Kingston Parish Food & Traditional Cuisine

Jamaican food is one of the great Caribbean cuisines, built from African technique, indigenous ingredients, and everything the colonial period brought in.

Jerk is the signature: meat rubbed with a paste of scotch bonnet, allspice, thyme and scallion and cooked slowly over pimento wood. The method descends from Maroon cooking in the mountains, developed by people who needed to preserve meat and cook without much smoke.

Ackee, brought from West Africa, is the national fruit and is cooked like scrambled egg with salt cod — a combination that arrived from opposite sides of the Atlantic and became the national dish.

Indian and Chinese indentured labour in the nineteenth century contributed curry goat and a Chinese-Jamaican tradition that is genuinely its own thing.

Ground provisions — yam, breadfruit, green banana, dasheen — accompany most meals, and the fruit is exceptional.

Ackee and saltfish, the national dish: the yellow arils of the ackee fruit sauteed with rehydrated salt cod, onion, tomato, scotch bonnet and thyme, eaten at breakfast with fried dumplings, breadfruit or green banana. The unripe fruit is toxic, which is why it is picked only once the pods open naturally.

Jerk chicken or pork, from a drum grill at the roadside, chopped with a cleaver and served with festival — a slightly sweet fried dumpling — and a beer.

Jamaican patty, a turmeric-yellow flaky pastry filled with spiced beef, chicken or vegetables, eaten standing up at any hour.

Curry goat and oxtail with butter beans, both slow-cooked and both Sunday food.

Escovitch fish, fried whole and topped with pickled onion, carrot and scotch bonnet.

Also: rice and peas cooked in coconut milk; bammy, a cassava flatbread; and sorrel at Christmas.

Coronation Market downtown is the largest in the English-speaking Caribbean and is a genuine working produce market — loud, crowded and best visited with someone who knows it.

Cook shops serve a plate of the day’s stew with rice and peas for very little, and are where most of the city eats lunch.

Jerk centres operate from the late afternoon into the night, often with music, and are as much a social occasion as a meal.

Devon House makes what is widely held to be some of the best ice cream anywhere, with local flavours — soursop, devon stout, rum raisin — and a long queue.

Ital food, the Rastafari vegetarian tradition, cooked without salt or processed ingredients, is available across the city.

Tipping around 10 to 15 per cent where service is not added.

Jamaica grows no wine, but Kingston sits at the centre of two drinks traditions that matter internationally.

Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee is grown on the slopes directly above the city, between roughly 900 and 1,700 metres, in cool, misty conditions that slow the cherries and concentrate them. It is a legally protected designation covering a small defined area, and the result is mild, low in acid, and among the most expensive coffee in the world — the majority of it goes to Japan. Estates including Craighton and Clifton Mount receive visitors for tours and cupping, and buying at origin is both cheaper and better for the growers.

Jamaican rum is a serious category of its own, distinguished by long fermentation and pot distillation that produce the intensely fruity, funky character distillers call hogo. Appleton and Worthy Park are the best-known, overproof white rum is the everyday drink, and rum punch is the standard.

Red Stripe is brewed in the city, and sorrel — hibiscus steeped with ginger and rum — is the Christmas drink.