Truck stop: Don’t let the casual digs fool you. Irie’s food is straight out of Jamaica. (photo by michael persico)

Caribbean Queen

Our hearts, they beat as one with Irie Caribbean Grill.

by Adam Erace

You know that Dior perfume commercial with the impossibly hot—like, no, ridiculously hot—Charlize Theron strutting down some hotel hallway, burning down the carpet in matchstick stilettos, throwing down her diamonds and dress? That’s the new PW food section, casting off the jewels and finery: the high steaks of Butcher & Singer, the expense account panic at Del Frisco’s, the vestiges of a more robust economy. When the Dow hands you lemons, make lemonade, son. Hot and naked’s what we’re striving for in 2009.

In the coming issues, expect a lot more burgers and beer, unknown BYOBs and ethnic eats like whoa. We’re not totally forsaking the upscale—ahem, Chifa, Noble—but most of the time we’ll have your wallets in the back of our minds.

In that vein, where better to start than on the street with a Philadelphia icon, the humble lunch truck? Though hot dogs and cheesesteaks seem to dominate, amazing falafel, crepes, burritos and chicken tikka can also flavor your meals on wheels if you know where to look.

Way down South Philly, parked off a West Passyunk pocket square of grass, Irie Caribbean Grill adds to Philly’s mobile menu. Painted the evergreen, black and banana yellow of Jamaica’s flag, the truck dishes the kind of incendiary island fare that makes tables and chairs seem superfluous.

Irie Clark owns the truck (and its twin, coming soon to a location near the airport) and shares the cooking duties with Angela Johnson, a native of Kingston who came to the States 11 years ago. Should the subzero chills trigger the need for a jaunt to the tropics, shawty, they can take you there. The armored car packs the heat of Jamaica’s darling chili, the Scotch Bonnet, a key ingredient in proper jerk.

Clark and Johnson do justice to Jamaica’s calling card, softening the chili’s brash edges in their jerk chicken with allspice, cinnamon, woodsy thyme and a wet jerk sauce dripping with honey. The result: more soulful and flavor-charged than angry-hot. (Of course if you like it like that, a bottle of Grace’s hot sauce, a Caribbean staple, is on-hand.) Nine bucks buys the medium-sized platter—$6 for the small, $11 for the large—an insurmountable heap of legs, thighs and juicy bone-in breasts that Johnson hacks crossways with a scary-ass cleaver.

Every platter includes two sides, similarly portioned to put you into a serious food coma. Zesty rice and peas. Tender collards resounding their all-day braise in turkey butt stock. And, oh, the mac ’n’ cheese. Clark and Johnson use elbow noodles, yellow and white cheddar, provolone and sweetened condensed milk, de rigueur in island mac. Soft and comforting as your favorite pillow, the sweet, cheesy, two-inch-thick square soothed away the jerk-induced sunburn. Last time I had mac ’n’ cheese this good, I was in the Barbados airport, the bright spot in a four-hour layover.

Other island favorites round out the menu: pepper steak, kingfish, beef patties, notoriously tough oxtails slow-braised into tender submission and glossed in barbecue sauce electrified with more Scotch Bonnets. Curry, brought to the Caribbean in the 1800s by the sugar plantations’ Indian indentured servants and enforced by the colonial Brits’ love for the stuff, is always available with tender chicken, shrimp or slightly gamy goat. You don’t need to be a heat freak to embrace the bony bits wading in the turmeric-yellow tide; the Jamaican curry was way mellower than its cousins across the Atlantic.

Irie’s cooler of island tonics— ginger beer, champagne cola, coconut water—makes a fitting mate to the Caribbean plates, though as Johnson dangles your order out the lunch truck window, leaky Styrofoam clamshells straining against the bottom of a plastic Thank You bag, she’ll ask jovially if you’ve got some good beer chilling at home.

A woman with her priorities straight. I like that. Times might be tough, but prices like Irie’s keep the bare necessities completely in reach.