Diaspora communities are constructed differently but they usually demonstrate three characteristics. There is a home country from which the community originated. There is the host country in which the community exists. Finally, there is a real or imagined connection between the host location and home that is continually nourished in different ways. Sometimes the connection is physically maintained and reinforced through frequent travel between the two locations. Other times it is through culture, especially with music and with food.

Food plays an important role in cementing diasporas often exemplified in the universal proliferation of ethnic cuisine such as Italian, Cuban, Vietnamese, Indian and Chinese restaurants all over the world. China Towns are especially plentiful in just about every country. The China Towns of Toronto in Canada, New York and San Francisco in the USA as well as São Paulo in Brazil are well known for their elaborate merchandise centres and for their variety of regional Chinese restaurants. But just about any emigrant group uses food as the basic material that nourishes its nostalgia and reifies its sense of self.

Jamaicans too, have taken their culture with them and so Jamaican food can be found wherever Jamaican expatriate communities have formed. Good Jamaican restaurants exist in expected places like London in the United Kingdom and South Florida and Atlanta in the United States. Other locations pleasantly surprise, like Oxford in the UK, Madison, Wisconsin in the USA and Melbourne, Australia. But then Jamaicans have never been shy about flaunting their food. The controversial, though accomplished and highly entertaining Levi Roots, born Keith Valentine Graham in Clarendon in 1958, has single-handedly boosted the appeal of Jamaican and Caribbean cuisine by his successful venture selling his Reggae Reggae brand jerk sauce across Europe.

Jamaican food stories can be followed through the big brand names like Pickapeppa, Dunns River, Jamaica Sunpride, Walkerswood, Grace and Goya that find prominent shelf space in many supermarkets. But often the best stories are found in small Ma and Pa operations that thrive on individual industry and reliable word of mouth. The famous Jamaica Kitchen falls in that category.

Alfred Kong and Veronica McKenzie, originally from Portland, really know a thing or two about food. Kong is the cook, a wizard at delivering a bewildering variety of excellent dishes seemingly at a moment’s notice. McKenzie is the engagingly extroverted receptionist and cashier. After 30 years running the celebrated Jamaica Kitchen in a nondescript strip mall along SW 72nd street in Kendall, a skip, hop and a jump from the Miami International Airport, they know how to please palates. Not just Jamaican palates, but anyone with a yen for good food, really good food.

Jamaica Kitchen, like the mall in which it is located, seems a little underwhelming at first. With two very small tables and a limited counter, the 20-foot-wide dining area accommodates no more than 10 seated diners at any one time. That is less than a government-regulated paladar in Cuba. But that is not the point. The waiting take-out line can snake out through the doors and into the parking lot.

Indeed, long before the small restaurant opens an hour before noon, an excited and delightfully agitated line forms along the walkway. The line tells a lot about the restaurant and its owners. One Wednesday the line had several Jamaicans, a few Africans, many local Americans, a Nicaraguan and a cute, loquacious Cuban. The Cuban had lived for three years in Jamaica and declared rhapsodically to all who would listen that she could not exist a week without eating Jamaican food, and that the Jamaica Kitchen was like a pilgrimage site to her. The others spontaneously agreed.

As the door opened the line moved orderly, like a serious quiet religious pilgrimage toward the cashier about 12 feet in, placing their order and retreating like an orchestrated theatrical production. The restaurant itself looks like a Jamaican publicity stage set. Both walls are covered with shelves filled with a variety of Jamaican groceries, beverages, lotions and potions. The Jamaica Kitchen is more than a source for food. It offers a compact version of the old family-owned Chinese grocery stores that once dominated many villages before the advent of supermarkets.

Yet the focus at the Jamaica Kitchen is on the prepared food. The daily menu offers more than two dozen main course items built around pork, beef, chicken and fish, plus a variety of patties and soups. The patties have real beef, and come in three styles – mild, spicy and triple spicy. Triple spicy patties can bring rivers of tears in a moment and definitely are not for the faint of heart. The Wednesday pepper pot soup revives images of far away and long ago in St Elizabeth.

A menu that offers curry goat, curry chicken, fricassee chicken, Chinese roast chicken, stew peas, stew pork, stew beef, stew oxtail, stew cow foot, curry oxtail, pork and hamchoy, pork and muknee, cabbage and saltfish, jerk chicken sausage, jerk chicken, jerk pork, escoveitch fish, brown and stew fish, ackee and saltfish, curry shrimp, suey mein, foo gua (stuffed bitter lemon) reflects the essential diversity of Jamaican cuisine as well as the eclectic culinary history of the island.

Kong’s reputation is well-deserved. He is no ordinary cook. His food conjures not comparison with other restaurants in other cities but rather of old-time Jamaican mothers and grandmothers who could prepare meals to make one salivate long after swallowing the last morsel. He is that good. The rice and peas is perfectly composed, neither too loose nor too sticky and with a tantalising taste of coconut milk. The curry goat is delicately spiced and cooked to perfection. In the mouth the meat literally melts off the bones allowing one to savour effortlessly the delightful experience. Food like this can easily turn eating into a joyful cult activity bonding any dispersed diaspora.