Poor People Cook the Best Food

I don't do restaurant reviews very often but todays lunch warranted as much publicity as I could give it.

My wife took me to lunch today but the place we planned to visit wasn't open so instead we meandered across the street to a little place my friend recommended a while ago- Dominic's Jamaican Restaurant. While I was initially disappointed that our first choice was closed, I wound up being extremely happy with the runner-up.

Let me begin by saying that many folks will not read this and then go there because of it's location which is right in the middle of the hood, but I urge you to overcome your fear of lower income neighborhoods and I assure you you will be rewarded. This place has little to offer in the way of ambiance but the counter service was very nice and appreciative of my praises.

The wife and I each made our choices from their small but fairly varied menu, for her the Jerk chicken (she stole my thunder!) of course she got it with white meat (silly girl!), and to accompany it she chose the fried plantains and cinnamon yams which were a great compliment to the spicy chicken which was cooked on the bone as it should be. The plantains were soft and very sweet, most likely from very yellow or almost black plantains, delicious! As for myself, since I was left to order outside my standard Jerk, I went for the Brown Stew Chicken (not available in white meat). To accompany the stew I chose the peas (black eye) and rice and some fried dumplings which our server brought out some magical salsa in which to dip them. The stew was in my own words-fucking amazing! It was all dark meat chicken cut into small chunks served on the bone not that you could keep it on there since it was so tender. It was stewed perfectly so that even the smaller bones softened, I think I ate about half of them only pulling out the larger ones. The sauce was a rich deep brown-mahogany color and just thick enough to coat the meat without becoming thanksgiving gravy and intermingled with the chicken were sprigs of fresh thyme, allspice berries, potato and chunks, that's right CHUNKS of fresh ginger. There wasn't any heat to the stew which made the wife even more jealous when I finished it all. The salsa that I mentioned, I would never have dipped fried bread (except tortillas) into salsa before today, but they recommended it so i did it and I will be doing it again in the future, especially at this place. The dumplings were essentially hush puppies which were great by themselves but the salsa set it all in motion. It looked like a basic pico de gallo with tomatoes and onions and such but there were little bits of yellow that may have been very ripe mango, I'm not sure and I really don't care so long as I can get it the next time.

I am happy that this place isn't any closer to home because I would become even more poor and much fatter, I may be a white boy raised in Columbus but this is the food I was made to eat. You can keep your over frenchified suburban bistros and your well manicured haught cuisine establishments, I'll take the poor folks food every time, it's about simple pleasures, making the most out of what you've got and Chef Gotty is rockin that shit like a bad ass blues jam!