Mistress of flavor

Rose Lin Zamoa says she hopes to have a few small stores around Asia, patty shops with maybe some jerk chicken to go. Photos by Feng Yongbin / China Daily

Rose Lin Zamoa offers tasty treats at her restaurant in Beijing, reports Tym Glaser, who delves deeper into the secrets of Afro-Caribbean fusion food.

Born in Africa, brought up in Europe and living in China, it's obvious that any restaurant you open would sell Jamaican food! Rose Lin Zamoa, the 34-year-old Afro-haired proprietor of the tiny Beijing restaurant in Andingmen called Jamaica Me Crazy, is quite the entrepreneur.

The "110 percent African" from Ghana came to the capital from her adopted home in London about five years ago to further her Mandarin studies and is now cooking up a storm.

Zamoa studied full time for two-and-a-half years and whilst studying she used to cook on weekends for her classmates at Beijing International Studies University.

"Then some said they would like to eat my food for lunch and asked if I could make it and sell it to them. Soon, a few other foreign students at the Communication University of China, which was next to my university, also started ordering. That's how it started."

The Andingmen take-out restaurant, which serves popular Jamaican dishes like jerk chicken, beef patties, ackee and saltfish, curry goat (mutton), yams and plantains as well as English-style pies, is Zamoa's third site in the capital.

Zamoa's Jamaica Me Crazy is tucked away in a hutong at Andingmen.

The dual passport holder (Ghana, United Kingdom) who took Caribbean cooking classes while living in London, wasted little time in setting up her new headquarters, with four employees.

"I'm not making a profit yet, but the restaurant is starting to take care of itself. I hope by the summer - April, May - it will start making money. It better!"

Jamaica Me Crazy attracts a mixed crowd. "It's about a 50-50 split between locals and foreigners, but the good thing is that about 50 percent of the Chinese are repeat customers who live near the restaurant," she says.

"They love the spices used with the (jerk) chicken. It's something new to them."

Those herbs and spices are imported from Britain and, sometimes, Ghana, the country she left at the age of 7.

She harbors mixed feeling about her time in China, citing bureaucratic red tape in setting up her business as being one of her biggest bugbears while appreciating the friendships she has built with locals, particularly the parents of children to whom she taught English in another of her various endeavors.

"It's been five years, and to summarize everything, generally the Chinese are very nice people. I used to teach English and became very close to my students and I met some really great Chinese people through that," she says.

"What I also like is that it is also very safe here, I feel very secure walking down the streets at night, and that is something I didn't always feel while living in London. It's a great environment."

She is also looking to expand her pastry business throughout China, and, perhaps, other parts of the region. With all that going on, she also manages to find time to design clothes and jewelry.

Still, she feels her use-by date in China is nearing and a move to the far-flung Caribbean could be on the cards.

"I have pretty much set up the business where it can run without me. I brought someone from Ghana to do what I do so I can leave China. Don't get me wrong, I love the country, but I got what I came here for and that was the language.

"I'm going to stick around for a while. Ultimately, I'd like to have a few small stores around Asia, patty shops with maybe some jerk chicken to go.

"But, I want to venture outside of Beijing to see what is out there. I would hopefully go somewhere like Jamaica, where my father's father was born. I very much want to go and live there and send stuff back to Asia and check the cash every now and then," she says with a grin.

The Afro-Caribbean fusion Zamoa has created through her restaurant was a natural progression, she says.

"There are many links between Ghana and Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean region for that matter," she says. "If you look at it, many of the slaves transported to Jamaica and other islands came from that part of Africa.

"They brought their culture and food to that part of the world. There are not that many differences between Jamaican-style cooking and that in Ghana. The ingredients are basically the same and the way the food is cooked is similar."

The Africa-Europe-Asia-Americas trek would pretty much complete a global circle for the adventurous Zamoa.

Contact the writer at sundayed@chinadaily.com.cn.