THEWASHINGTONPOST.
FRIDAY,JULY31, 2020EZ
8 9
EZTHEWASHINGTONPOST.
FRIDAY,JULY31, 2020away from home for Caribbean
expats.
Washington’s development
boom hasn’t completely erased
the Caribbean footprint on Geor-
gia, either. From Negril to Te ddy’s
Roti Shop, and numerous estab-
lishments in between, the Carib-
bean community still has a strong
presence along the thoroughfare,
even if many of their customers
have moved out of the area.
“However, they come in to D.C.
to make their purchases at Carib-
bean businesses,” says Jennifer
Selman, co-owner of Crown Bak-
ery Restaurant and Catering
(5409 Georgia Ave. NW, 202-291-
3009; dccrownbakery.com). “The
Caribbean community has been
really supportive of this busi-
ness.”
With the demise of Brown’s
and Rita’s in the past decade,
Crown has assumed the status of
elder statesman among Caribbe-
an eateries. Selman and her hus-
band, Trevor, are natives of Trini-
dad and To bago. Their storefront
specializes in Trini breads, pas-
tries, roti, stews, curries and
street foods, though Jennifer will
be the first to tell you that Crown
has also adopted some Jamaican
staples to appease customers who
might not realize they’ve set foot
into a Trinidadian shop. She and
her brother, head baker Wayne
Dickonson, also have created pas-
tries, such as a blueberry tart, for
palates not yet ready for the tropi-
cal punch of their coconut-pine-
apple tart.
As much as I like Crown’s flaky
currant rolls, its sweet-and-sa-
vory brown stew chicken and its
macaroni pie (splashed with jus
from the brown stew chicken!), I
adore its Trini street foods, avail-
able only on Friday and Saturday.
The snack known as doubles
starts with fried bara flatbread —
prepared in-house, like every-
thing here — stuffed with curried
chickpeas and topped with cha-
don beni (an herb sometimes
called culantro) sauce, tamarind
sauce and cucumber chutney.
Your brainpan won’t know what
hit it.
The bake and shark is even
better: Fried fillets of shark are
slipped into an inflated mini-loaf
known as a fry bake, along with a
scotch-bonnet pepper sauce and
many of the same condiments as
in the doubles. Jennifer doesn’t
know what species Crown
sources for the sandwich, but
traditionally, Trini cooks rely on
Atlantic blacktip shark, which the
National Oceanic and Atmos-
pheric Administration considers
a “smart seafood choice.” If this is
correct, I consider the bake and
shark at C rown a brilliant seafood
choice.
Sunrise Caribbean Restau-
rant (5329 Georgia Ave. NW, 202-
291 -2949; iamsunrise.com) occu-
pies a storefront where Crown
once conducted business before
CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGEBY TIM CARMANCustomers have formed two
lines, one each down the narrow
aisles at Move and Groove Carib-
bean Market (5119 Georgia Ave.
NW; 202-210-2163), where they
stand next to containers of fresh
mangos, boxes with large yellow
onions and shelves stocked with
canned callaloo leaves and pigeon
peas. A stick of incense burns
somewhere, its scent informing
every square inch of the place.
Everyone is here, it appears, for
the same thing: owner Maurice
Grant’s jerk chicken, which he
serves only on Fridays. Patrons
wait their turn to speak, quite
literally, through the wire metal
shelving that blocks a small win-dow through which everyone or-
ders, and receives, their food. If
you didn’t know it was there, the
window would be easy to overlook.
It’s camouflaged not just by the
metal shelves but by a variety of
household goods and food prod-
ucts: incense, Jamaican curry
powders, Maggi seasoning cubes,
ginger teas, bottled water, bags of
plantain chips, you name it.
The jerk chicken at Move and
Groove has a reputation among
Washington’s C aribbean c ommuni-
ty for a reason: It pulls no punches.
When you open the clamshell con-
tainer, the bone-in legs and thighs
release invisible clouds of smoke,
which fade into the background on
first bite. An atmospheric heat
abruptly assumes control, authori-tative in its scotch-bonnet intensity
but benevolent enough to allow the
aromatics in the marinade to have
their say, no matter how muted.
The dish doesn’t soft-pedal its spice
with browning sauce or some other
sweetener. This jerk chicken lets its
heat flag fly.
Grant is Jamaican by birth,
which helps to explain his facility
with jerk chicken, a dish born on
the island, a likely amalgam of
indigenous and African influenc-
es. Because of its name recogni-
tion and sheer deliciousness, jerk
chicken has become a dish avail-
able at almost every Caribbean
market, carryout and restaurant
along Georgia Avenue NW, re-
gardless if the owners are Jamai-
can or Trinidadian.Island hopping in the city
Georgia Avenue NW is area’s capital for Caribbean food
“The Caribbean community has been really supportive of this business,” says Crown
Bakery and Restaurant co-owner Jennifer Selman, left with co-owner Trevor Selman.From the Cover
“I never made jerk chicken in
Trinidad. I learned that here,”
says Alisa Plaza, co-owner of Sun-
rise Caribbean Restaurant. “If I
sell 100 meals, 80 are going to be
jerk chicken.”
In the past few weeks, as I’ve
frequented establishments along
Georgia Avenue, I’ve been think-
ing about the food and drink of
Trinidad and To bago, Jamaica
and other islands in the Caribbe-
an. Mostly, I’ve been contemplat-
ing a seeming contradiction: Ca-
ribbean cooking, in its many fra-
grant variations, is widely avail-
able in the D.C. area and yet
seriously overlooked, at least at
the small mom-and-pop opera-
tions that hide in plain sight
throughout our region.
Perhaps this is because of how
seamlessly Caribbean immi-
grants, many from countries
where English is the official lan-
guage, have integrated into the
region, at all levels of society.
Some 100,000 immigrants from
Jamaica, Trinidad and To bago,
Haiti, Guyana and other coun-
tries have settled in the metro
area, says Claire Nelson, founder
and president of the Institute of
Caribbean Studies (though she
cautions this number is quite
“fuzzy”). They live in Gaithers-
burg, Silver Spring, Prince
George’s County, the District and
other areas, Nelson says.
With such widespread integra-
tion, Caribbean immigrants per-
haps haven’t had the benefit of a
central gathering spot, a neigh-
borhood that would have the
same gravitational pull as the
Eden Center in Falls Church for
Vietnamese cooking or, back in
the day, Adams Morgan for com-
munal Ethiopian platters. You
can sort of understand how, in the
absence of an established scene to
guide newcomers, many might
simply gravitate to jerk chicken, a
dish that requires little research
to grasp. It’s spicy chicken from
the grill.
But the Caribbean diaspora in
Washington hasn’t always been
so scattered, Nelson says. In the
1970 s and 1980 s, a fair number of
Caribbean immigrants lived on
Georgia Avenue near Howard
University, the historically Black
university that has long been hal-
lowed ground for scholars from
the islands. A business corridor
developed along the avenue to
cater to the community, i ncluding
two mainstays from the era:
Brown’s Caribbean Bakery and
Rita’s W.I. Carryout. The former
was Jamaican, the latter Trinida-
dian.
“If I wanted food, I had to drive
on Georgia Avenue,” remembers
Nelson, who came to the United
States in the early 1980 s. For
obvious reasons, the annual D.C.
Caribbean Carnival paraded
down Georgia Avenue until the
celebration was compelled to
move to Baltimore in 2012. For
decades, the street was a homeCLOCKWISE FROM
LEFT: Selwyn Mungo
dishes up macaroni and
cheese at Sunrise
Caribbean Restaurant.
Castello’s ambitious
menu includes an oxtail
entree with rice and
cabbage. Teddy’s Roti
has been serving
Caribbean favorites,
such as veggie buss up
shut, f or 26 years.PHOTOS BY LAURA CHASE DE FORMIGNY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST