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Local Eating in Jamaica

A profile of Jam-Asian cooking, a new culinary style that combines local Jamaican flavours and traditional Asian dishes

It's a long, zigzagging float down river to Miss Betty’s Riverside Canteen (876-389-8826) at the base of the Blue Mountains on Jamaica’s northeast coast. To get there, you need to buy a ride down the brawny Rio Grande aboard a bamboo raft, steered by a barefoot captain with a long pole. The alternative is a 40-minute trek on the “ankle express” through thick brush, which is how entrepreneurial cook Miss Betty Wilson and her daughter, Miss Wissy, have come since 1979, lugging their pots and pans to the same sandbank a few days every week.

“The rafting was getting popular with the American tourists, so I started boiling corn along the riverside,” says Miss Betty. “They liked it, so I brought one chicken, then two.”

In no time, Miss Betty’s down-home meals became the destination rather than a stopover. The meal choice has expanded as well. But the chicken fricassee, curried goat with rice, salt fish and ackee (Jamaica’s delicate and fleshy national fruit), mackerel rundown, steamed callaloo (similar to spinach), fire-roasted breadfruit and the much-loved river shrimp pepperpot soup are all still cooked over an open fire. Now tourists need to call ahead to book lunch with Miss Wissy.

Award-winning chef, cookbook author and restaurateur Walter Staib got wind of this riverside secret in the late 1980s. He hitched a raft to Miss Betty’s sandbank, threw on his apron and cooked alongside her, learning by rote the century-old recipes, or so the story goes.

This bush-style cooking was exactly the type of off-road epicurean exploration that Staib, the Sandals/Beaches resort chain’s culinary ambassador since 1992, had been looking for. Staib’s indoctrination had been earned inside jerk huts, local vegetable markets, spice orchards and coffee and rum plantations.

At Billy’s Grassy Park, a roadside shack with an open coal pit (876-366-4182) in Middle Quarters, South Jamaica, Staib was drawn to the spicy pepper shrimp that Bilroy Kerr had mastered over 14 years of cooking for the locals. At Little Ochie Seafood Restaurant (876-610-6566) in the rural fishing village of Alligator Pond, it was roasted turbot, curried conch and lobster, jerk crab and owner Evrol Christian’s specialty: escoveitch fried fish (made with a spicy vinegar marinade).

Staib’s passion for local cooking methodologies has greatly influenced his cuisine, and it’s reflected in the menus at the 16 Caribbean properties where he personally oversees more than 100 restaurants.

“I serve Miss Betty’s pepperpot soup in a half coconut. Salt fish and scrambled ackee, jerk chicken, boiled bananas and pepper steak are at every Sandals buffet,” says Staib. “And Bilroy’s shrimp has been on the menu for decades.”

It’s not hard to eat regionally in Jamaica, where nearly everything grows. Sandals works closely with neighbouring farmers, getting around 80 per cent of its produce locally, and dedicates at least one restaurant per resort to local cuisine.

“Not only have guests become interested in eating local foods, but [they] are keen to try local dishes more than ever before,” says Staib.

And in Jamaica, local staples are perhaps more international than you might think. “You’ve got to go back a bit in history to understand the Jamaican diet,” says Staib. “Every culture that came here brought their own food, from the Chinese to the West Africans, the British to the Indians and the Palestinians to the Spanish.”

For Staib, the tastiest marriage by far is between the Chinese and Jamaicans. They arrived as indentured workers in 1854, and today there are more than 70,000 Chinese-Jamaicans. Chinese culture has been largely preserved through cuisine, only blended with some local spice. Think scotch bonnet peppers in soya sauce, or jerk pork in chow mein.

“There is a real back and forth in ingredients and cooking styles, and so much to play with in terms of colour, flavours and plating,” says Staib.

Staib’s name for this delicious hybrid? Jam-Asian. He’s been experimenting with the concept for a decade at special dinners for returning guests. Their response has been enthusiastic enough that Sandals opened its first restaurant dedicated exclusively to Jam-Asian cuisine in August. Seville, the upscale dining room at Beaches Negril, scrapped its West Indies/European menu in favour of grilled chicken with coconut sauce and vegetable rice and jerk-seared smoked pork chops with hoisin sauce and guaza glaze.

Again, Staib went straight to the source for edification. “Jamaicans don’t really partake much in restaurant culture,” he says. “The best meals are cooked in the home.” So he got himself invited to dinner with seasoned hostess Beverly Rousseau, wife of Jamaican hotelier Peter Rousseau. “She laid out easily 15 spectacular dishes; her version of dim sum with a kick.”

Staib says everything on the Seville menu was first tasted in Rousseau’s kitchen. “Her best dish was what I later called Portland Junction [after the tract connecting Kingston to the North Coast],” he says. “I served it to the mayor of Chongqing in China, along with Miss Betty’s pepperpot soup. He loved it! Nowhere else in the world can you find those combinations!”

Except now at Sandals. Staib has sought out the best eats in Jamaica—most without a street address—and replicated the recipes in his kitchen. And his efforts to promote Jamaican cuisine have won him an induction into the Caribbean Culinary Hall of Fame, substantiating his declaration that “white men can jerk.”

Rafting the Rio Grande