Mon appétit

Cheers, Mon! This toast in Caribbean lingo rings out to celebrate the reopening of the Kingston Café.
From what I’ve seen, it seems that during the four years of closure — catering only to private parties — the café has been gathering speed for momentous days ahead as a full-service restaurant.

For many of us who love Caribbean cuisine, the reopening fires expectations: It’s like getting back aboard a great white yacht, jubilant with flags, setting sail for many ports along the Caribbean’s floral necklace of 7,000 islands.

The longest stop is the island nation of Jamaica, a mooring defined by delicious multicultural cuisine and enhanced by traditions of hospitality and generosity to visitors. That spirit’s here, in the restaurant founded in the early 1990s by Jamaicans Una Morris and her husband, Charles, and operated today by their USA-born sons, Keone and Cheynne Chong.

Jamaican chef Randy Whyne runs the kitchen but “Mom’s recipes rule it,” said Keone Chong. Whyne has added overlays of Caribbean inspirations like five Black Tiger shrimp, fried in Red Stripe beer batter and served with a papaya and Scotch bonnet chile tartar sauce ($20 at dinner) — “all with Mom’s OK, of course.”

Succulent yet firm, the large tigers snap when you bite into them. Other Wynne dishes I’ve enjoyed are jerk chicken — either chunked over salads or sandwiched at lunch. FYI: “Jerk meat” is not the name Jamaican vendors reserve for grinning tourists. In many dishes, you’ll admire the judicious way Chef Whyne uses Scotch bonnet — hotter than the lantern-shaped habanero chile, though not quite as hot as the Peruvian death pepper. By request, Whyne regulates the hits from tingle to wicked to whiplash.

How is it that after only four months of pre-grand-opening trial operations Kingston managed to receive the most votes as Best Caribbean Restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley in the Weekly’s 2009 readers’ poll? Part of it comes from old customers from the halcyon days of the mid-’90s and early 2000s returning, said Keone.

Or as a Jamaican pal, adopting the picturesque patter of melodious Jamaican folk patois, puts it: “What you bring we? All of we frien’ a come.” (All of our friends have arrived.) After the Best of Pasadena results were published, Chong indicates that a lot of new “friens” are arriving daily.

I couldn’t resist equating the speed of their comeback with the celerity of Jamaica’s Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest human ever, who recently set the world’s record of 9:58 for the 100 meters in Berlin. “If Bolt dashed in for lunch, what would you serve him?” I asked Keone. “Jerk chicken sandwich and Red Stripe beer battered shrimp,” he replied.

Beyond dining, tom-tom tub-thumbing will lead you to the dance floor on Saturday nights for live reggae music. This Saturday, Halloween, servers will be costumed in bewitching attire. If you spot a red devil with a bent wire tail and a fork in hand, skulking and grinning like Groucho Marx — that’s me.

But I hope by the island voodoo traditions (called obeah in Jamaica) that a doctor will rattle some bones, scramble some goat innards or rub a talisman and transform me from evil devil to dancing fool. I’d look lean and mean as a machete sheathed in black leather. And later, at the turn of a tarot card, I’d make three mango crème brulées disappear.

Abracadabra! You’ll admire Kingston’s new look: It starts with four intimate, nicely appointed dining rooms. They feature faux-stained-glass windows refracting a sunlight that warms the room’s sand white walls and lightly colored trim. Then there’s a large dining room with British Colonial furnishings, plus a dance floor and a bar which flow onto a moonlit patio. Paintings and mosaics throughout the meandering rooms are from Gino Perez, a witty, timely and timeless artist. Don’t look for any Caribbean sun smiley with sunglasses.

Contemplating the evolution of Kingston Cafe’s Caribbean cuisine, there’s plenty of history to chew over. Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492 — he didn’t “discover” America: How can you discover a place where Native Americans had already settled for centuries? In truth, he stumbled onto Cuba and Haiti and (in 1494) Jamaica, while bound (he thought) for the East Indies seeking cinnamon for Queen Isabella’s toast.

They don’t serve jellied toast at Kingston Café, but try the Jamaican patties. These are golden crusted baked pockets of pastry filled with savory fillings of beef, chicken or vegetables ($3.50 to $4).

Some 300 years after Columbus, Captain Bligh washed up on Jamaica — on his way to Catalina — with ackee from West Africa. Ackee is a red tropical fruit with a soft, creamy white flesh tasting like scrambled eggs and is a “go-with” for one of Jamaica’s national dishes, salt fish (usually cod), and a local treasure at Kingston Café.

Kingston kitchen larders also bear fruit from forays by Spanish, French, English, Swedish and Danish invaders who followed Columbus with a map — and slaves from West Africa who followed without portfolio. Because plantation masters provided slaves with boring leftovers, slaves became masters of herbs and spices. Later fugitive slaves hid in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains where the aroma from their cooking risked giving away their positions. After slavery was abolished, indentured servants (cheap labor) arrived from India and China — hence the curries and gingers.