The sun was pouring into the Jerk House on a chilly December day in California when Thursday Life visited. The sunshine, infused with the sea scent of the gloriously beautiful Monterey Bay not far away, made us feel that we had stumbled off a beaten path in Jamaica and into this charming eatery. Soon we were marvelling at the effortless way the proprietors had recreated the ambience and taste of the island in a place that was hours and hours away by plane.

Surprisingly, the Jerk House is the only Jamaican restaurant in Santa Cruz, California, a city of close to 63,000, not far from San Francisco. The restaurant is the brainchild of Americans Tim Buonagurio and partner Aaron Bistrin, who, one day while surveying the restaurant scene in Santa Cruz, noted the absence of a cuisine that they both loved. By that time, Buonagurio had earned his stripes working for years at Jamaican restaurants in Atlanta, Georgia, before moving to the gorgeous city by the Monterey Bay. In a sense, by opening The Jerk House, Buonagurio was indulging a long-time passion of his.

“I love Jamaican food and I love Jamaican music,” Buonagurio, who oddly enough has never visited Jamaica, told

Thursday Life, “and I just felt that Santa Cruz needed to have a Jamaican restaurant, and so Aaron and I set about creating what you see today.”

No idle boast, it’s evident the great care the partners have taken to create a place that has the feel of an authentic Jamaican restaurant, complete with the outdoor sign that features a boat coming ashore, painted on crackling wood and topped by a short zinc fence covering. The Jerk House forces one to appreciate the particular beauty to be found in the vernacular architecture of Jamaica. Inside the restaurant, an actual rowboat serves as the counter for a bar, while, painted on the walls of the restaurant, are large fresco-style paintings, similar to what one sees in bars in Jamaica. The restaurant is furnished with repurposed barrels used as tables, more wooden tables and chairs, and dominating the middle of the restaurant is the pièce de résistance — the metal-covered area where the cooking and jerking take place, so reminiscent of the pan drums where delicious chicken is cooked and sold at any joint where jerk is found in Jamaica. Enhancing the look and feel of the place, there is, of course, lilting Jamaican music in the background.

All well and good, but what was the food like? In a word: amazing! The food at the Jerk House is actually some of the best Jamaican food served up, both on and off the island. On the menu are traditional favourites like curried goat, curried chicken, jerk chicken, oxtail, and brown stew snapper. Added to this are curried shrimp, curried vegetables, jerk shrimp, glazed ribs, veggie stir fry, and a “Kingston Combo” in which one gets to mix and match all of the above. Also on offer are jerk burgers, sweet-glazed jerk wings, a roasted root salad, and a colourful Caribbean house salad, which is a medley of organic greens with a citrus vinaigrette, tossed with raisins, carrots, and walnuts. Side orders include: rice and peas, cucumber mango salad, festival, jerk fries, fried plantains, and vegetable and beef patties. For those with a sweet tooth, there are coconut brownies and pineapple rum cake for dessert. To wash it all down, naturally there is Red Stripe beer and coconut water, among other beverages.

We ordered a mélange of jerk chicken and curried goat, curried chicken, all of which came with rice and peas and a multi-coloured steamed cabbage, which was well-seasoned and delicious. The curried goat was unbelievably soft and juicy, and also very well-seasoned — right down to the bone. So was the curried chicken. The only quibble was that both the goat and chicken (and from the looks of the oxtail stew that someone at another table was eating) needed to be cut into smaller pieces; the Jamaican palate does not do chunky! No worries, though, our side order of fried plantains was enjoyable and came with a sweet red berry sauce that was quite tasty.

But, it was the jerk chicken that gave us ‘mouthgasms’. One bite into it and we were transported back to the land of its origin — Jamaica. The jerk chicken at the Jerk House, according to the owners, is the best-selling item on the menu.

“We try to stick to authentic Jamaican cooking as much as we can,” Buonagurio told

Thursday Life. “Twice a week we drive to Oakland to shop for such products from Jamaica as Walkerswood jerk sauce, Grace pepper sauce, Jamaican Choice curry powder, and then, of course, we add our secret touch to the spices that we purchase.”

So who is responsible for the cooking? The head chef is a Jamaican, naturally, one Robert Foster, who hails from Spanish Town and whose grandmother, Goody, taught him everything he knows about cooking. And then there is Shakea, the cashier-cum-server-cum-bartender, who makes a demanding job look easy as she bustles quickly from one post to another, from inside the restaurant where we were eating to serve the growing numbers of people filling up the chairs outside in the sun, all the time maintaining a calm, pleasant demeanour.

The Jerk House, though, only open for a few weeks now, has been steadily receiving rave reviews from such notable publications as the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Good Times Santa Cruz, and Santa Cruz Waves magazines. Kudos to the proprietors for so effectively recreating a Jamaican jerk shack experience in California that’s quickly establishing itself as the place to get delicious Jamaican food, not only in Santa Cruz, but in the Bay Area as well.

— Jacqueline Bishop is an associate professor — liberal studies, NYU