Its delicate crust is flaky and golden, its ground beef punctuated with kicks of Scotch bonnet, black pepper, onion and garlic. While it may not yet have achieved the popularity of the taco or the pizza, the Jamaican beef patty is expanding its reach.
It has made its way out of Jamaican kitchens and bakeries, to immigrant enclaves and bodegas, and into major retailers like Wal-Mart and Costco. The New York City school system served more than 3 million during the 2016 fiscal year.
In Lawrence, Kansas, Jamaican beef patties are on the menu at Lucia Beer Garden & Grill. They are particularly popular among the city’s college students, said the owner, Mike Logan, attributing some of its success to convenience.
“You can hold it in one hand,” he said. On Friday and Saturday nights, customers can even buy them through a walk-up window.
Logan, who is from Lawrence, was introduced to Caribbean cuisine long before he opened his restaurant in September, but it is relatively new to many of his customers, so his menu also includes Caribbean tacos and jerk chicken egg rolls — the “Americanized items,” he calls them.
He said he owed his passion to George Ricketts of G’s Jamaican Quisine, in Kansas City, Missouri, who introduced him to Caribbean food.
“Most of my experience from Jamaican food comes from George,” Logan said. He recalled the first time he tried the island food. It was seasoned red snapper, a baptism of the taste buds. “I fell in love,” he said.
Lowell Hawthorne has been introducing Americans to Caribbean food for decades. In 1989, he took a gamble on the food of his homeland, Jamaica, in the hopes that many Americans would embrace it, opening a bakery in New York. He and his family watched it grow.
Now, as president and chief executive of Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery & Grill, he oversees 120 restaurants in nine states, with seven more shops expected to open this summer.
The chain’s menu includes meals typically found in Jamaican dining rooms — rice and peas, brown stew chicken, curry chicken — but the biggest sellers continue to be the beef patties.
About 10 years ago, Golden Krust was producing around 30 million patties annually. Now, having expanded into the retail market, it produces more than 50 million a year and supplies patties to around 20,000 outlets across the United States.
“We believe in the power of the patty,” Hawthorne said.
Ziad Lobbad, who owns Devil’s Pizzeria & Restaurant in Durham, North Carolina, says he sells about 150 Jamaican beef patties daily.
Customers can add mozzarella and pepperoni for an additional 50 cents a topping. “Some people ask us to put tomato and lettuce, and I won’t do that,” he said. “It’s not a burger.”
The beef patty may have stayed a household secret if it weren’t for Zoe Bruce, who was raised in Manchester, a parish in Jamaica.
She and her two sisters opened a grocery shop in Kingston, Jamaica, said her grandnephew, Jimmy Bruce; Zoe Bruce, who had a knack for baking, would sell pastries and patties on the counter. Around the 1930s, she opened Bruce’s Patties just north of downtown Kingston.
“People would gather there after work,” Jimmy Bruce said of his family’s business, which built its reputation on having the best beef patties in Jamaica.
“When you pull it open, it was full of meat,” he said. “You could eat it with a fork.”
He would not disclose his family’s secret recipe, but he said annatto, beef suet and all-natural beef were basic ingredients of all beef patties of the time.
The annatto, a red seed boiled in butter or oil before being folded into the minced meat, gave the spices an earthy balance.
“Bruce’s was the trailblazer,” he said, adding that until his family’s shop, most beef patties were made in home kitchens.
“Bruce’s commercialized it,” he said. “Bruce’s stood out.”
After some time, larger competitors like Tastee and Juici Patties began to take hold of the market and industrialized the process. While a shop like Bruce’s could produce 2,000 handmade patties a day, a machine could produce that number within an hour. Unable to get the money for new equipment, Bruce’s faded into the background, closing its doors in 1992.
“After another 10 years, you won’t hear the name Bruce,” Jimmy Bruce said. “The name has died, or is dying quick.”
Bruce’s voice filled with pride as he spoke of a time long ago, when the Jamaican beef patty was arguably tastier, the dough was more pliable and less flaky, and the island nation was economically stronger, before the violence and upheaval of the 1970s.
It was during that period that nearly 257,000 Jamaicans migrated to the United States, said Basil K. Bryan, Jamaica’s former consul general to New York, who wrote “The Jamaicans: Children of God in the Promised Land.”
“These were people of means, not poor people coming to look for any job,” Bryan said at his home in Boynton Beach, Florida.
Earlier Jamaican immigrants were largely farmers and domestic workers, he said. But this newer group, he pointed out, had more money and resources and had an appetite for comfort foods from home.
“They tried to get their jerk seasonings, the scallions or the thyme, the spices from Jamaica,” he said. An economic pipeline between America and Jamaica began to emerge, this time with a population that could support it.
Richard Hammond was a part of that later group. After his family arrived in 1979, his father bought a Caribbean-style bakery in Miami Gardens, Florida. Today, Hammond’s Bakery has two shops, both producing his father’s patty recipe. “Very few people make it by hand,” he said.
When the bakery opened, it was the only beef patty shop in the area. Now, several competitors sit within a 2-mile radius. A Golden Krust is a mile north.
For now, his typical customers are first- and second-generation Jamaicans who want a beef patty that not only tastes homemade, but is also like the ones made back home.
“The younger generation will see a patty at a gas station or at school, and they’ll eat it,” Hammond said. “It’s just a patty, like a burger, they’ll eat it.”
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