Eulita “Tina” Clarke was six when she learned how to cook. Her grandmother, Mavis Hunter, taught her. This was on a family farm in rural Jamaica.
“I’m not a person with measurements, I just use my mind,” said the ebullient Clarke on a recent afternoon, as she brought red kidney beans to a boil in the open kitchen of Grill-Mon Island, the new Jamaican restaurant on the site of the former Grand Cafe. She added scallions, a splash of coconut milk, and chopped ginger and garlic, before stirring in Jalapeno pepper, thyme, and allspice.
Clarke, head chef and co-owner, along with her son Jamiel Bowen, of the Fair Haven eatery, was making rice and peas, but there were no peas. In Jamaican cuisine, peas generally refer to beans.
Grill-Mon, which currently offers take-out and delivery, will celebrate its grand opening on Thursday.
From her grandmother, Clarke said, she learned how to cook with fresh, aromatic ingredients like Scotch bonnet peppers, allspice, and thyme. She also learned what it took to keep a farm going. “We planted crops, carrots, turnips, yams,” she said, setting the cover on the pot to simmer. “We had lots of cows, goats, pigs, and we sold cow’s milk. We were always doing.”
She disappeared into a smaller kitchen in the back, returning with a dish of braised oxtail. The tail of a cow cut into cross sections, its origin can be traced back to the meager amounts of cheaper cuts given to enslaved Africans on Jamaican plantations. They slow-cooked the tough meat into tender chunks, seasoning it with local spices, and getting a rich, sustaining meal.
Two centuries later, a pressure cooker accelerates the process. That’s what Clarke used earlier that day, after marinating the oxtail with scallions, fresh thyme, and garlic, along with Scotch Bonnet peppers. “It went for thirty minutes, no time at all,” she said, setting the bubbling stew on the counter.
Clarke eventually moved to Kingston, working at a popular restaurant for nine years. “Cooking, washing dishes, cleaning, everything,” she said, as she mashed a few cloves of garlic and added it to the oxtail. Growing up, Bowen and his brother watched their mother work long hours and take on double shifts. “We didn’t come from means,” he said from the other side of the counter, as a reggae version of “Hallelujah” filtered through the gentle light of the space. “She gave us allowances, taught us how to manage money, taught us the value of hard work.”
At 18, Bowen came to the University of New Haven on a scholarship. There, he studied accounting, graduating summa cum laude, before earning a master’s in taxation and an MBA. Then his mother joined him. They opened a restaurant, also called Grill-Mon in Middletown, with Bowen’s wife, a labor and delivery nurse, pitching in as lead baker. “That has always been our dream, my mother and me,” said Bowen, now a fund accountant in the corporate accounting firm Phalanx. When he noticed the former site of Grand Cafe was available to lease, he sprang into action. “We love New Haven,” he said.
Over in the kitchen, Clarke was adding a pinch of sugar to the stew. She pivoted back to the range, checking the tenderness of the beans, and stirring in the rice, a look of bliss on her face.
“When my father used to slaughter cows, he always killed two,” she recalled. “One to sell, and one to give away to the community to savor and enjoy. It was the same with pigs, goats, everything. That’s how I grew up.”
She still has that impulse, it seems. “If I see people cutting the grass, I always want to ask ‘can I make lunch for you?’ ‘can I make you happy with lunch?’ Food for me is love.”
This being my first encounter with oxtail, the notion of eating the tail of a cow admittedly gave me pause. Still, having been tasked to report on Grill-Mon’s cuisine, I plunged in. First was the fall-off-the-bone tenderness of the meat. Then the taste—rich, robust, succulent. Then, a gentle but growing heat, deep and mellow, from the Scotch bonnet peppers; a hint of sweetness, released by the gravy by way of the onion and sugar, before the spices and the milky coconut in the rice completed the experience. I was transported. Toes wiggling in the sand, the rhythmic pulse of reggae in my ears, the warm sun smiling down at me.
Yes, Eulita, your braised oxtail with rice and peas indeed made me happy.
