The island is a garden of exotic tropical fruits and vegetables that make Jamaican food and Jamaican restaurants an absolute treat. The local cuisine is delicious and frequently spicy. You would not be the first visitor who wished they could take their Jamaican food and Jamaican chef home with them. The local markets as well as the local bars and restaurants overflow with color and life that make Jamaican food an unforgettable experience.

Jamaica features a vast array of restaurants serving great Jamaican food. From authentic island cuisine, especially "jerk chicken" to fine Italian restaurants, Jamaica villa rental guests have many desirable choices while enjoying Jamaican food. Some of Jamaica's restaurants are located in swishy hotels, while others are perched cliffside affording amazing Jamaican sunsets.

Montego Bay
Akbar: Good Indian & Thai restaurant located in the Half Moon Shopping Village. Gloucester Ave. Montego Bay. 876.979.0113.

The Houseboat: Floating restaurant in Freeport, ferry across from parking area. Pepper shrimp, tenderloin, seafood. Reasonable prices and very good. Call for reservations & be sure to request a table on the outside deck for view! Freeport Rd, Montego Bay. 876.979.8845

The Brewery: Casual bar and restaurant on the Hip Strip. Big screen TV and Karaoke. Wide variety of cuisine. Gloucester Ave, Miranda Ridge Plaza, Montego Bay. 876.940.2433.

The Native: Open for lunch and dinner. Outdoor terrace dining overlooking Walter Fletcher Beach and the coastline. Good local food. Gloucester Avenue, Montego Bay. 876.979.2769 or 876.940.4390

The Pelican: Casual Denny's style restaurant located on the Hip Strip/Gloucester Ave. 876.952.3171

Marguerites: A lovely spot to enjoy Jamaican food in the center of downtown Montego Bay, overlooking the water. Formal dining room and next door is the famous Margaritaville sports bar and disco. Phone: 876.952.4777

Round Hill Hotel: Upscale, excellent alfresco dining by the sea for lunch and dinner. Also, a piano bar and entertainment two nights each week. Round Hill Hotel, Montego Bay. Reservations. Phone: 876.956.7050
Round Hill Beach Party: Every Monday night-beach BBQ buffet with Calypso band.
Every Friday night-Jamaica night with Jamaican buffet and Steel or Reggae Band and Jamaican Floor Show. $49 for dinner & music & 50% discount for children under 12 years of age. Reservations. 876.956.7050.

Sugar Mill Restaurant:
Located just across the street from the Half Moon Resort’s golf course, this restaurant offers a delightful blend of Jamaican food ingredients with an international flair, creating a great Jamaican restaurant. Phone: 876.953.2314. Reservations

The Pork Pit:
A casual, open-air place with picnic benches that offers fiery jerk pork and chicken, a Jamaican food staple.

Ritz Carlton:
Jasmines at the Ritz is considered to be one of the best restaurants in Montego Bay for world class cuisine blending Asian and Jamaican specialties. 876.953.2800.

Scotchies: A casual, open air place with picnic tables and bar that offers the BEST jerk pork, chicken, fish, breadfruit, yams etc. Just east of town and the airport.

The White Witch: Located high up on the golf course, it serves a good lunch and offers a lovely view. Restaurant high up on the golf course serves a good lunch that comes with a breathtaking view.

Tryall Great House: Continental dining inside or on a terrace under the stars. Happy hour 5-6:30, sunset
cocktails and hors d'oeuvres (ONLY Tryall villa guests). The Tryall Club. 876.956,5660

Negril
Chicken Lavish: Low budget eatery located along the West End. Curried goat is a specialty as the chef's special Jamaican chicken. Dining is either on the roofed verandah or take-out. Phone: 876.957.4410

Cosmos Seafood Restaurant & Bar: Located on the East End of the beach, an open air, casual place that offers wonderful conch chowder, another can't miss Jamaican food. 876.957.4330, 876.957.9072

Da Ginos: Gino Travaini, the Italian born owner, offers specialties such as linguine with lobster, fillet of beef with peppercorns and huge platters of grilled seafood. Norman Manley Blvd. in the Mariposa Hotel. 876.957.4918.

Gambinos: Located adjacent to Margaritaville, the restaurant has a deck that opens onto the sands of the beach. It features Jamaican and Italian food and fabulous drinks. Menus include fresh salads, grilled fish, spaghetti Alfredo and a good version of fettuccine with lobster. Norman Manley Blvd. in the Beachcomber Resort. 876. 957.4170.

Hungry Lion: A wonderful casual alfresco spot located on the cliffs offering wonderful seafood and vegetarian dishes as well as a juice bar. West End Road. 876.957.4486.

Ivan's Bar & Restaurant: Located at Catcha Falling Star on the West End, well priced and good food. 876.957.0390

Normas on the Beach: Located at the Sea Splash Resort, the spot offers romantic wooden decks and pavilions along the 7 Mile Beach. The menu features many regional products and is seasonally adjusted with items that may include grilled red snapper, jerk penne pasta. 876.957.4041.

Rick’s Café: THE place to be at sundown as everyone in Negril heads to the famous Rick's Cafe for either drinks or dinner at sundown. Dinner can be romantic with dining alfresco on such specialties as imported steaks and a complete menu of blackened Cajun style dishes. The fish is always fresh. The food is expensive. West End Road. 876.957.0380.

Sweet Spice: Authentic Jamaican fare, good food and inexpensive. Sheffield Rd., West End, Negril. 876.957.4621.

Ocho Rios
Jamaica Inn: Phone: 876.974.2514. Colonial atmosphere and continental cuisine and dining by the sea under the stars. After dinner, couples dance under the starlight. The former playground to such luminaries as Noel Coward and Elizabeth Taylor.

Toscanini: Phone: 876.975.4478. Located at Harmony Hall, a causal Italian restaurant that offers a marriage of traditional Italian cuisine and fresh tropical produce and spices.

Jamaican Food Glossary
Ackee:
A handful of islands grow ackee as an ornamental tree, but only in Jamaican food is it looked upon as a tree that bears edible fruit. The ackee fruit is bright red. When ripe, it bursts open to reveal large black seeds and bright yellow flesh. The flesh of the ackee is popular as a Jamaican breakfast food. Ackee is poisonous if eaten before it is fully mature. Never open an ackee pod; it will open itself when it ceases to be deadly.

Annatto:
This slightly musky-flavored reddish yellow spice, ground from the seeds of a flowering tree, is native to the West Indies and the Latin tropics. Islanders store their annatto seeds in oil--giving the oil a beautiful color. Saffron or turmeric can be substituted for this Jamaican food product.

Bay Rum:
The bay rum tree is related to the evergreen that produces allspice. It is used to flavor soups, stews and other Jamaican food.

Blue Marlin:
A Jamaican food that offers great variety, the marlin that isn't immediately devoured as a great steak is delivered to the smoker, where it takes on a milder flavor like salmon.

Breadfruit:
This useful Jamaican food is served like squash--baked, grilled, fried, boiled or roasted after being stuffed with meat. It's even been known to turn up in preserves or in a beverage. The breadfruit is a large green fruit, usually about 10 inches in diameter, with a pebbly green skin and potato-like flesh. Breadfruits are not edible until they are cooked and they can be used in place of any starchy vegetable, rice or pasta.

Callaloo:
This colorful Jamaican food turns up in records as early as 1696. This leafy, spinach-like vegetable is typically prepared as one would prepare turnips or collard greens.

Star Fruit:
This fruit is a tart or acidy-sweet star-shaped Jamaican food. It is often used in desserts, as a garnish for drinks, tossed into salads or cooked together with seafood.

Cassava:
This tuber is also known as manioc and yucca. Both kinds of cassava can appear as meal, tapioca and farina and can be bought ready made as cassava, which is used to make bammy. Sweet cassava is boiled and eaten as a starch vegetable. This Jamaican food is a staple.

Conch:
These gastropods are a beloved part of the cuisine as far north as the Bahamas and Florida. When preparing conch soup, conch salad or, best of all, spicy conch fritters, you must tender the tough conch flesh

Escovich:
The Spanish word for "pickled." It usually refers to fresh fish (and sometimes poultry) that is fried and then pickled in vinegar, spices, hot peppers and oil.

Goat:
Goat meat is eaten with enthusiasm in only a few places in the world, and Jamaica is assuredly one of those places. Some credit immigrants from India who searched in vain for lamb to prepare their beloved curry. Many who try this Jamaican food for a first time find it milder in flavor than lamb.

Guava:
Tropical fruit that has over a hundred species. The smell and taste are intense and perfumed. Guava is used green or ripe in punches, syrups, jams, chutneys, ice creams and an all-island paste know as guava cheese; a great Jamaican food.

Hibiscus, Flor de Jamaica, Sorrel:
A tropical flower--not to be confused with the garden-variety hibiscus--grown for it crimson sepal, which is used to flavor dinks, jams and sauces.

Jack:
A fish family of over two hundred species, these colorful saltwater fish go by a host of variety names such as yellowtail, greenback, burnfin, black and amber jack. These delicately flavored fish tend to be large, weighing a much as 150 pounds, and have become an important Jamaican food.

Lobster:
In Jamaican food, it's the spiny or Caribbean lobster that is found. Although the texture of this cooked meat is considered in some to be inferior to that of the Maine lobster, the flavor of the spiny lobster meat more that makes up for the supposedly inferior texture.

Okra:
This finger-shaped Jamaican food, is fried as a side dish, used as a thickening agent in callaloo.
Pimento:

Unique to Jamaican food, the more global name refers to the allspice berry, which has the taste of nutmeg, cinnamon, black pepper and clove. All but a tiny bit of pimento is grown in Jamaica, the remainder being grown in southern Cuba. Thanks to its embrace by English and Spanish colonist, allspice is used in numerous

Jamaican classics, from Escoveitched Fish to Jerk Pork.
Plantain:
Technically a banana-family fruit, and used as such in Jamaican food, but generally regarded as a vegetable. Inedible raw, cooked plantains are served as appetizers or starchy side dishes. The unripe (green), ripe (yellow) and very ripe (dark) plantains are used in Caribbean cooking.

Salt fish:
Salt fish is any fried, salted fish, but most often cod. Jamaican food still uses the taste of this salted cod (Italian, Spanish or Portuguese markets have the name bacalao). Ackee and Salt fish is the preferred breakfast of Jamaicans.

Scotch Bonnet Peppers:
The fiery Scotch bonnet pepper, ranging in colors from yellow to orange to red, is considered the leading hot pepper in Jamaican food. Some peppers are sold whole, others are dried and ground, and still others are processed into sauces, such as Jamaica Hell Fire.

Sour sop:
Elongated, spike-covered fruit, slightly tart and delicately flavored. This odd Jamaican food is used mainly in drinks, punches, sherbets and ice cream.

Tamarind:
This decorative tree produces brown pods containing a sweet and tangy pulp that's used for flavoring everything in Jamaican food from beverages to curries and sauces.

Yam:
Similar in size and color to the potato, but nuttier in flavor, it is not to be confused with the Southern sweet yam or sweet potato. Caribbean yams are served boiled, mashed or baked.