Shaggy’s
1600 S. Congress, 447-5375
Cafe Josie
1200-B W. Sixth, 322-9226
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hand, Shaggy’s Caribbean Grill on South Congress feels like a Jamaican beach bar.
The first time I went there, a girl with blue hair and a guy in black clothes were
sitting at the next table eating French fries and drinking beer. I wondered why they
were making a meal of French fries in a Jamaican restaurant — I soon found out.
The jerk pork and Jamaican rice and peas at Shaggy’s are a joke. Jerk is the Jamaican
style of barbecue, a process requiring meat to be marinated in jerk seasonings and
smoked over a slow wood fire. What Shaggy’s calls jerk pork is a skinny little pork
chop doused with vinegary herb sauce. Rice and peas, known as “Jamaican Coat
of Arms” because of its universal popularity in Jamaica, is something like Louisiana’s
red beans and rice; rice and gunga peas are cooked together into a thick and
satisfying stew. When I ordered rice and peas at Shaggy’s, I got a plate of rice with
exactly 21 kidney beans tossed in.
Once you realize that Shaggy’s isn’t really a Caribbean restaurant, you
can kick back and enjoy yourself. The chicken taquitos and the black bean nachos are
good, and the hamburgers look great. The basket of French fries is $1.95 and
although there’s an annoying amount of cinnamon in the seasoning mix that’s sprinkled on them,
the basket is so enormous that two people really can make a meal of them. The
vegan Ital Run-down, a stew of nicely cooked vegetables in a well-seasoned coconut milk
sauce is authentically Caribbean, and so are the flaky Jamaican-style meat patties.
And pints are only $2 at happy hour, so what else could you want in a Jamaican
beach bar?
I had this bright idea of reviewing Shaggy’s together with another
restaurant, Cafe Josie. They are both fairly new, and I was under the impression that
they are both Caribbean restaurants. This was a mistake, and I apologize for their odd
juxtaposition here. Though both of these places use Jamaican and jerk on their menus a lot
and both serve Red Stripe beer, there aren’t a lot of other similarities.
Shaggy’s is a funky South Austin joint with a Caribbean theme and 22 beers
on tap where musicians in baseball caps and women with blue hair eat French
fries and drink beer. Cafe Josie, “a tropic-inspired fresh seafood grill,” is
a toney little perch tucked behind the boutiques of West Sixth where people with
sunglasses on top of their heads do lunch. The night that I ate at Cafe Josie, there was
one woman with blue hair, but it was the other kind.
Most of the entr�es at Cafe Josie are excellent. Pepita crusted
redfish with haba�ero butter ($16.95) was moist and tender inside, crunchy outside.
Jamaican grilled shrimp with ginger tamarind sauce and tropical fruit salsa ($14.95)
were absolutely succulent. The jerk pork tenderloin ($15.95) wasn’t really jerk
either, but it tasted a lot better than the pork chop at Shaggy’s (at three times the
price, of course).
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grill?” I guess it’s because it mixes Jamaican, Asian, and other hot weather cooking
styles together and serves mostly fish. Actually, there are 12 entr�es on the
menu, of which six are seafood, four are meat, and two are vegetarian — but who’s
counting? The patio and sunny dining room do have a tropical sort of mood, the
presentations feature a lot of mangoes and passion fruit, and the menu includes quite a few
exotic seafood appetizers. The Cajun-spiced calamari and the homemade shrimp
potstickers are particularly good.
But it’s odd that while your seafood comes all decked out in tropical
trappings at Cafe Josie, the vegetables appear stark naked. The vegetarian Jamaican
stir-fry ($8.95) is a plate of stir-fried vegetables on a bed of rice. It comes with
three sauces to liven it up: wasabi, passion fruit, and jerk. This is not a very
good way to season things. There you are with a plate of flavorless vegetables on a
bed of rice and three little dishes of disparate sauces. Now what are you supposed
to do? Mix the Japanese horseradish, tropical fruit puree, and thyme-laden jerk
sauce together on your plate? Pretend the vegetables are crudit�s and pick them up and
dip them?
The side dishes have the same problem; the black beans are bland, the
saffron rice is bland, and so are the “fresh veggies.” I tried slathering
the steamed zucchini and carrots with haba�ero butter — they were still dull. This
kind of vegetable cookery doesn’t work for me, but those of you who like sauce on
the side and nude veggie-weggies will be in heaven.
I suspect that I am not really in Cafe Josie’s intended audience anyway.
The cooking seems to be geared toward affluent West Austin diners who are trying to get
in a good meal while sticking to their diets, and in that regard Cafe Josie is
doing an excellent job. A first-rate piece of fish with a good salsa or tropical fruit
sauce and some low-fat sides is a painless way to eat healthy. (There’s a grilled
rib eye with peppercorn butter on the menu for your unrestrained dining
companion.)
If your bathing suit is tight but your budget isn’t, you could hardly do
better than Cafe Josie’s. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a $6 dinner for
two, you can’t beat a basket of French fries and a couple of pints at Shaggy’s. If
you’re dying for Caribbean food, call a travel agent.
Robb Walsh is the co-author of Traveling Jamaica with Knife, Fork &
Spoon; A Righteous Guide to Jamaican Cookery.
This article appears in August 1 • 1997 and August 1 • 1997 (Cover).