Reggae Rice
Rice and “peas,” a savory mess of rice and beans as rich in protein as it is in flavor, may be as close as there is to a universal dish in the Caribbean. In Cuba, they fry rice and black beans with fat pork and garlic and call the miscegenation moros y cristianos , Moors and Christians. In Nicaragua, it’s called gallo pinto (“speckled chicken”); in Puerto Rico, where the rice is mixed with pigeon peas, it’s arroz con gandules .
Except for an occasional bowl of the thin Salvadoran rice-and-bean gruel called shuco , I’ve never tasted a version of rice and peas I didn’t like. But as other fish soups tend to pale next to a great bouillabaisse, other rice-and-peas dishes seem insignificant when juxtaposed with a fine Jamaican version, especially when the Jamaican rice and peas in question happen to be topped with a piece or two of freshly grilled jerk chicken.
I am especially partial to the rice and peas served at the Pomona Jamaican restaurant Sweet Pot. Simmered with coconut milk and sprigs of thyme, crunchy with whole allspice, given gentle, pungent heat with an exceedingly small amount of Scotch bonnet pepper, it has the rich texture of a first-rate Milanese risotto and an exotic, elusive tropical flavor barely hinted at in all the mango-heavy Fusion Cuisine restaurants you could name.
Sweet Pot is a sort of minimalist place, located in a vast strip mall that has clearly failed to thrive, in a corner of northeast Pomona I’ve always sort of thought of as Claremont. Inside, it’s the usual Jamaican thing, a big, airy dining room decorated with pictures of Haile Selassie, accented with a whole lot of red, black and green, and booming with the reggae you’d expect, with a heavy emphasis on the collected works of Bob Marley.
Look around, and every table is crowded with the Jamaican drinks made in the back: big glasses of thick, sweet soursop drink--you may know the fruit by its Spanish name guanabana --that tastes like an exotically scented vanilla shake; also a powerful ginger beer and something they call pine-ginger, which sounds like a tropical cleaning product but is basically their ginger beer thinned out with fresh pineapple juice. With the wonderful brown-stew fish--a whole small snapper fried, then simmered with vegetables in a thin, peppery broth--pine-ginger is as bracing as Muscadet.
Sweet Pot is usually at least moderately crowded, but it seems as if more than half the customers who come into the restaurant end up at the takeout counter, waiting for big brown bags full of the crisp Jamaican turnovers called patties, for cartons of soup, for foam boxes filled with jerk chicken that will leave a Caprice smelling like allspice and garlic for a week. And though Sweet Pot’s jerk chicken isn’t the best in town--that would be at the indomitable JA’net’s Jerk Chicken in South Central L.A.--it’s remarkably good for a place that doesn’t specialize in the stuff: crisp-skinned, chewy, gritty with whole spice, in no particular need of the bottles of Scotch bonnet sauce on the tables.
The main dishes--gelatinous stewed oxtail, mellow brown-stew chicken, an intensely spiced green curry of goat--arrive atop a giant mound of the rice and peas. Alongside lies a dollop of gently stewed cabbage with red peppers, or an unusual Jamaican vegetable stew, sweetened with coconut milk and thickened with dried beans. Wedged in at the sides are lengths of fried plantains and slivers of cruller-like festival bread--a hearty tropical meal for the height of summer.
Sweet Pot has kind of a strong reggae connection: The chef used to travel as the assistant to the reggae star Peter Tosh, and the restaurant runs the jerk chicken concession at most of Southern California’s big reggae shows. The Sunday reggae-show jock on KROQ plugs the restaurant so incessantly on the air that it sometimes seems as if he owns a piece of the place. (He doesn’t.)
If you’re of the opinion that Pomona might be a good place to eat a plate of akee and salt fish without hearing “No Woman, No Cry” at least once, maybe you’d better stick to takeout.
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WHERE TO GO
Sweet Pot, 3161 N. Garey Ave., Pomona, (909) 593-1323. Open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tues.-Sat.; noon to 8 p.m. Sunday. No alcohol. Cash only. Lot parking. Takeout. Dinner for two, food only, $14-$19.
What to Get
Recommended dishes: peas and rice; curry goat; brown stew fish.
