Festival is the sweet fried dumpling that appears alongside almost everything we serve. It has no business being as good as it is – it is essentially flour, cornmeal, sugar, and a pinch of salt, fried. But done properly, it is one of the most satisfying things on the plate.

The Base Recipe

Two cups plain flour. Half a cup fine cornmeal. Two tablespoons caster sugar. One teaspoon salt. One teaspoon baking powder. Enough cold water to bring it together – not too wet, not crumbly. Rest it for twenty minutes before shaping.

Shape into small logs, not balls. The elongated shape gives you more surface area and a better crust-to-interior ratio. Fry in neutral oil at 170C. Four minutes per side. They should float when they are done.

The Coconut Version

Replace a quarter of the water with coconut milk. The result is subtly sweeter and has a faint coconut flavour that works particularly well with curry goat.

The Scotch Bonnet Version

This one is not on the menu because most people find it confusing – sweet dough with heat? But the regulars know to ask. Half a scotch bonnet, seeds removed, finely minced, into the dough. The sweetness and the heat together are better than either alone.

Real jerk is not a marinade – it is smoke. And the smoke has to come from one specific tree growing on hillsides across the parish of St Ann.

Pimento wood – allspice wood – burns differently to anything else. The essential oils in the bark and the green wood carry into the smoke, and the smoke carries into the meat. You cannot fake it with liquid smoke. You cannot fake it with ground allspice. You can only use the wood.

Why We Started Shipping It

We tried British oak first. Good smoke, clean burn, honest flavour. But it was not jerk. The chicken came off the grill tasting like a good barbecue – which is not bad, but it is not what we are doing.

We found a supplier in Birmingham who imports direct from Jamaica. We now get a pallet every six weeks. It costs more than it should and we do not apologise for it.

What Happens to the Smoke

The pimento wood goes on the grill first, whole branches. We let it catch, let it settle to a deep smoulder. The chicken goes on after the flames die down – it needs smoke, not fire. Forty minutes minimum. The skin crisps up, the smoke gets into every layer, and the allspice oils do what no marinade can replicate.

That is the difference you taste when you eat our jerk. It is the wood.

Eight hours of low-and-slow is the only way it works. There is no shortcut. Pressure cooker oxtail is a different dish entirely – tender in the wrong way, the collagen not given enough time to break down and re-set into that particular sticky, unctuous texture that is the whole point.

We start at four in the morning when we have a festival day. By midday the oxtail has been in the pot for eight hours. By the time the queue forms it has rested for another hour. That rest matters as much as the cooking time.

The Ingredients That Cannot Be Compromised

Scotch bonnet is non-negotiable. Habanero will do in an emergency but it is the wrong flavour profile – brighter, sharper, lacking the fruity depth of the scotch bonnet. We use four peppers per pot. Not three. Not five. Four, whole, seeds in.

Browning is the other thing people skip. Caramelise the oxtail pieces properly before any liquid goes in – twenty minutes on high heat, working in batches, turning every four minutes. Rushing this step is where most oxtail stew goes wrong.