Pizza Please at Victoria Pier is a slice counter with tables set between the ROK Hotel and Kingston Harbour, selling Roman style pan pizza with ackee and saltfish or jerk chicken on it for around US$4 to US$6 a slice. The pizza brand dates from 2016 and has no deep history, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The pier it sits on is a different matter.
History
The pier at the foot of King Street
King Street runs straight down through downtown Kingston to the water, and Victoria Pier sits at the end of it, carrying Queen Victoria's name as did the market that once stood opposite. For the first half of the twentieth century this was the passenger front door of Jamaica. Photographs held by the National Library of Jamaica show boats tied up along it and people walking the waterfront in front of the King Street shops.
The Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation records that cruise ships called at Victoria Pier from the 1940s to the 1960s, and that HMT Empire Windrush departed from it. That is the ship that carried over a thousand passengers, more than half of them Jamaican, to Tilbury in June 1948 and gave a British generation its name. Sources differ on the sailing date, most British records giving 24 May 1948 and the Municipal Corporation 27 May. We could not find a reliable construction date for the pier itself, so we are not offering one.
Fifteen idle years
The pier went out of use and stayed out of use for roughly fifteen years. The Urban Development Corporation, the state body that built Ocean Boulevard and most of the modern waterfront from the late 1960s, eventually leased the derelict building to Yosamini Holdings Limited on a twenty-five year lease. Reported investment ran past J$100 million, and the restored pier reopened in late 2017 as a run of small food and drink businesses: a pizzeria, an ice cream shop, a coffee bar, a lounge, a gaming room, an art gallery, a rooftop bar and an outdoor entertainment area. The 168 room ROK Hotel opened alongside it in summer 2022, the first Tapestry Collection by Hilton in the Caribbean.
So the honest framing is this: you are eating on a restored piece of Kingston's passenger port, in a building that spent a decade and a half empty, as part of a deliberate attempt to bring people back downtown after fifty years of the money moving uptown.
Why the pizza is rectangular
Pizza Please sells pizza al taglio, pizza by the cut. It is a Roman form, not a Neapolitan one, and it is genuinely a twentieth century invention: Roman bakeries began baking pizza in large rectangular trays and selling it by weight in the 1950s, as a fast lunch for workers in a rapidly growing city. It boomed through the 1960s. The dough is wetter and slower fermented than a Neapolitan base, which is why it is airy inside and crisp underneath.
Pizza Please has been doing it in Jamaica since 2016 and now has four branches across Kingston and Ocho Rios. It is not an old company, its founders are not publicly documented, and there is no origin legend attached to it. What is genuinely interesting is the topping list, which puts ackee and saltfish, ackee and red herring, jerk chicken, oxtail and BBQ pork shoulder on a Roman base. That is a real Jamaican adaptation rather than a marketing line.
What it costs and when it opens
Open every day, roughly 9am to 7pm, including public holidays other than Christmas. The site is on Victoria Pier itself, between the ROK Hotel and the water.
Slices run about J$599 for a margherita to J$999 for beef short ribs, ackee and saltfish or ackee and red herring, which is somewhere around US$4 to US$6.50 each. Whole round pizzas are roughly J$2,499 to J$3,999, about US$16 to US$26, with the oxtail at J$5,999 or around US$38. Wings are about J$1,999, pastas run J$2,399 to J$3,299, and drinks are J$200 to J$1,000. Two people eating slices and a drink will spend well under US$20.
What it is actually like
Casual and counter service. You choose slices from the tray, they reheat them, and you carry the plate to a table facing Kingston Harbour with Port Royal across the water. It is one of very few places in downtown Kingston where you can sit outside by the sea with a cheap plate of food and no entrance fee.
Slices are best in the middle of the day when turnover is high and trays are fresh. Late in the afternoon the selection thins out and the popular ones go first. It is busy at lunch with office workers from the waterfront buildings, quiet mid afternoon, and busier again at weekends when the rest of the pier fills up.
How it fits a day
This is the lunch stop that makes a downtown Kingston morning work. YaadBinge typically runs National Heroes Park, the Institute of Jamaica and the Ocean Boulevard promenade first, then lands at Victoria Pier between 12.30pm and 1.30pm.
Allow 45 minutes to an hour. Because the counter closes around 7pm, it does not work as dinner, though the lounges and rooftop on the same pier carry on later. From here Port Royal is roughly 30 to 40 minutes out along the Palisadoes, and uptown Kingston is 20 to 25 minutes north in normal traffic.
