All Hail the Jamaican Patty
The leader of the fancy-patty movement, for me, though, is Bar Kabawa, the swanky, sexy East Village Daiquiri joint that’s attached to Kabawa, the chef Paul Carmichael’s marvellous Caribbean tasting-menu spot. Carmichael’s patties are cheffy and ambitious, for sure, with a dazzling array of creative fillings including curried crab with squash; pepper-pot-spiced duck with foie gras; and an unctuous blend of short rib, conch, and bone marrow. Some of the patties come with laminated Haitian-style casements that are burnished in a deep fryer. Others, with breadier wrappers, are baked. The prices are high—on a recent visit, a patty filled with kale and oats (richer and livelier than it sounds) was ten dollars, and one containing a briny, spicy mixture of lobster and herring cost more than twenty. (Coco bread, if you’re feeling sandwich-y, was an extra four dollars.) Somehow, despite their decadence, these pastries never feel one bit haughty or pretentious: Carmichael understands that a patty isn’t for fussing over. It’s for tearing into. It’s for devouring.
Jamaican and other Caribbean immigrants brought the patty to New York beginning in the sixties, and it is still a staple of the city’s West Indian enclaves. It’s Caribbean food, Black food, American food—and, like so much of what makes New York’s cuisine vital, it comes from communities whose contributions to the city often go unrecognized until they become impossible to ignore. In that sense, there’s a bit of poignant irony in the patty’s current elevation: it takes a moment of trendiness, of pageantry and gussying up, for the patty to claim its crown. My own first Jamaican patty came from a corner store on 111th Street. It was shoved into my hands one hungover morning by a friend who had been living in the city a year or so longer than I had, and who had a lot to teach me. That patty, almost certainly mass-produced by Tower Isles, the city’s ubiquitous patty distributor, remains my benchmark: warm as a kitten, neon-yellowy, with a gooey filling that tasted mostly of salt and hot pepper. The great and grand patties of the new generation aren’t better than that, though neither are they worse: they’re just fancier, louder, higher-wattage. The Jamaican patty has made it into the ballpark, thanks to Onwuachi; perhaps next it’ll be printed on T-shirts, or used as Big Apple shorthand in the movies, or added to the ranks of MOMA’s N.Y.C.-themed collection of Christmas ornaments, alongside the Anthora coffee cup and the yellow cab and the cranky pigeon. But the patty is what matters, the joy of it, the heat and the flake and the bite. ♦
