My wife was kind enough to book us a vacation package, including flights and hotel, to Fort Lauderdale, Florida using our trusted travel agent Dilworth Daley, who owns Daley's Destinations. We've used Dilworth several times before, and he has never disappointed us yet. Our flights landed around noon, and we hadn't eaten all morning. Our hotel check-in wasn't until 4pm, so we decided to kill time by going somewhere for lunch. That's when I thought it would be great to find black-owned businesses to support while here on vacation.
A quick Google search led us to the 16 Black-Owned Restaurants in Greater Fort Lauderdale article on Visit Lauderdale. They have several interesting and unique restaurants listed in the article. One of the restaurants that stood out to me was Chef Rose Jamaican Cuisine, that had a whopping 4.9 out of 5 rating with 457 reviews on Google, at the time of this post. I can't recall ever seeing a restaurant with that many reviews having that high of a rating, basically having an almost perfect score. This was a restaurant we couldn't pass up trying. This is my Chef Rose Jamaican Cuisine review.
What I didn't realize prior to writing this article was right below the Visit Lauderdale article was another article called Broward's Best 10 Black Owned Restaurants of 2022 from a black-owned blogger website called The Hungry Black Man. The Hungry Black Man has reviews from a couple dozen different cities. This is a website that I will definitely be using when traveling in the future.
We decided to take a cab straight from the airport to the restaurant with suitcases and all. Taking a cab from the Fort Lauderdale airport to Sunrise was an expensive mistake that we wouldn't make going forwarded for the rest of the trip because we rented a car after that. We pulled up to the restaurant with our suitcases and didn't realize the restaurant was takeout only, with no in-door dinning except for a table with 4 bar stools. We thought about leaving and trying out a different place since we were looking for a dine-in restaurant. But that 4.9 Google rating convinced us to try it out.
All the food here is cooked to order, which I'm still not actually sure what means. I thought all the food at restaurants are cooked to order, maybe not. On the other side of the check out counter was the kitchen area. Then outside in the back you could see an actual grill where the food was being cooked. The smoke and aroma coming off the grill smelled great. It took about 45 minutes for us to get our food, and it was well worth the wait.
My wife had the Jamaican jerk chicken with rice and peas, and plantain, while I had the Rasta pasta with salmon. The food was great. Everything tasted fresh, and both meals were piping hot since they were just taken right off the grill. My wife and I sat right at the table and ate our food. The owner, Chef Anthony Rose, talks a little about the inspiration for opening his business on the his website: "This is the first Jamaican restaurant where you have the option of going vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian and everything is cooked to order".
I would give this place a 10 out of 10. If you're ever visiting the Fort Lauderdale area, you have to try out this place. The food is fantastic and Chef Rose is very hospitable. As we were leaving he specifically came outside to bid us farewell.