Perched on a hill overlooking Ocho Rios is the charming little Italian restaurant Evita’s. And standing in the quaint entranceway, with its weathered thatched roof and nearby potted plants, is its vivacious owner — the smouldering Eva Myers.

“Hello. Welcome to my restaurant,” she says, with a voice still revelling in the sultry purrs of an Italian accent and posing with hands akimbo.

On this calm, breezy day, in her tomato-red blouse, floral skirt and red pillbox hat, she is a force of charisma and charm. She takes us by the hand and shows us her koi pond. She shows us the wood columns supporting the thatched portico.

“You know they are genuine four-poster bedposts?”

She takes us inside and shows us the restaurant. The unpretentious interior leads onto a terrace that offers a breathtaking view of downtown Ocho Rios and the sea. It’s little wonder, we think, Evita’s was nominated for Best Outdoor Dining Experience at this year’s Food Awards. To our left is a photo gallery of all the important guests who have dined here — Brad Pitt is among them; Uma Thurman stopped by several times, so did LL Cool J; Kofi Annan had come some time ago, as did Princess Margaret. In fact, there are too many high-profile names to list.

As we look at some of the names, she regales us with stories of some of the people she has met (Keith Richards personally told her she could use his swimming pool anytime). One story leads to another and soon she is telling us about transatlantic adventures and a love affair that led to marriage.

Eva is a natural raconteur; her every word is accorded a gesture; her sentences are delivered with hearty expressiveness. She has an air about her, one infused with old-Hollywood glamour. We become so absorbed we almost forget we’re here for lunch.

We go on to the terrace (we couldn’t resist exploiting that gorgeous view) and are first treated to the classic bruschetta — a garlic crostini topped with fresh tomatoes, onion, basil and olive oil. We give it a try and are taken aback by a kick of flavour that’s unexpected but welcome.

“It’s the marlin,” Eva says.

The marlin, she explains, is an incorporation of a Jamaican flavour that complements her Italian cooking. It is this active drive to meld the Italian with the Jamaican (sometimes subtly, and at other times decidedly blatant) that makes Evita’s in Ocho Rios truly stand out.

She had, in fact, originally tried simple Italian cooking when she first opened business in Jamaica, but she found patrons were not taking to it with fervour. So she tried her hand at “pasta with a little Jamaican” and found that both tourists and locals responded enthusiastically.

“And then they say, ‘let me try a little of this and a little of that’,” she says, waving her hands airily. “They don’t feel like they’re jumping into the unknown.”

Her knack for fusing flavours results in her unique ‘Jam-Italian’ pastas, like the jerk spaghetti, which is spicy jerk sausage sautéed with garlic onions, marinara sauce and jerk seasoning, or the delightful ‘Suprema’ — a smorgasbord of shellfish (mussels, scallops, lobster and shrimp!) tossed with one’s choice of pasta and sautéed with oils, herbs, fresh tomato sauce and uplifting pepper flakes.

There is also an unalloyed Jamaican menu (the shrimp rundown and JA Curry Supreme were instant hits) and an authentic Italian menu. Italians have a penchant for using light seasoning to maximise a meal’s flavour. The grilled octopus we had was a sumptuous example of Eva’s deft hands at using ‘just enough’ seasoning — a little olive oil, a little salt and a little pepper brought out the octopus’ authentic flavour while keeping pungency at bay.

“And when Italians come here,” she injects, “they say, ‘signora, finalmente, we can eat!'”

Perhaps it’s the inventiveness of her menu that makes Evita’s in Ocho Rios a popular stop for diners in the area and for those passing through. Food is never static at Evita’s — menu items change and food combinations evolve — because this spirited restaurateur is a true gourmand. Eva loves the chemistry of food and she loves the limitless possibilities of its flavours. There is no place for the banal at Eva’s table — even the complimentary bread is served with a special dip — a simple yet tasty reduction of cheese, béchamel and wild sage.

“Why have butter when you can have this?”

Eva started experimenting with food as soon as she was tall enough to reach the stove.

“I was always trying new things with food,” she says. “In Italy, everything is seasonal. So when it was the season of string beans, I’d do string beans a hundred ways.”

But Eva was an adventurer outside the kitchen as well. When she was 18, she and her family left Venice, Italy for America. She had seen all there was to see in Venice.

“I couldn’t understand these tourists,” she says of her hometown, “looking up at the ceilings, taking pictures of everything.”

The family settled in New York, but Eva found the Big Apple a bit stale.

“Everything was so square,” she says.

Eventually, Eva moved to Chicago, where things started happening. She made friends there and even met her first husband.

“It was what you did back then,” she says, “you find a good man . . . the machine starts rolling . . . and before you know it, you’re walking up the aisle.”

Eva donned the housewife frock for a while before growing bored. She spoke four languages (Italian, English, French and German), so she went to work at a travelling agency.

“I was travelling to Jamaica one time — I got a 70 per cent discount working with the agency so I flew first class — and that’s where I met my second husband.

“His name was Walter Myers. He was a businessman from Chicago who owned a home in Tryall, St James. He was fun, exciting, spontaneous.

“He convinced me it would be more fun to stay with him in Jamaica,” she says, smiling sheepishly.

And so she did. Eva divorced her first husband and got married to Walter, and they spent some happy years together.

When Walter died, however, she grew depressed.

“And then one day I thought, ‘why don’t I open a nightclub so people could have fun?'”

When asked why, she says:

“I was bored.”

Evita’s On The Sea opened in Montego Bay in 1984, just below the Round Hill Hotel. It was a disco and sported accommodations for live entertainment. But paying for entertainment was expensive.

“So then I added food,” she says, “which did a lot better.”

As good as the food was, Eva’s personality was also gaining notoriety in the area. She walked around with a parrot named Captain Bligh on her shoulder (she found him near dead on her window sill and nursed him back to health) and she drove around Montego Bay in a vintage speedster (one time in nothing but a bikini while on her way to Negril because she wanted a tan, she says).

“I was this blond lady from Tryall who owned a nightclub driving this buggy and always wearing a hat.”

But a force even greater than Eva rocked the island and changed the course of her business — its name was Hurricane Gilbert, and it completely destroyed Evita’s On The Sea.

Not to be outdone, Eva moved to Ocho Rios and looked at a property on a hill owned by Chris Blackwell. She bought it and on December 4, 1989, Evita’s (“the best little pasta house in Ocho Rios”) was opened.

Business has been better in Ocho Rios, she says. She has a rapport with her patrons when they walk in (in the middle of our interview, a group of patrons interrupt us, remarking how nice it was to see Eva again). They sometimes even influence the menu, for example, when Asha, Joe Issa’s wife, wanted escargot but didn’t want to fill up on the pasta that came with it. She suggested mushrooms. Eva tried it. Loved it. And so it made the menu.

Even after 20 years in Ocho Rios, Eva Myers is not content with merely running a restaurant. For one, she gardens. She likes sweet cherry tomatoes to go with her roasted garlic, so she grows them. She grows her own sage. And, after getting instructions on how to make a proper mint mojito from Bacardi representatives (she was hosting a rehearsal dinner for the Bacardi heiress), she grew to like the flavour of the mint, so now she grows that too.

She’s also heavily involved in the Ocho Rios community. She’s a member of the local chapter of the Jamaica Hotel Tourist Association, of the St Ann Chamber of Commerce, of the Kiwanis Club of the Garden Parish, of the Chaine des Rotisseurs and even of a local orchid society.

“I can’t stand just doing nothing,” she says.

When asked how she manages it all, she says:

“It’s easy. I don’t have any children to look after anymore. This,” she says, gesturing to the restaurant and its workers, “this is my family.”

— Kedon Willis