Jerk is not a sauce you brush on at the end. It is a marinade, a wood, and a slow fire, and if any one of the three is missing you can taste it. Here is how ours is made.
Scallion, thyme, garlic, ginger, allspice, nutmeg and scotch bonnet, blended wet and worked into the bird right down to the bone. It sits overnight, because a few hours only seasons the skin. The pepper is in there whole, seeds and all, which is where the heat comes from and why it builds slowly instead of hitting on the first bite.
Allspice, what Jamaicans call pimento, is the berry and the wood both. It is in the marinade and it is in the smoke, and it is the single flavour that separates jerk from every other barbecue on earth. Without it you have spicy grilled chicken, which is a fine thing, but it is not jerk.
The chicken cooks slow and off to the side, taking smoke the whole time. That is what builds the dark bark on the outside while the meat underneath stays wet enough to pull clean off the bone. Rushed jerk goes black on the skin and dry in the middle, and the difference is obvious the moment you bite it.
Medium, and honest about it. There is real scotch bonnet in the marinade so it carries genuine heat, but it sits behind the smoke and the allspice rather than in front of them. If somebody at your table cannot take pepper, the BBQ chicken off the same grill gives them the char without the burn.
The technique belongs to the Maroons, Africans who escaped slavery into the Blue Mountains and cooked meat slowly in covered pits, partly because it worked and partly because a pit gives off far less smoke than an open fire when you are hiding from the British. Boston Bay in Portland is the stretch of coast most associated with it. That history is why jerk is a way of cooking and not a bottle of sauce.
Shared kitchen, grill and fryer. Labels say what a dish contains, never what it is free of. Call (646) 603-8665 about any allergy.
The full list is on the menu page.
Jerk Chicken travels well, so it goes out for delivery across Queens and out by the tray for catering. The rest of the board is on the full menu.
