Review: Sweet Home Jamaica Brings Caribbean Cuisine to South Baltimore

Walk into Sweet Home Jamaica in Brooklyn and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d wandered into someone’s Kingston living room rather than a neighborhood restaurant in South Baltimore. When chef Tony Henry, who owns the restaurant with his wife, Sophia, opened the place a decade ago, that’s just what he wanted—to bring the feeling of his native Jamaica to his adopted hometown.

Inside the space, which had been a series of Jamaican restaurants before the Henrys took over, you’ll find a long counter and pastry case filled with house-made cakes and sweets running down one side and a dining room of cafe tables and chairs filling the other. But there’s also a sitting room filled with comfy couches, walls lined with art and posters (Usain Bolt, Bob Marley), and plants and flower vases filling available spaces.

The menu is loaded with the food Henry grew up eating and making. He’s cooked professionally since he was 23, having gone to culinary school and operated a seafood restaurant in Jamaica before moving to Baltimore, where he has family, in 2009.

There’s an extensive seafood menu, unsurprisingly, as well as a list of Jamaican classics like brown stew chicken, jerk chicken, ackee and saltfish (the Jamaican national dish), curry goat, and oxtails. To broaden the range of options, there’s also a small menu of Chinese dishes as well as vegan offerings. (Henry does a lot of catering.)

Though the jerk chicken—a smoky, soulful dish—is marvelous, it’s the oxtails that Henry says are everyone’s favorites, with patrons getting vocally upset if they’re sold-out. Fall-off-the-bone tender and mahogany-sauced, they’re accompanied by peas and rice, another must-have.

Henry credits his wife, an ER nurse at Johns Hopkins, with expanding his repertoire, notably by having him add the honey jerk salmon to the lineup. A slab of spiced, crispy, skin-on salmon served atop sauteed vegetables, it’s a terrific alternative to all the meat on the menu, especially when paired with the callaloo, another Jamaican favorite, here a thick stew of greens that can be added as a side.

For those wanting lighter fare, there’s a separate lunch-only counter through another door, where a smaller lunch menu is on offer with sandwiches and savory hand pies in various iterations like spinach and chicken.

And then there’s that pastry case, with a jigsaw of boxes filled with slices of cakes—sweet potato, rum, carrot, red velvet, lemon, and more. If you’ve got time, pick up a slice for dessert and take a seat, ideally on one of the evenings when Henry has a deejay, or when he brings back the live reggae bands—a monthly event before the pandemic and something he’s hoping to jump-start in May.

If he’s not sold out, you can have some oxtail with those tunes as well.

SWEET HOME JAMAICA: 3612 S. Hanover St., Brooklyn, 410-335 1575. HOURS: Mon.-Sat., 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. PRICES: Sides, soups, sandwiches: $3-16; Mains: $15-26.