THE calendar has flipped to 2022, Omicron and inflation have not let up on how they impact businesses, but Nicole Pandohie is charting a course for one of Kingston’s newest attractions to be among its biggest.

Launched in December last year, the Jamaica Food and Drink Kitchen at the Progressive Plaza in Liguanea, St Andrew, is already proving to be an oasis for food connoisseur’s in the hustle and bustle of the city.

“It is not a restaurant, it is not a bar,” Pandohie, who is the managing partner at Jamaica Food and Drink Kitchen, was quick to point out. “Its a great new innovation for curating memories,” she adds.

It’s the latest addition to the Jamaica Food and Drink brand, out of which the Jamaica Food and Drink Festival was spawned in 2015. “And we couldn’t start half-baked.. For us it has always been go big or go home. Thankfully the response has been amazing,” she says beaming

Developed at a cost “in the region of about $100 million”, according to Pandohie, the business is novel in Jamaica. She tells the Jamaica Observer, the biggest challenges to starting were “deciding if the timing was right and finding the courage to take a bold step in the context of a pandemic and the fact that we were doing something completely new with no model to follow, no local data to analyse”.

Pandohie explains further: “Throughout the pandemic, we decided to evolve the Jamaica Food and Drink brand and developed a whole new concept that adds significantly to the culinary/entertainment landscape in Jamaica. And so, here we have our artisan market, where you have all the local food purveyors and chefs, who had to pivot over COVID, because all the events stopped happening; they literally had no work. And they all brought out these amazing very premium brands…that were being sold via Instagram, via word of mouth, and we decided, in the interest of elevating gastronomy in Jamaica, to set up a show case for all these food purveyors.”

She continues, “In addition to our artisan market, we have an experience kitchen, a studio kitchen. It can be a studio, where you create content; it’s set up to create content in terms of lighting and sound and so on, and it’s also a place where you can have chef guided food experiences as well.”

These experiences are guided by some of the nation’s top chefs, Pandohie boasts as she outlines how the location can be used to create content. “Any food company wanting to launch a new product, any chef who wanting to showcase [his/her] wares, it can be anyone wanting to create content around food — a state of the art space.”

“In addition to that, we have an experience kitchen, which is really the stronghold of the entire brand. What happens there is that we have classes, we have Jamaica’s top chefs rotating through the space.

“Ten years ago we had tourism business coming here for restaurant experiences, but now more and more,they want gastronomy experiences. To do that, we need things like cooking classes and food trails and really just to expand the product that we have, that was only really around restaurants. Now you can come and you can cook, you can understand what our flavours are, you can understand our coffee, and our rum and our ginger and our Scotch bonnet, and really play with those flavours in this space.”

So far, the Jamaica Food and Drink Kitchen has hosted top names in culinary landscape, such as Stush in the Bush, Ms T, and Chef Pring Apron. “We have themed events. We have all kinds of culinary innovations to present to people, Tuesday to Sunday.

“You come in as strangers, but when you cook you bond over food. You can celebrate your birthday, you can have date night, you can learn to cook something, all our top chefs pass through this space,” Pandohie adds.

“You have to go into the kitchen and cook, either as part of a class or a culinary experience. However, if you want to come and buy something in the artisan market like a bottle of liquor, you can sit and we will serve it or take it with you.”

Despite the successes so far, Pandohie said the pandemic “is still presenting challenges in the form of cancellations and apprehension with regard to the safety of the experience, but we mitigate by having staff and patrons that are only fully vaccinated,” she emphasises.

So far, there is only one location for the Jamaica Food and Drink, but Pandohie outlines to the Business Observer there are plans to expand across the island and evolving the experience into a food and drink tour, with Kingston as the centre of the island’s gastronomy experience.

“We think this is an amazing product to draw visitors to Jamaica and to Kingston. Think about it, this is coming and doing Coronation Market and then coming and cooking your food or going on trails in the Blue Mountain. Next we want to open a company called Jamaica Food and Drink Tours, which will also centre on the platform of food.”

She reminds the Observer that when the Jamaica Food and Drink team started the festival in 2015 it was to make Kingston, Jamaica, the world’s coolest food destination — an aim she called “our big, hairy, audacious goal”. That is the aim of the Jamaica Food and Drink Company, established in 2015 with the key proponents being Matthew Lyn, Nasma Chin, Alicia Bogues, and Nicole Pandohie.

Jamaica Food and Drink Kitchen now employs four culinary assistants, two stewards and, in terms of the management team, another five people.