JAMAICAN ME CRAZY

Well, after a long drought, Oregon finally got its very own truly Jamaican restaurant yesterday. Montego Bay opened its doors, and after many days of driving by their location on our way home from downtown Portland, we saw lights, customers, drinks being served and so we stopped.

Dinner was good. We started with Jamaican beef patties, which are nothing more than spicy, savory meat turnovers (empanadas) in a savory pastry crust. They were very good. We had refillable Jamaican limeaid wash (overly sweet limeaid - Jill: "I feel like I'm drinking sugar water"). And then the main courses: curry chicken for Jill and curry goat for me. MMM.

Jamaican Patties


Both were good, but our ignorance of how Jamaican curries are served on the island might have detracted from our experience. Mainly, the curries were diced meat - with bones - curried as a thick stew, served with beans and rice and asparagus spears. The bones, well bone fragments, were not exactly easy to remove from the dish. They had to be extracted from our mouths, to a napkin, as we supped. So that was odd and perilous for our teeth, to say the least.

The owners were clearly excited that their new restaurant had finally opened - occupying the space that the Oregon Culinary Institute cafe once filled. After we finished, the female of the owner-couple proved garrilous as she talked our ear off, asking how the food was, if we enjoyed ourselves, how much work they had put into the place, etc. I don't know when it happened, but early in that monologue - I hesitate to call it conversation - we went from patrons to patronizers. I felt like a counselor obliged to validate her. Only we were paying her.

What I didn't say, which I wished I did, was that the prices were a little too steep for the dining experience they were providing. Dinner entrees ranged from $13 to $18 for the dish and a side of beans/rice and fried plantains - which they substituted with asparagus for whatever reason - I didn't complain. But their restaurant is very casual, open, not at all intimate and the dishes, though exotic, aren't exactly gourmet. For $13 to $18, I can have a more luxurious dinner in downtown or elsewhere and not be badgered by well-meaning owners. They were proud parents, so I shouldn't criticize too much. The problem is that their ingredients are clearly special order and their space might be very expensive, so they really have cost control issues. They're passing it on to customers, understandably, but once the luster and novelty wears off, they'd better be prepared to reprint new menus to reflect affordability.

While waiting to pay, I noticed something very interesting. When we arrived, a family of three were seated on the right side of the room and we chose a table just on the other side of them from the front door. But as the evening progressed, four black couples and families arrived to dine. As they did so, they chose to sit on the opposite side of the room away from the first family, all white, and Jill and me. A profusion of empty booths on our side eliminates the excuse of seating availability by us.

It reminded me of Prof. Henry "Skip" Louis Gates' recent special on PBS - America Beyond the Color Line - about the progress of the black community over the last twenty years. While seeing a profusion of economic improvement and entitlement, he openly criticized Black America's growing trend of self-segregation.. specifically in the Atlanta suburbs. Not to mention on the airwaves, i.e. the WB and UPN networks, and elsewhere. Despite Portland's progressive facade, it doesn't speak well of things when people don't want to eat near each other.

But I digress. We payed, left and when we sat down in the car, we noticed that some punk vandalized our windshield with a marker. Clearly writing his/her name or full contents of their vocabulary, the word "poop" was plainly scribed. Jill wanted to call the cops, but I urged circumspection and proceeded to the nearby convenience store for an overpriced kitchen sponge and bottle of Formula 409 for windows. Adding a little bit of elbow grease and the word was scrubbed from the window. And so, it was agreed, we wouldn't be visiting the restaurant again at night and until prices were more reasonable.