Walk into Sweet Home Jamaica in Brooklyn and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d wandered into someone’s Kingston living room rather than a neighborhood restaurant in South Baltimore. When chef Tony Henry, who owns the restaurant with his wife, Sophia, opened the place a decade ago, that’s just what he wanted—to bring the feeling of his native Jamaica to his adopted hometown.
Inside the space, which had been a series of Jamaican restaurants before the Henrys took over, you’ll find a long counter and pastry case filled with house-made cakes and sweets running down one side and a dining room of cafe tables and chairs filling the other. But there’s also a sitting room filled with comfy couches, walls lined with art and posters (Usain Bolt, Bob Marley), and plants and flower vases filling available spaces.
The menu is loaded with the food Henry grew up eating and making. He’s cooked professionally since he was 23, having gone to culinary school and operated a seafood restaurant in Jamaica before moving to Baltimore, where he has family, in 2009…