How To Order Food From The Jamaican Spot: A Guide
Bet so, fam you gwine walk up to a empty counter first. You a go want to call out when you hear laughter coming from the back and the whole place smell wicked good.
Don’t bruv.
There’s a menu with delicious-looking pictures of food but...
Ignore that shit.
That ackee and saltfish lunch special not even real fam, you get me? And dem plantain you see is just reminder mans want plantains in dem food. Not like say we have plantains.
Mans named Shane or Lincoln or Marlon or “British” gwine stalk the counter before him even look pon you. But fix your face, fam. Don’t talk.
Make him speak first because anything you say is worthless and won’t help shit, yea? Alton carried these oxtails down from Saint Peter at the gates. You wan’ ruin this with stuttering orders and fuckery?
Listen, on the way to the cook-top, my guy Spencer:
Did hop two dollar van.
Put four daughter true Yale (manga cum laude. A-whoa.)
Grow AND pick the herb bushels cooking in the Dutchie.
And Tracy, his wife, his beloved wife deh Stacy Ann Tracy Ann Merrington, daughter of Linval, did a watch over them two pickney and the $8,000 industrial stove of carrot and tomato aromatics. She whiled her other twelve hour shifts cleaning bedpans for decaying Whites.
So, as you imagined the flavor of a beef patty’s spicy bonnet-sparked meat slipping through that flaky crust, Horace had just sold the last two patties from the lunch rush. Those patty sales finally equaled the mortgage for the Newark house plus what it cost to have have his mother Millicent buried in St. Elizabeth.
BLACKIE PICK UP THE RAASCLAAT PHONE NUH MAN!
Phone just ring it look like.
Customer come in during the phone call:
What a way patty shop nuh have no patty though breh? Mans can’t rate that, bro, for real.
COME OUTTA MI FUCKEN SHOP THEN NUH, BRO! STEUPS.
If this how Elroy greet a loyal customer, how him gwine bother wid you? You never choose what you want yet. Everything look good. Deep, deep vats covered with metal lids with the slit handles. Dem have bout two piece-a chicken in them and one tail from the ox, trust.
“Wha’agwaan?” You want to say. “Wha you deh pon bro? Easy yo.”
But you look pon Horace and is a war him want. His eyes sorrel-red from something or other, Linton’s scowl suggests neither service, nor appetite.
WE AVE X-AMOUNT A YAM AN X-AMOUNT A BANANA ZEEN?...AN IS *DAT* GWINE NYAM AN GUWON. WE OUTTA PLANTAIN.
So that is how you leave from out of the place. Some yam and banana and one piece-a steam fish to rahtid, but NO cow foot, NO stew chicken (dat did done already), no stew chicken gravy. No bun-and-cheese (them did outta bun) and no peanut chew.
Is another thirty minute for the roti order, Sar, if you would like to wait.