Hollywood’s Hottest New Restaurant Serves Oxtail Egg Rolls and Jerk Fried Oysters

The mother-daughter group behind Little Tokyo’s in style Jamaican restaurant, A Beautiful Life, opened a brand new vacation spot for Jamaican-Chinese cooking in Hollywood on April 22. At ABL Hollywood, Aja Dawson and her mom, Barbara, discover their household’s heritage in dishes resembling jerk fried egg rolls and chen pi ji–type hen wings in an intimate 35-seat house that was a boba store.

For the Dawsons, ABL has at all times been a extremely private enterprise. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Aja bought patties and Jamaican dishes as a grassroots pop-up earlier than opening A Beautiful Life in 2013; she additionally ran a Jamaican meals truck. The new undertaking diverges from the usually conventional Jamaican dishes that may be present in Los Angeles’s Caribbean eating places by exploring the intersection of Jamaican and Chinese diasporic cultures, which has a long history: data present that, as early as 1854, English plantation homeowners in Jamaica introduced over Chinese and Southeast Asian migrants to work as indentured laborers.

The progress in populations of Chinese and South Asian immigrants in Jamaica introduced new flavors and dishes to the island’s shores, which the Dawsons lean into at ABL Hollywood, Los Angeles’s first full-scale Jamaican-Chinese restaurant. “When growing up, my mom made jerk chicken bao,” says Aja. “ABL is all about paying homage to my family, mom, grandparents, diaspora, and the intersectionality of what makes up our genetic code.”

On the menu, diners can discover crowd-pleasers like oxtail macaroni and cheese, conventional beef and vegetarian patties, coco bread, and an oxtail platter with caramelized plantains and rice and peas. Oysters get doused with jerk seasoning earlier than being fried crispy, whereas “islander egg rolls” arrive crammed with a selection of earthy jerk hen, greens, or fall-apart oxtail. Larger dishes embody deep-fried entire escovitch snapper laced with fiery Scotch bonnet pepper, citrus ginger branzino, curry fried rice, and chen pi ji wings paying homage to orange hen.

ABL’s dishes finally hint Aja’s personal path by way of the United States. Jerk hen doused in mambo sauce, a well-liked condiment in Washington D.C., pays tribute to her alma mater, Howard University. A daytime brunch options most dishes from the dinner menu together with apple-rum French toast and honey jerk hen wings over crimson velvet waffles to pair with drinks resembling mimosas and a lychee passionfruit martini.

ABL Hollywood takes over the previous Bearology Boba house on the nook of Cahuenga and Hollywood Boulevard. Aja designed the 35-seat eating room, which has been lined in deep hues of crimson and maroon; customized textured banquettes are tucked alongside the partitions. A brilliant neon-red signal that reads “abl” in lowercase script emits an ethereal glow on the entrance.

For Aja, the brand new restaurant has been a very long time within the making. “ABL is my most honest expression of food and is a full-circle moment,” she says. “It’s always been our ultimate vision to move to Hollywood. We saw an opportunity come up on Cahuenga, our dream street. We decided to go for it and expand west, joining the fabric of that location.”

ABL is open at 1649 N. Cahuenga Boulevard, Hollywood, CA, 90028 from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday by way of Thursday, till midnight Friday and Saturday, with weekend brunch beginning at 11 a.m. Reservations can be found on Resy. The Dawsons additionally function their authentic Little Tokyo restaurant, meals truck, and catering enterprise, stylized as (abeautifullife).