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The New York Times - 1990

"Let Them Eat Jerk", The King Decrees
by Molly O'Neill

Jerk-Style Jamaican barbecue is more prevalent than McDonald's along East 233rd Street in the Bronx, and Allan Vernon is known there as Vernon, the King of Jerk.

Mr. Vernon, who is 47 years old and moved to New York City from Jamaica 20 years ago, is circumspect about his title. He says he didn't get to be king just by owning two of the best jerk houses in the city. He has vision. "I see my jerk sauce on the shelves of ever grocery store in the land," Mr. Vernon said.

When his countrymen hear him talk like that, they suggest that Mr. Vernon might rather be president than king. But they like to hear his Horatio Alger tale. It began in 1972, when Mr. Vernon was working as a carpenter on top of a building in Harlem. His ambition burning as hot as a Caribbean sunset, he studied the panorama of his adopted city and tried to gauge what was missing. He decided that there was a "lack of jerk."

New York had approximations of Texas barbecue, Carolina low-country barbecue, Korean barbecue and Sichuan barbecue. But no one had blended Jamaican peppers, herbs and spices to make a proper jerk marinade for beef, pork, chicken, porgy or red snapper. No one had tried to figure out how to combine oven baking and charcoal grilling to approximate the slow, steamy way that jerk-style barbecue is cooked in shallow pits in Jamaica.

The origin of the name jerk is obscure, but it is thought to derive from a word used by the Arawak Indians for sun-dried beef, charqui or jerky, later revised by African runaways and their descendants in Jamaica.

Mr. Vernon moved in to fill New York's jerk gap. In 1982, he opened Vernon's Jerk Paradise, a fluorescent-lighted carryout counter that features jerk-style Jamaican barbecue at 987 East 233rd. This was "the first stage of the dream," Mr. Vernon said, "letting people know who you are and what you can do."

Since opening day, Caribbean people who live in the neighborhood have dropped by at the first pang of jerk deprivation. For those who live in Brooklyn, Queens, Connecticut and New Jersey, a jerk fix requires planning. They save their appetites, listen to reggae music and look at snapshots from back home before driving to the Bronx. By the time they are in aroma range of the Jamaican barbecue, they are in a frenzy of homesickness. The King of Jerk, a benign despot, soothes them.

No one does jerk like Mr. Vernon's. And once he had "a foot in the American dream," he said, it seemed only natural that he "move on up." Last year, he opened a second jerk dispensary, a fancier restaurant also called Vernon's Jerk Paradise, at 252 West 29th Street in Manhattan. Patrick Ewing came in, along with half the Knicks, who shoot hoops just four blocks north. Bill Cosby began requesting Vernon's jerk for cast lunches on the set of his television show.

It is as if Mr. Vernon had dug a pit, lighted a barbecue and sent an irresistible fog of jerk over Chelsea. Some 2,000 people have signed the guest book in his pink dining room.

Mr. Vernon has earned his crown and doesn't wear it lightly. As he sees it, he is obliged to maintain a pure jerk state of mind; "Good jerk requires patience," he says. It takes forbearance to find the blend of peppers and smoke that makes a barbecue "hot and smooth without choking you." He also has the obligation to warn his customers about a consequence of eating jerk. On his menu, he posts a caveat: "Caution, this food will make you greedy."

The noblesse oblige of Vernon, the King of Jerk, doesn't end at the doors of his restaurants. He has always felt a certain mass-market manifest destiny about his jerk. Last year, he began having the visions of his own jerk sauce - jars with his label - lining grocery shelves.

Faster than he can jerk a chicken, Mr. Vernon made a deal with a spaghetti factory