Watch how they jerk food in Jamaica

Here's a link to a YouTube video made by the Washington Times at Scotchie's, the jerk centre in Coral Gardens, near Montego Bay, Jamaica. (See previous post, "Hit the road for good food in Jamaica.")

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrFFDub93eU

Hit the road for good food in Jamaica

You'll find some of the best food on the island of Jamaica at the side of the road.

Just look for the phrase "jerk centre," an informal, open-air eating place where chicken and pork are rubbed with a spicy mix, then smoked over wood and charcoal before being chopped into bite-size pieces. Yam, sweet potato, bread fruit and other side dishes usually are available.

Last week, on the way back from a tour of reggae great Bob Marley's birthplace and tomb, our driver stopped at the Ultimate Jerk Centre in Discovery Bay, on the island's north coast. I bought a half-pound of jerk pork for $500 Jamaican dollars (about $5.85 U.S.). My wife bought two pounds of jerk pork for herself and her large family.

I asked the cashier about the pork we had ordered and she said it was raised locally. She even described the animal's diet.

I ate my food back in the room at the RIU Montego Bay Hotel and washed it down with two bottles of Red Stripe beer, the air conditioner going full tilt, the ceiling fan spinning and the door open wide to my beachfront balcony. The meat was moist, smokey and delicious, with just a little fat or bone to contend with.

Scotchie's is the jerk centre near Montego Bay where I first tried jerk chicken in 2001, declaring it "the best chicken in the world." I even stopped there on the way to the airport for a last meal of jerk chicken on the plane. Last week, my wife and me had jerk pork and steamed fish and noticed how Scotchie's had grown into a place with a full bar and lots of seating under thatched shelters.

The pork was great. The snapper fillet had been wrapped in aluminum foil with sliced okra, onion and tomato before steaming. The fish was juicy and perfectly cooked. We shared a sweet potato and drank Red Stripe.

Good supermarket buys

Today through Saturday, ShopRite supermarkets are knocking down the price of free-range Australian beef tenderloin to $3.99 a pound with the Price Club Card. It's sold under the Nature's Reserve label.

The whole tenderloin is shrink-wrapped, but there is usually a lot of blood and you'll have to trim some fat. But you'll get a dozen or more small steaks and, sliced thin, some Korean-style barbecue meat. The meat, raised without antibiotics or hormones, is chewy and has a nice beefy taste.

Live lobsters are $4.99 a pound at ShopRite with the club card.

My wife picked up a seedless watermelon this week at Costco in Hackensack for $4.99. The next day, Tuesday, I shopped at H Mart in Little Ferry, where they were going for $3.99 each.

RIU hotel downplays Jamaican food

Despite all the variety in the buffets at the RIU Montego Bay Hotel in Jamaica, you have to search for the few Jamaican dishes offered each day and hope the cooks haven't botched them.

I spent six nights there, but the national dish, ackee and saltfish, was serve only once and turned out to be way too salty. The genius of this breakfast is the contrast between the soft-but-not-sweet ackee fruit and the salted fish bits, accented with the hot Scotch bonnet pepper. It is usually served with bland boiled green bananas or dumplings (boiled dough).

The Jamaican food usually was placed by itself at the back of the hotel's large Rose Hall Restaurant dining room and some guests couldn't find it. Jamaican cooking shows strong African and Asian Indian influences.

Brown stew chicken appeared two or three days in a row, and I wondered if it was the same food served over and over. My wife had some curry goat, which she liked, though I never saw it again. But the extraordinary steamed fish with okra or fiery escovitch fish (whole fish pan or deep fried and served with hot peppers) never appeared. And where were the Jamaican patties -- the island's empanadas, filled with beef, chicken, vegetables or fish?

Jerk chicken and pork, two of the most beloved dishes on the island, weren't served in the restaurants at all, but were offered daily at a beach kiosk. But jerk, which is a rub of several spices and hot pepper, wasn't used. The roasted poultry and meat were served with a mild or a so-called spicy jerk sauce.

Don't check into a smokers' paradise

If you are a reformed smoker or don't smoke at all, stay away from the RIU Montego Bay Hotel on the island of Jamaica, an all-inclusive hotel that allows smoking in guest rooms, at tables on terraces outside restaurants and just about everyplace else except for the dining rooms themselves.

Continental Airlines Vacations, which sold me a hotel-air package, never informed me the hotel allows smoking in all of its nearly 700 rooms.

When I checked in Aug. 24, I was given Room 5218, which reeked of smoke despite the application of a cosmetic spray. Coincidentally, I caught a cold in the plane on the way down and by the morning of my second day, I was coughing and wheezing, and my chest was congested, aggravating my chronic bronchitis. (I quit smoking more than 25 years ago.)

To make matters worse, each employee I spoke to recited a different version of the hotel's smoking policy. On my first day, I called the hotel operator and told him I didn't know there were smoking and non-smoking rooms, and could I get a non-smoking room. He insisted all rooms were non-smoking. I asked about the two ashtrays in the room; he said they must have been brought by guests.

In fact, housekeeping supplies ashtrays to every room, because the managers feel they can't enforce a no-smoking policy. Yet, the hotel refuses to set aside any no-smoking rooms, as do many hotels in the United States, or designate part of the terrace outside restaurants for non-smokers.

I was up at 4 a.m. Tuesday, gagging on the heavy smell of smoke, and went down to the lobby. The overnight clerk said, of course, the hotel has no-smoking rooms and he would get me one in the morning. I saw the hotel nurse at 7 a.m. and I was finally moved to Room 5121 at 3 that afternoon, but it was just another room with a faint smell of smoke, yet far more tolerable than the original.

If I had known the RIU Montego Bay Hotel was a smokers' paradise, I would have stayed elsewhere. This is one Spanish hotel company that is out of touch with the health concerns of many of its guests and refuses to yield to complaints. For all my trouble, the staff delivered a free fruit-and-cheese platter to my room one night. Big deal.

The all-inclusive hotel's food trap

I just returned from six nights at an all-inclusive hotel on the beautiful island of Jamaica and I have a lot to say about the food and service.

All meals, juices, soft drinks, beer and liquor are included in the room rate at the RIU Montego Bay Hotel, but the waiters and bartenders don't pour champagne or cognac, and there is no free-range beef or Caribbean lobster on the menu. Meals are served buffet style in four restaurants, two of which require reservations.

RIU is a Spanish hotel company with three resorts in Jamaica. The Montego Bay hotel has nearly 700 rooms. So what's the problem? If you want to explore the island, you'll invariably miss meals you have paid for. If you want to try some of Jamaica's superb jerk chicken, pork or fish, you'll have to go to a nearby jerk centre, because what passes for jerk at the hotel's beach kiosk makes you feel like a jerk for eating it.

Some of the hotel food is very good: marinated white tuna sashimi was a stand-out in the Asian fusion restaurant; intensely sweet mango showed up a number of times, perfect in the morning on your fruit plate or in the evening with cheese and red wine; breakfast always included several freshly blended fruit juices, a big block of goat cheese and such Jamaican dishes as callaloo, a collard-like green sauteed with onions and tomato. In the Rose Hall Restaurant, the carvery offered Jamaican-raised turkey with juicy dark meat.

But there were lots of poorly executed dishes: ackee and saltfish, the breakfast often called the Jamaican national dish, was too salty because the cod hadn't been boiled long enough; cassava in garlic sauce (yuca con mojo) is best left to the Cubans. One night in the Italian specialty restaurant, Little Italy, I ordered risotto with prawns in a seafood sauce. The rice was undercooked and crunched in my mouth and the plate held shrimp, not prawns, and mussels. Most fish served was farmed and imported; I had local fish at only one meal.

Want an espresso? It comes out of a Nescafe machine and tastes horrible. This from a European hotel company that hosts espresso-loving Spaniards, Italians and other Europeans.

One problem is too much variety. What do they do with leftovers? Serve them at the next meal or the next day? You could never be sure. Invariably, you'd see an item on another guest's plate you didn't know was being offered.

On my last night, I took my wife and mother-in-law for dinner at the nearby Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which is smaller and more expensive. My brother-in-law is a chef there. The a la carte menu in the Horizons Restaurant listed appetizers for up to $18 (crab cakes) and entrees for $28 and up. We chose to have the buffet for $45 each, including wine.

The contrast to the RIU buffets was stark: fewer dishes were offered but they were of higher quality: shrimp salad, steamed asparagus, salad greens, marinated mushrooms, hummus, tapanade, imported prosciutto, fresh mozzarella and more. The entrees were roast lamb in a red-wine sauce and two kinds of fish. Desserts included cheeses, carrot cake and creme brulee, as well as flambeed bananas with ice cream.

We were brought a basket of warm olive rolls and the waiter poured me a generous glass of pinot noir, one of several red wines to choose from; at RIU, you got "white" or "red" wine. My brother-in-law offered to make me pasta with seafood for my entree. The waiter brought me a nice bowl of penne with swordfish, fat sea scallops, shrimp and mussels in garlic and oil. Perfect.

I finished my meal with cheese and fruit and the last few sips of that terrific pinot noir.