The Pelican Grill opened on Gloucester Avenue in 1964, which makes it about two years younger than independent Jamaica and older than nearly everything else on the Hip Strip. It is still run by the same two families, three generations in. If you want one meal in Montego Bay where the room is full of Jamaicans rather than only visitors, this is the reliable answer.
History
Three people who admitted they had no idea
It began in 1964 as The Coffee Shop, opened by Stanley Scudamore, his wife Clarissa, and their friend Jeremy Bennett, an accountant then working for what is now PricewaterhouseCoopers. The division of labour was blunt: Clarissa took the kitchen and the floor, Stanley took purchasing and stores, Bennett took the books and stock control. Bennett's own summary of the early years, given to the Jamaica Observer at the fiftieth anniversary, was that they really did not know what they were doing. The formula that made the place last took decades to arrive at. The name changed to The Pelican Grill somewhere along the way.
A death, a marriage and a family business
Stanley Scudamore died of a stroke in 1967, three years in. Clarissa and Jeremy kept the restaurant going and married in 1970. By the time the Pelican marked fifty years on 3 March 2014, day to day operations had passed to Stanley and Clarissa's son Peter Scudamore and his wife Elaine, alongside Elizabeth Bennett-Dalley and her daughters Rachel and Laura. That is two founding families and three generations still in the building, on a strip where restaurants routinely last eighteen months.
The genuinely unusual part
The Pelican runs a pension plan for its staff. That is close to unheard of for an independent restaurant anywhere in the Caribbean, and it shows in the numbers: at the fifty year mark, the seven longest serving employees had accumulated 210 years of service between them. If you eat here and the service feels unhurried and competent rather than performed, that is why. The person bringing your food may well have been doing it since before you were born.
The street underneath it
Gloucester Avenue was the road that Montego Bay's tourist trade grew along, running from the harbour end past the bathing beaches. It was officially renamed Jimmy Cliff Boulevard on 28 March 2019 for the singer and actor, though almost nobody says that out loud and the Pelican's address is still given as 99 Gloucester Avenue. The restaurant sits on a bend with the park on one side and the sea on the other, which is why it has a view that newer places on the strip cannot buy.
What it costs and when it opens
It serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, generally from around 7am to around 11pm daily, which makes it one of the few places on the strip you can eat properly at eight in the morning. Prices are in Jamaican dollars and sit in the everyday local range rather than the resort range: a Jamaican breakfast such as ackee and codfish or callaloo and codfish runs roughly US$8 to US$12 equivalent, with the full breakfast sampler somewhat higher. Mains at lunch and dinner are correspondingly modest. Treat all of this as indicative, since Jamaican dollar menu prices move with the exchange rate.
What it is actually like
Plain, bright, air conditioned, and busy. Booths, laminate, a long counter, and a view out over the water. It reads as a diner more than a restaurant, and that is deliberate and has not changed in sixty years.
The cooking is straightforward Jamaican: ackee and saltfish, callaloo, curry goat, oxtail, stewed peas, jerk chicken, escoveitched fish, whole snapper. Portions are generous. The house speciality that people come back for is the jumbo malt shake, which is a proper old fashioned malted milk in a metal cup, not a modern dessert drink. The desserts, particularly the rum and raisin cheesecake and the bread pudding, have their own following.
Breakfast is the best value and the quietest hour. Between roughly 7am and 9am the room is mostly local people eating before work, before the cruise passengers reach this end of the strip. It is also the easiest time to get the window side.
How it fits a day
We use the Pelican in two places. As breakfast at about 7:30am it sets up a beach morning, because you can walk to Doctor's Cave from the door and be on the sand for opening at 8:30 having eaten properly and cheaply. As lunch at about 1pm it is the natural landing point after a beach morning, and it is indoors and cool, which matters more than people expect at that hour.
What it is not is a dinner destination for a special occasion. It closes late and will feed you well, but for an evening built around a view and a sunset you want the harbour or the lagoon instead. Put the Pelican at the start or the middle of a day, not the end of one.
