Jamaica on a plate
Some of the best seafood in the Caribbean is served from a beach hut - no jacket and tie required
Decca Aitkenhead
Saturday January 21, 2006
The Guardian
Make it snappy ... Blackie at Little Ochie.
Little Ochie must be one of the few restaurants in the world where diners schedule their visits according to the moon. It sits on the beach in Alligator Pond, a remote village still untouched by tourism in the south of Jamaica, and for visitors staying along the coast in Treasure Beach it is best reached by boat. At sunset, a fisherman will collect you and take you on a bumpy ride across dark waves, the silvery light of a full moon picking out the skyline of the desolate coastline. After nearly an hour, in the distance a glow begins to twinkle on the shore. Quite suddenly the boat runs aground, pitched on to the beach by the surf, more or less depositing you at your table.
Evrol Christian - known as Blackie - opened Little Ochie (00876 965 4449, littleochie.com) in 1989 as a tiny restaurant serving breakfast for fishermen on their way out to sea. It now seats 400, most in old wooden canoes built on stilts on the sand, thatched with palm fronds and painted Rasta colours - a deceptively rustic aesthetic, for this is one of the most celebrated fish restaurants in the Caribbean.
"You'll never come to Little Ochie and be served on a white tablecloth because that's not our style," says Blackie. "Over the years people hear about the place, and so they come in suit and tie, and when they reach here they're a bit surprised. But our ambience matches the food we serve."
To order your meal, you head up the beach to a spartan wooden building housing a makeshift bar, an old-fashioned cashier's booth, and several massive chest fridges stocked with that day's catch - crab, conch, shrimp, lobster, sea puss (octopus), snapper, turbot, doctor fish, parrot fish, mullet, moon shine, kingfish. You scoop your selection into a battered old pan, a chef hangs it on scales, and you pay for your dinner by the pound. "It's an unusual idea," admits Blackie, "but I think doing it by weight is more appropriate, because the customer gets the true value."
Then you tell the chefs how you want it cooked. "The beauty about Little Ochie is you could come here 10 different times and taste 10 different things," he explains. Lobster can be grilled on an open fire of pimento wood or curried, peppered, fried in garlic, boiled or steamed. Fish can be roasted or jerked - with a fiery home-made seasoning of dried escallion, thyme and a touch of vinegar - or come as "brown stew", simmered until tender in a vinegar and tomato sauce with cayenne pepper and okra. Each order is cooked in a separate pan - vast skillets holding up to 40 fish - and everything is served with either bammy, a kind of fried cassava bread, or with festival, a deep-fried Jamaican dumpling made with cornmeal. Cups of fish tea are served while you wait, flavoured with pumpkin, yam and banana.
Like many Jamaican chefs, Blackie learned to cook from his parents, and some of the island's best restaurants are simple family-run affairs. For fine dining in Kingston, there is Strawberry Hill (Irish Town, Kingston , +944 8400), an exclusive colonial-style hotel high in the Blue Mountains, with views over the city, or Norma's on the Terrace (26 Hope Road, +968 5488), down town in historic Devon House, voted one of Condé Nast Traveller's top 60 new restaurants in 2000. But Blackie prefers Redbones (21 Braemar Ave, +978 6091), an intimate blues cafe where Kingston's fashionable crowd gather in the early evening for live jazz and to enjoy classic Caribbean cooking - callaloo strudel, smoked marlin salad, jerked chicken kebabs with guava dip.
When I ask Blackie where he eats in the big tourist resorts of Montego Bay and Ocho Rios, he just looks politely blank. "Um, I'd rather just catch a piece of jerk chicken and go."
Jamaicans are generally unimpressed by the international hotel chains' elaborate pastiche of Caribbean cuisine - but visitors can get the real thing in Negril, Blackie says, if they go to Cosmo's (Negril Beach, +957 4330). Like Little Ochie, its humble appearance belies the quality of the food, and as well as every kind of seafood Cosmo serves red pea soup, goat curry, oxtail stew, brown chicken stew, rice and peas.
These are the ubiquitous staples of Jamaican food, and the cuisine has sometimes been accused of lacking sophistication. Blackie laughs at the suggestion. "But we could use five items and prepare them 60 different ways," he points out firmly with a smile. "So I wouldn't say there's not much variety."
