[New York - Elmira] Taste of Jamaica - Cafeteria Style Jamaican Food

We stopped at Taste of Jamaica in Elmira on a road trip. There weren't very many options other than chain restaurants and we wanted to go to locally owned businesses.

We arrived 10 minutes before Taste of Jamaica closed there were still a surprising number of people. We all did take out, but there were a few tables and chairs available to eat in if you so choose.

It's a cafeteria-style set up. In saying that, since we were late in the night I was expecting the food to be less than stellar since it was the end of the night.

I was pleasantly surprised. The meat was not super duper dry. I had totally expected them to be dry since they were out in the serving pans for so long. That being said, the chicken was a little on the dry side, so I had wished that I would have grabbed a ton more sauce (there's a sauce bar of sorts at the counter).

With each meal, you get to choose two sides.

We went with the Jerk Chicken for one meal and added white rice and gravy and rice and beans for the two sides for that meal.

It seems like we decided to get a crazy amount of rice, but we had two meals, so we wanted to keep the rice together in one container.

The chicken was flavorful, but slightly dry. The dryness is probably since, as I mentioned earlier, we arrived 10 minutes before the restaurant closed.

For the second meal, we went with oxtails. The two sides we chose were cabbage and carrots and vegetable chop suey. We kept the vegetables together in one container and then swapped between the two containers for rice and vegetables.

I think the oxtail was the better of the two meat choices. It was very flavorful and tender.

If I had to choose sides next time, I would probably go for the beans and rice and then the vegetable chop suey. However, if you're a gravy person, the gravy that came with the white rice was pretty good.

Tips: Don't mess up like I did and grab tons of containers of hot sauce, even if you feel like you're being judged. Hot sauce is the spice of life!

We didn't get desserts, but thought I'd take some pictures of them so you know what's available.

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