Negril, Jamaica – July ‘02 (Part II)
Eating out in Negril
Behind the walls of exclusive resorts there may be talented chef’s working to fuse native Jamaican ingredients and the country’s culinary heritage into a fine dining experience in air-conditioned dining rooms. We chose to focus on traditional Jamaican restaurants where cooks turn out a limited selection of tasty, time-tested dishes.
Air-conditioning in these establishments refers to the occasional breeze from the sea or overhead fans. Décor is basic and televisions common. Dinner is accompanied by the sound of frogs, crickets and toads in the distance. By in large, menu items are stewed, fried or grilled. The stews are usually seasoned with and called curry owing to Jamaica’s British heritage and spices originally brought to Jamaica from another British colony. Alternatively there are dark brown stews. Most common are curried chicken or goat though you sometimes see curried conch or fish. The curries are mild. Hot sauce is usually on tables if you prefer more zip. Fried foods include chicken and conch in a variety of forms including fritters, patties and steaks. One would hope to find the kinder, gentler grilling on more menus but only occasionally there is a grilled fish. Another menu highlight is roasted lobster served with melted butter. Salads and vegetables are few and far between. The common entrée accompaniments are rice and peas – rich rice and dried red bean or pigeon pea pilaf often cooked in coconut milk and a dry shredded cabbage and carrot combination. Plain white rice is sometimes offered.
Fish may be offered escoviched, which in Jamaica usually means an accompaniment of a clear vinegar-based sauce with onions and sweet peppers poured over a fried fish. In other cultures, escoviched is a way of cooking fish with hot vinegar and onion based liquid poured over raw fish and allowed cook while cooling in similar fashion to cerviche. Bread is not typically offered and desserts are perfunctory.
Some Negril restaurants
Negril’s restaurants are found primarily along the beach road and West End road. The higher end restaurants tend to be connected to higher end hotels. Most are available to guests not staying in those hotels. These hotel restaurants offer a somewhat higher standard of décor and service though the food is not necessarily better than the more modest independent restaurants.
At it best, Negril’s restaurant service is accommodating. It was surprising that at the all of the restaurants that we visited the staff rarely smiled or made us feel they were glad that we were there. Service was a job that had to be endured and punctuated by conversations with visiting friends and co-workers. Our friendliest service was on the second of two visits to the ramshackle Jerk Hut mentioned below when we had established the status of regulars.
On our first night we visited the very modest Chicken Lavish. It was not our intended destination. We arrived at Chicken Lavish after first arriving at a closed Hungry Lion. Hungry Lion was billed as specializing in fish and vegetarian foods and popular with Rastafarians who are vegetarians. While nights are marginally cooler than days, the humidity is no less.
At this very slow time of the year for tourists, dinner takes a long time, as most things are prepared completely from scratch. Noah chose a safe fried chicken for his first night while my inaugural dinner was conch curry. The conch curry was dark, earthy, nicely chewy, vaguely exotic and wonderful. Noah’s fried chicken was crisp though pretty greasy. Chicken Lavish is typical of this sort of Negril restaurant. It had about a dozen wooden tables under a roof open to the air all around. Jamaica’s beer is Red Stripe, a perfectly fine brew and the right compliment to most Jamaican foods and weather. Red Stripe also brews Heineken, Dragon ale and Guinness stout. As our house was a short walk from Chicken Lavish, on the walk home we stopped at a pastry stand for a little dessert.
Cabs in Negril outnumber tourists in the summer. They cruise up and down the beach and cliff road. On our first night our cab driver told us it would cost $10 US to get to the restaurant that turned out to be closed and another $5 to return us to Chicken Lavish. What did we know? On subsequent nights we clearly established our price by announcing to the cab driver what we were willing to pay to get to our destination – usually $5 to $6 US.
The Jamaican dollar is roughly 50 to 1 US dollar so a typical fare was $250 - $300 Jamaican. Often the cab driver had a lady friend traveling with him to help pass the time. Alone with a cab driver, imagine being locked in a closest with a telephone marketer. You are captive to their pitch for the offer of additional services. On one occasion a cab driver asked us how serious it was that his condom broke while he was having sex with someone he believed to have AIDS. Jamaica has a reputation for being unsafe. There is some history of violence directed at tourists many years ago and not in Negril. Certainly in neighborhoods of Kingston are unsafe for tourists. Overall, we never felt at risk. The roads are active into the night and while the cab drivers are aggressive, they are not scary.
For our second dinner we visited the outdoor dining room at the Rockhouse Hotel. Rockhouse is an architecturally dramatic high-end hotel. It is built on and into the tall cliffs, which occur as Negril moves west toward the lighthouse that marks the western tip of Jamaica. Our table was set at the edge of the cliff where we could look far down on a lighted blue lagoon with stairs, ladders and sunning and diving platforms. Service was slightly formal with linen napkins and a small basket of soft, commercial rolls served with butter. Noah sampled the local roast lobster after an appetizer of stuffed crab backs. Figuring I could get chicken or fish most anywhere away from Jamaica, I had conch again in the form of generous and moist cakes accompanied by crisp fried bammy triangles. We were both happy with our choices.
And speaking of choices, Choices was another restaurant we visited. Also located on the West End Road, Choices was a smaller version of Chicken Lavish with a television centrally located on a chair set so that it could be viewed by both diners and the two workers – a cook and a server - behind the service counter. Occasionally a local dog wandered over to investigate whether we had anything for him. Choices were fine, if undistinguished.
One evening we set out for Shorty’s, a restaurant noted in a popular guidebook. We negotiated a fare with our cab driver and off we went. Because we didn’t know where Shorty’s was, we got out of the cab where the driver indicated. It turned out that there was no Shorty’s here, or anywhere? We had arrived at a large and elaborate hotel about six weeks from opening. According to the very pretty young women we found in the reception area, the hotel was owned by someone whose nickname was Shorty so perhaps that was what the cabdriver was thinking.
We walked up the road a few hundred feet to dine at Xtabi, a fancy hotel with a dining room located on the cliffs. It had the architectural ambition of Rockhouse without the execution. We requested extra candles so we could read the menu. Dinner for me was a tasty and moist conch cake similar in texture to a crab cake, though I had ordered a conch steak. The kitchen was near enough to the dining room to hear the pounding of the conch – the necessary activity to tenderize the tough mollusk. Maybe they took the pounding too far and had to turn my steak into the cake?
Sweet Spice is a traditional Jamaican restaurant located on the Sheffield Road. It is featured in most Negril guides and came highly recommended by Benji, our driver. Unlike most of the other restaurants we visited, it was fully enclosed though cooled by lots of cross ventilation and ceiling fans. Its ambience was relaxed, but more formal than the open-air Chicken Lavish and Choices. An element of prosperity was the multiple televisions suspended from brackets on the walls rather than sitting on chairs.
We began with delicious creamy textured fish soup with generous cubes of potatoes. Still in search of a conch steak, I ordered it here. What I received was a long, thin strip of pounded conch, lightly breaded and pan-fried. The conch was tender while retaining some chewiness. Noah again went for the lobster.
On our last night we returned to Cosmos, a restaurant we had visited earlier in our stay and probably our favorite. Cosmos is located in about the middle of the seven-mile beach. Diners are seated in a sheltered open-air room with a thatch roof, generous wooden tables and comfortable wooden chairs. There is a long bar along one side where the staff gathers between forays into the dining room. The restaurant was the busiest we visited – mostly with locals. It retains the feel of a traditional Jamaican beach restaurant, but with a more professional approach. Cosmos offered a choice of a house or chef salad. Cucumber, lettuce and tomato were a welcome addition to our nightly dinners. The salad was accompanied with a sweet commercial Russian-style dressing. On Noah’s first visit to Cosmos had tried the goat curry. He mostly enjoyed the dish’s flavor though he had some trouble dealing with the small bones. On his second visit he had a nicely grilled filet of mahi mahi. It was unusual to find grilled fish on the menu of a traditional restaurant. I had some sort of conch preparation on my first visit that I cannot recall and escoviched fish on our last night.
The Jerk Hut and Da Buss
Though jerk can be found throughout the Caribbean and occasionally in the United States, Jamaica is its home. Jerk chicken is the most common, but jerk pork and fish can also be found. The island abounds with roadside jerk stands, tiny restaurants no more than a brightly painted wooden shack with a counter and bench or maybe a few plastic tables that can be occupied by men playing dominoes, a national pastime. To get into the jerk business in Jamaica you need only a 55-gallon steel drum, cut in half, hinged and set on its side as a barbecue. There were several such stands in a dusty parking lot across from Negril’s KFC.
Jerk is made by first “washing” the chicken with fresh limejuice. Jamaican limes are small, round seeded key limes with a flavor slightly less acidic than the larger Persian seedless limes found in the United States. The chicken is then marinated in a nearly dry marinade in which the common elements are the native pimento – we call it allspice – and the fiery Scotch Bonnet pepper. Then the chicken is placed on top of a grid of green pimento wood branches and slowly barbecued over a fire of dried pimento wood. During the barbecue process the chicken is loosely covered by a sheet of corrugated metal with reflects the heat back on to the chicken and reinforces the smoky pimento-wood accent.
Jerk was our preferred lunch. We sampled jerk at the Jerk Hut, which is located near the Hi Lo market and at Da Buss, which is on the beach next to hotel Kayuba. It turns out that the large sign at the Jerk Hut advertising Boston Jerk is not because of a secret jerk recipe from New England. Jamaica’s Boston Bay is home to the jerk tradition. The aptly named Jerk Hut is a roof, counter and hard wooden bench with a sink to wash your hands. How cold your beer is depends on how busy the stand is as everything cold is kept in a coffin freezer. On one visit the beer was nicely cold and on the second is was nearly frozen because the freezer did not get as much open and closing action on the slower day. Our dry-roasted chicken jerk and pork jerk were microwave heated in foam lidded containers and served with ketchup and a very hot Scotch-Bonnet relish.
On our second visit to the Jerk Hut we had become regulars and earned an accompanying knot of festival, deep-fried bread made from corn meal, white flour, a little sugar and baking soda. Da Buss provides a large, open-air dining area bordered by its beachfront bar and large grill with whole chickens slowly cooking atop branches of pimento. The moist, cut-up chicken arrived piping hot with glaze of a fiery barbecue sauce highly flavored with pimento and a delicious order of dark French fried potatoes.
Breakfast at home
Ackee is a Jamaican fruit that grows on tall trees that line roadways and backyards. In its unripe state ackee is poisonous. In its ripe state ackee is the foundation of the classic Jamaican breakfast that we asked Pauline to make for us before we headed to the airport on our last morning. Ackee has a hard outer skin that turns from green to scarlet as it ripens and naturally opens to reveal a protruding black seed. The edible flesh of the ackee surrounds the seed. The raw ackee that we sampled along the road had a texture reminiscent of the flavor and texture of a raw cashew. For breakfast, ackee is sautéed with onion, garlic, tomato and dried, flaked saltfish – usually salt cod. In it’s cooked state ackee takes on a look and texture of scrambled eggs. Our “scrambled ackee” was accompanied by callaloo, a spinach-like, bittersweet leaf of the cassava root with firm stems. The callaloo was also sautéed with some onion, garlic and smaller flakes of the salt cod. Callaloo is the primary ingredient in the principal island soup. Our breakfast was also accompanied by little fried dough dumplings the size of a walnut. Served to us on our long wooden dining table on our porch, our traditional breakfast made a delicious farewell to Jamaica.
The bottom line
Jamaican food is not one of the world’s great cuisine. However, a week of eating in Negril was hardly a hardship. Seeking out local restaurants provided us with a rich connection to Jamaica and coming to understand the elements of Jamaica’s cuisine added greatly to our visit and appreciation for the island and its people.
Previous: Negril Jamaica - July '02 - Part I
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Negril, Jamaica - July '02 - Part II
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