San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
The Jerk Shack
‘Caribbean food with a Caribbean wait’ is worth it
I’ve never been to a roadside jerk stand in Jamaica. But I’ve been to a roadside jerk stand on the West Side of San Antonio.
That’s real, and that’s enough. Enough for two stars in a rating system that recognizes the transformative power of food, not just the package it comes in.
The Jerk Shack doesn’t look like much. Just a walk-up window with tilted patio awnings and picnic tables on either side. But when the food kicks in, none of that matters, whether it’s the Jamaican jerk chicken burning away the frustrations of a sweltering wait in line or an iron pan of shrimp and grits generating its own steam power.
The force behind this powerful food is Lattoia Massey, a Culinary Institute of AmericaSan Antonio graduate operating under the nom de guerre Chef Nicola Blaque. Working with her husband, Cornelius Massey, and fellow CIA alum Chris White, Blaque opened The Jerk Shack in May.
At the time, she told the Express-News, “We want to give people a taste of real Jamaica … my homeland.” Here’s how she does that.
The Jerk Shack’s core menu is a Jamaican greatest hits album: jerk pork, jerk chicken, coco bread, oxtails, beef patties, curried goat and a rainbow of bottled fruit drinks and ginger ale. The San Antonio influence clocks in with tacos, chicken wings, macaroni and cheese and that Southern all-star, shrimp and grits.
The pork’s roasted and pulled, and the chicken’s grilled and chopped. “Jerk” is the common denominator. It’s not just a sauce, more like a philosophy, a concept applied liberally as an adjective and verb the same way “barbecue” works in the States.
As a noun, the jerk was hot enough to curl your eyelashes, a sauce animated by thyme and cloves and garlic and citrus, but mostly by the high-Scoville blast of habanero. Blaque said she uses habanero rather than jerk’s usual scotch bonnet pepper because habanero is easier to get in these parts.
For me, habanero’s a pepper too hot for its own good, sacrificing flavor for fire. But suspended in a sweet velveteen sauce that found every fissure of charred skin and juicy meat, the habanero was suddenly bright, bold and nuanced.
I could begin and end my time here with jerk chicken and jerk pork. On its own, in a taco with pineapple relish or on a sandwich with slaw and Texas toast. But I’d miss out on something just as good: braised oxtails.
You’ve seen the star-shaped oxtail bones in other Southern preparations, surrounded by concentric halos of fibery beef and sticky fat. The Jerk Shack cuts back the fat, and the lean meat absorbed a tangy mahogany sauce that rippled with toma- to, herbs and heat. Served with unfussy sides of cabbage and a mix of rice and peas, it formed Jerk Shack’s most balanced plate.
There’s nothing balanced about curried goat, nor would I want there to be. Goat’s a rebellious meat, thin and rangy and prone to contrary fits of tough and tender. This golden curry spiked with ginger and scallions didn’t try to tame that goat. It just harmonized with it.
I learned something about Jamaican snack food here that puts our pasta bread bowls and crunch-wrap gorditas into perspective. There’s a thing called coco bread. Kind of a dry, thum- py, bun-size yeast loaf with a toasty crust. Then there’s the Jamaican patty, like a savory hand-pie filled with beef and mild gravy, the crust flaky and glowing yellow from turmeric.
They’re a symbiotic unit. The beef patty’s highest calling is to fold inside the coco bread like a carbohydrate turducken. Heed the call.
A Jamaican jerk stand knows fried chicken wings and macaroni and cheese are part of the universal language. The Shack adds jerk spice to the lexicon for wings that fluently blended spice and crunch. Three of them draped along an iron pan of thick macaroni and cheese offered bar-food satisfaction in the sober light of midday.
With two cooking-school grads in the kitchen, not even the cramped space of a former West Side taco shop could stop shrimp and grits. Full-contact shrimp, with legs and feelers and eyes and insides, stood sentinel over grits with a grain as fat as puffed rice. Corn relish and jerk sauce lit the fuse for one of the city’s hottest takes on a dish that seldom gets the respect — or the shrimp — it deserves.
All that’s scaled back from a menu that once included salt fish fritters, fried spring rolls, even a whole fried snapper. Blaque said those might come back as part of a Sunday fish-fry when the Masseys finalize their plans for brunch.
Food doesn’t tell the whole Jerk Shack story. The shop has seized its own corner of the San Antonio zeitgeist, on Facebook especially. One video has generated more than 2 million views, and every post spawns long contrails of comments about the food, the newspaper it’s served on, the long waits in line and the inevitable sellouts.
The food’s the easy part. The newspaper? Just food-service wax paper printed to look like a front page. But there’s no easy answer to the laws of supply and demand.
My own Jerk Shack waiting experiences ranged from 10 to 45 minutes. I had to walk away once, when half the menu was already gone and it took seven minutes for them to take a single order in a line 15 people deep.
The Jerk Shack’s ongoing response is sympathetic but unrepentant. “Caribbean food with a Caribbean wait.”
That’s called owning it. The Jerk Shack’s worth the wait.