Miss T's Kitchen is a walled garden with no walls, off Main Street in Ocho Rios, built on the site of a scrapyard by a chef with no formal training who was told the idea was mad. In February 2022 it was voted the best restaurant in the Caribbean by readers of USA Today's 10Best. It takes reservations, and on a busy night you want one.
History
Anna-Kay Tomlinson
Anna-Kay Tomlinson is self taught. She has no culinary school behind her. She started by cooking for friends, at their houses and at her own, which turned into catering requests that she filled over wood fires without a proper kitchen to work in. Somewhere in that period people stopped using her name. She has said that everyone calls her Miss T, including her own children.
The junkyard
The site at 65 Main Street was a junkyard belonging to her father in law at the time. She looked at it and decided it would be a restaurant. She has described the plan in her own words as turning that yard into an authentic Jamaican restaurant with every element she could think of in it.
She opened in May 2009, which was the wrong year to open anything. The 2008 crash had gutted Caribbean tourism and people told her she was making a mistake. She kept building the property out for roughly thirteen years after opening, which is why the place reads as grown rather than designed: clinker board, zinc, a roof carried on posts shaped like trees, red fairy lights strung through it, gourd and wicker lamps, painted boards and old Marley photographs. There are effectively no walls. You are eating in a garden with a roof over it.
The award
In February 2022 USA Today's 10Best named Miss T's Kitchen the best restaurant in the Caribbean. The mechanism matters for how much weight to give it: a panel of experts drew up the nominees with the publication's editors, and the final order came down to a public vote. The field it beat included Jade Mountain Club in St Lucia, Sheer Rocks in Antigua, SUI-REN in Turks and Caicos and 1919 in San Juan, which are the sort of rooms that usually win these things. A garden restaurant in Ocho Rios built on a scrapyard came first.
The street it sits on
Main Street is worth understanding, because it explains the town around the restaurant. Ocho Rios was a fishing village. The name is not Spanish for eight rivers, whatever the guide books say. The Spanish called this coast Las Chorreras, the waterfalls or spouts, after the cascades running into the sea, and the English mangled it into something that happens to look like ocho ríos. There were never eight rivers here.
The village became a town because of bauxite, not tourism. Reynolds Jamaica Mines built a deep water pier west of the bay in the 1940s and shipped the first commercial cargo of Jamaican bauxite in 1952. In the 1960s the government moved in through the St Ann Development Company and the Urban Development Corporation, dredged the harbour, built a marina, reclaimed shoreline to make Turtle Beach and put up the shopping complexes. The pier built for ore ships was repurposed for cruise liners. Main Street is an industrial port that was redressed as a resort.
What it costs and when it opens
Open daily, generally around noon to 10pm, though some listings say it closes at 9pm, so call. The number is (876) 795-0099 and reservations are advised, particularly for dinner and on cruise days. Dishes run roughly US$8 to US$36 across the menu. Most mains sit in the mid teens to low twenties in US dollars, with grilled lobster at the top end around US$28. That is not cheap for Jamaica and it is very reasonable for what arrives.
What it is actually like
The oxtail is the reason to come. It is stewed down with butter beans, spinners and carrot until it gives up entirely, and it is the dish the restaurant is known for across the island, not just among visitors. Beyond that there is coconut curry lobster served in the shell, stamp and go saltfish fritters, crab backs with a fruit salsa, oxtail sliders on cocoa bread, and the expected jerk chicken and curry goat done properly rather than for tourists. Vegetarians are actually catered for rather than tolerated, with a chickpea stack and veggie balls on the menu. Drink the fresh limeade.
Service is unhurried in the Jamaican sense, which is to say the food is cooked when you order it. Budget an hour and a half. The garden is small and fills from about 7pm.
How it fits a day
YaadBinge uses Miss T's as the dinner anchor, booked for 7pm, after a full day at the falls, the caves or the river. It is in the middle of town rather than out on a resort strip, so it works from anywhere in Ocho Rios and does not need a long drive at the end of a tiring day.
Lunch around 1pm is quieter and the easier booking. Coming off a ship, the restaurant is a short run from the pier, but the kitchen cooks to order, so do not attempt it with less than two hours on the clock.
