St. Bess aims for Jamaican domination

A veteran cook has no use for your jerk egg rolls and rasta pasta.

By MIKE SULA

Ricardo Blake is not having it with your jerk egg rolls.

“We don’t wanna do jerk pizza,” he says. “I just want to be authentic. I want to be outstanding. You gonna go to a Jamaican restaurant, you look for oxtails, curry goat, jerk chicken. We don’t want jerk pasta.”

That’s what the chef told me when I asked him why he doesn’t have a jerk egg roll on the menus at any of his three St. Bess Jerk outposts, three seeds of a nascent empire tra cking in classic Jamaican food, and a few trending mashups.

Jerk, both the method and the seasoning, is perhaps one of the first regional barbecue styles, the indigenous Caribbean Taíno having taught escaped African slaves—Maroons—the process of roasting meats low and slow over native wood. In that case it was pimento, which also provided the allspice that, along with scotch bonnet peppers, evolved into the signature warmly spiced, smoky flavors it’s known for.

Blake grew up in his mother’s restaurants in Saint Elizabeth, Jamaica, and is steeped in this tradition. He’s unimpressed by the jerk taco revolution that swept the south and west sides of Chicago in the last few years. Though he has allowed jerk chicken, shrimp, and catfish tacos on his menus, that isn’t what he’s making his name on.

Blake came to Chicago 13 years ago and started cooking a similar lineup of scratch dishes at Auburn Gresham’s Jamaican Jerk Villa, and then at the near-southside Jerk Villa Bar & Grill. But in June during high pandemic, he struck out on his own, opening the first St. Bess (named for home), a takeout-only joint in a Burbank strip mall.

Blake opened his second location in Norwood Park in a former burger joint at the thrumming intersection of Northwest Highway and Nagle, just north of Bryn Mawr and I-90. With a handful of tables and a surrounding parking lot, it seems perfectly situated to dominate a vast jerk-less frontier on the far northwest side.

But Blake isn’t stopping there. Earlier this month he opened his third spot in Norwich, Connecticut, with his childhood best friend, and he’s shooting for two more Chicago-area locations before the year is out. (I think I made a strong case for Albany Park.)

Blake envisions a national presence, but for now he and Wazwaz seem to have different ideas about the best way to grow. Wazwaz wants to see a built-out bar-and-grill-type model: “I feel like one big headache is better than five small headaches,” he says.

Blake wants to focus on carryout, but he will allow that in a bigger spot he might entertain the possibility of o ering some of jerk’s more contemporary descendants. But egg rolls and rasta pasta just don’t seem like they’re in his blood.

“I don’t want to follow what people are doing.”

@MikeSula