Carribean that’s off the main drag

OK, let’s nutshell it: Owner of a car repair shop opens a Jamaican restaurant. Now make that a repair shop for English sports cars, put it in Santa Monica and you have Port Royal Cafe.

To be more exact, Port Royal Cafe is in back-street Santa Monica. It and the British Car Clinic next door are on a stretch of Broadway, so quiet that one side of the street doesn’t even have parking meters.

Because the neighborhood’s empty in the evening, Port Royal ostensibly closes at 6:30. In practice, it will stay open later if you make a reservation, but pay no attention to the wildly inoperative hours listed on a sign often set out on the sidewalk. The place usually doesn’t open for dinner at all on Saturdays.

It consists of two tiny dining rooms decorated with prints of Jamaica and reggae singers. If you turn right just before the back dining room, a place of rough concrete walls painted pale pink and off-white, you’ll see a little takeout shop with a deli case for snacks and desserts.

Owner Radcliffe Reid has run the neighboring car clinic for 20 years. It was only in February that he took over this building and opened it as a restaurant with his daughter, Zoe, who speaks with the sort of English accent that makes Americans think of Gwyneth Paltrow, rather than in a Jamaican sing-song. She’s the one who decorated one wall of the shop with panels from wine cases -- rather hip wines too, making you think it’s probably a shame the restaurant doesn’t have a wine license.

A banner outside the place advertises patties, which are little flat pies, roughly square and colored bright yellow with annatto, that are related to the Cornish pasty and the Spanish empanada. They’re the sort of thing that Americans would call pockets and carry as snacks if the pastry weren’t so flaky and fragile. The main fillings are simple ground beef or spicy curried chicken.

Chicken dominates the menu, because Port Royal has the understandable impression that Santa Monica is poultry-eating country. The mildly spiced jerk chicken is basically just very good, moist roast chicken (at least at lunch; by evening it sometimes seems a little dried out). Occasionally there’s a lively special of jerk pork, also perfectly cooked but far spicier. They ought to put it on the regular menu.

The other chicken dishes are at least as good at the jerk. Brown stew chicken has a rich brown gravy, and curry chicken uses a lively, medium-hot curry powder, not heavy with fenugreek.

Curry goat comes in a milder curry sauce, and it’s very tender and moist, not as gamy as some other goat curries around town. It’s very meaty, but the meatiest thing here is Negril oxtail. It comes in a bit of rich brown gravy along with, oddly, a couple of lima beans.

Fish isn’t Port Royal’s strong suit, though the hint of vinegar in escoveitched fish makes red snapper less boring than usual. Fish Port Royal style includes sprigs of fresh thyme, which raise it above the usual dish of fish simmered in tomato sauce that you find everywhere from Louisiana to Chile.

There are a couple of simple, hearty soups and salads, and you can get callaloo, a West Indian green like collards only milder, either as a side dish or in the “vegetarian surprise” entree. On Fridays Port Royal serves the dish Jamaicans are most homesick for, salt cod stewed with ackee, a vegetable that tastes a bit like scrambled eggs.

All entrees come with fried plantain, steamed vegetables (just cabbage and carrots, but with a sweet, attractive flavor) and “festival bread,” a fried cornbread like a slightly sweet, extra-crunchy hushpuppy. You have a choice of plain steamed rice or rice and “peas” -- black beans, that is.

The desserts are mostly familiar cakes: carrot, Black Forest, sock it to me or fruit cake. Banana bread, bread pudding with rum sauce or sweet potato pudding are also listed on the menu, but typically only a handful of desserts are available at any given time, and there usually aren’t any at all on Mondays. Given a choice, I’d generally go for the coconut meringue pie, very sweet and with a strong coconut flavor.

Port Royal doesn’t make much of the fact, but it has an espresso machine. It offers a couple of American and Jamaican sodas, including Kola Champagne (brass-yellow and ginger-flavored), Jamaican ginger beer (clear and positively fierce with ginger) and Ting, a grapefruit soda.

It also makes some drinks, such as a pineapple drink with a bright, aggressive note of ginger, and sorrel. Ironically, Jamaican sorrel is better known in California as the Mexican drink jamaica, pronounced “hah-MY-kah,” as in Spanish. But in a nutshell: The Jamaicans had it first.

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Port Royal Cafe

Location: 1412 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 458-4147; fax: 458-6068.

Price: Appetizers, $1.70 to $5.95; entrees, $5.95 to $9.95 for lunch, $8.95 to $11.95 for dinner; desserts, $2.49 to $3.49.

Best dishes: Curry chicken, brown stew chicken, jerk pork, curry goat, Negril oxtails, coconut meringue, pineapple ginger.

Details: Lunch, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Saturday; dinner, 3 to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday. No alcoholic beverages. Street parking. MasterCard, Visa and American Express.