THE STORY OF NIGEL JONES, WHO BROUGHT JAMAICA TO OAKLAND.
“Before you can understand anything about what I’m doing, you have to understand this dish,” Nigel Jones says before disappearing into the back of his restaurant, Kingston 11 in Oakland.
The restaurant’s Sundaymorning service on this November day starts slower than normal, hampered by light showers that misted windows. Every few minutes, a car hums down Telegraph, its tires audibly cascading across the roadway’s newly formed wet patches.
Despite the weather, Kingston 11 soon begins buzzing with energy. Playful chatter pours from the kitchen, echoed by the few jovial clusters of customers in the dining room, most of whom are sipping rum punch and mixtures of grapefruit soda and gin (dubbed the Oakland Ting). Plates of Jamaican patties and jerk chicken cover their tables.
Jones’ spot has been popular among East Bay locals for years, yet it remains relatively under the radar to San Francisco chef-watchers and the greater Bay Area. That’s fine, Jones says. Kingston 11 wasn’t built to please everyone, or to garner attention from bloggers and food writers.
But his next project, whether he desires it or not, will.
In mid-January, Jones, who was raised in Kingston, Jamaica, will open a new Caribbean restaurant in San Francisco. Named Kaya, it will be a partnership with chef Daniel Patterson and will be located in the Mid-Market space that currently houses Patterson’s Alta. Kaya, slated to be more of a “fine-casual” Caribbean spot, will be Jones’ first restaurant outside of Oakland. Although the two restaurants will have their differences, Jones says they’re also inextricably linked.
The chef returned after a few minutes from the kitchen, bowls of saltfish and ackee cradled in his arms.
“To know this dish is to know Jamaican flavors,” Jones says, sliding into a booth near the back of the restaurant.
Saltfish is cod, or any other non-oily white fish, that has been seasoned and cured. It originally came to the islands as an import from the North Atlantic. Plantation owners at the time used it as an inexpensive way to feed their slaves.
Ackee is a fruit that came from West Africa to Jamaica in the 1700s. Its colors change from green to bright red to yellow-orange as it ripens before it splits, revealing a couple of shiny black seeds surrounded by soft, yellowish flesh.
Jones had planned to discuss the new project, his life, how Kingston 11 came to be — a story that simultaneously explains how Kaya came to fruition — but all that had to come the food, he says. So he picks up one of the warm rolls, splits it in half and scoops peppers and whitefish onto the dough.
“You don’t have to do it this way,” he says. “But it’s the way you
should do it.” Then he takes his first bite.
Jones was born in Jamaica to teenage parents, neither older than 16. “My mother jokes that the first time she slept with someone, she got pregnant,” Jones says. “Either way, they weren’t ready for me. That’s why I was raised by my grandmother.”
His grandmother — Gwen Larmond, or “Miss Gwen” as she was called — was a neighborhood celebrity, if there was such a thing in Kingston, one ZIP code away from Trenchtown, a place once known as much for its crime as for its most famous resident, Bob Marley.
“It’s like Jay-Z collaborating with Mozart. They’re from two completely different angles, but are ass-kickers in their own ways. Why not come together and do something special?” Nigel Jones, on collaborating with Daniel Patterson on S.F. restaurant
The community was tightknit, Jones says. For example, as a kid, if he needed to get away from his own home for a few hours, he would just sneak through holes in the fences connecting houses all the way down the block. It was an escape hatch for when he wanted to be with his friends more than he wanted to be in his room. Then there were the nights where he was just trying to evade his grandmother’s dinners of cow foot soup or liver. Those nights when he didn’t reach the fence in time and found himself at the dinner table, he complained.
“She said if I wanted to eat something else, then I needed to learn to cook,” Jones says. “So, that’s what I did. I learned from her.”
First, he learned to make Caribbean black fruitcake. A relative of British plum pudding, the dessert is crafted from an assortment of dried fruits — cherries, prunes and raisins — and stays fresh for months at a time. From there he learned the intricacies of layering flavors and the value of locally grown fruits and vegetables.
Decades later, that knowledge has grown and manifested into the Kingston 11 menu: oxtail stew with jasmine rice and plantains, jerk chicken with rice and peas, curried goat, Jamaican patties.
In the years between, his culinary training was intensive but informal. Instead of sharing the memories that graduates of a cooking school might have of white chef ’s jackets and pristine tablecloths, Jones sees his grandmother and the red, bauxite-tinged soil of rural Jamaica.
Jones moved to New York as a teenager and went to high school in the Bronx, a borough with an extensive Jamaican population at the time. He moved to Florida for college and then came back to New York years later to work for Levi Strauss. Jones says he was successful in the garment industry, but it wasn’t completely fulfilling.
“I always wanted to open a restaurant like Kingston 11,” he says. “So, as any good Jamaican would do, I rolled up my sleeves and dove into it.” no choice if we wanted to be able to offer the things we wanted to offer and have the space we wanted,” Jones says. “It was a good problem to have.”
When Kingston 11 opened on Oakland’s Telegraph Avenue in 2013, there was no public relations company guiding the debut. Local media outlets weren’t waxing poetic about its deeper meaning to the Uptown neighborhood. The team relied on word of mouth.
It worked. Positive reviews began appearing about the Jamaican fare and the weekly live music shows; quietly, it became the preferred hangout for folks in the industry, chefs and line cooks alike. Recently it piqued the interest of awardwinning Bay Area chef Daniel Patterson.
Jones’ business partner Adrian Henderson knew Patterson from Restaurant Opportunities Center United, a national worker advocacy group that addresses racial equity in the industry. He eventually connected the two.
According to Jones, Patterson knew his San Francisco Mid-Market restaurant, Alta, would be moving down the street, but he wanted to hold onto the current location.
“So we just started getting together and talking.” Jones says. “I wanted to make sure it was genuine. I needed to know we were like-minded people. I’m not interested in bringing my style and my culture to someone else so they can appropriate it.”
They spent the next few weeks, as Jones jokes, “going on dates.” He said there were nights where they’d talk for hours, sometimes about food, sometimes not. Whether it was talk about community, politics, family or diatribes about their personal journeys in life, Jones says they found common ground and quickly became friends.
“I respect that he’s doing what he’s doing but instead of keeping the door closed, he’s holding it open for other people like me,” Jones says. “It’s like Jay-Z collaborating with Mozart. They’re from two completely different angles but are ass-kickers in their own ways. Why not come together and do something special?” like Kingston 11, will be home to weekly live music shows.
Jones believes that finding success across the Bay Bridge means operating the way he would in Oakland, a city that embraces authenticity in its restaurants above all else, he says. It’s what keeps small, family-owned spots like 10th and Wood in West Oakland or up-and-coming businesses afloat, like Chef Smelly’s downtown Creole pop-up.
It’s possible San Francisco may be similar to Oakland in this regard, he says, but then again there could be limits on whose authenticity is accepted more openly. San Francisco has a black population that has dramatically diminished in the past four decades, according to census data. In 1970, black people made up 13 percent of the San Francisco populace; as of 2016, the total is below 6 percent. For Jones, it raises the question of how the city will view an unapologetically Caribbean restaurant.
But he hasn’t let that thought shake his confidence.
“I bring my flavors. I’m not tamping down for anybody,” Jones says. “It’s hard to tell if San Francisco is a place where my culture and food will be accepted, but I’m ready to find out.”
The weather at Kingston 11 picks up a bit on this Sunday, and more customers begin streaming through the doors. Jones is approached by Rick Carter, a close friend also from Jamaica. Carter hands the chef two boxes of dough mix for Jamaican patties.
“I make these from scratch,” Jones says with a laugh before setting the boxes to the side. “But I’ll take the hot sauces you’ve got, as usual.”
Jones says he wants Kingston 11 — and now Kaya — to be more than just places where people can eat Carribean food and maybe even learn about the culture. He wants the businesses to act as pipelines into the restaurant industry for young brown people.
“Everyone talks about how there’s no diversity, especially in fine dining, but then people will say it’s because there are no black or brown candidates to choose from,” Jones says. “This would solve that problem. We all need connections.”
In keeping connections local, Kaya will be designed by Rachel Konte, owner of the East Bay boutique OwlNWood and a former director of women’s products at Levi Strauss for more than 15 years.
As Jones talks about the future, a young, multiethnic family with two kids, neither older than 3 or 4 years old, shuffles into seats at a table near the front of the restaurant. The young daughter’s long black hair hangs in curls and flops as she turns to look at her parents. Her brother, his auburn hair equally as curly, sits near a Ziggy Marley Wild and Free poster on the wall and laughs. They, too, eventually order the beloved Jamaican breakfast dish, ackee and saltfish.
At Jones’ table, the bowls are almost empty. When he takes one of the remaining bites, he says the dish, for Jamaicans, is an emotional anchor, something rooting them to home no matter where they are.
Kaya, he says, will embody that feeling and transfer it to diners.
After the last bite, Jones turns and glances at the growing crowd, with its eclectic mix of faces, and spots the young family. At this point, more laughter comes from the kitchen.
“This is what you want to see,” he says. “Kingston 11 is more than a restaurant. We want Kaya to be that same way, too.”
“I bring my flavors. I’m not tamping down for anybody. It’s hard to tell if San Francisco is a place where my culture and food will be accepted, but I’m ready to find out.” Nigel Jones, on his S.F. restaurant, Kaya