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Coffee, a company founded by her father, Ali Ghambari, in 1999. The popular local business operates nine cafés and serves coffee roasted by Sumner, Wash.'s Dillanos Coffee Roasters. A love for Dillanos' carefully sourced and expertly roasted coffee is something Laila shares with the Rituals team: Laila used Dillanos coffee to win the United States Barista Championship in 2014, and Rituals has built its island success in large part due to the quality of its coffee. Still, specialty coffee in the Caribbean has a long way to go. Rituals was inspired to bring Laila to Trinidad for this visit and series of barista trainings in an effort to further popularize specialty coffee in this traditionally tea-drinking domain. A guide from Rituals, Sharleen Ortega Lewis, collects Laila at the hotel for a day of café-hopping. This is an opportunity for Laila to learn more about the country's coffee industry, one on the precipice of mainstream popularity. In a country where most people consume instant coffee, Rituals has played a major role in demonstrating the potential for coffee beyond Nescafé. Founded by Mario Sabga-Aboud in 2003, Rituals opened 12 shops in its first year due to demand. In the decade-plus since, the chain has enjoyed steady growth, and now operates 54 coffee shops in this small country of just 1.2 million peo- ple. (Throughout the Caribbean, Rituals operates 68 shops.) Due to the lack of any sizable competitor, the press often describes Rituals as Trinidad's Starbucks. This perspective, however, lacks nuance. On her trip, Laila sees how the company's young baristas, committed to their craft, have the potential to create a homegrown coffee culture skilled enough to compete on a global level. Rituals gives Laila the red-carpet treatment at many of the loca- tions she sees. In the first café she visits, a sign reading "2014 U.S. Barista Champion Visits Rituals Coffee House" adorns the large front wall of the building. She soon discovers every Rituals location in the area has the same sign. They have even displayed her picture on a large banner draped outside the corporate office. As she walks into each café, baristas timidly smile, immediately recognizing her. Customers also glance in her direction. Not expecting this level of exposure, Laila is a little taken aback: "It's weird seeing your face in so many cafés." While the country's coffee industry may be in its infancy compared with more developed markets, Laila sees much potential for further growth. Her experiences working in Iran—a country that just two years ago lacked any formal barista culture—inform her perspective. Her help cultivating and supporting the coffee community there has been crucial to the establishment of Iran's barista guild, which has registered hundreds of members in the past year and hosted its first national competition. In Trinidad, Laila sees many parallels with Iran, primarily a growing excitement among local baristas for their craft. Laila spends much of the trip making appearances on national TV shows and giving interviews with newspapers and magazines. This means early morning wake-up calls and rushing from appointment to appointment. "I don't think everyone expected I would be so energet- ic and well-spoken on camera," she says, laughing. While she's been interviewed on TV before, she is surprised by how interested journal- ists were in her trip. "They really did their research, and they really seemed excited about the growing coffee industry." The length of her stay limits the amount of time she spends on educational activities. "As a coffee educator, I was really hoping to do more training with the baristas," she admits. But on her fourth day, Laila conducts workshops at Rituals' headquarters, giving her the chance to make meaningful connections with the company's employees. Here, in front of a room of around 50 baristas, she is truly in her 38 barista magazine