Seventh Annual Madison Black Restaurant Week Sponsored by the Madison Black Chamber of Commerce: Delicious Authentic Cuisine
Camille Carter, CEO of the Madison Black Chamber of Commerce (l) and David Blake, owner and head chef of David’s Jamaican Cuisine
By Jonathan Gramling
While some Black restaurants have come — MacMade Delights — others have gone like the late Valice Payton who made sweet potato pie that was out of this world. And yet, pandemic or no pandemic, their numbers have grown over the years. Seven years ago, the Madison Black Chamber of Commerce started Madison Black Restaurant Week with a handful of restaurants, food carts and caterers. This year’s Black Restaurant Week, being held August 14-21, features roughly 35 restaurants, food carts and caterers.
“It’s a very popular campaign and a lot of work,” said Camille Carter, CEO of the Madison Black Chamber. “We want the community to patronize all of the restaurants and food carts. They are out there on a daily basis. They have a fixed corner or a route for their food carts. They are featuring Madison Black Restaurant Week specials. That will go on throughout the week. And we close out the week on Sunday, August 21st with the Food Taste Jamboree held at the Feed Kitchen parking lot on the north side. That’s an opportunity to really have many of our food carts and caterers come together and offer $5 a taste portions. It makes it an affordable family-friendly event. We want people to come and experience some of their cooking and food. That is an exciting, popular event for our businesses with the Food Taste Jamboree. The Jamboree attracts people not just from the Madison and Dane County area, but also from Iowa, Illinois and upper Wisconsin. It is really becoming a Madison favorite.”
One of the older Black restaurants in Madison is David’s Jamaican Cuisine on Monona Drive. Its Jamaican food is about as authentic as it gets as David Blake, the cook and owner is a native Jamaican.
The Jamaican taste is as unique as it is delicious for it is, in essence, Jamaica is an international community. Jamaica’s motto is Out of Many One People.
“There are lots of different cultures all over Jamaica,” Blake emphasized. “That’s why our language called Patois is broken English. When we speak that, no one can understand it. A Jamaican will have to break it down for you. Sometimes I can’t even understand Patois myself. It’s all those different languages mixed up into one mumbo jumbo. We have Chinese, Indian, Irish, Spanish, and African among many others. I’ve got a lot of them in me. I’ve got 25 percent Irish, 25 percent Indian, about 10 percent African and about 15 percent Chinese. All of that is in me, my bloodline.”
And from that mix springs Jamaican food.
“Those influences also found their way into Jamaican cuisine, no doubt about it,” Blake said. “You put a little Chinese stuff into it, a little African stuff in it, a little Irish stuff in it and so on and so forth and then you have one nice dish. That’s what really makes it authentic.”
Jamaicans don’t cook from a recipe book. They cook according to instinct, Blake said.
“I cook by taste,” Blake said. “If I’m making a jerk sauce, I would find out if an ingredient was missing just by tasting it. I would know which ingredient was missing.”
Blake started cooking when he was seven-years-old.
“I’ve always been in the kitchen with my mom or my grandmother, always,” Blake said. “My grandmother was about 80 percent Indian. I learned from my grandmother and my mom. I was always in the kitchen with them. I never left the kitchen. I never left my mom’s side actually. I’m a real momma’s boy. They just put stuff in. They never wrote stuff down. They never used recipe books. These are ways of cooking that have been handed down from generation to generation.”
As an adult, Blake moved to Florida where he was hired to work for the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line for 10 years. Blake and his wife love to travel and when they realized they couldn’t travel on the minimum wage jobs they worked in Florida, they moved to Madison. And wanting to be his own boss and still having the Jamaican cooking instinct, Blake and his wife opened David’s Jamaican Cuisine on Monona Drive.
Walking into the restaurant, its interior design features the colors and graphics of Jamaica. And the aroma lets you know you are in the right place for an island treat.
“We have jerk chicken, jerk chicken and ribs, jerk pork, jerk steak, jerk salmon, jerk popcorn shrimp, jerk red snapper and we have mango tofu,” Blake said. “We have curry chicken, curry goat, country-style catfish, breaded catfish, oxtail stew, pineapple salmon, jerk shrimp and the whole red snapper. We also have mango chicken and the Jamaican National Dish. We also have steamed mixed vegetables and pineapple tofu.”
And to top the meal off, you can wash it down with a Red Stripe beer or some of their smooth rum punch.
Blake and his wife have devoted their lives to selling authentic Jamaican food. In addition to the restaurant, Blake’s wife operates their food cart on Library Mall on weekday lunch hours. Right now, they are a two-person crew.
“It is full-time work, no doubt about it,” Blake said. “I start out most mornings at 5 a.m. and work until 10 at night. When we finish serving, we have to clean the place up for the next day.
Everyone is experiencing staffing shortages. Even when we went out for dinner on Sunday evening, we had to wait a whole hour because there was no one there to serve us. I’m okay because I never get tired of my own cooking.”
Blake and his wife do take off in order to travel. They close for a couple of weeks over the Christmas-New Year holiday.
“We are open Monday-Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.,” Blake said. “For 14 years, we were open seven days per week. We take Sunday off to go to church now.”
David’s Jamaican Cuisine has stayed in business for 20 years. It’s all about customer service. While Blake would give food out for free with his generous soul, it is his wife’s business mind that has also kept the doors open.
“We try to keep our customers coming back, make them full,” Blake said with a laugh. “Whatever we can do to make you and your tummy happy is what we try to do. That’s what we are here for. Just give us a call. I don’t like unhappy customers. Over my years working — I started working at a hotel in Montego Bay, Jamaica in 1975 — I never got a complaint. I don’t like complaints and I stay away from them.”
Madison Black Restaurant Week will also feature a version of its Soul Food Sunday so that people can get a full helping of what the food carts and caterers have to offer.
“We are opening up our Madison Black Restaurant Week edition of Soul Food Sunday Marketplace,” Carter said. “That’s an opportunity to pre-order entrees and specialty items from the Madison Black Chamber app. It is also online via our webstore. People can pre-order at our site from August 14-18. The app is downloadable from Google Play and the Apple Playstore. People can order from the convenience of their homes and then pick up those orders at the Jamboree. The Marketplace is open for only four days for pre-orders. It closes down on August 18th to allow the restaurants time to order and prepare the entrees. Pre-orders, which take place between Aug. 14-18 on the Black Restaurant Week webpage can be picked up from 1-3 p.m., Aug. 21 at the Jamboree. Contactless pickup is also available.”
And the Black Chamber has added a new feature this year.
“We want people to be aware that we are adding a new dimension to Madison Black Restaurant Week, a fun dimension,” Carter said. It is Vote for Your Favorite restaurant, caterer, food cart as well as Jamboree taste. “That will be available as well and we will be kicking it off on August 14th.”
Madison Black Restaurant Week is one of the Black Chamber’s signature events and it generates a lot of awareness about Black restaurants in the Madison area.
“The restaurants look forward to this every year,” Carter said. “They are prideful in what they do. And this year, they continue to participate and are actively engaged in the campaign. It does bring new customers. It increases their revenue. And it keeps them very excited about Madison Black Restaurant Week in general.”
And Madison Black Restaurant Week will keep all of us coming back for more.
For more information about Madison Black Restaurant Week, visit https://www.madisonblackchamber.com/black-restaurant-week-2022.
