Yardie Ting chef Jake Williams and his wife, owner Shanna-Kay Wright-Williams. The restaurant moved downstairs and expanded in the Public Market this year and now takes up most of the first floor. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer Ellsworth, a small city of about 8,000 people just north of Bar Harbor, might seem an unlikely place to open a Jamaican restaurant.
But in 2016, Jamaican native Shane Griffiths had been living in the area for 10 years, and felt he was long overdue for a taste of home cooking. “It was just a struggle,” Griffiths recalled. “Back a few years ago, there really wasn’t much ethnic food around here.
There was no Jamaican food around, no Caribbean food period. I had nowhere to go to buy what I wanted. But I knew how to cook it, and I was like, ‘This is an opportunity to introduce people to Jamaican food.
’ And I just went for it.” He launched Taste of Jamaica, a tidy little restaurant on State Street with patio seating out back. Fortunately enough, the community went for it, too.
“They were very excited to have something different,” Griffiths said. “Slowly but surely, they worked their way through the menu. They started with the safe stuff – jerk chicken or pork – and then things they might not think they’d ever eat, like oxtail and curry goat, but they loved it.
” Today, more than a dozen Jamaican restaurants and Caribbean markets are scattered around Maine. Griffiths helped his friend and fellow Jamaican Clayton Whyte launch Strait .