a single summer, is what’s turning Island Quizine from a beloved Baltimore-area restaurant into a name recognized on the national festival circuit — one plate of Reggae pasta at a time.
Island Quizine Restaurant and Catering has locations across the Baltimore area and beyond, including Reisterstown, Pikesville, Woodlawn/Windsor Mill, Milford Mill, Towson, and Silver Spring in Montgomery County. Learn more at islandquizine.com.
