Jamaican Chic

Coley’s Place is in a new Ladera Heights mini-mall, next door to a gleaming industrial park, just west of swift-coursing La Cienega, over the hill from the cemetery that plays host to Al Jolson’s mausoleum and over another from the empty husk of the Wich Stand. Even when every seat is full, Coley’s sometimes seems as vast and uncrowded as the dining hall at an off-season resort: soaring ceilings, Versailles-size mirrors and sprawling pastel murals of the Jamaican coast. The carpets smell new; the chefs wear toques and crisp whites; the Jamaican ambience is kind of chic. At about $20 a person for dinner, with dessert and maybe a bottle of Red Stripe, Coley’s Place is not the cheap date that the Coleys’ old Jamaican restaurant, Coley’s Kitchen on Crenshaw, used to be. People dress for dinner here. On the sound system, Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer play more discreetly than you’ve ever heard them played before.

On each table at Coley’s Place is a small bottle of Melinda’s hot sauce, a sunny orange-yellow condiment made from Belizian scotch bonnet peppers, hot enough to make jalapenos seem sweet and mild as Fudgsicles. Melinda’s fresh, bright taste somehow improves everything it comes in contact with, especially Coley’s musky West Indian sauces, and its heat intensifies rather than overpowers the flavors of the food. If the sauce doesn’t do it for you, you can ask for a dish of fresh scotch bonnet sliced razor-thin, and gulp down a handful of the hottest pepper in the world. My friend David did, and lived.

This is what he might have gulped down to cool the burn: milky spiced soursop, made with fresh guanabana pulp; nutmeg-flavored Irish moss, a thick and tasty beverage made from the same seaweed McDonald’s uses to emulsify the McLean; tart vivid-red sorrel; homemade pineapple-ginger juice.This is what he did drink: the house’s very fine ginger beer, which is sweet and extremely spicy itself. These might be the best Jamaican drinks in town.

You might try a drop or two of Melinda’s with a Jamaican vegetable “pattie,” a turnover stuffed with spiced, cooked greens, which is great when it’s crisp and hot out of the oven, limp and sort of acrid when it’s been reheated, which it often has been. It’s your gamble. Patties stuffed with spiced, finely ground beef or chicken may be slightly less delicious to begin with, but age better than the vegetable.

Conch fritters--airy, golden batter things studded with vegetables and itsy bits of shellfish--are deep-fried to order, and are perfectly crisp and hot, even if not loaded down with a whole lot of conch.

Coley’s Place may not be cheap, but it is generous. With dinner, you get a mound of rice and “peas,” a lozenge of sweet “festival bread” that resembles a dense doughnut, a heap of steamed vegetables, and fried bananas. There’s also either the green-salad/blue-cheese dressing sort of thing or soup--a thick chicken soup, afloat with what are essentially Jamaican spaetzle, or possibly a delicious “pease” soup, which has an elusively sweet taste that I only later connected with Japanese azuki beans.

If you’ve been to many Jamaican restaurants, you know the basic menu, and Coley’s Place does everything you expect, mostly pretty well--lightened versions of the classics. Oxtail is braised until the meat turns fragrant and soft, the strong-tasting essence of beef. Tender, bony chunks of goat are stained with curry. Coley’s curried shrimp with vegetables would be the hit of any dinner party. “Escovitched” fish is a fried fillet, firm, pungent with vinegar, positively incandescent with scotch-bonnet heat. And chicken “Lockerton” is a breaded and fried breast, rolled around a banana like a new form of burrito, in a fine, subtly spicy gravy.

Not everything’s good: “jerk” chicken, normally grilled with a spice rub, seems baked here, the flesh too soft, the skin not half crisp enough; roast beef is too well-done. The bread pudding, though, heated and drizzled with something sweet and liquored, is very good indeed.

Coley’s Place, 5035 W. Slauson Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 291-7474. Open daily for lunch and dinner; Sunday brunch. Beer and wine. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Lot parking. Lunch for two, food only, $13-$20; dinner for two, food only, $20-$40.