Jamaican food of Chinese descent

Continuing with yesterday's story on residents of Chinese descent in paradise, there is a very successful business family in Jamaica by the name of Hendrickson, who owns a major bread company National, and despite the name that sounds more Northern European than Chinese, they are of Chinese descent.

The family is known for having introduced to Jamaica a machine to slice bread, which made their small bakery grow into National, whose many products also include my favourite plantain chips. They then expanded into the hotel business, and now own numerous hotels and resorts in Jamaica and other islands, including Courtleigh that serves my favourite Jerk Chicken Linguine that I wrote about on October 21.

I was looking for a newspaper feature article on the history of the family that I read once, but instead, I encoutered an interesting interview with the head of the family published on the Gleaner in 2003 - Karl Hendrickson: A business titan speaks. His warning then about the risk of Jamaica becoming a country of buyers is spot-on in today's context.

In all those stories about the family that I read and heard about sporadically in different places, what left a lingering impression on me was this machine that sliced bread in a massive quantity. Every story about the family seems to begin with this machine, like a legend. Now every time I see the name National on a small package of plantain chips, the first thing that comes to my imagination is this legendary machine surrounded by people in awe. Beside the legend behind the name National, what I like about National plantain chips is that they are very light and crisp, they are cheap, and above all, they are put in small packages that help me not overeat them. Each small package is only 25JMD - that's only 32 US cents, and contains 120 calories.

Chinese food with a Jamaican twist

Residents of paradise seem to like Chinese food, and many Chinese restaurants and eateries are found in Kingston. Among them, Jade Garden is my most favourite, and probably the most expensive. It is on the top floor of the Sovereign shopping mall, and the dining hall is surrounded by large windows that provide a good view of mountains. Today, I had...

Steamed Black Bean Rib, from their daily Dim Sum menu. Very tasty.

Steamed tofu stuffed with shrimp. This is what I was craving for today. Delicate, warm, soft and light, it's my comfort food.

Baby pak choi sauteed with garlic. I always order this in a Chinese restaurant. I feel energized after eating this, just as Popeye would when he eats spinach. It is not on the menu at Jade Garden as often is the case with other Chinese restaurants elsewhere, but if you ask, they should be able to make it for you very easily as long as they have pak choi. Fortunately for me, pak choi is widely available in paradise, and you can find it in any market. Chinese people began settling in Jamaica long time ago in the mid-19th century when they came as indentured labourers, and probably they brought pak choi with them.

If you'd like to know a bit more about the history of Chinese people in Jamaica, read Out Of Many Cultures: The People Who Came - The Arrival Of The Chinese in the Pieces of the Past series of the Gleaner. The series is also published as a book, and it is available from Amazon.com here.

This sauce, which is soy sauce with chopped hot peppers in it, is always served in a Chinese restaurant around here. I have never seen it in a Chinese restaurant elsewhere, and I think it is very particular to Jamaica, though I am not certain since I have never been to China. It is very hot, and although I rarely use it, residents of paradise seem to put it on everything.

Delightful food with a great view does not come very cheap. The steamed tofu was 1300JMD (US$18.50), sauteed baby pak choi 1200JMD (US$17), and steamed black bean rib 400JMD ($5.50), all before taxes.

Heading East for sushi

I had a major craving for good sushi, and went to East. East Japanese Restaurant is found in the Courtyard, a fancy, high-end food court in the Market Place on Constant Spring Road. It is very popular, so popular that you need to reserve a table ahead if you want to make sure that you'd get to eat there.

East serves good, authentic sushi, though it doesn't carry raw shellfish, which was why I preferred the Japanese restaurant at Hilton before when it existed - basically, I only eat shellfish and toro when it comes to sushi. Today, I indulged myself in a sushi feast, with toro, salmon toro and uni, all of which were of good quality, though I couldn't capture it well in my photo above. I also had negi-toro, which I thought were in need of stronger negi flavour.

As is the case with every other sushi restaurant in the world, sushi at East is very expensive, and each little piece of sushi costs 300JMD. For the 6 pieces I had, I was charged 1800JMD (before tax), which is about US$25... Negi-toro was 430JMD (US$6).

Despite the popularity and the high pricing, the chef said the business was struggling. The price of raw fish went up by 30% in the last year because of the rise in the fuel cost that raised the cost for transporting fish. Then, due to the financial crisis in U.S., affluent Kingstonians are reducuing the frequency of their visits to this expensive restaurant. Here again, we spot a want, not a need, called sushi, though for me, sushi is nearly a need, and I really hope that East will survive this difficult time.

Where is the news...?

The Sunday Gleaner was in high demand this morning. I went to a pharmacy around noon to buy a copy to discover that they were sold out already. I went to a supermarket next door, and they were sold out there also. My curiosity was strongly stimulated, and I asked the salesperson what the news was this morning, but she didn't know. I had to find out, and I drove to another supermarket. Luckily, it had a few copies left, and I finally got to look at the front page headline. It said "Not Important," with huge photos of the faces of the two U.S. presidential candidates.

The news that helped sell the paper so well this morning was merely that a former prime minister of Jamaica said that neither of the two U.S. presidential candidates cared very much about Jamaica. My first reaction was, what is the news about this? It does not seem to me that the information makes any news; there is no story in it even. I mean, most of the countries of the world wouldn't be considered very important by the two candidates at the moment in any case, and to me, it's no news if Jamaica wouldn't be an exception. How is it that such a matter would make interesting news for so many Jamaican people to make the paper sold out? Or is the general assumption that Jamaica is considered more important than others by U.S.? I am puzzled...

By the way, to continue with yesterday's story on Jamaican people's love of fried food, on the lower right-hand corner of the photo, you can see an advertisement of Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is by far the most thriving among the U.S. fastfood chains operating in Jamaica. In contrast, McDonald's didn't do well at all in Jamaica and withdrew in October 2005. To me, that was big news, that McDonald's, the global giant that seems to be able to grow everywhere, couldn't compete in Jamaica. But it didn't make any headline on Jamaican papers...!

Where pirates of the Caribbean used to hang out

If you happen to glance through this blog, you would probably wonder, but what about the sea? This blogger is writing from a Caribbean island, but we never hear about the sea. Is Kingston not on the sea?

That is a very good question. Before coming here, I thought I would be living in a town on the sea, and imagined myself going to the beach and sitting on a seafront terrace every day. It turns out that the seafront of Kingston, which is called Downtown, the old part of Kingston as opposed to New Kingston where I live and work, is heavily ridden by crime and violence. Beside the fact that foreigners are advised not to go there, the seafront has become like a ghost town with numerous deserted buildings and closed shops... It is such a pity because the area is so blessed in terms of its location. If it were not for crime and violence, Downtown would thrive as a commerce and tourism district with many restaurants and bars on the sea.

Still, there is no need to despair. Kingston has more to offer than the deteriorated Downtown area, and if you drive out a bit, you will find a restaurant on the sea that you dreamed of. My favourite such place is Morgan's Harbour (http://www.morgansharbour.com/).

Morgan's Harbour is a hotel, a restaurant and a marina in Port Royal. It is where you take a boat to Lime Cay, a sand reef island that offers my most favourite beach around Kingston. Morgan's Harbour is also where you can enjoy a pleasant and relaxing dinner on the sea, with the sounds of waves and a view of the mountains and twinkling lights of the city of Kingston. It is about a 30-minute-drive from Kingston, and I enjoy the drive. You drive straight ahead on a flat road surrounded by the sea, mountains and green bushes, and it has a calming, meditative effect.

Port Royal, where Morgan's Harbour is located, is on the tip of the Palisadoes, a long sand spit that comes out of Kingston. It is a historical town known for many things. It was the most important commercial port in the Caribbean as well as the main harbour for the pirates of the Caribbean in the 17th century, and it was the place where a big earthquake hit in 1692.If you'd like to get to know more about Port Royal, the following websites may be helpful:

- http://www.jnht.com/heritage_site.php?id=289 (by the Jamaica National Heritage Trust)
- http://www.hmsf.org/exhibits/port-royal/port-royal.htm (by the Historical Museum of Southern Florida)
- http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/pages/history/story001.html (From the Pieces of the Past series of the Gleaner)

Morgan's Harbour is named after Sir Henry Morgan, who supposedly was the model for the main character of Captain Blood, a popular novel published in 1922 about the adventures of Dr Peter Blood, a physician turned pirate. The text of the novel is available from the Project Gutenberg here as well as from Google Books here. The novel was also adapted into a film in 1935, which, amazingly, you can watch on YouTube here.

At the restaurant of Morgan's Harbour, Grilled Snapper is my most favourite on their menu, but it is available only for dinner. Today, I passed by for an afternoon snack, thus there was no grilled snapper available. Instead, I had fish fingers with tartar sauce. It was very good. 485JMD which is a bit less than US$7 (before tax and service charge).

By the way, Jamaican people love fried food, eg. fried chicken, fried fish, fried shrimp... there are very Jamaican fried food items called "bammy" and "festival". Basically, the former is fried cassava and the latter is fried cornmeal.
See http://www.jamaicatravelandculture.com/food_and_drink/bammy.htm for a recipe and picture for bammy, and http://www.jamaicans.com/cooking/appetizers/testcook.shtml for festival.

Another BTW, according to reporters, chicken nuggets were the source of power for Usain Bolt, the sprinter! See the following articles:

• Usain Bolt's Secret to Being the Fastest Man: Chicken Nuggets (from the People magazine)
• Chicken nuggets and yam fuel Bolt's sprint double bid (from ABC News)
• Olympic 100m hero Usain Bolt powered by chicken nuggets and yams (from Mirror.co.uk News)

I am thinking, it's simply that he likes fried food as other Jamaican people do. Probably, bammy would have done the same.

Mountains around Kingston

What would be the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear "the Caribbean"? I am sure many of you would think of a long white sand beach with crystal clear turquoise blue water. Yes, that is true. The Caribbean will not disappoint your imagination, and there is an endless number of incredibly and astonishingly beautiful beaches across the various islands of the Caribbean. In Kingston, however, what always take my breath away are the mountains that surround the city. On the one side of the city is the sea, and on the other side is the mountain range of which the Blue Mountain is a part.

The colours and movements of the sky, clouds and mountains change throughout the day, and they are never the same and all the time so engaging. Everytime you look up, from your car, from your office, or from your bedroom, they sing to you together in a powerful and dynamic voice of colours, lights and shades. If it were not for all the crime and violence, Kingston is so exceptionally blessed, surrounded by the beautiful mountains and the sea.

The photo shows a mountain view from the balcony of my apartment at 6pm today. Another thing about living in the tropics is that it gets dark around the same time all year round: here, always around 6pm.

Will Blue Mountain coffee survive the global financial crisis?

I had no idea, when I wrote the blog on October 9, 2008, that Blue Mountain coffee was facing a major challenge for survival. First, International Herald Tribune published an AP report a few days ago that the two largest Blue Mountain coffee bean buyers stopped buying the beans because of the combination of bad times, i.e. the economy and hurricanes: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/10/18/business/CB-Jamaica-Blue-Mountain-Coffee.php. Then today, the Jamaica Observer, one of the two national dailies in paradise (the other is the Gleaner), reported that two major Blue Mountain coffee companies were being "divested": http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/html/20081022T010000-0500_141617_OBS_COFFEE_SALE.asp.

I read the Observer article. What was striking to me was that the Jamaican government wants to privatize them, which implies that they are government-owned at the moment...! I had no idea, but Blue Mountain coffee has been government-owned in Jamaica, like water and electricity (by the way, now, Marubeni, a Japanese trading company, owns the electricity of Jamaica...). This indicates how important coffee beans have been for paradise.

The fundamental issue, however, that the Observer missed was that, whether privately or government owned, Blue Mountain coffee is facing a serious difficulty. It's "a want, not a need" when it comes to good coffee, I suppose, and so people around the world just choose to live without Blue Mountain coffee. I hope, I really hope, some affluent individuals out there would come and save the good old, wonderful, so dark and flavourful Blue Mountain coffee at this hard and difficult moment of the world...

The photo shows the packages of Blue Mountain coffee beans sold at the Sovereign supermarket in Liguanea. On the top shelf are found Jablum packages made by Mavis Bank (http://www.mavisbankcoffee.com/mavis_about.php), and the bottom shelf has packages from the Wallenford (http://www.wallenford.com/), both of which are being considered for "divestment" at the moment.