Epican Tapas Lounge is a small plates and cocktail bar at MarketPlace on Constant Spring Road, run by the cannabis company that holds the first cultivation licence Jamaica ever issued. Be clear about what it is: the tapas lounge is a restaurant, the dispensary is a separate licensed shop on the same lot, and the two are not the same transaction. The lounge itself is recent and has almost no documented history. The law that made it possible has a great deal.
History
Ganja is not originally Jamaican
The word is Hindi, inherited from Sanskrit, and it came to Jamaica with people, not with ships' cargo. On 10 May 1845 the Maidstone landed at Old Harbour Bay with 261 passengers from India, the first shipment of indentured labourers brought in to replace the enslaved Africans freed in the 1830s. Between 1845 and 1921 more than 36,000 Indians arrived under indenture. They brought cannabis seed, the plant knowledge and the word for it. Everything Jamaica later became famous for grew out of that.
The Ganja Law of 1913
Cannabis was legal in Jamaica for roughly seventy years. Then in 1913 the Legislative Council was asked to ratify the International Opium Convention. Cannabis was not on the Convention's list. Members added it anyway, and the resulting Ganja Law banned cultivation and importation. Historians have read the move as directed at the Black population rather than at any drug problem, and the enforcement history that followed, including the flogging provisions of the 1960s laws, supports that reading. For a century the plant was used constantly and prosecuted constantly, and the people who went to prison for it were poor.
2015, and what actually changed
The Dangerous Drugs (Amendment) Act passed Parliament in February 2015 and came into force on 15 April 2015. It did not legalise ganja. It made possession of two ounces or less a ticketable offence with no criminal record attached, carrying a J$500 fixed penalty payable within thirty days. It allows five plants per household. It permits sacramental use by Rastafari at registered places of worship, after a century in which Rastafari were the people most heavily punished under the old law. It keeps smoking in a public place, or within five metres of one, prohibited. And it created the Cannabis Licensing Authority to run a legal medical industry.
Epican
The CLA issued its first two licences on 18 October 2017. One went to Everyting Oily Labs for processing. The other, a cultivation licence, went to Epican. Processing and retail licences followed in November 2017, making Epican the first fully vertically integrated cannabis company in the country. Its retail doors opened on 14 July 2018, the first cannabis store in the capital.
The tapas lounge came afterwards, as the food side of the same site. It has no meaningful published history, no famous chef and no origin story worth repeating, and we are not going to invent one. It is a good bar in a well chosen spot with a genuinely interesting landlord.
What it costs and when it opens
Epican Tapas Lounge sits in MarketPlace at 67 Constant Spring Road, Kingston. Listings put it at roughly 4pm to midnight Monday to Thursday and from about 2pm Friday to Sunday, but hours at Kingston lounges move, so ring ahead on 876 583 6562 for a table or 876 672 7262 for takeaway.
Small plates run roughly J$750 to J$2,100, which is somewhere around US$5 to US$14 each, so two people sharing three or four plates with drinks lands in the region of US$40 to US$70. Cocktails, wine and Jamaican rums are the strength of the bar.
The Epican dispensary next door keeps its own longer hours, broadly from 10am, and is a separate business with separate rules. You need valid identification, and purchase there is governed by the CLA, not by the restaurant.
What it is actually like
MarketPlace is a courtyard of restaurants off Constant Spring Road, so the setting is uptown Kingston at ease rather than anything scenic. Epican is dark, low lit and loud once the music starts. It fills after 8pm on Fridays and Saturdays and there is often live music. Service is unhurried, which is normal here and not a fault.
The food is Jamaican ingredients on a tapas format: escovitch shrimp, hot pepper shrimp, pimento garlic snapper, tacos, edamame, a vegetarian red peas soup. Portions are genuinely small plates, so order more than feels right.
How it fits a day
This is an evening slot. Constant Spring Road runs north from Half Way Tree, so YaadBinge normally puts Epican at the end of an uptown day: Devon House or Hope Gardens in the afternoon, Half Way Tree on the way through, then here from about 7.30pm.
Allow ninety minutes to two hours. If you want a late night afterwards, you are five to ten minutes from New Kingston, which is where most Kingston nights end up.
