Pier 1 has been sitting on its own spit of land in Montego Bay harbour since 1986, doing two completely different jobs. Until about nine at night it is an open air seafood restaurant with the whole bay in front of it. On a Friday it becomes the island's best known weekly party and stays open until four in the morning. Book it as one or the other, because they are not the same evening.
History
Pier 1's own paper trail is short. It opened in 1986 and has traded continuously since, and beyond that there is very little documented about who built it or why. What is worth knowing is the water it is built over, because almost everything that made Montego Bay a town happened within sight of that pier.
The bay named after lard
Columbus reached this bay on 9 May 1494 and called it Golfo de Buen Tiempo, Fair Weather Gulf. The name did not stick. Spanish settlers hunted the wild boar in the forests behind the shore and shipped the rendered fat out through this harbour, and the place became Bahía de Manteca, Lard Bay. When the English took the island, manteca wore down into Montego. Jamaica's second city is named after pig fat, and the harbour you are looking at is the reason.
Sugar, and the man they hanged for stopping it
By the eighteenth century this harbour was shipping sugar cut by enslaved Africans on the St James estates inland. At Christmas 1831 Samuel Sharpe, a literate enslaved Baptist deacon in Montego Bay, organised what he intended to be a general strike: no work after Christmas Day until the estates conceded. It turned into the largest rebellion in Jamaican history, the Baptist War, with around sixty thousand people involved. The reprisals were savage. Sharpe was hanged on 23 May 1832 in what was then Charles Square, roughly a ten minute walk inland from where you will be eating.
The rebellion and the brutality of the response are widely held to have contributed to the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act through the British Parliament the following year. Sharpe was later declared a National Hero of Jamaica and Charles Square was renamed for him. Sources disagree on the exact year of the proclamation, so we will not pick one.
Half this waterfront is younger than the restaurant
The harbour Pier 1 sits in was substantially rebuilt within living memory. Montego Freeport Limited was incorporated on 15 February 1966 to reclaim and develop up to 500 acres of the Bogue marshland at the south end of the bay. Dredged spoil was dumped over the existing mangrove islets to manufacture dry land, and the dredging left a channel deep enough for cruise ships. The company listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange on 5 January 1969. A meaningful part of what you see across the water at night is engineered ground that did not exist when your grandparents were young.
The road outside carries a more recent name again. Howard Cooke Boulevard is for Sir Howard Cooke, the St James schoolteacher who became Jamaica's fourth Governor-General and served from 1 August 1991 to 15 February 2006.
What it costs and when it opens
Kitchen hours run Monday to Saturday from 11am to 11pm and Sunday from noon to 11pm. Star Struck runs on Wednesdays with the bar open until around 2am, and Pier Pressure on Fridays until around 4am. Main courses on the posted menu sit at roughly US$20 for braised oxtail, jerk chicken pasta or the house drunken fish, around US$22 for coconut crusted shrimp, about US$42 for a whole red snapper and about US$53 for the seafood pot built for sharing. Prices move, so read them as a range.
What it is actually like
It is an open air deck on a peninsula, so the setting does most of the work. Sunset lands over the water in front of you and cruise ships pull out of the harbour while you eat. Service is relaxed and the whole snapper takes a while, which is fine if you have not scheduled something after it.
The Friday night version is a different venue in the same place. Dancehall and reggae, a large mixed crowd of Jamaicans and visitors, and volume. If you want the sunset dinner, come Sunday to Thursday or eat early on Friday and leave before the sound system takes over. If you want the party, arrive after eleven.
This is an open deck over the harbour with a working water edge and no continuous barrier in every spot. Late at night, after drinking, that combination has an obvious risk. Keep back from the edge, and arrange your ride home before you start the evening rather than looking for one at four in the morning.
How it fits a day
We use Pier 1 in one of two slots. As dinner it goes in at about 5:30pm, which puts you at the table for sunset and out by eight. As a night out it goes in from about 10:30pm on a Friday and closes the day entirely. It works well after a Hip Strip afternoon, since it is minutes down the coast from Doctor's Cave, and badly on the same day as a south coast trip, because coming back from St Elizabeth you will not want a four in the morning finish.
