John Crow's Tavern is an open sided pub at 10 Main Street, Ocho Rios, a few minutes' walk from the cruise pier, doing jerk wings and oxtail alongside burgers and pizza and staying open long after the ships have gone. It has been there since 2005, so it is not an old building with a story. The name is the interesting part, and it belongs to a bird most visitors have already seen circling over the road without knowing what it was.
History
The John Crow is a vulture
John Crow is the Jamaican name for the turkey vulture, Cathartes aura: the big dark bird that rides thermals over the north coast road and comes down on carrion. It is not an affectionate name. In Jamaican speech John Crow is an insult, tied to blackness, ugliness and death, which makes it a genuinely odd thing to put over a pub door and a fairly Jamaican joke to make.
The origin of the name is not settled and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. The most commonly given explanation is that it evolved out of "carrion crow", the older English name for the bird, through Jamaican Creole. What is worth stating plainly is what it is not. There is no evidence connecting John Crow to the American Jim Crow laws, despite how often that link is repeated online. The Jamaican name was in written use by the 1820s, decades before Jim Crow segregation existed as a legal system.
The mountains that carry the same name
The John Crow Mountains run along the eastern end of the island through Portland and St Thomas, and the name reached them the same way, from the bird. The range was reportedly called Carrion Crow Ridge before that.
Those mountains matter more than a bar name suggests. Their limestone ridges and dense forest sheltered the Windward Maroons, who fought a guerrilla war against the British from settlements including Nanny Town, and whose leader Queen Nanny is a national hero. The First Maroon War ended in a treaty in 1739 conceding the Maroons land and a degree of sovereignty, an extraordinary outcome for enslaved people who had freed themselves. In 2015 the Blue and John Crow Mountains became Jamaica's first UNESCO World Heritage Site, listed for both its biodiversity and its Maroon heritage. So the vulture's name is attached to a place inscribed by the world for resistance to slavery.
Ocho Rios does not mean eight rivers
The town's name is a mistranslation that stuck. The Spanish called this stretch Las Chorreras, the waterfalls or rapids, for Dunn's River and the streams pouring off the escarpment. When the English took over, the name was mangled into the similar sounding Ocho Rios, which does mean eight rivers in Spanish. There are not eight rivers here. There are roughly four: Dunn's, Roaring, Turtle and Cave.
Under the old name, this was also a battlefield. On 30 October 1657 the deposed Spanish governor Cristóbal Arnaldo Ysassi landed at Las Chorreras with several hundred troops from Cuba to take Jamaica back from the English, who had seized it in 1655. Edward D'Oyley marched across the island and beat him. A plaque at Dunn's River marks the site, about ten minutes west of the bar stool you are sitting on.
The pub itself
The tavern opened in 2005 and has become a fixture on Main Street on the strength of being open, being consistent and not being a resort. That is the whole of its history and we are not going to inflate it.
What it costs and when it opens
Pricing is moderate by Ocho Rios standards and well below the beach club and resort rates a few streets away. Expect main plates in the range of roughly US$12 to US$25, with jerk chicken, oxtail, curry goat, steamed fish and coconut shrimp on the Jamaican side and burgers, wraps, wings and pizza on the other. Red Stripe and rum are cheap. There are drink specials through the week, including a Friday beer promotion and a Tuesday wine offer.
It opens from late morning and runs late, with a DJ at weekends and live music at points during the week. The hours published on its own website and on the aggregator listings contradict each other, so if you are planning a late arrival, call ahead on the number on the door rather than trusting a listing.
What it is actually like
It is an open fronted pub on a busy street, with fans, a long bar, televisions showing football and cricket, and tables spilling toward the pavement. The crowd is genuinely mixed: cruise passengers in the middle of the day, Jamaicans working in town in the evening, and expatriates who treat it as a local. Service is friendly and unhurried, which is a virtue at night and a problem if you are on a ship clock.
Two honest points. Main Street traffic and noise are part of the experience, so this is not somewhere for a quiet dinner. And the kitchen is better at the Jamaican half of the menu than the international half. Order the oxtail, not the Hawaiian pizza.
How it fits a day
We use John Crow's as the landing point at the end of a north coast day rather than the destination itself. Dunn's River or the Blue Hole in the morning, Ocho Rios craft market or Island Village in the early afternoon, then here from around 5pm as the town empties of ship passengers and the prices stop feeling like port prices. If you are on a cruise call, it works as a straightforward lunch because it is close enough to the pier to walk back, but keep an eye on the time, since the kitchen runs at Jamaican pace and will not hurry for your sailing.
