Pity those stiff-necked fools who make definitive statements about a city as sprawling, disparate, and contradictory as L.A.
There’s no good Mexican food on the Westside, they say. We beg to differ. People in L.A. are “fake,” they cry. Yep, all 10 million of us, fake as a Walk of Fame Mickey Mouse. "Beat L.A.," many chants, but as a certain team from San Diego found out last week. It's not that easy.
Jamaican food is non-existent in L.A., they dare to whisper… ignorant to L.A.’s jackpot of patty wagons, patty daddys, Hungry Joe’s, roving pop-ups, celebrity-parent-owned jerk-burger trucks, Belizean-Jamaican spots, farmers market-led jerk pop-ups and celebrated Downtown and venerated Leimert Park restaurants, plus ranking Valley, Mid-City, Culver City, Arlington Heights, Palmdale, South Central, SGV, and Inglewood and Inglewood-adjacent restaurants brown-stewing, goat-currying, and jerking it in a neighborhood near you.
Still, the pursuit of perfect jerk chicken can be a deeply personal endeavor; an endless exercise in chasing a dragon that wriggles faintly between your taste buds and your gustatory cortex. This is particularly true if you seek jerk traditionally enshrouded in the smoke of pimento branches or pine for the taste of your first bite amid entire galaxies of recipe interpretations.
Our own formative jerk memories were enthroned at a young age in Jamaica’s Saint Ann’s Parish in the late 1980s, when meat and gas were as much a tourist privilege as beach access would soon be on the island’s tourist-heavy northern coast.
El Africano was a jerk center spread amongst a few wooden lean-tos on a curve of white sand near Runaway Bay, where spatchcocked chickens were traditionally smoked under a corrugated steel shield over lengths of pimento (aka allspice) branches laid over the grill. The chicken was then chopped into quarters on a tree stump by a lean dread.
The scotch bonnet heat on this blackened, piquant poultry nearly liquified our 11-year-old tongue, but we were unable to stop gnashing on it down until the sheared bones landed in the provided bucket. It was as soul-satisfying as the pungent, light green ganja sold from the shed on El Africano’s side. Better than that.
Somebody somewhere in L.A. is most likely slow-cooking whole jerk chickens like this; grilling it for some craggy char and smoking it over pimento for the intense flavor, possibly in an old metal barrel, with some aromatic barrier between the herb, nutmeg, sugar, all-spice berry, and chile-saturated meat and the burning grillwork.
We can only hope there’s a conduit somewhere for pimento wood and true tams of scotch bonnets, similar to the travelers you see on a flight from Oaxaca delicately fitting a stack of real tlayudas into the overhead bin for the folks back home.
These fantasies may keep us up at night, but jerk chicken doesn’t necessarily have to be made this way to taste good. A simple heat source and a great marinade can still work wonders. And in our years of traveling in Jamaica, we’ve had just as many dry, middling, traditionally-made jerk as we’ve had mediocre tacos in and around L.A.
While some of the very best jerk chicken we’ve tasted was bound in foil and cooked in an oven by a white Burning Man-devotee introduced to us by our late friend Ras Leon Burke, leader of Santa Barbara’s Underground Roots Syndicate.
Local regulations and the high prices of HVAC systems inhibit the use of smokers and smoldering charcoal inside most restaurants. So, when it comes to jerk in L.A., gas-grilled jerk chicken rules the roost. But as long as we have it in some form, we feel lucky to be alive in Los Angeles.
Jerk Stop, a new restaurant at Bundy and Santa Monica Boulevard, recently opened in the Westside neighborhood of Sawtelle. It is in a second-story space ruled for 25 years by All India Cafe, whose owners are now focused on their Melrose restaurant, Roots Indian Bistro. About a block west, signage for Jerk Chicken Cafe has also risen, portending a monumental westside jerk-battle to come.
It’s no small thing to find a type of food you love suddenly materialize in your neighborhood like a gift from the gods. The last time there was a Jamaican restaurant even close to here was at Port Royal Cafe, an adorable yellow house that was often wide open to the street, but where you could sit for an hour without anyone serving you or even appearing.
You’ll find Jerk Stop by tuning your ears for blasts of Beres Hammond, Demarco, and Bob, which pound out of a sole speaker placed outside of the restaurant like a Saint Catherine carnival barker, which are different from the tunes that play from a TV inside for customers nearly as loudly.
Above the long counter at its core, Jerk Stop boasts a large ites, green, and gold-toned menu of Jamaican eats. And unlike many Caribbean restaurants we’ve stopped at, from Bull Bay to Brownsville, we’re yet to be told they don’t have something in stock on any particular day.
There’s chicken, served fried, curried, or in a traditional brown stew. They’ve got escovitch and steamed snapper, jerk salmon and shrimp, and curry lobster. You can get ackee-and-saltfish, Jamaica’s national dish, placing your order beside a hot case of yellow beef patties and coco bread, radiating across the room from a fridge stacked with Ting and Irish moss. A handwritten note taped to the counter promises housemade lemonade, pineapple-and-ginger, and sorrel-and-ginger juice.
Jerk Stop’s jerk chicken is grilled and spread with an obsidian sauce that wouldn’t look out of place on a thigh and leg served beside a temple-shaped cone of rice at one of the neighborhood's reigning Oaxacan restaurants. The chicken is tender, the flavors rich, and our companions, along with a sizable handful of Yelpers, give it the thumbs up.
It’s not really the jerk chicken we’ve long been seeking in the states, though. The sauce it relies on for jerk flavor clinging too closely to a southern U.S. barbecue sauce to reach the personal zenith of slow-cooked flavor our dreams are made of. Though a bottle of Blue Mountain scotch bonnet sauce helps provide the missing heat we hoped to find in the dish itself.
Firing more precisely on our nostalgic neurons is the restaurant’s curry goat, a dish that takes its inspiration from the nation’s third largest ethnic population, descendants of South Asian immigrants brought over as a labor force by the British in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Served on the bone, the goat meat is smoky and stained red inside beneath a creamy thick coat of green curry, which emits the flavors of allspice, chiles, sweet onion, ginger, and something close to anise. The lean goat strikes a nice balance between tender and meaty, providing an enduring bite. Served with rice and peas (beans), the bready dumpling known as festival, plantain, and greens, its flavors recall a favorite dish we compulsorily order from Brooklyn to Jamaica.
Then there are the oxtails; the divine oxtails, which have been broken down to a beefy ambrosia.
A considerably easier dish to prepare and please with than laboriously-smoked, critically-scrutinized chicken or lean, curried kid, these long-stewed sections of cow tail are delicious; slutty even, falling from the bone with a susu-susu into a puddle of liquid collagen and tallow.
The dark marinade bears labyrinthine depth, emanating notes of nutmeg, sugar, garlic, all-spice, and Worcestershire-level umami with each bite. You will know bliss, however briefly.
The accompanying festival and rice-and-peas (beans) make the perfect sponges for the shimmering gravy that pools just beneath these oxtails, which so far are the bantam dish here, though just one example of so many great oxtails served around L.A.’s Caribbean restaurants.
In the end, though one may stay on the chase, you seldom need a letter-perfect version of a dish like jerk chicken to be happy. As long as you can appreciate a peaceful moment in the day with a cold bottle of Ting, some dancehall tunes, hearty and delicious Jamaican food, and a great companion to enjoy them with. Along with the fact that your neighborhood even has a Jamaican restaurant in the first place, maybe even with another on the way.
Until we find the chef or friend out there dedicating their lives to smoking their chicken over pimento branches and chopping it on an old stump, we continue to revel in the eternal search, amid the endless options we have to eat so well in this awesome city.
One that has patty wagons, patty daddys, Hungry Joe’s, roving pop-ups, celebrity-parent-owned jerk-burger trucks, Belizean-Jamaican spots, farmers market-led jerk pop-ups… and so much more.
Jerk Stop ~ 12113 Santa Monica Blvd. Ste. 205 Los Angeles, CA 90025
