Boston Jerk City – Plate 18

I am a hellaciously ravenous eater, so I get the “did you even taste it?” and “aren’t you going to chew that?” comments a lot. James, however, is a very thoughtful and patient eater, also willing to frame the shot perfectly for the photos. I’ll admit, his photos are a lot better than mine, and he dipped his pork, instead of eating the pork and then shooting the jerk sauce, which led to potentially more enjoyment on his part and significantly less on mine (that stuff is hot as H-E-double-hockey-sticks). Also, it left me watching him enjoy every last tasty morsel of the beautiful, savory, spicy, succulence for a good ten minutes.

We got the Jerk Pork meal (above) and the Half Chicken Jerk (below), and we definitely got an extra two drumsticks in the Half-Chicken. The jerk pork was the dish I was most interested in trying because I’ve had jerk chicken before. Turns out that I’ve just had roast chicken with jerk seasoning on it. I learned today that TRUE Jerk needs to be smoked. The jerk pork was smoked well; there were crispy pieces, juicy pieces, drier pieces, but no bad pieces. This is tough to achieve, but they nail it at Boston Jerk City.

You can see by the close up of that jerk that they season it well. James (who is almost finished with a book proposal on barbecue) said that the chicken was smoked perfectly after seeing the pinkness of the insides. I don’t know what all of this means, but I couldn’t have cared as I barely said a word while devouring the chicken. I was full, I still am (it’s 6:45 AM the next day), but this stuff was so damn good I would have pounded another quarter chicken if I didn’t have to eat another 75 meals this month. Of course, the chicken was their specialty and it was unbelievable.

OK, you gotta see this place – it’s absolutely anomalous:

What was this guy’s interior designer thinking? No idea. There was religious rasta music on in the background for our whole meal, which wasn’t as annoying as show-tunes hour in Starbucks and was a huge bonus to the we-ain’t-in-Kansas-anymore feel.

The bread (pic) was very pillowy and soft, but that’s only if we’re talking about a memory-foam contour pillow. The final touch to the meal was the Baba Roots (pic, link) here are some quotes from some popular (needs verification) rasta musicians:

Kiprich say when it comes to strong back dem fi know seh a Baba roots!
Bounty Killer says Babaroots is Good to the Riddim!
Macka Diamond says: Baba Roots a dat de roots da me a hunt … fi give mi man … fi hav da power to work mi good and work me proper … ah Baba Roots a fi mi booster!
Twin of Twins say Babaroots gives me adequate stamina!

Most if this probably makes sense to someone, but do the people at Baba Roots know what kind of strength adequate connotes (maybe adequate is the gold standard for all Red Bulls for the West Indian Community)? And if the product is called Baba Roots, why call it Babaroots on the front page of your website? They must have farmed the web design out to the same guy that writes the Nigerian spam e-mails. I would not drink this again, but when we saw it, we had to buy it once. It tasted of watery bitters.

The Foodie is willing to look past all of this to the Jerk. Amazing, wonderful, gorgeous Jerk. If the Sesame Chicken at Precious is worth the trip to Hoboken, this is worth the schlep to deep, dirty BK. – Take the Four to Utica Ave and the 46 to Foster and say hi to Lawton for me.

Guest Writer: James Boo … Here’s his post

The IRL Arts Foundation and The Wandering Foodie thank Lawton at Boston Jerk City for being pretty laid back about the whole thing and pretty much ignoring me. I don’t care, I love you and your Jerk anyway … you big Jerk.

Boston Jerk City
1344 Utica Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11203
(718) 629-3002