For the Perfect Jerk Chicken, Fly to Newfoundland

Why two Jamaican exiles opened their dream restaurant 2,500 miles from home.

Photos by Scott Grant

“The biggest difference between Jamaica and Newfoundland?”

The head chef at Newfoundland’s only Jamaican fusion restaurant, Kirk Myers, a soft-spoken native of the Caribbean island, contemplates the question for a brief moment.

“The snow.”

In 2015 Myers, 32, co-founded Taste of Jamaica – located in a 20,000-person city called Corner Brook in Newfoundland, the massive Canadian island jutting into the icy Atlantic at North America’s easternmost location. Though it’s the largest city on the west coast of the island, remote Corner Brook is a seven-hour drive from the provincial capital. Myers first arrived here just shy of a year ago, certainly the first person to leave a cruise-ship job to go on to serve Jamaican food in eastern Canada. He notes that the two islands, set approximately 2,500 miles apart, have more in common than many might assume.