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.