Ava’s Taste of the Caribbean offers a Jamaican getaway for the senses
Flying to Jamaica would be one way to escape another frigid, sun-challenged winter day in Columbus. This getaway idea occurred to me recently, but then I thought about the potential costs — in cash and stress — for a long trip, made during an ongoing pandemic, that entailed hanging out with strangers on planes and in hotels while dealing with the COVID protocols of another country.
So I did one of the next best things: I drove to the Hilltop.
About a half-hour after leaving Clintonville that evening, I was eating delicious jerk chicken with a boatload of Jamaican-style sides and fixings. My expeditious “dinnertime vacation of the mind” came courtesy of another huge and quickly served meal from Ava’s Taste Of The Caribbean.
The rare food truck to specialize in Jamaican cuisine on the West Side — a region that could lay claim to “the taco truck capital of central Ohio” — Ava’s Taste Of The Caribbean is stationed near the building (breaking news!) it will apparently occupy as a brick-andmortar restaurant come springtime: the old Westgate Dirty Frank’s Hot Dog Palace (a new West Side Dirty Frank’s appears imminent in the Hollywood Casino Columbus).
Until the changeover (and fresh signage), look for Ava’s food truck just west of Hague Avenue in a spot denoted by Castro Body Shop, whose sign is missing its “C.”
If this sounds complicated it’s really not. Just park behind what looks like “astro Paint & Body,” and you’ll locate a white food truck that’s often busy with customers, and whose appealing attributes include a nicely painted Jamaican map and Caribbean Sea-blue hubcaps.
Another appealing attribute of Ava’s is Ava, aka Avril Gombedza. Recounting her venturesome past, she told me she’d emigrated from Jamaica 21 years ago, worked in hotels, studied Culinary Arts and Restaurant Management at Hocking College, and launched her first mobile kitchen (a food cart) in 2017.
I can attest that her venturesome present includes consulting with restaurant renovators while busily serving homestyle Jamaican food to eager customers, many of whom she calls “Sweetie.”
Many of them request Ava’s irresistible barbecue jerk chicken: smoky, falloff-the-bone dark-meat quarters with grill-seared skin slathered in a perky house barbecue sauce with an alluring little kick.
That zesty chicken is available in: plump burritos supplemented with Jamaican-style rice and beans ($10.99); the unlikely but inspired “rasta pasta” ($14.99) — bone-in meat atop penne in a well-made Alfredo sauce; and, my preference, bowls heavily loaded with good sides of fried sweet plantains, hearty rice with beans plus overachieving, naturally sweet sauteed cabbage (the recommended “large” bowl also came with two thighs and two legs for $13.99).
Most of Ava’s proteins, though, are rustic stews with falling-off-the-bone meat. None were better than the curry goat ($15.99 for a large) — an enormous serving of tender, lamb-like goat and potatoes in a flavorful gravy whose mild heat can be increased with Ava’s flameinducing hot sauce.
(Note: Ava’s stews are even better with a generous side of fried-crisp festival dumplings ($3.99) — think hefty, doughnut-esque hush puppies.)
Awash in rich dark gravy, the lovable brown stew chicken ($13.99 for large) shared flavor characteristics with much-fancier beef short ribs dishes, albeit with tiny bones. I loved the flavor of the similarly prepared oxtail even more, but its price ($19.99 for large) and meatto-bone-and-cartilage ratio were less lovable.
In a provocative recent New York Times article about strong brain-stomach connections, Dr. Uma Naidoo — a prominent Harvard psychiatrist, nutritionist and trained chef — noted that the “gut” and brain originate from the same embryonic cells.
So, while a Hilltop parking lot is hardly Jamaica, don’t be shocked if eating Ava’s food will prompt your stomach to communicate with your brain that you’ve momentarily been transported to the Caribbean — at a relatively insignificant cost, too. gabenton.dispatch@gmail.com This story is part of the Dispatch’s Mobile Newsroom initiative. Visit our reporters at the Columbus Metropolitan Library’s Hilltop branch library and read their work at dispatch.com/mobile newsroom, where you also can sign up for The Mobile Newsroom newsletter.