A New Generation of Caribbean Restaurants Is Revamping the Food Scene in Los Angeles

Daring and delicious new takes on Caribbean cuisine.

Compared to cities like New York, Miami, Washington, D.C., and Boston, Los Angeles’ Caribbean restaurant scene — a broad and sweeping classification that includes over a dozen countries — remains quite modest. Of course, there are the city’s beloved culinary institutions like Natraliart Jamaican Restaurant on Washington Boulevard, Blessed Tropical Cuisine, Ackee Bamboo, Wi Jammin, Little Belize, Hungry Joe’s, and Sattdown Jamaican Grill, among others.

Related: 26 Caribbean Recipes From Cuban Sandwiches to Jamaican Jerk Chicken

But there’s also a new wave of Caribbean restaurants, chefs, and pop-ups in Los Angeles who are doing daring, delicious things with Jamaican, Bajan, and Trinidadian flavors, and slowly changing the tides for Caribbean food in Los Angeles. We talked with chefs behind Bridgetown Roti, Rubie, and Anjahles to find out their inspirations, the state of Caribbean food in Los Angeles, and where they hope the future takes them.

Bridgetown Roti

In 2019, when Rashida Holmes was promoted to chef de cuisine at Botanica — a charming Silver Lake restaurant where no one ever seems to tire of vegetables — she should have been happy. And yet, she felt only... apathetic. “I was so uninspired,” explains Holmes, who now runs Bridgetown Roti, the pop-up darling turned brick-and-mortar restaurant located in Los Angeles’ East Hollywood. “That’s when I started kicking around the idea of cooking something else. And a friend of mine said, ‘Why don't you write down everything you love to eat and cook in a notebook, and see where that takes you?’” She did that for two days, glued to her notebook, frantically jotting down everything she could think of. “The one thing that kept coming up was Caribbean food. That's how the whole idea for Bridgetown started.”

And although Holmes would later spend much of her childhood moving around the country, no matter where she was, she could always count on her parents cooking Caribbean food during the holidays and for birthdays (her mom, Joy, grew up in Barbados.) “I was always a Caribbean-American kid. That was just my identity. But when I started cooking professionally, I never connected the two things, my childhood with my desire to cook. It’s been an epiphany moment for me in the last few years.”

Holmes was also determined to radically reimagine what a restaurant could be. “We’re a team and we’re striving for perfection together,” she explains. “We don’t all have to be perfect, but we can be perfect as a group. That’s my philosophy.” At Bridgetown’s new East Hollywood location, you’ll find all Holmes’s treasured family recipes, plus a few new additions: chicken curry spiced with turmeric; cod cakes slathered in garlic aioli (one of her Aunt Vie’s creations, actually), and paratha-style rotis — golden parcels of flaky, hand-rolled paratha brushed generously with butter.

“I'd like us to last. That's my main thing. I'd like us to have longevity,” says Holmes while reflecting on what’s next for Bridgetown. “But L.A. is hard. It’s expensive and the rent is high. We, as a city, have not recovered from the strikes in the film industry and it’s affecting the hospitality industry. The crews are what sustain this town.”

Anjahles

At the helm of the Jamaican fusion pop-up known as Anjahles (pronounced AN-jul-ess. Like, you know, the city), stands Jazzy Harvey, a Los Angeles native who specializes in “Cali-Caribbean cuisine for vegans and non-vegans alike,” and cooks for the stars. Since its launch in 2020, business has skyrocketed, with Anjahles picking up Spotify, Disney, Reddit, and Playboy as corporate clients, as well as a healthy rotating list of repeat celebrity customers.

Alongside traditional dishes made vegan, like BBQ jackfruit sliders or vegan jerk gumbo, Anjahles also serves Jamaican classics: think oxtail mac and cheese, or jerk club sandwiches with dripping hot honey. It’s a culinary mixtape style that Harvey calls, “the Californication of Caribbean food,” which instantly conjures up images of a young David Duchovny going to town on some jerk chicken, or that one Red Hot Chili Peppers album. “I love traditional Jamaican food, but I also wanted to bring something else to the table and make it really mine. I’m giving it that California flair,” says Jazzy. “It’s not like bringing sand to the beach for Caribbean people. Anjahles is authentic, but it has its own twist, a modern twist.”

What’s next for Anjahles? A cozy supper club debuting in the fall called “Plug and Plate.” Each menu features Anjahles’ signature Cali-Caribbean cooking, paired with a specific timeless album, like a chef’s table set to music, with Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun up first.

Rubie

Giancarlo Scott, the owner and chef behind Rubie, a Jamaican pop-up in L.A., always found the note ‘connect with your heritage’ to be grating and difficult, especially in the pressure cooker of professional kitchens. “I was always being told, ‘Know your roots,’ and ‘Find your voice,’ in the kitchen, because having that identity was extremely important. I had a hard time doing that,” says Scott, looking back.

Yet, when the chef, who previously cooked at two-Michelin-starred Providence and at 2016 F&W Best New Chef Edouardo Jordan’s pair of Seattle restaurants, Salare and Junebaby, decided to cook one last, final goodbye meal for his close friends and family members in Seattle before moving back Los Angeles in 2020, the menu was obvious: he would make Jamaican food.

“I kept coming back to the summers where I met my dad. He’s from Kingston and he grew up extremely poor. So, despite what happened in our relationship, he really made it out,” he recalls. Whenever they saw each other, Giancarlo’s dad would always take him to a small mom-and-pop Jamaican restaurant, where they would dine on patties and plantains and ackee and saltfish. In a way, he was reminding Giancarlo of where he, and they, came from.

Back in L.A., Giancarlo now runs Rubie, an experimental Caribbean pop-up where bold dishes like salt and ackee chawanmushi carry a certain funky, undeniable California-ness with them, and complement the existing Jamaican flavors. Rubie (named after his maternal grandmother) is the perfect embodiment of Scott as a chef: the summers he spent with his dad, eating patties; growing up in the Valley; his rigorous training at Providence. 

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